Author's note: Traumatised by being held hostage in the cafe siege, Chloe has chosen a new direction in her life. She gives up her steady boyfriend and stable job to seek out new thrills in risky encounters. Covalent has laid out his plans to make her disappear and Chloe finds herself spiraling deeper and deeper into his fantasy of total control.
We also see what Lydia (from
The Flip Side
) does for a day job.
The story contains themes of female submission, edge play and autassassinophilia. Discretion is advised: please check the story tags to see whether this a series you'll enjoy.]
---
KEEPING YOU FOR THE WEEKEND
Kaylee is trying to explain something to me, again, but I'm having trouble understanding her. I know it's vitally important, what she's saying, but every time she gets to the crucial part, he shoots her again. She looks at him, annoyed, and he just stands there grinning, then she turns back to me and has to start all over again. I listen in mute horror, my cup of coffee in front of me on the table, watching her blouse stain red with each fresh wound. She's getting weaker now, her body succumbing to the damage, but she's ploughing on because she's telling me something I need to know.
He fires again, and her body jerks with the impact. I don't get any answers. Kaylee frowns at the interruption of the bullet, at the inconvenience of having to go back to the beginning. I want to stop him, I want to take that gun and empty it into him. I want to rip him limb from fucking limb with my bare hands. Instead, I sip my coffee, listening intently to her words until he fires again.
I wake up, tangled in my bedsheets, my heart hammering in my chest. The day goes downhill from here.
I'm already going to be late for work, so I grab a piece of toast and wrap my hair up in a bun for a lightning-fast shower. I race into my bedroom and pull on a skirt, finding a loose-fitting blouse to go with it, grabbing my phone and my keys, sliding on my trainers and bundling myself out the door. If the bus is merciful to me, I can still make my meeting, so I hustle to the corner with my toast in my mouth and my fingers doing up my buttons. The bus is pulling up to the stop so I wave like a mad lady to get the driver to stop. He opens the door and I get on, panting, flustered as he just smiles. I give him a curt nod of thanks and drop down onto a seat as he pulls away into traffic.
I cross my legs and fold my arms in front of me, a defensive posture I've adopted ever since Covalent banned me from wearing underwear. He knew what he was doing, and I can feel it even now, sitting on the bus. There's an insistent tingle inside me, and I find myself keenly aware of my body. I have modest breasts, so going without support isn't too difficult for me, but it's the feeling of the cotton blouse brushing against my bare nipples that sends little tremors through me. Not because of the friction of the material, but the reminder of what he's done to me.
It had been the usual conversation to begin with. We were chatting via voice now more often than not, catching up on my day, when he had revealed the next step he wanted to take. He'd just asked me what I was wearing, and after I'd told him, he'd told me to take it all off. I had surprised myself by complying, sitting there afterwards with my arms huddled across my chest while I talked to him as if he could somehow see my nakedness through the phone. That was the point that he'd said he would like me to be naked around home.
It's been a week since that call, and he'd followed up with more specifications since, such as what I was wearing now. He had explained it simply, rationally, telling me that I needed to think of clothing as a privilege rather than a right, that being naked helped cement the mindset that he was in control. I had surprised myself by not telling him to get fucked. If Toby had asked me to strip off whenever I was at home, he would have gotten the full brunt of my distain very quickly. The extension was logical, that I should wear the minimum required clothing for appearing in public. He had permitted me a top and a skirt, always a skirt, never trousers.
I understand the skirt part. The air moving between my legs, over my bare crotch, keeps my mind on two things: firstly, that I'm following his instructions, and secondly, just how unbearably horny he's made me.
That last part was the thing right now, sitting on the bus, trying to slow my heart rate. By such a simple thing as not allowing me to touch myself, he's turned me into a sex-craving fiend. I've gone from having three men in one day to nothing for two weeks, and it's gradually driving me insane. Everything seems to turn me on, even the couple kissing on the seat in front of me. My phone buzzes and I check my messages. It's him.
C: Nearly missed the bus. Slept in?
That's the other thing. He's insisted on me installing a tracker on my phone, so now he knows all my movements. It's a gross invasion of my privacy, but it's also a requirement of his. He's very particular about how much freedom I'm allowed. I know I can delete the app, like I know I can block his messages, but I'm not going to. I'm living my life under his microscope, letting him study me like a bug.
R: Yeah
C: Bad dreams again?
R: Yeah
C: I'm sorry. I hope you have a better day today
I can feel the tone, and it's warm, reassuring. There is a caring side to him, as well as the manipulative mode that has seen me surrender my privacy and my right to underwear in the space of a week.
R: Not likely. It's the big review meeting this morning
C: But you're prepped, right?
R: I'm still shitting myself
C: They're the ones who should be shitting themselves. You are all across this
R: Thanks
C: You got this. Don't take any crap
R: Yes sir
I pause, staring at the last word. It wasn't supposed to be there, but I can't delete it. If I edit the message, he'll see, and it would only draw attention. Sir. Too many fucking late-night hours reading dumb shit about dominance the Everything Engine had been serving up in my feed. It was getting under my skin.
Idly, I flip open my Kikster test account, the secret one I've been using to explore the new world. The Everything Engine obliges, showing me the last items I've read and then a set of new content it's recommending for me. I feel strange reading this on the bus, among the other passengers, but I tap on the first new post the Engine has unearthed for me.
My feed has steadily refined itself, showing stories of women who have been turned into slaves and sex dolls by their partners, shut away from the world, focused solely on serving their owners. In my semi-permanently aroused state, I find myself drawn deeper into their tales, imagining myself in the position of the wife who has been told by her husband to wear a collar and nothing else as she serves him dinner. There's a comparison between her existence and my own, sitting there last night at my own table, naked, eating dinner alone. Her husband would then take her to bed and satisfy himself, using her for his pleasure, and she would orgasm, caught up in the feeling of just being used. I wonder what was going through her mind to make her want to live like that, and more than that, to confess it to the world on an anonymous forum that the Everything Engine had been able to find, analyse and file away for my later reading.
I still have fifteen minutes to go, so I click on another link. Again, it's a woman's real-life story of her particular obsession. She's confessing to a need to be disposed of, to be wrapped up in a garbage bag and to be thrown away. Her posts are arranged chronologically, detailing her progression from fantasy to reality. I read avidly, as she experiments with wrapping herself in a bag, sitting there enclosed in her broom closet, holding the bag closed over her head until she begins to run out of air. She's toying with herself as she struggles to breathe, bringing herself to a violent climax, and I feel the dampness between my legs as I imagine how that would feel.
I want to touch myself so badly now, but instead I click on the next entry. She's talking about how she's found someone who has the same fantasy. She doesn't describe him, but it's clear how excited she is. The next post is short, detailing how amazing it all was, how happy she is that she's done it. The next one is also short, promising more details later, if only she had the time to write it all down. The implication is that she's too busy with her new life, living her dream with the man that she's found, wrapped up literally and metaphorically in the fierce thrill of a new relationship. I have another five minutes, and I'm skim-reading her posts, needing to get to the end, to the longer post at the bottom, to find out where she took it.
The last post is explicit, detailing what's going to happen to her and how excited she is. He's going to take her away for the weekend. She's been told to pack nothing more than a fresh roll of garbage bags and some duct tape. She confesses to climbing inside one of the bags and bringing herself to orgasm after orgasm, fantasising about what he's going to do to her. She wants to feel the plastic around her body, enveloping her completely. He's promised to bag her again, adding more and more layers until she is cocooned helplessly in black plastic, tied up. He has told her that he's going to let her cum as much as she wants, feeling the helplessness as he lifts her into a rubbish skip and begins to pile trash over her. There is a desperate eagerness in her words as she writes that she can't wait to be thrown away. The last line is a promise to tell all, after, but it's the last line she ever wrote.
The bus shudders to a halt and I look up, startled, to see people getting off at my stop. I dash to the door before it closes and find myself standing on the street, unable to move, staring at what the Everything Engine just showed me. I click on her profile, but it's been inactive since that last post. I can't breathe, catching gasps as some strange overwhelming feeling sweeps through me.
There was every chance that it wasn't as good as she expected, and instead of experiencing the bright ecstasy of the act, it had been a bitter disappointment. Or, maybe he turned out to be a prick after all, and the weekend turned into an argument. Perhaps they'd had a great time, but he'd told her that he didn't want her to reveal anything to strangers on some forum, and she'd come to respect his feelings. Perhaps they were married now, years after that post, living happily with kids in the suburbs, with a wife who occasionally liked her husband to take out the trash. There were many reasons for not posting again.
There was one other possibility. I stare at her last line. To be thrown away, to be finally and irrevocably disposed of, to feel yourself abandoned to your doom. I could imagine her there, buried under a hundred bags that looked just like her, squirming as her air ran out, her fingers buried inside herself, cumming over and over again until her eyes rolled back in her head and her body gave in to the inevitable. I could imagine one bag among many, silent now, covered over by the next layer of garbage, day after day, year after year, never to be found again. I need to get up to my office. I need to find that bathroom and plunge my fingers inside myself until I orgasm, but I'm forbidden. I'm standing in front of the doors shaking.
---
It's a cast of thousands in the meeting, the full three-ring circus. My boss is there, the ringleader, directing the show as he goes around the big boardroom table asking for reports. The investors are breathing down his neck, trying to reconcile the millions they've pumped into Kikster with the lacklustre growth of the company. The upgrade was supposed to be the magic bullet, but the metrics are going the wrong way and no-one seems to be able to explain it.
Travis is sitting opposite me, the representative of the front-end dev team. He's got a plan that involves a rewrite of the user interface that he's selling like it's going to save the company. The audience engagement team have got marketing spend budgets that they think will open up the pipeline and bring in new customers. I see Lydia, our head of PR, sitting back with arms folded trying to work out what's going on. She's scowling, and I don't blame here: it's a complete shit-show and she knows she's going to be the one the boss asks to package this all up and put a neat positive spin on it afterwards.
Everyone is talking at once, including my boss, who is cracking the whip, trotting out trite one-liners that he's scraped from some stupid inspirational poster somewhere. It's carnage, and I'm stuck in the middle of it, unable to escape, with more and more fingers pointing in my direction.
I need to defend myself, I need to push back in this crazy echo-chamber blame game, but again and again the thought of the woman, sealed and quiet in her garbage bag, lost out there somewhere, comes back to me. I'm watching my career go down the tube and all I can think about is just how relentlessly horny I am. I close my eyes, and imagine stripping naked, climbing into the bag and sealing over my head, feeling the plastic wrapping around my body. It would be amazing. It would be a relief.
"Chloe."
I look up. My boss is staring at me. "Huh?" I say.
"You with us here?"
"Yeah."
"I mean, it looks like it's the Engine that's the root of all this. We've been through the rest. They can only fix so much if the core is broken."
The room has fallen silent now. They're all looking at me. I just want to walk out of the room, to open the door and disappear. It would be so easy.
"So, what do you have?"
