V.i.p.

Hayley ached all over. Her feet were sore, her back was stiff, and her arms felt like they were held together with old frayed rubber bands. Frankly, the only thing had had come even close to getting her through her double shift today was the promise of the little silver card in her back pocket. And she didn't care if it was six-thirty in the afternoon on a day when she'd gotten up at one in the morning, it was her day off and she was going to fucking spend it getting pampered for a change. It wasn't as though she didn't deserve it, right?

She walked through the sliding glass doors, half-expecting the bleach-blonde receptionist behind the desk to take one look at Hayley's greasy brown hair, callused fingers, and waitress uniform and call security. But all she did was gaze at Hayley with polite disdain as the young woman came up to her and handed over the small plastic card with the magnetic strip on the back and the wonderful, impossible writing on the front. "Hi," Hayley said, trying to mask her slight anxiety with a touch of brassy confidence. "I'm here for the V.I.P. treatment?"

The receptionist took the card from Hayley's hand with her bright pink, impeccably manicured fingernails and examined it much the same way that Hayley had the previous evening. She'd practically memorized the text: 'This card entitles the bearer to one (1) free, full V.I.P. treatment at the Metamorphosis Spa and Emotional Transformation Center at time of presentation.' There wasn't any fine print, no asterisks or hidden surcharges... not that Hayley wasn't used to getting shafted by last-minute fees, but this place looked like it catered to rich suburban women who spoke to the manager like it was their second language. Places like that didn't need to screw girls like Hayley out of their last twenty bucks to make a profit.

Sure enough, the blonde woman ('Coretta', according to her nametag) smiled politely, exactly the same way Hayley did when she was dealing with someone she couldn't quite feign genuine interest in, and said, "Of course." She slid the card through the reader before slipping it out of sight beneath the desk. "If you'll just proceed past the yellow curtain, you'll find a changing room. Go ahead and undress there-you can shower if you like-and Ermalinda will be along to begin your full treatment momentarily."

There were two archways at the end of Coretta's pointing finger, one with a purple curtain and one with a yellow curtain. Hayley practically skipped through the yellow curtain, thanking Danielle Birkenstock with every step.

Not that she really knew Danielle Birkenstock or anything-to Hayley, the Caucasian woman with the long, wavy auburn hair was just another customer in the middle of a shift full of them, perhaps a little demanding but at least polite in her constant requests. Hayley would probably have forgotten her the second she ran the older woman's credit card... but instead of tipping on the card or even in cash, Danielle had left her a gift certificate for what Google told Hayley was probably a $400 spa treatment, leaving it on the table with a little handwritten note that said, 'You deserve to be pampered a little for your hard work!' Hayley couldn't agree more.

Once she passed through the curtain, Hayley pulled off her tight black shoes with an almost tangible moan of relief. The spa hadn't exactly been in a public transit-friendly area, and after a double shift, Hayley's feet felt like they'd been worked over with ball-peen hammers. She peeled off the socks as well, wiggling her little pink toes in an effort to get some feeling back into them that wasn't pain, before shoving both in one of the little lockers on the right-side wall.

Hayley followed up with the skirt and panties, shucking them both in a single swift gesture and tossing them into the little cubbyhole with everything else. She wondered for a moment if she was supposed to leave her underwear on for this, but then she remembered that vaguely insulting offer of a shower and finished undressing hurriedly. After a double shift helping the kitchen staff with the deep fryer whenever they got behind, a long hot shower was probably worth $400 to her by itself. She undid her blouse and crammed it in with the rest of her clothing, then fumbled with her bra for a moment before adding it to the heap of clothes.

Before adding her purse to the crowded cubbyhole, Hayley dug out her trusty combination lock and used it when she was finished to secure her belongings. Not that she had much to protect by the standards of the typical... spa... person, but Hayley knew that this place had employees as well as customers. And even if they probably earned more in tips from a single backrub than Hayley did from a full shift, that didn't make them immune to temptation. She was going to be good and careful.

She went over to the showers and turned them on full blast, sighing in weary relaxation as the pounding spray massaged her aching back and shoulders. Her fingers moved to rub away some of the soreness where her bra had been digging into her all day long; it was an old one, well past the point where anyone less fucking broke would have chucked it out, but Hayley was trying to get one or two more months out of it before she bought new clothes. Just long enough to find a roommate, move into a cheaper place, and maybe win the lottery while she was daydreaming.

She let the water sluice down her body for a long moment, washing away the grime and grease and sweat and leaving behind soft skin that was practically bright red from the heat of the spray, then reached over to the taps labeled 'SOAP' and 'SHAMPOO' in scrawled cursive script. The foamy body wash that poured out when Hayley put her hand under the soap dispenser smelled like lavender and chamomile and heaven, and she sighed contentedly as she scrubbed herself clean.

The shampoo had a similar scent, one that clung to Hayley's clean, soft, grease-free hair as she rinsed off and grabbed a towel from the nearby rack. Just breathing in that soothing aroma felt like a million dollars to her, as if it melted away all of the grinding weariness from her muscles and left behind only sweet, gentle relaxation behind it. Hayley wondered if they sold it in bottles or something. She might ask her friends to buy one for her birthday or something. If it made her feel this good after sixteen hours on her feet, then-

"Excuse me?" Hayley tensed a little at the sudden intrusion on her thoughts, but the shower had done a good job of calming her down and she didn't actually jump or yelp when the tall Caucasian woman with the blue eyes and the long legs and the honey blonde hair that went down to her ass in flowing waves tapped her on the shoulder. "Hello. I'm Ermalinda. You must be Ms. Birkenstock's V.I.P., yes?" She spoke in a European accent that Hayley couldn't begin to place, her voice lilting musically as she inclined her head toward the far wall. "Please. Come with me."

Hayley nodded, her voice sounding a little over-loud in her ears as she tried to recover from the surprise of being snuck up on by Ninja Melania just then. "Yeah, my name's Hayley," she replied, falling into line behind Ermalinda as they passed through another yellow curtain to a small room lit in gentle lavender colors that instinctively soothed the eyes. There was a massage table in the middle of the room, looking so soft and inviting that Hayley worried for a moment that she might fall asleep in the middle of her extra-special spa treatment.

"Please," Ermalinda said, gesturing to the chair. "Lie down. We'll begin with an acupressure scalp massage, which will relax you and prepare you for the full V.I.P. treatment that you're going to experience." She smiled, and unlike the receptionist it felt genuine to Hayley. Like the tall, leggy supermodel actually cared about making Hayley happy. She was pretty sure that it was just an upgraded version of Hayley's customer service face, but it was good enough to at least give Hayley an idea of why Ermalinda was giving upscale spa treatments to rich white women and Hayley was stuck in chain restaurant hell.

She lay down on her stomach, wriggling a little to get comfortable in the places where her body wasn't exactly contoured to the expected occupants of the massage chair, and put her face into the little padded hole up at the top. "So you knew Ms. Birkenstock gave me the card?" she asked, as Ermalinda sat in front of her and began to firmly press her fingers against Hayley's head like the young woman was some kind of particularly complicated musical instrument.

"Oh yes," Ermalinda replied musically, reaching around to push hard at the base of Hayley's neck. "She was very excited to see that you took her up on the offer. Some girls don't, unfortunately. They assume the card is a joke or a scam or something, and toss it in the back of a drawer or hand it off to their less deserving friends. But you responded just like she hoped you would. That's a really wonderful thing-between you and me, those cards aren't cheap."

"Oh, I know,"Hayley said, her body gently sagging into the cushions as the massage slowly melted away the last residual tension in her limbs. A full spa package at Metamorphosis cost almost a week's pay to someone like her, and even though she was sure that a woman like Danielle Birkenstock made that kind of money just breathing for ten minutes, she understood that it was still a lot to blow on a generous whim. She made up her mind to thank the older woman if she ever saw her again.

"And there are no refunds, either," Ermalinda said chattily, working her thumbs into the tiny gaps between Hayley's vertebrae and pressing down almost painfully hard for a moment before rubbing her way up the supine young woman's scalp. "If you were to hand off your card to some friend of yours with a flat chest and a short tongue and little stumpy fingers, well... we'd still do the treatment, of course, and Ms. Birkenstock could decide if she wanted to keep the results or try again. But I know she wouldn't be happy about it."

"Um..." Hayley wasn't exactly sure how to respond to that. It seemed unnecessarily harsh, even though Hayley hadn't ever taken the time to measure her friends' tongues or fingers to see if any of them fit the description (okay, so Tia wore an A-cup, but after a long day wearing her worn-out bra, Hayley kind of envied her). And why would Danielle Birkenstock feel so personally invested in the results of her random act of kindness? "Uh, yeah, no, me neither," Hayley's lips filled in while she wondered, desperate to avert an uncomfortable silence.

"But we don't have to worry about any of that, do we?" Ermalinda continued brightly, cupping Hayley's skull in her hands and applying rolling, gentle pressure with her palms. "You showed up just like you were supposed to and the treatment can begin." It felt so damn relaxing that Hayley saw a few little drips of saliva fall from her parted lips onto the marble tiles. She somehow couldn't bring herself to care, not when those fingers were massaging her so wonderfully. Hayley never imagined a scalp rub would make her feel this good and happy and warm and relaxed and peaceful, but Ermalinda's fingers proved her wrong.

Which was good, because the next words would probably have made Hayley a little bit tense otherwise. "And Ms. Birkenstock has been notified, and she should be getting here just around the time you finish up. Won't that be nice, darling?" Because that seemed... odd. Ermalinda didn't talk like she thought that Hayley and Danielle were friends, she seemed to think there was a real possibility that Hayley would dismiss the whole thing as a prank and throw the gift card in a junk drawer... but she expected Hayley to be glad to see the total stranger whose only interaction with her was mandated by the requirements of Hayley's shitty job. That sounded strange. Unnerving, even, if Hayley wasn't so deliciously relaxed.

Hayley wasn't sure what to say in response, but the silence stretched on and on as it became clear that Ermalinda didn't mean the question rhetorically at all. Finally, just to end the uncomfortable pause, Hayley murmured, "Uh, yeah, sure, I guess." After a moment, she added, "Why is she coming to see me?" She wondered vaguely if this whole thing was some kind of set up for a date, if Danielle Birkenstock was a lezbo and the spa treatment was just one big rich lady version 'I invited you out to dinner so now you have to sleep with me'. Hayley felt around loosely just to make sure she was still lying on her towel. Just in case she had to get up in a hurry.

"Well, you're her V.I.P., dear, aren't you?" Ermalinda cooed, pressing both thumbs into the soft spots behind Hayley's ears and rotating around until Hayley's eyes rolled back in her head with the force of the sensation. It wasn't exactly pain, but it wasn't exactly pleasure, either; it all just felt like too much. Much too much. Hayley gasped so sharply that she almost missed Ermalinda's next sentence. "At least, you will be once the treatment is over."

"Wait, wha?" Hayley mumbled, her jaw feeling like it wasn't quite working properly anymore. "Wha's, whaddya..." It wasn't just her jaw, she realized. The pressure felt like it was pinning her actual thoughts down, pushing somehow into her mind if not her brain and squeezing tightly until she had to wriggle each concept through a suddenly much smaller passage. "...'m already VIP!" she finally managed to stammer out, the closest she could come to articulating a concept that felt much too big for her unexpectedly drowsy head.

"Oh no, dearie, not quite yet," Ermalinda said, her voice cheerful as she relaxed the pressure and lifted Hayley's head up from the table to stare into her glassy, heavy-lidded eyes. Even though the physical stimulus vanished when Ermalinda's thumbs shifted position, Hayley could still feel that weird, squished sensation inside her mind. Like her thoughts couldn't get room to maneuver, and she could only really process information a little at a time. When Ermalinda added, "You're vacant, but I don't think you're quite at the 'incapacitated' stage," Hayley really didn't understand what she meant.

And when she tried to ask, it seemed almost impossible to frame the question properly. She knew she was confused, she knew that the source of the confusion was Ermalinda's non-sequitur answers to all of Hayley's questions... but every time she tried to wriggle her thoughts out of the tight little space inside her head, she ran into something else she didn't understand about what she didn't understand. She finally settled for a whimpered, "Huh?" It didn't sound much like her at all.

"You're getting the V.I.P. treatment," Ermalinda replied condescendingly, letting Hayley's head drop back onto the cushion before going back to her scalp massage. "Vacant Incapacitated Plaything. Ms. Birkenstock paid handsomely for it, and we always give our customers exactly what they want. The acupressure was the first step; it's softened your mind and body, putting you into a more receptive state for your deeper programming. You've noticed how difficult it is to move now?"

"Uhhhh..." Hayley thought she was going to have something more intelligent to say than that, but somehow her brain got distracted by the sudden realization that her muscles simply didn't want to move anymore. She tried to lift her arms, swing her legs off the table, even just close her lips to stop the steady trickle of drool from dribbling out of her slack and vacant mouth, but her body just wouldn't listen. It felt a little like when she fell asleep on the couch, and she could hear everything going on around her and she was sure she was still awake, but somehow it just felt more comfortable to lie there and relax. It felt like she could get up any time she wanted, so long as that time wasn't now.

And her mind had the same loose, disconnected quality to it. When Ermalinda picked up her arm at the wrist, letting it dangle limply between her fingers for a moment before letting it drop, Hayley could register the sensation. She could even understand that something was strange and incongruous about it. But she couldn't really think about what was happening to her. That seemed like something she was always just a few moments away from getting to. She only needed to rest a minute or two first.

"That's right," Ermalinda cooed, standing up and walking over to a cabinet that Hayley hadn't bothered paying much attention to when she came in. "You're very malleable right now, soft and sleepy and open to our programming, and we're going to turn you into a good little V.I.P. for Ms. Birkenstock." She wheeled out a small projector that rolled into place right under the hole in the massage table, then adjusted it so that it fit seamlessly against the underside without a gap. "It's a sort of code, you see. So we can talk about it without letting anybody know what we're doing."

Ermalinda turned on the projector, and a series of receding circles began to appear in front of Hayley's face. Each one got smaller and thinner as they approached the center of the screen, and within moments Hayley's kinesthetic sense became hopelessly confused by the illusion of movement that made her feel as though she was floating endlessly forward and staying perfectly still at the same time. It deepened her disorientation, captured her limited attention, and left her dazed and drowsy and utterly fascinated by the dizzying depths of the captivating tunnel of light.

"You probably wouldn't have come if you knew what it really meant," Ermalinda continued, her voice pert and chipper as she gently spread Hayley's legs and began to massage lubricant into her exposed pussy. "That's another reason to put it in code, isn't it? If we told you, 'Ms. Birkenstock thinks you have nice tits and she'd like to make you her happy little fucktoy,' well, you might think twice before showing up. But if we say, 'Come get our V.I.P. treatment,' you're here the very next day! That's why Ms. Birkenstock pays us so well, you see. Because we know little tricks like that."

The gorgeous blonde parted Hayley's labia with one hand, then slid an enormous silicone dildo into her slippery cunt with the other. She turned a knob, starting it buzzing with a slow, languorous thrum that teased Hayley's pussy into arousal without letting her limp body find any kind of release. "I'm sorry if I natter, by the way," she said, as she affixed a harness into place to keep the fake cock in position. "But this early bit is so boring, and it's not like you're going to remember anyway. You're never going to think again, darling. At least not for yourself."

She spread Hayley's ass cheeks, applying another generous dollop of lube. "Oh! That reminds me. Did you mention the card to anyone before you came here?" Hayley wished the answer was yes. She wished she had enough presence of mind to pretend the answer was yes. But the buzzing hum between her legs was breaking up the few tiny fragments of thought that weren't being swept down into the bottomless waves of receding light, and there were precious few of those after the acupressure numbed her brain into compliance. Whoever designed this whole set-up wasn't leaving much to chance.

So she heard herself mutter, "Nuh uh," in a loose and muzzy monotone, and realized too late that she'd pretty much just sealed her own doom. Without the gift card to link her to the spa, nobody would have any idea where she'd gone at the end of her shift. Her friends might not realize she was missing; they were used to her crashing hard after working a double and not answering her phone all day. And by the time her boss noticed that she had stopped showing up for work-if he didn't just fire her and go on with his life-any trail she left would be ice cold. Nobody was ever going to find her. It didn't seem likely that anyone would really look too hard.