It was time once again. Nina had left for the weekend two hours early because she was certain she would burst if she did not do something about the frustration that had accumulated over the working week. Especially about the sexual frustration: She'd left Robert almost four weeks ago and had not had sex since. It was not the case that no willing partner had offered himself though; on the contrary, there had been no shortage of advances since word had spread that she was 'on the market again'. If she'd accepted all invitations for coffee, she probably would not have been able to sleep for weeks - the customary fate of an attractive woman working in a predominantly male domain. Then again, nerd biotope would probably be a more apt description; Nina could not fathom why many of her colleagues apparently tried hard to match the characters from 'The Big Bang Theory' in both appearance and habitus. Consequently, among her would-be consolers, there had been mostly consolation prizes, and not a single man she would have considered fit to satisfy her very special needs. Those which Robert had satisfied like none before him - and perhaps none after.
Nina closed the front door and threw her backpack carelessly into the corner. There was a suspicious rattle, but she had no hope of finally having dealt a well-deserved death blow to the bulky and heavy laptop her employer bestowed on its software developers. Neither sleek nor fast, its imperviousness to almost any kind of abuse was its one redeeming quality, unfortunately - apart from the presumably unbeatable price tag. More stylish and powerful models were, of course, reserved for members of the management caste, which undoubtedly boosted their productivity while creating presentations of supreme importance on the always popular topic of cost savings.
From the direction of the living room a plaintive meowing was heard, then a cat rubbed up against her legs leaving tufts of long, grey hair behind on her black jeans. She sighed and went to her knees to scratch her tomcat Christian under his chin, which he allowed with visible relish, but only for a short time, before turning away. He used his body language to make it abundantly clear that she was expected to follow him immediately and without further delay into the kitchen. She stripped off her sneakers and hung her wickedly expensive Italian, black leather biker jacket (a gift from Robert) on the coat rack, then grabbed the storage jar from the pantry where she kept his dry food and entered the kitchen. Looking at the battlefield of scattered crumbs from breakfast around the food bowl, she wondered once again why the hell cats were reputed to be clean animals. It certainly couldn't be their table manners; even the fact that they didn't get tired of licking their anus and genitals didn't necessarily speak for exemplary personal hygiene in Nina's opinion. Admittedly, they were able to use a litter box for their needs.
But perhaps she had been graced with a special specimen of
Felis silvestris catus
, because Christian was not found to be lacking in the department of behavioural abnormalities: Unlike most felines, he did not shy away from water or fire, was interested in all kinds of food accidentally left within his reach which by rights any self-respecting carnivore should not give a damn about, maintained a (one-sided) sexual relationship with an old blanket and was a passionate collector of Nina's hair bands. These, he dragged by the dozen to an unknown den, somewhere in the cellar, and Nina suspected that there he would rest upon a mountain of loot, like Smaug on his hoard.
After she had taken care of Christian and cleaned up his mess, she let herself sink with a weary sigh onto the leather sofa in the living room.
"Ana, do I have any new messages?"
"There are two new calls and seven new e-mails," replied a female voice from an inconspicuous little cylinder next to the TV, while at the same time the screen turned on and displayed an overview of the received messages. The phone calls were from her parents. Once again, the PC that Nina had set up for them during an episode of insanity, had presented them with seemingly insurmountable problems. So once again, Nina would have to guide them through the required steps in her self-inflicted role as 24/7 first-level support - but certainly not today.
The mail was mostly spam with only a single one from Robert asking her to meet. His smug tone gave her a sting: How could he dare to not suffer terribly from their separation? After all, it was her who had sent him packing - not the other way around. Why on earth did she get the feeling that she was missing him more actually? In any case, given this sorry state of affairs he would have to wait a while longer before she was ready to face him again.
"Ana, turn off the TV and play some music, but quietly, please!"
The device marketed as 'smart loudspeaker' complied with her wish and immediately the unmistakable bass line of Radiohead's 'All I Need' filled the room. Allegedly, thanks to the built-in camera, the AI technology behind Ana was able to analyse her facial expression and use it to determine her emotional state, which sometimes worked with astonishing success -- thus giving the manufacturer the opportunity to delight her with offers adapted to her current mood and thus increase sales. Orwell probably would not have dreamed that thirty years after '1984', people were not only willing to allow a machine that put his crude 'Televisor' to shame in every respect into their homes, but were paying for the privilege to boot. When Robert had brought his latest toy along, Nina had initially been strictly against it, but as is so often the case, the concrete increase in comfort soon triumphed over abstract concerns. She consoled herself with the thought that given today's technical possibilities, there was only one realistic chance to escape the unpleasant consequences of total surveillance, namely to be sufficiently insignificant and thus get lost in the masses - which was undoubtedly the case for her.
Nina ordered Ana to close the roller shutters, then made a short tour around the house to ensure that all the windows and doors were closed, before she was finally ready to devote herself to her project. As a first step, she took a hot shower to wash the week's stress and tension down the drain. In the upcoming 48 hours she didn't want to waste any thoughts on unrealistic release dates and intractable Heisenbugs. No, this weekend would belong to her alone, work and the rest of the world be damned.
After the shower, she devoted herself to taming her mane of curly brown hair, which took up the next fifteen minutes. A final critical look into the mirror confirmed that only a few strands had escaped her practised efforts to bundle the unruly hair mass into a tight braid. She was pleased with the sight that faced her in other respects as well: her slender, well-proportioned body testified to the hours spent every week doing sports and yoga while her alert, brown eyes and energetic chin signalled intelligence and strength of will. It was by a small margin that she had missed a career as a fashion model -- roughly estimated by about thirty centimetres of additional body height. But as it were, she found it hard to find fashionable clothes in her size and was more often than not referred to the children's department, which at the age of twenty-eight was not only embarrassing, but rather impractical from a stylistic point of view. She even needed an additional seat cushion for her office chair, but at least she was able to fly long distances in the cattle class without having to undergo orthopaedic treatment afterwards.
Her nudity also revealed the submissive side of her personality, which she otherwise hid carefully from the world. Even before she'd got together with Robert, she'd had her nipples pierced and since then, four holes had been added to each of her outer labia, while the existing ones had been stretched further so that now they were all able to accommodate the massive piercing jewellery he had commissioned for her. Incidentally, he had conveniently forgotten to inform Nina that none of her new jewellery's closures could not be opened again once they had snapped closed. When she found out about his little omission, she had been raving mad at first, but in due course and after a few particularly intense sessions - thanks to her new and now apparently permanent adornments - her initial anger had been supplanted by the delightful excitement she felt every time she was reminded of these visible signs of her enslavement. This horniness still affected her even now and was also the reason why she had not yet taken a bolt cutter to the so-called 'jewellery'.
However, there was one piece of her slave accoutrements that was
not
part of her permanent equipment: the shackle for her nose. Robert had realised that with this, a hard limit would have been violated. Nina had reluctantly, but only after some insistent and at times physical persuasion obeyed his wish to get a septum piercing. Yet this evening, she wanted to indulge her masochistic fantasies to the utmost extent and savour the feeling of being helplessly enmeshed in strict bondage as much as possible. Consequently, she opened the bathroom cabinet and withdrew the inconspicuous box in which she kept the 'jewellery' for her nose.