Chains in Mind Page 10

  “The men or the women?” she asked.

  Katherine shrugged. “Both.”

  “The women seem quite happy to take control,” Susan allowed, “but they seem to need a little help to screw the men down tight. As you know, I’ve made a few jokes about how badly the guys are doing, and that maybe housework is something they could manage, and at least some ladies have started to take that idea seriously. Stuff like that. I think they’re beginning to get the idea.

  “As for the men, they mostly have no idea what to do: they just need rounding up and tying down.”

  “So the drugs are working, then?” Katherine asked.

  “Must be.” Susan yawned. Her task required a lot of after-hours socialising with women from the office, and she had only just got in. She looked at her watch:

  “Bed time, I think.”

  “Yes. You’ve had a long day. Good-night, dear,” Katherine gave her a warm smile as Susan stood up and made for the door.

  As soon as she got home, before she had gone to see Katherine, Susan had used her remote control to send Harry a signal, in the form of four sharp little shocks to his groin. That meant that he should be scrubbed and in place by now in her bedroom, which was the same size as Katherine’s, but at the other end of the building.

  As Susan entered, she glanced to her right. There was a bedside lamp beside the large bed, creating a warm pool of light. Well beyond it, a spotlight in the ceiling illuminated a gilded cage. Surrounded by carpet, it had a circular base of welded metal panels five feet in diameter. Bolts round the rim fastened it firmly to the floor. The walls were delicate-looking, the bars no thicker than the mesh on a supermarket trolley, although more carefully and beautifully constructed. At about five foot high, the walls started to curve inwards, until eventually they joined to make a pointed dome. There was a little ornamental flourish of metal scrollwork - a little twisted-onion shape - on the point. The whole effect was of an oversize birdcage modelled on an Indian temple.

  Inside, of course, was Harry. There was no room for him to lie down straight, although he could just about have stood upright in the very centre, if he had ducked his head. At the moment, he was sitting on his heels, naked, waiting for her. The small cage door by which he had crawled inside was clicked shut firmly behind him, and the key was where he had left it: on a little hook on the wall of the room, far out of his reach.

  “Hello, lover,” Susan said, putting some husky emotion in her voice, and pouting at him. The name was a little joke of hers. It had, in truth, been more than a year since she had had sex with anyone else, and that gave the two of them a certain intimacy that they would not have shared if he were just one of many toys. Still, the truth was so far from what the name implied that it appealed to her sense of the ridiculous.

  Harry did not reply - she didn’t want him to - but his eyes followed her as she moved. She went to her ensuite bathroom, and then undressed, moving around the softly-lit bedroom, getting ready for bed. Her nightdress was short, a brief confection of black silk chiffon. Her fine and silky blonde hair, loose now, came down to her shoulders. She knew that she looked fantastic. She strolled over to the cage, resting her delicate hands against the golden bars, and inspected the slave inside. His eyes were deferentially downcast, and his arms were at his sides. The spotlight cast strong shadows over his body, making his musculature look more impressive, and criss-crossing it with the shadows of the cage bars. She could see his breathing quite easily, by the way the lines moved across his chest. He had an erection, she noticed. That wasn’t surprising: of course he yearned desperately for her, driven almost insane by his unfilled need, and that was very proper, and quite amusing.

  “Ready to generate some juice for me tonight?” she asked him, her eyes sparkling as though she were offering him a treat. He looked up at her, hopelessly in love, hopelessly enslaved.

  “Yes, Mistress,” he said.

  “Good.” Susan walked past him to get the key to the presentation cage. Although he was always in there when she came up to bed, if she wanted to use him it was usually necessary to get him out again. If not, of course, then he slept as best he could on the metal floor, grateful to be so close to his owner’s bed.

  As he crawled out through the door she had unlocked, she gave him a kick on the rump with the side of her foot.

  “Hurry up.”

  He scurried to the foot of her bed and dragged a large machine out from underneath. It was built on a large blockboard base, three feet by six, and he neatly aligned the long edge along the end of the bed. Above the base, side by side, there were two planks about the size and shape of skis, but without the turned-up ends. At the front ends they were fixed to each end of what looked like a bicycle pedal crank, so that one plank was up when the other was down. At the back end, they were supported by black steel arms, rising from the base board, that only rocked them back and forth rather than right round a circle. The result was that, when the crank turned, each plank, in counter-phase, swung forwards, and tilted up at the front, then tilted down at the front and swung backwards, cyclically, not unlike a cross-country skiing movement.

  There were leather straps fixed to the planks, and Harry started strapping himself on, his legs from foot to knee on the planks at the back, and then his arms from hand to elbow on the planks at the front. Naturally, Susan had to do the last straps for him. She checked that they were all tight and secure. Now he was bound onto the machine in a crawling position, sideways on at the foot of her bed.

  Susan stood back to check that everything was as it should be. One last thing. There was a loose flex on the base board ending in an odd-looking clip. She squatted down and connected it to the groin-encircling metal ring that, just like Katherine’s slaves, Harry wore. It closed over his scrotum, and he gave a little sound, not so much of present distress, as of sensitivity and uneasiness.

  That done, Susan walked round the machine to get to bed, deliberately passing so close to Harry that her thigh was inches from his face, increasing his need further. She gave a little hip wiggle as she passed. There was nothing he could do: bound as he was on knees and elbows, he could not even touch anything with his erection. He gave a little moan of frustration, which privately delighted her.

  She pulled back the pretty quilt and got in, reaching out to the side to turn out the spotlight on the now-empty cage. From the bedside cabinet, she retrieved a vibrator. It was eight inches long and jet black; it had been modified: it used to run on batteries, but these had been taken out, and Susan fished out a flex from under the bed and plugged it in. She lay back and got comfortable, half sitting against the lacy-edged pillows.

  Eyes closed, she began to think about some of the men she had seen that day, at Sallis and Company, many of them still managers. They would be brought low. She imagined them in chains, begging for mercy. She twisted the base of the vibrator, turning it on at minimum power.

  Immediately she could hear activity from the end of the bed. A little electronic control device continually checked how much power the vibrator was taking, and if that much wasn’t being generated, it sent sharp, very localised, electric shocks through the clip that currently encircled Harry’s scrotum. The faster he turned the crank with his crawling action, the more power reached the vibrator.

  At the moment, Susan was just getting started. She was running the device over her breasts and down to her navel in soft, languid, strokes, on minimal power, so her slave only had to crawl quite slowly to avoid a shock. He knew perfectly well what was happening, of course. He would be able to hear the slight noises as she moved against the bedclothes. He was working for her pleasure, but he couldn’t even see her. His throbbing erection would be helpless, unable to reach anything even to touch, in his forced knees-and-elbows posture.

  Susan ran the tool up the inside of her left arm, and down the outside of her left breast. She decided to turn it up a little, twi
sting the base control a little more. There was a little squeak from her unseen slave at the foot of her bed, as he got a shock and increased his output. The generator was deliberately inefficient: he would be crawling quite vigorously now, to provide her with the pleasure she wanted. There was a slight mechanical sound, but the machine was well oiled: it wasn’t disturbing her.

  Now, in her mind, the men were forced to their knees, either side of a beam six-inches wide, their erect members bound and strapped across it, and she was walking along it - strutting as if on a catwalk - in bare feet, crushing them as she went, each male squealing as her weight landed on his most prized possession: the thing that did his thinking for him.

  More. She turned the vibrator way up, and started running it over her inner thighs and belly. For some reason, the males in her imagination were each ejaculating as she squashed their shafts, as though their organs were cows’ teats, and she was milking them with the soles of her feet. The white sprays were squirting across the room. Her breathing was coming harder now, melding with the panting coming from Harry at the foot of the bed. She was no longer giving him a thought, but he would be working exhaustingly hard, pricked on by shocks through his scrotum, providing the power for her delectation.

  Her legs were apart now, her head back and eyes screwed shut, as she concentrated on her fantasies. She inserted the tool inside herself, and started stoking her inner fire. An individual manager swam into her vision: his name slipped her mind. He was looking confused, helpless, as she bent him backwards over his own executive desk and straddled his head. She held on by grabbing handfuls of his expensive haircut, where it emerged between her legs, and ground herself into his face.

  Without looking, she turned the vibrator right up to maximum. She was nearly there. Harry was wheezing, gasping for breath, as he put all his effort into his task.

  She cried out, once, twice, more.

  “Yes, oh yes!”

  Eventually her spasming died away. With a lazy hand she turned the vibrator down but not off, leaving it in place inside her as she revelled in a happy after-glow. Harry would be having an easier time now, although she could still hear him clearly, as his breathing struggled to catch up. She thought she detected a few sobs. He had served her pleasure without touching her, without even being able to see her, and his only reward would be to spend the night strapped in his uncomfortable position, as his unused erection gradually sagged away, leaving him empty and used, knowing himself for what he was: an instrument for her amusement.

  She turned off the vibrator and put it aside. She turned off the lamp and settled down to sleep, perfectly content.

  Chapter Twelve

  “So pleased to meet you.” Christine shook the hand of Michael Baxter, head of Baxter Central Heating, one of Simon’s oldest clients. “I do apologise that we seem to have been rather slow, lately.” Pointedly, she glanced sideways at Simon, who was standing half a pace back, carrying his own briefcase and hers. He pretended to ignore it. “But we’ve had something of an internal reorganisation, and I am now your account manager. I’m sure if you’ll bear with us for a few more days, we can get back on track.”

  She smiled winningly and Baxter softened, a sucker for a pretty face. And not just a face: Christine’s new pinstripe skirt hugged her figure, emphasising the curve from her slim waist round her hips and in again to a narrow hem above the knee. Her lilac silk blouse was just thin enough to give a hint of the lacy bra underneath. Her hair was pulled back, and woven into a complex pattern behind her head, so that her pearl stud earrings were shown to best advantage. Everything about her was immaculate; not only did she look immensely desirable, but she simultaneously projected an impression of great professionalism and competence.

  “Well, okay,” Baxter said. “But we really do need the year-ends by the end of next week.”

  Simon had just finished them, after a lot of effort; and Christine knew it, because she and he had just spent the morning together, reviewing all the clients she was taking over from him.

  “I’ll see to it, straight away,” she assured Baxter, “I don’t expect that it will be as difficult as all that.”

  Baxter glanced Simon’s way. His scorn for someone who couldn’t hold down their own job, and then ended up as flunky to a woman, was clear on his face.

  Simon seethed. He wanted to protest: it had been difficult, but he had done it. But Christine was his boss, now, and she was paying his rent, too; he couldn’t afford to offend her. Baxter would believe what Christine wanted him to believe: that she had done, easily and quickly, what Simon had failed to deliver. He clenched his jaw, and said nothing.

  The furniture in the office had been rearranged. The three women, the senior consultants, had taken a private office each, with Christine, of course, commandeering the corner office, which was the biggest. The partition walls between these private spaces and the open-plan area were glazed from about two feet upwards. A desk had been set up against each one, on the outside, each of them so low that the desktop fitted neatly against the wall just below the glazing. A chair low enough to match was provided, so that each assistant consultant would sit facing into the office of his own boss, with his back to the main open-plan area. He wouldn’t see much of the inside, though: the offices had venetian blinds for privacy, and the ladies had all chosen to pull the blinds down to a point about forty inches above the floor: that was just low enough so that their assistant was looking at nothing but the blind, but high enough so that their bosses had a clear view of their underlings’ desktops, and so could keep tabs on what they were working on.

  The lowness of the desks, not much above knee high, and their placing, which emphasised the assistant’s subordinate position, was a constant humiliation, but after a week or two Simon simply became used to it. Perhaps it was still affecting him, but he no longer gave it much conscious thought.

  He no longer had a phone on his desk: it was deemed unnecessary now that he had no clients of his own: it had been replaced with an intercom, so that Christine could call him in as necessary; but what she mostly seemed to use it for was to make him fetch her coffee.

  The first time, he had thought of resisting, of saying that it wasn’t part of his job description. But she could leave his flat any time: she had had more sense than to sign a lease that locked her in; and at work, his performance bonus, if any, was entirely up to her. He needed her goodwill. He stuttered for a moment, and then caved in.

  “Yes, Christine,” he said.

  Once the precedent had been set, that was it: none of the senior consultants ever got their own coffee again, or even washed their own mugs. Any time of the day, an assistant might be seen fetching some for his boss. Simon wouldn’t meet the eyes of anyone else in the office when he was doing it.

  Simon’s workload, or his ability, seemed to change again: now, as in the old days, snags came up sometimes, but sometimes the work went smoothly and easily. The thing was, there was just so much of it, or else he was just so slow. Chrissie said it was the latter: that he needed to buck his ideas up, and concentrate better, but it felt almost as if he were doing two people’s work.

  Chrissie and the other two women had taken to coming in about nine thirty, taking two-hour lunches, and leaving about four-thirty. Their assistants, however, were working from seven in the morning, until about nine at night.

  In the mornings, Simon queued to use the single shower. The others took the bus, but Simon walked the two miles to work, to get there by seven o’clock Right now, he couldn’t even afford the bus fare.

  As head of the office, Christine had brought in a rota for cleaning the kitchenette. She had happened to see what a state it was in one day, and immediately ordered that the three assistants clean it thoroughly, first thing every morning, in rotation. So, often, Simon’s first chore was to scrub the place down, before starting his own work.

  It had been four weeks,
now, and Christine still hadn’t provided the work she’d promised. He’d mentioned it a couple of times, but she had put him off, told him not to pester her. He was surviving mostly on white bread from the supermarket, and he had run out of things to sell: only his CD collection had produced any real money. He felt dizzy, and that wasn’t helping his work performance. Still, it was Saturday tomorrow, perhaps she’d have something for him, then.

  “Simon, I’d like a word.” Mid-morning, Christine used the intercom to summon him from his desk outside her office. She had sauntered in at about half-past nine. He jumped up.

  When he knocked and entered, she didn’t look up for a few moments, keeping him waiting, standing in front of her big, solid, desk, as she typed something on the screen turned away from him. Her hair was pulled back into a knot behind her head, but it was so long that the free end still hung down twelve inches, clearing her shoulders. She was wearing expensive-looking stud earrings, and a business suit in dark green. Her skirt was hidden by her desk, but he knew that it stopped six inches above the knee. She looked fabulous, and she knew it.

  “Ah,” she deigned to notice him, eventually, “Simon. You know I’ve had my new car a week, now?” A Mercedes convertible. In yellow. “Well, it needs washing, and I don’t trust the machines to be thorough enough. Could you see to it in your lunch hour?” She gave him a sweet smile.

  A job! It was in the car park, and everyone would see, but he no longer cared: he was hungry. “Okay, Christine. Um, how much?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I told you I’d keep you, but if you don’t trust me, you can make other arrangements.” She was frosty.

  “No,” he said hastily, “that’s fine.”