Mailgirl Number Thirteen winced as she accepted another blow. The sound of the paddle connecting against the bare flesh of her behind echoed through the locker room, and carried over the murmured conversation of the other mailgirls behind her. She was standing, with her legs spread and bent at the midsection over the spanking bench, just to one side of the locker room's entrance. If she had looked up, she'd have been able to watch as her own reflection received the paddling in the mirror-glass. But, as she was painfully aware of the audience on the far side of that glass, she kept her eyes cast downwards and braced herself for Mistress Zero to connect again.
She wasn't alone. The spanking bench, such as it was, had always reminded Thirteen of a pommel horse, and was large enough to accommodate two girls at a time. She might have been alone for most of her day, dashing from mailstop to mailstop in the buff among a sea of fully-clothed Wall Street types. But, here in the mailgirls locker room, she was rarely alone, and typically suffered her embarrassments and indignities in good company. And so she'd waited patiently, in position, as Mailgirl Number Twenty-One was paddled first, just as Twenty-One was waiting now for Thirteen's punishment to be complete.
Not that Mistress Zero was today willing to let either girl wait without inflicting a new form of torture upon them. As early as that morning, Thirteen had suspected that her mistress, her dominatrix, had something waiting for her, something for Thirteen to remember her by. That something turned out to be a pair of weighted nipple clamps, a new hell that Mistress Zero was gifting to her mailgirls as a celebration of Thirteen's last day at USF Plaza. Each time another blow connected, Thirteen grimaced in pain - not so much at the paddling itself (after all, no matter how red Thirteen's bottom became, it was a pain she was used to), but at the tug and pull the clamps' momentum exerted upon her nipples.
It could have been worse. It could always be worse. It was the motto of the mailgirl, the mantra that allowed Thirteen to accept a new form of torment without complaint. In the grand scheme of all she'd suffered that summer, a pair of nipple clamps and a paddling was a parting gift Thirteen would happily accept.
Thirteen had thought, for sure, she'd be treated to the riding crop. She'd picked up her twenty-fifth demerit on one of her first few deliveries back from her morning break. And then another just before lunch. And she found herself wondering how Mistress Zero would make her pay for any demerits that earned that afternoon. The paddle had been a surprise, though; the girls were subjected to corporal punishment every time they racked up twenty-five demerits, but Mistress Zero had been granted latitude in how that punishment was delivered. She could spank a girl with her own bare hand, if she so chose - it was the least painful, and it was also the choice that Thirteen had to admit got her hottest. There was also the paddle - a long, cricket-bat-looking piece of wood that was one part fraternity basement and one part sex dungeon, and the instrument that Mistress Zero was currently applying to Thirteen's naked ass just now. Then there was the riding crop, which stung tremendously, left welts on a mailgirl's behind for the better part of a day or so, and would have made the ride tomorrow from New York to New Haven less than comfortable. And then, finally, there was the most sadistic - the whip that sat curled, ominously, in the bottom left-hand drawer of Mistress Zero's desk. She'd used it only once all summer, on Twenty-One, and the memory of the sound alone was capable of sending a shiver of fear up Thirteen's spine.
The paddle hurt, sure. And Thirteen's ass would be red when she returned to duty after lunch. And, yes, she'd feel it if she found herself tempted to sit down tonight for Bitch Sessions at the Imperial. But the very fact that she'd be able to ride back to Connecticut without the painful and present memory of Mistress Zero seemed almost like a kindness.
Almost, Thirteen thought to herself. The nipple clamps were a powerful counterargument.
It wasn't the physical pain of the paddling that had Thirteen wet - she hadn't picked up that particular kink that summer, thankfully. And it wasn't the embarrassment and humiliation over the act that turned her on. Like so, so many other aspects in the life of a mailgirl, it was the very fact that she'd ceded power over to Mistress Zero that hit the sweet spot somewhere deep inside of Thirteen. She was entirely at the mercy of the tall German woman spanking her, and it was the submission itself that had Thirteen's pussy tingling.
The memory of the whipping Twenty-One had received triggered the memory of what had come after. And if submission to Mistress Zero now had her wet, submission to Mistress Zero that particular weekend would haunt Thirteen's fantasies for years to come.
It was Human Capital that had flagged the irregularities in Twenty-One's data set. The smartphones that the girls wore on their arms were equipped with geo-locators that allowed Mistress Zero and the analysts on the 18th Floor to track their every move in the building. And every delivery was logged, tracking a girl's actual delivery time versus the delivery time that Human Capital had expected, based on a massive amount of data that included that girl's typical speed, other girls' typical speeds, how many floors a girl needed to ascend, how long the average wait for the service elevators might be, and so on. The girls themselves tried to game the numbers some; it didn't pay to arrive too soon, as deadlines would only be made shorter the next time. And, of course, it certainly didn't pay to arrive late, as they'd pick up a single demerit for anything less than a minute past deadline, and then an exponentially increasing number of demerits after that.
The smartphones also logged breaks and lunches, and bathroom breaks were required to be logged by an employee chaperoning a mailgirl's trip to the toilet. It wasn't uncommon for a mailgirl to ask a specific employee to babysit them in the bathroom on a regular basis. After all, the girls knew who was friendly and who wasn't, who'd treat them well and who'd treat them poorly, who'd grant them a modicum of privacy and who'd stare at them like a lech. And as much as they were here, there, and everywhere over the course of a day, they could be requested specifically by senior executives willing to spend a few chits to call Mailgirl Number Thirteen, or Mailgirl Number Twenty-One, and there was admittedly some opportunity for the mailgirl herself to volunteer to take standard mail up to a specific floor.
It also wasn't uncommon for a mailgirl to ask a male employee to play the part of chaperone. Some girls preferred it, as most men were more willing to defy the mailgirl regulation that required a granting employee watch the girl actively as she peed. Thirteen wasn't among these girls, however, as the opportunity of drawing a pervert who enjoyed watching her simply wasn't worth the risk.
But that first week in August, one of the analysts in Human Capital noticed an abnormally long pair of afternoon bathroom breaks in Twenty-One's data. They were both in IT, and they were both logged by the same male technician. When, on Friday, that very same technician in IT had logged the start of a bathroom break on Twenty-One's behalf, Human Capital received an alert, and they sent Mistress Zero to investigate.
Thirteen had since heard directly from Twenty-One how Mistress Zero had found her. She was in the handicapped stall of the men's room on the 6th Floor, door dutifully left open, and accompanied by a chaperone - all per regulation. However, she was clutching one of the handrails, with her face pressed up against the wall, as her chaperone stood behind her with his pants around his ankles and his dick buried deep inside of her. She hadn't been able to stop, even when she'd been found out, and she managed a few more quick thrusts against the tech before Mistress Zero grabbed her by the hair and pulled her screaming from the men's room. A few seconds more, Twenty-One had later opined, and she might have been able to hit her climax.
As arbitrary as it may have seemed, given the nude mailgirls parading through a place of work and masturbating on the second floor for all to see, USF had no tolerance for sexual relations between its employees and its mailgirls. It was what had drawn Thirteen and her advisor to USF in the first place, as Thirteen could conduct her anthropological research without fear of becoming of a full-on sex slave. The offending tech was fired on the spot, and his supervisor was terminated later that afternoon; per Human Capital, it was the supervisor's responsibility to supervise his employee. The following week, Employee Relations was called in, and three more techs were told to clean out their desks, as they had known what was happening but hadn't bothered to report it.
As there was literally no offense for which a mailgirl could be fired, Twenty-One was introduced to the whip. And the other girls were forced to watch. A joyous Friday afternoon in which half of them were off the next day, and most of them were headed over to the Imperial for drinks and their weekly Bitch Session, quickly went off the rails. Every crack of the whip drove home that, no matter how horny and turned on a mailgirl might become, there was a line that USF was not willing to let them cross.
It had been Twenty-One, as it turned out, who'd initiated congress with the technician, a rough-around-the-edges low level employee six years her junior. She'd lured him into the stall that first time, and suggested that he send a few interoffice envelopes over the next couple of days to bring her back. This confession irked Thirteen, as she herself had been called to the 6th Floor on one of the days, only to be greeted by a look of disappointment and what she now believed had been an empty interoffice envelope. The tech, certainly, hadn't resisted Twenty-One's advances, but the very fact that Twenty-One had been the aggressor left the rest of the girls breathing a sigh of relief; if had been the other way around, they all might have been concerned that the slide down the slippery slope had begun, and that any one of them could be next.
Not that that relief provided much comfort when all twenty-four girls were punished for Twenty-One's sins. Twenty-One had been the only girl to be lashed, sure. But Thirteen doubted that the whip alone was enough to keep the girls from acting on their arousal; she herself had been horny enough on more than one occasion that she might have willingly accepted the punishment in exchange for the pleasure. To keep Twenty-One in-line, and to keep any of the other girls from ever repeating Twenty-One's mistake, Mistress Zero kept every single one of the girls at the Plaza that night.
No drinks at the Imperial that particular Friday night. No Bitch Sessions. No weekend escape for the girls who'd suffered all week long.
