(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 meâI'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 (CPAâthe 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 womanâand especially any young womanâwho 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 knowâhow 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 meâfor 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 mantrasâmost of which involved begging for a master's prick to violate my openingsâall 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.
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