(This story is set in a world where legalized, non-hereditary slavery is commonplace for serious crime, unredeemed debt, or voluntary self-indenture. Eighteen years of age is the minimum for anyone in this world to be enslaved or to have any intimate/sexual contact with slaves. Thanks to Belinda for her suggestions about this character; any resemblance between Melinda and Belinda is purely . . . intentional if fictional.)
(
Melinda Moody's perspective
)
Being an accountant has always been both easy and difficult for me. A single college semester course will cover the rules for debits and credits, although it may take decades to understand all the nuances. That was fine by me—I'm naturally good at math and enjoy the detailed work of interpreting laws and regulations. By age 35 (three years before these events), my reputation as a Certified Public Accountant (CPA—the UK term is Chartered Accountant) was attracting so many large business clients here in Texas that I had become a partner in a large accounting firm. I've heard the jokes about the boring life of CPAs making them appear to live longer, and all I can say is the truth is rarely funny.
The difficult part is not the actual accounting but rather convincing other people that your interpretation is correct. Clients naturally want an interpretation that is more favorable to their bottom line, even if that interpretation may not be allowable if they are audited either as a business or (for personal income) by the Internal Revenue. That means I have to be stubborn, because for me to go along with their "solution" would be unethical and possibly illegal. I don't like arguing with people under the best of circumstances, but in the male-dominated world of business, "pushy" females like me are much less welcome than "assertive, confident" males. For a lot of men, any woman—and especially any young woman—who refuses to "go along" with what some good ol' boy wants is labelled with a word that begins with a "b" and rhymes with "witch."
That kind of confrontation was particularly challenging for me because, to be honest, I was a socially-handicapped introvert with significant doubts about my attractiveness. Other women had the self-confidence to hold their own in the office, but not me. I was a late bloomer with no hand-eye coordination, constantly stumbling and staggering, all of which meant that I had very little experience in social settings and found physical exercise almost impossible. My roommates in college insisted that I was at least cute and perhaps sexy, but that's not what I saw in the mirror. Five foot five, 120 pounds, mousy brown hair with C-cup breasts and a well-padded tush; I should have thought myself at least pretty if not more, but my social ineptitude and self-doubt hung on for years after I graduated college. I had sex half a dozen times and gave hesitant blow-jobs to three guys I dated because it was expected of me, but I was still very inexperienced. The stress of working in accounting drove me to the gym, where regular exercise tightened everything up so that even I had to admit I had a toned abdomen and shapely legs. But I still felt at a disadvantage whenever I had to deal with beautiful women, let alone powerful men.
OK, deep secret time, and don't you dare repeat this. I was pretty sure that I was submissive, that I wanted to just shut off my brain and surrender to whatever some impossibly-masculine, opinionated guy told me to do, preferably involving wild sex. I know, I know—how could an educated, successful woman want that? I wasn't stupid enough to want to be an actual slave, but the image of being some (probably ignorant and arrogant) male's collared sex toy was enormously appealing, as if I needed a man pounding my brains out to validate myself as an attractive, sexy woman. Even admitting that desire in private is still humiliating, but I could not and cannot resist the idea. My guilty pleasure when I stayed at home nights was reading the Hillary Rodham Clinton paperback novels, all of which have the same theme: smart, beautiful but shy woman becomes enslaved only to fall in love/lust with (not necessarily get freed by!) a masculine man who protects her but also objectifies her and stuffs all of her openings as his designated "love toy." I'm still disgusted to put those words on paper, but I had been longing for such a situation(violation?) for two decades. And it wasn't an occasional thought for me—for the past three years before my troubles I had been working out to slave yoga videos. I would carefully pull all my shades down, strip down to undies or, when I felt really wicked, to bare skin, put on a training collar, and then watch in a mirror while I contorted my body into all those lascivious positions shown on the video, repeating the submissive slave mantras—most of which involved begging for a master's prick to violate my openings—all while imagining that I was a real slave about to be bred ruthlessly by the man or men who controlled my body and my life.
*****
Which is why what was about to happen when this tale begins was so ironic—and unlike Alanis Morrissette, I DO know what the word "ironic" means! You see, some unknown person—probably another accountant, perhaps even one of my business partners—went to a lot of trouble to frame me for felony tax fraud, as if I were Al Capone or something. How else did a faked-up double set of books for one of my clients mysteriously appear on my home computer, right next to all that female enslavement porn, when the DA just happened to serve a search warrant on that computer? And this morning a judge would almost certainly enslave me as punishment, because in modern Texas "felon" (especially female felon) equals "slave," and "slave" (again especially female slave) equals "naked whore." I didn't know how I could survive the public exposure, let alone what I would do for a living afterwards, when I wouldn't be allowed near any form of accounting. Who would want to hire a crooked ex-accountant?
"Defendant will rise. . . Having been found guilty of a felony, I sentence you to five years' criminal enslavement. Bailiffs: strip the slut, take her for branding and then, after one week for medical recovery, sell her at the contracted slave market." Even knowing that this sentence was unavoidable, I was still in shock when a bailiff jerked me to my feet and used a sharp knife down my back to quickly, almost casually, cut through all my clothing, even my bra and panties. The remnants fell away in a heap while my male defense attorney tried in vain not to look at my body . From a clothed defendant I was suddenly reduced to a naked piece of property in front of several dozen people, including the jury that had just convicted me.
"Kneel, slut." Came the calm voice of a bailiff. I knelt down amidst the remains of my clothing, so that the defense table in the courtroom momentarily shielded my blushing body—or at least my breasts—from view. Then came the inevitable instructions to "collar" (holding my chin-length hair out of the way so that a basic slave collar, not unlike a dog collar, could be wrapped tightly around my neck) and "back hands" which led to my wrists being cuffed behind my back. Two bailiffs lifted me by the elbows to my bare feet, once again giving the judge and jury a full frontal view of my body, then frog-marched me out of the courtroom through the throng of spectators, all of whom appeared to be leering at me. With breath-taking speed, I had gone from fantasizing about slave life to living it! My horny libido was in shock, as embarrassment and sexual arousal struggled for control of my brain. The latter apparently won, as my nipples stood erect and I became aware of a damp buzz between my thighs. These visible indications that I actually ENJOYED being a naked slave only increased my shame and blushes.
Any doubts I may have felt about whether this wet dream (you know the kind of dream where you're naked and everyone else is clothed) was real came to an abrupt halt five minutes later, when the circle star of a convicted felon was fried into my formerly unremarkable but unblemished butt. The pain was so intense that I fainted and probably lost control of my bladder.
When I regained consciousness, I was face down on a paper-covered bench, with three simultaneous sensations on my upturned, bare butt: a deep throbbing pain, a chilly feeling because something cold had been applied to that rear end, and finally alarm because some unknown person's fingers were pressing down firmly around the edges of my new burn. Eventually, my mind realized that these fingers were pressing the adhesive of a bandage to cover the wound that had already been treated with a cooling antiseptic and analgesic spray. I didn't know whether to be grateful for the care or outraged that someone was feeling me up, but I quickly remembered that I was now a criminal slave with no choice about what happened to my body, so I quietly groaned a "thank you" without moving. Then I was placed upright on my feet by the same two (male) bailiffs, who each took the opportunity to heft and squeeze a breast. And my treacherous, horny little brain actually enjoyed the fondling—despite my misery, my nipples erected instantly!