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 ï>¿A Very Merry Mailgirls XMas Ch.  02 bylizstanton8181Â(C)

   It was only just after midnight that Erin Ryan O'Neill found herself on
the floor of an empty cubicle, on her back and grinding her clit in
complete and total surrender.  The roar of the party down the hall carried
on in the distance.  So, too, did the vocalizations of Sophie Scott from
the next cubicle over.  As well as the vocalizations from another, unknown
girl in another cubicle somewhere else out there in the darkness.

   It was dark.  Erin had that going for her, at least.  If she had
succumbed to her baser instincts back in the locker room, it would have
been under bright, fluorescent lights, with dozens of other girls playing
witness to her capitulation.  The same could have been said of the employee
lounge here in Human Resources, though that hadn't stopped Visitor H from
doing so while Mailgirl Number Eleven and her other friend, Visitor I,
laughed and cheered her on.  Visitor D wasn't yet so bold or abandoned.

   But that wasn't to say that the dimly-lit cubicle farm a hundred feet
down the hall was private, exactly.  For one thing, Erin wasn't going to be
able to explain away her prolonged absence as a simple bathroom break -
especially if she returned to the party covered in a sheen of sweat and
stinking of sex.  For another, Sophie Scott was in on what she was doing.
In fact, it was her stepsister who had recognized the look in Erin's eye,
and who had suggested she might be able to find somewhere marginally more
private for her to - in Sophie's words - provide herself with a little
"relief."

   Erin was on her back, with her knees up and her legs spread, halfway
under some stranger's desk.  The faint, orange glow of the power strip
beside her illuminated the underside of the desk, and Erin focused,
absently, on a dry and aging wad of gum directly above her.  Her hair was
in a puddle around her, intertwined with power cords, and when she wiggled
and wriggled just so, the top of her head bumped gently against the fabric
of cubicle's wall.  The carpet beneath her was both scratchy and thin, the
floor hard.  She wanted to give in and surrender completely, to close her
eyes and imagine that she was back in LA, in her bed, but she wasn't quite
there.  For one, she kept glancing nervously in the direction of the
cubicle's opening, fearful of being discovered in such a compromised state.
But also, it was her environment, and the utter depravity of fucking
herself in such in an environment, that made her hotter and hornier than
any session of self-pleasure had ever delivered her at home.

   She'd been drinking, of course.  Drinking, in fact, more than could
remember drinking in the last couple of years.  Save for maybe her sorority
sister Ashley's wedding in Glendale the prior summer?  Or maybe Ashley's
bachelorette party in Scottsdale a few weeks before that?  Either way, Erin
had had more than her fair share holiday-themed candy cane cocktails that
night - equal parts vanilla rum, white chocolate liqueur, and peppermint
schnapps.  And while she wasn't yet drunk, she was on her way, and the fact
that she'd lost count of how many times she'd re-upped could well have
explained why her inhibitions had been lowered enough to take Sophie up on
her offer.

   She wasn't exactly sure what she'd been expecting of that night's
holiday party, exactly.  Sarah's depictions of the "Bitch Sessions" that
the Plaza girls engaged in on Friday nights had always carried with them an
air of "classiness" - cocktail dresses, fancy hotel bar, Wall Street types.
She understood that things could get rowdy and randy pretty quickly, but
her imaginings of Mailgirl Thirteen and her friends out for an evening
drink stood in stark contrast with what she assumed those same "Bitch
Sessions" might be like for the 24/7 girls in Jersey City.  Still naked and
collared, beaten down and imprisoned, she'd half-expected the "party" here
at Park Place to be nothing more than a bunch of miserable cunts slugging
back vodka from water cooler cups and whining to one another under harsh
lighting in a break room that smelled faintly of burnt microwave popcorn.

   And maybe that's what these "Bitch Sessions" were to the Park Place
girls more regularly.  But the 2nd Floor employee lounge was nicer than
Erin had imagined it was going to be - not as nice as the executive lounge
that they'd been allowed to use every once in a blue moon, Sophie
apologized - but better than the rundown break room of Erin's expectations.
Half the room was carpeted, the other half tiled, with a
breakfast-bar-of-sorts (turned actual bar, tonight) breaking up the two
zones.  To one end of the room, there was a "living room" setting, complete
with a flat-screen television, a pair of expensive-looking sofas, and
handful of matching, upholstered chairs.  Modern-looking tables and chairs
were scattered about, and a Christmas tree had been erected in one corner.
A big, industrial sterling silver refrigerator presided over the
kitchenette area, and the coffee makers, water filtration systems,
microwaves, and toasters were all top-of-the-line.  It was still very much
an office setting, but a high-end one.  And, if a girl were to squint, she
might have been able to imagine herself in an expensive downtown loft,
instead of on the second floor of USF's back office in Jersey City.

   The girls weren't allowed to sit on the furniture, of course, so the
presence of the comfortable sofas and chairs were their own torment.  The
veteran mailgirls seemed to pay them no mind, pushing them up against the
wall and arranging a few dozen of the USF-branded pink "mailgirl mats" (no
thicker and not much more different than a standard yoga mat) around in a
circle in their place.  But though none of the girls was bold enough to
risk being caught sitting in a chair, more than a few took up spots sitting
on the bar with their legs dangling beneath them, or perching up atop one
of the various tables.  Erin couldn't imagine that the more regular users
of this room would have been crazy about exposed pussy and bare asses on
top of their eating surfaces, but there seemed to be enough grey area in
the policy that the Park Place girls didn't think twice about it.

   Holiday music blared in the background, and a Yule-tide log flickered on
the flat-screen in a loop.  Mailgirls Six and Eleven, as well as Visitors H
and I, were tending bar and mixing cocktails when Erin, Catherine, and the
Scott girls first arrived.  But it was casual, and mostly self-service. 
Sarah and Sophie explained that Mistress Rei and her masters in Human
Capital usually provided them with a good assortment of drinks, mixers,
wines, and beers, but admitted that tonight's selection was on another
level.  In fact, they all seemed surprised by the platters of hors
d'oeuvres, cookies, and desserts that had been laid out for them - for most
of the Park Place girls, it was one of just a few times they'd been allowed
to eat something other than mailgirl chow since they'd first inked their
contracts.

   Girls milled about, talking and laughing with another, and making
introductions to visitors from the Plaza and from the outside world.  But
for the lack of clothes, and maybe the aggressive drinking, this could have
been a holiday party or networking event anywhere in the world.  Only when
she slipped up and introduced herself as "Erin," and was rewarded with a
slap across the face from Sophie - a hard one, at that - did the world the
mailgirls now lived in intrude upon the mirth.  As Visitor A had promised,
any awkwardness or embarrassment about Erin's nudity faded away quickly,
and she soon found herself almost forgetting about it entirely.

   Almost.  The mailgirls of Park Place and the Plaza were all decidedly
more comfortable in their skins than Erin or the other visitors, and
thought little of a hug, a caress, or holding hands.  At one point, Erin
had Mailgirl Number Six's hand upon her naked hip as the two chatted
Catherine, Mailgirl Number Fourteen, and Mailgirl Number Fourteen's mother
Angela.  There was little to read into it, Erin told herself - all over the
room, there was skin-to-skin contact and a casual attitude towards
"handsy-ness" without there being something necessarily sexual or predatory
about it.  A nipple pinch here or there.  A slap on the ass.  A kiss on the
cheek or the neck.  It was all innocent enough in the early hours of the
evening.

   Allowances had been made that let the girls use one of the nearby
restrooms on the 2nd Floor without a non-mailgirl chaperone - common enough
for their weekly "Bitch Sessions," as Erin understood it.  Only the men's
room, of course, and stall doors were still required to be left open, but
the girls could come and go as they pleased.  For the visitors - the Plaza
girls included - this allowance was moot; said restroom was on the far side
of a locked door, and required a smartphone-equipped mailgirl to lead the
way.  But the back-and-forth inevitably led to the party spilling out of
the employee lounge and into the hallway beyond.  And though none of the
girls would have dared to violate Mistress Rei's restrictions of letting
themselves into anyone's office, the darkened cubicle farm beyond seemed to
be fair game.

   Conversations were wide-ranging, but often led back to life as a
mailgirl, as girls swapped war stories and horror stories, and did their
best to one-up each other with confessions and admissions of an
increasingly naughty nature.  The mailgirls told stories that left Erin's
mouth agape, but also just gave the brunette a fuller picture of even the
less sexual aspects of their servitude here at Park Place.

   "Exercise ball," Sarah answered at one point, laughing, in response to a
question from her mother.  She was the rare mailgirl who was actually
allowed some "down time" on Sundays to work on her research - a special
dispensation awarded to her due to the nature of USF's arrangement with her
graduate program back in New Haven.  Sarah was given the opportunity to
work in one of the cubicles here in Human Resources, detailing and
documenting her life among the mailgirls for her former academic advisor
and head of Human Capital both.  As she was restricted from sitting in a
honest-to-goodness chair, however, Human Capital had opted to provide her
with a giant, inflatable exercise ball for those hours in front of a
keyboard.

   "Most of us aren't even allowed to read," Mailgirl Six added, in a
lighter tone that sounded as if she found humor in the restriction.

   "Seriously?!!" Plaza Eighteen shrieked, aghast.  She, apparently, didn't
get the joke.  "That's some straight-up 'Handmaiden's Tale' style
bullshit!"

   "We're allowed to read," Sophie said, partly contradicting Six and
partly coming to her defense.  "We just don't have much of an opportunity.
And when we do..."

   "Porn," Six explained.  She directed Erin's attention to the magazine
rack.  "It was Three's turn this week to replace the usual reading
materials in here with Mistress Rei's selections." Gone were the Wall
Street Journals and New York Times and Fortunes that Erin assumed usually
occupied the rack.  Only now did Erin see that, in their stead, were issues
of Playboy and Hustler, as well as such lesser-known titles as "Bait" and
"Booty" and "Big & Bouncy."

   Sophie elaborated.  "We're on the clock for twelve hours a day, every
day.  And usually in the locker room for the other twelve.  We don't really
have a chance to read, other than Saturday nights."

   "And when you do...?" Plaza Eighteen asked.

   Six shrugged.  "'Reading for pleasure' has taken on different
connotations." This elicited an uncomfortable laugh from Plaza Eighteen.

   "I read them for the articles," Sophie added sarcastically.

   Sure enough, Plaza Eighteen's Park Place counterpart was sitting
Indian-style on one of the mailgirl mats by the magazine rack, deeply
engaged in her reading material.  Though a party may have been going on
around her, she was using this time off the clock to catch up on all the
literary offerings Mistress Rei's smut had to offer.

   "This can't be a Barrow thing," Plaza Eighteen remarked, referring to
the director of USF's Human Capital group in a tone that almost bordered
upon disappointment.  The brunette apparently thought highly enough of her
captor that she felt this sort of thing was beneath him.

   "Not his style," Six agreed.  "It'd be crueler to give us Newsweeks and
Cosmos and whatever.  Normal stuff.  To rub our noses in what we're
missing, the normal stuff, from outside."

   "That's Barrow," Sarah offered.  Chin nodding towards Park Place
Eighteen and the magazine rack, "That?  That's one the underlings.  Bagby,
maybe."

   While Erin had been exposed to her fair share of masturbation and
muff-diving back in the mailgirls locker room, the girls' Christmas party
started out on a decidedly less desperate and depraved note.  She supposed
this made sense; for the girls who absolutely needed some sort of physical
relief, most of them had taken care of it after their shifts had ended. 
Dirty jokes, dirty stories, dirty looks?  Sure.  But - at least initially -
Erin was granted a temporary reprieve from having to play audience to any
sort of dirty acts.  As the hours passed and the liquor flowed, however,
this changed.  The mood of the room began to shift, and took on an
increasingly charged air.  Around the same time that body shots started,
Erin began to notice girls slinking off out of the party in two's and
three's, or taking suspiciously long "bathroom breaks." It was only a
matter of time before Mailgirl Number Ten began to openly rub one out in
the corner of the room, with complete and total disregard for whoever might
be watching.

   While Erin couldn't help but be distracted by the softly mewing girl a
few feet away, the other mailgirls paid her no mind.  Even back in the
locker room, Erin had noticed this behavior; while a mailgirl wouldn't
think twice about carrying on a conversation while at the food trough, or
while squatting over the washikis, they seemed to grant one another some
illusion of "privacy" when engaged with themselves, or when engaged with a
partner.  Immediately after completion, though, these post-orgasmic girls
were often greeted with teasing, laughter, cheering, and applause.

   There were exceptions, however.  A handful of the girls' drinking games
had taken a decidedly more hardcore turn.  Erin blushed all over when she
realized that Plaza Seventeen and Park Place Fifteen were engaged in a
"race" to see who could get herself off first, while Plaza Seven, Plaza
Ten, and Sarah Scott cheered them both on, laughing and screeching all the
while.  Visitor H, meanwhile, had slunk off towards the back of kitchen -
but that hadn't stopped her friends from hooting and hollering in her
direction.

   It was around this point that Sophie took Erin by the hand, and led her
from the room.  She knew what Erin needed, even if Erin hadn't yet been
able to admit it even to herself.

   And so it was here that Erin found herself, on the floor of a cubicle in
a mostly-empty office building, with her hand between her legs.  There
hadn't been much back-and-forth between Erin and Sophie.  For the briefest
of moments, Erin feared that her stepsister might have something more
participatory in mind.  She was worried about how to politely decline such
an offer without hurting Sophie's feelings or coming off as judgmental over
how far Sophie had fallen.  She was worried that, in the moment, she might
not have been strong enough to do so.

   But, though Sophie was only a few feet away, separated from her
stepsister by a thin partition, the topic of active participation in Erin's
"relief" had not been broached.

   Erin tried her best to think of Ben.  She really did.  She knew that
what she was doing wasn't cheating on him, exactly.  But she had promised
him that she'd try to be good, and this self-indulgence - solo, or
borderline solo as it may have been - felt like a violation of that
promise. If she fantasized about him while doing this,
then...maybe...maybe...it wouldn't be so wrong.  But the fact that was
wrong was precisely the reason it felt so right.  And, try as she might to
imagine him here with her now, Ben was not a part of this fantasy come
alive.

   Instead, as her fingers increased their speed and intensity against her
clit, she found herself wondering whose cubicle this was.  Because this was
Human Resources, after all, the likelihood was that the cubicle's more
regular occupant was a woman.  On the one hand, that seemed like the
preferred choice; surely another girl might forgive a sister in need?  On
the other, the chance that she was at a man's desk was naughtier, dirtier,
and more of a turn-on.  She imagined that she was here mid-day, while some
middle-aged pencil pusher tried to get his work done, all while a naked
mailgirl diddled herself at his feet.  The sheer depravity of her need
brought her to another level.

   "Ohhh," she moaned softly, self-conscious that Sophie would hear her.

   A rapid inhale-exhale, inhale-exhale, inhale-exhale was the only
response from the cubicle next door.

   It wasn't going to take long.  Erin knew her body well enough to know
that, at least.  As unsexy as she felt while gobbling down mailgirl chow
from the communal trough in the locker room, and as brisk and frigid as her
shower had been, Erin's arousal had never really abated since she'd first
set foot in USF's lobby.  The truth of the matter was that this had been
building since she'd landed at Newark yesterday, maybe even since she'd
first decided upon this visit back around Thanksgiving.  For months, Erin
had dreamed and fantasized and imagined what it would be like to be a
mailgirl - a naked slut at the receiving end of humiliation and control on
the part of some unseen corporate master.  The abandonment and obscenity of
it all was too much.  She never stood a chance when it came to resisting
these sorts of baser urges.

   "Ohhh..." she moaned again - a little louder this time, a little more
confident.  "Oh, oh, oh..."

   While her right hand continued on with the task at hand, her left found
one of her nipples.  It was rock-hard, almost painfully so, and she pinched
it between her thumb and the knuckle of her index finger.  She then traced
it with her thumbnail, running laps around it while gently kneading the
underside of her breast with her other fingers.  Mistress Rei had provided
similar attention earlier that afternoon - playing with her nipple
absentmindedly and casually, squeezing her tit while standing behind her,
breathing her hot breath on Erin's naked back.  Erin had fantasized about
being with a woman every now and then, of course, but she'd never acted
upon it - not even in her wildest days in Tempe.  Mistress Rei, with her
cruel and torturous pinches, pokes, and prods was the closest she'd ever
come.

   Erin probed the inside of her pussy with her middle finger first, and
then her middle and ring almost immediately after.  Her clit was rewarded
with an upgrade, as the butt of her palm picked up where her fingers had
left off.  She ground forcefully up against her hand, her hips rising to
meet it and her bare behind lifting ever-so-slightly up off the floor.

   "Hooo..." she breathed.

   She was wet.  Wetter than she had probably ever been, her whole life
over.  Whatever conflicts were playing out in her psyche between her id and
ego, these were conflicts that her body did not share in.  Her pussy knew
what it wanted.  Her pussy knew what it needed.  Her pussy was in the
driver's seat now.  It was calling the shots.  Perhaps it had been calling
the shots all along.

   The build was less of a build, and more of a sudden and uncontrollable
surprise.  And it came not from the presence of Erin's hand alone - but,
rather, from the presence of two naked figures in the dimly lit space above
her, standing the entrance of her cubicle.

   "Sorry!" one the girls yipped.  They both giggled and then stepped back
into the darkness.

   Erin exploded.  "Gaaaah!" she yelped, surprised by her climax and by
being caught in the act all at the same time.  "Ah!  Ah!  Ah!  Ah! 
Ahhhhh!" Any pretense of biting of her tongue was now gone.

   Her hips bucked violently and she arched her back.  Her left hand now
joined her right on top of her pussy, as if she was trying to hold onto the
orgasm as long as she could, as if she could keep it from escaping.  Her
leg muscles tightened, her heels lifted off the ground, and she rose to the
balls of her feet.

   And, through it all, she heard Sophie giggle in a hoarse, out-of-breath
voice, "...this one's occupied, too!" Apparently, Erin's visitors had
simply tried to move on to the next cubicle over.

   One orgasm would never be enough for Erin.  It had never been, when she
was alone.  More recently, it was at least three before she was ready to be
done.  Certainly, here and now, one wasn't going to cut it.  Before the
entirety of her first had even passed, her right hand was back at work,
coaxing out a second.

   She was embarrassed, of course, at being caught in such a compromised
state.  By that point, however, she'd lost count of the number of girls
she'd witnessed getting themselves off since the mailgirls had returned to
the locker room.  She told herself that she was just one more girl among
many.  She wasn't sure if that was her brain rationalizing it or reasoning
with her sense of shame, or if it was her crotch - willing to make her
believe anything in that moment, so long as she didn't stop.  Being caught,
even as briefly as she had been, and even if her witnesses hadn't seen her
face, was humiliating.  But humiliating in an oh-so-delicious way.

   In that moment, as orgasm number two now began to announce it was
coming, Erin felt a few brief seconds of clarity.  If it weren't for her
tattoo, none of the girls back at party would ever have been able to single
her out, or identify that it was Erin O'Neill - sorry, Visitor D - writhing
on the floor of that cubicle.  But, whoever they had been - Park Place
mailgirls, Plaza mailgirls, other visitors, or even Sarah and Catherine -
they'd know full-well who she was and what she'd done to herself when she
returned to the employee lounge.  They'd seen her transformed, and they'd
witnessed her become sex incarnate, arousal realized.  They'd seen her at
her most vulnerable and most honest, singly focused on nothing more than
sexual pleasure.

   She climaxed again.

   ***

   As her obsession with all things mailgirl began to take hold over her
that Fall, Erin increasingly took a more circuitous route back from work.
Capstone Partners was downtown, as was Donovan Runnels.  Capitol Pictures
had a program, but was all the way over in Hollywood.  Okajima Heavy
Industries was down in Long Beach.  Fabrikam, though?  Fabrikam wasn't
unreasonably out-of-the-way, and Erin could take the long way home, pass by
their suburban headquarters, and still get in the door before Ben.

   Erin knew it was unlikely she'd get a peek at one of Fabrikam's
mailgirls, especially at that time of day.  The company's offices weren't
terribly exciting from the outside - just the usual bland, modernist glass
and concrete structure, with its neatly trimmed grass and manicured hedges
that could be found anywhere in the sprawl of Greater Los Angeles.  She
knew, from her research on the Post Office, that the Fabrikam girls were
all picked up at home by a company shuttle bus with tinted windows.  That
they wore formless white shifts that they were expected to surrender to the
driver the moment they boarded.  And that they were unloaded each morning
inside the building's parking structure.  The chance that Erin would catch
a glimpse of one of these naked slaves was slim to none.  The only outward
sign that Fabrikam even had a mailgirl program was the presence of a
Whitestocking encampment across the street, protesting its existence.

   And yet passing by the building became a part of Erin's daily routine
all the same.  There was something exciting about being so close to the
action, about just being in the vicinity of the mailgirl world, that kept
her from her more normal commute.  Back in October, and in early November,
that had seemed almost enough.

   She imagined herself as one of them.  Rising each morning before dawn,
with Ben still asnooze in bed, and stripping out of her nightie.  Slipping
on her shift, with nothing beneath it, and waiting at the end of her
driveway for the short bus to come.  Stripping again once aboard, with her
covering - such as it was - deposited into a communal box at the front of
bus, and knowing full-well that the shift she wore home at the end of the
day might have been on another girl entirely that morning.  Getting
unloaded in the garage with her fellow naked mailgirls, and being roughly
hustled out to the courtyard that served as Fabrikam's take on the mailgirl
locker room.  Showering outdoors.  Shaving her intimate areas while the
muggles all watched from inside.  Getting collared, getting leashed, and
getting inspected before being put into circulation.

   It wasn't the humiliation that appealed to her; the embarrassment and
dehumanization of it all was secondary, a product of what the real allure
was.  It was control.  It was surrender.  It was playing the part of sex
object while someone else called the shots.

   How could she ever have expected Ben to understand that?

   She'd met Ben O'Neill shortly after college.  He was tall, good-looking,
and - above all else - kind.  Their marriage was one of those modern, 21st
century ones where they took turns making dinner, folding the laundry,
shopping for groceries, and all of that.  Ben brought home flowers for her
every Friday afternoon, and sometimes just because.  They went on hikes
together, trips up the coast together, and out to dinner for "date night"
every other Saturday.  They communicated well, telling each other
everything - every dream, every fear, every hope for their life together.
Because of this, Erin had felt guilty keeping her online exploration of
Mailgirls Exposed and the Post Office from him.

   Erin's preoccupation with idea of mailgirls was very likely a reaction
to fact that she and Ben had been talking about kids more and more over the
last year.  She was thirty, and Ben had a couple of years on her.  They
both had good, stable jobs.  They owned a house in the suburbs, in a
neighborhood they'd chosen in large part due the quality of the school
district.  And Erin wanted kids.  She did.  She really did.  She just
wasn't sure she wanted them quite yet.  She liked being the hot, young
schoolteacher the eleventh-grade boys thought about in the privacy of their
own bedrooms, the young-and-fun girl still in her twenties.  She wasn't
ready to become someone's mom.  She wasn't ready to sacrifice her body, and
be that woman with saggy tits and a muffin-top.  Ben wasn't pressuring her.
It wasn't his style.  But Erin had felt the pressure all the same.

   Sophie had called a couple of times that previous summer, panicking over
her own impending life events.  Though never quite as buttoned-down and
conservative as her older sister Sarah, Erin had always thought of Sophie
as someone who knew who she was, and knew what she wanted, from an early
age.  Even as a teenager, Sophie seemed to be one of those people who had
it all figured out - certainly more so than Erin ever did.  But Sophie was
increasingly on-edge about her wedding to John, fretting over whether she
was too young to settle down.  From high school to college, from college to
dental school.  From Patrick and Catherine's house to the dorms, and from
the dorms directly into an apartment with her fiancÃ(C)e.  House, job,
pets, kids, graduations, retirement, death.  It all seemed to be planned
out too soon, too early, too neat.

   Erin wrote it off as nothing more than cold feet - at least initially.
But it caused her to reflect on her own life, and her own life choices.  If
Sophie, at twenty-three, was worried that there were no more big adventures
out there for her, what did that mean for Erin at thirty?

   John had been outraged when Sophie called off the wedding, and informed
him that, instead, she'd been spending the next two years as a naked
mailgirl in New Jersey.  He just couldn't understand it, and was furious
that Sophie would do this to him.  Ben, in contrast, had been concerned and
empathetic - it was his nature.  He even offered to Catherine that he could
look over the contracts Sarah and Sophie signed to find some sort of
loophole; he wasn't a lawyer by training, but he worked in Procurement, and
knew enough that he might be able to parse the legalese.  Catherine had
thanked him, and shared the contracts with him, but nothing had ever really
come of it.  After all, both Sarah and Sophie had volunteered for this,
whatever their individual reasons had been.

   "I'll wait for you," Ben had told Erin that morning in bed earlier in
the month month, surrendering to her need to go visit her stepsisters and
everything that that visit entailed.

   "I'll wait for you," he'd repeated, when he'd dropped her off at LAX.

   "I'll wait for you," she imagined him saying, when she'd quit her job
and put in application at Fabrikam.

   ***

   "Fire alarm!" Erin thought to herself, waking with a start.

   The world was dark around her, and the floor hard beneath her.  She
panicked, and grabbed at the collar on her neck, knowing it was connected
to a short, metal leash, which in turn was connected to a metal eye-hook in
the floor.  If there were a fire, there'd be no way to get free; inebriated
as she may have been the night before, she hadn't forgotten the sound of
the "click" as she'd fastened the leash to her collar.  It would take one
of Mistress Rei's keys to get free.

   She could, however, remove her eye mask, and did so.  She was greeted
immediately by the bright, fluorescent lighting of the locker room.  She
squinted, and rubbed her eyes, the light assaulting her just as much as the
ringing was assaulting her ears.  The eye mask - a blindfold, in essence -
had been a necessity.  The mailgirls locker room was bathed in light
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  Shut-eye required the aid of a
staple from the world of bondage and discipline.

   Around her, thirty-some-odd naked girls were all pulling off their own
masks, and rising from the floor, but only the visitors seemed shaken and
confused by the clanging of the alarm bell.  This was, apparently, routine.

   "Good morning, pets!" Mistress Rei sang out from the center of the room
in heavily-accented English, her back to the squat toilets.  "Merry
Christmas!"

   True to Sophie's word, Mistress Rei had given up the pretense of being
anything more than a full-fledged dominatrix.  She was dressed in a black
leather corset, laces cinched tight at the mid-section, with garter straps
connected to a pair of white fishnet stockings with scalloped lace around
each thigh.  This was apparently Mistress Rei's holiday outfit, though, as
the cups of the corset were a bright red, with a big, black bow between
them.  The edges of the corset itself - at her chest, at her waist - were
trimmed with snow-white fur.  She wore a pair of red panties, which Erin
would later realize was a thong that left her backside nearly fully
exposed. On her feet were platform heels, the same shade as her underwear
and the corset's cups, with five-inch stilettos, a bit of fake mistletoe
near the toes, and more of the white fur at the ankles.  In her right hand
was a black-and-red leather bull whip, maybe four feet in length, that
ended with a small tuft of black leather tails.

   Erin's jaw dropped.

   "Up, up, up!" Mistress Rei sang out, and cracked the whip against the
backside of first one, and then another, of the two girls closest to her -
in this instance, Mailgirl Eleven and Mailgirl Thirteen.  Visitor G
(Mailgirl 12's aunt, Erin had learned last night) got the next kiss from
the whip, and she yipped out in a mixture of pain and surprise.  Mistress
Rei wasn't swinging the instrument with any particular ferocity, but the
"crack!" each time it landed sounded vicious all the same.

   "The rest of the visitors will be arriving at noon," Mistress Rei called
out.  The male visitors, she meant.  "Today is a holiday.  Even for little
sluts like you.  But before we do presents, I expect you all in uniform. 
Inspection is at six-thirty.  Wash.  Shave.  Shampoo.  Food.  Water.  And
then back on your knees."

   She unlocked Mailgirl Thirteen, freeing her from her leash, and then
handed over her keys for Thirteen to do the same for the others.  With a
few quick taps on her tablet, Mistress Rei brought a merciful end to the
ringing of the alarm bells, and then began to pace menacingly down the line
of naked girls in the direction of Erin and the Scott sisters.

   Erin drank in her surroundings.  Park Place's mailgirls had all secured
themselves to their usual spots.  Sophie and Sarah, as Mailgirls One and
Two, were on the end, closest to the door that Erin, Catherine, and the
visitors had all first entered the previous afternoon.  At the next
eye-hook over were Mailgirls Three and Four, and then Mailgirls Five and
Six at the next after that, and so on down the line.  The visitors - the
Plaza girls and the outsiders - had been given more freedom to choose where
they'd bed down for the night.  For the most part, they'd chosen to secure
themselves with their hosts, as Erin had with her stepsisters.  Visitor B
was with her sister, Mailgirl Five.  Visitor G was with her niece, Mailgirl
Twelve.  Visitor A was with her girlfriend, Mailgirl Sixteen.  But, as
there were only nineteen regular mailgirls distributed among twelve
eye-hooks in the floor, Visitors H and I had opted for the last hook,
unoccupied, on the far side of the room.  Catherine and Angela - or,
rather, Visitor E and Visitor F - had taken the other empty hook beside
them.  Plaza Ten, Plaza Seventeen, and Plaza Twenty-One were all with Park
Place Nineteen, Plaza Eighteen had cuddled up with Park Place Six, and
Plaza Seven had joined Erin, Sarah, and Sophie here on this side of the
room.

   Erin had been spared the embarrassment of having to face her stepmother
when she'd returned to the party with Sophie last night.  As things began
to get a bit more out of control, Mailgirl Fourteen had escorted her mother
and Catherine Ryan back to the locker room for an earlier bedtime than the
rest of the girls.  Erin doubted that anything had happened between them.
At least, she liked to tell herself that nothing had happened between them.
But, even if they had paired off, a lesbian tryst between the two oldest
visitors couldn't have held a candle to the other pairing that had the
party tittering over and whispering about.  No, it was what Mailgirl Five
and her sister had done that had scandalized and shocked a group of girls
who were most likely difficult to scandalize and shock.

   Erin risked a glance in their direction.  If either Mailgirl Five or
Visitor B felt any shame in what they had done, there didn't seem to be any
evidence of it.  They were standing close together, holding hands, and
whispering secrets in one another's ear, giggling and smiling back and
forth.  In a room full of goddesses and supermodels, these two were on
another level.  Big round tits, the both of them, with long, blonde hair
and bright smiles.  These two would have been the stuff of masturbatory
fantasy even fully-dressed.  That they'd been caught together in the men's
room, with Mailgirl Five's tongue buried deep between her sister's legs,
was so twisted and warped and wanton that Erin couldn't even fathom the
decision-making that had gone into such an incestful pairing.  That they'd
carried on even after being discovered - and even switched giver and
receiver - signaled such a complete and total lack of shame that Erin
couldn't wrap her head around it.

   Not that Erin was really in a position to judge.  She'd masturbated with
her own stepsister, after all, with only a few feet and a flimsy partition
between them.  When she'd finally finished and sat up, she'd been greeted
by a big, sly smile on Sophie's face, peering over the cubicle divide. 
Sophie had wrapped up a few minutes before Erin had fully satisfied
herself, and had played witness to at least Erin's last body-shaking,
spasm-inducing orgasm on the floor.

   "Better?" was all Sophie had asked of her.

   "Much," Erin had answered, while simultaneously wondering if the dim
lighting of the surge protector and the scattered exit signs gave away just
how furiously she was blushing.

   If Sophie had felt any shame of what they'd done more-or-less together,
she showed no more sign of it than the other pair of sisters a few
eye-hooks down.  She smiled at Erin when their eyes met, as Erin took in
her fellow "hook-mates."

   Sarah and Plaza Seven were still making googly eyes at one another, and
it was clear that - Ten's presence in their reunion yesterday evening
notwithstanding - there was something more than just purely physical
between them.  It made sense.  Erin got it.  She understood it.  They had a
history together at USF Plaza downtown, a shared experience that made their
relationship deeper than just a desperate pussy and a willing tongue.  Erin
had witnessed such connections last night, beyond just Sarah and Plaza
Seven, beyond Mailgirl Sixteen and her girlfriend.  Mailgirls Seventeen and
Eighteen appeared to be very much an exclusive couple.  And Mailgirl Twelve
had introduced her aunt to Mailgirl Three in such a way that signaled Three
was someone very important in Twelve's life.  "Letter-carrying lesbians,"
all, who'd found love and affection amid enslavement and abuse.

   That said, whatever Sarah's relationship was with Plaza Seven, it wasn't
a monogamous one.  The race Erin had witnessed between Plaza Seventeen and
Park Place Fifteen earlier in the evening, to see who could masturbate to
climax first, escalated towards something else entirely towards the tail
end of the night.  And it was Plaza Twenty-One who had her tongue buried
deep in Sarah's pussy, while Sarah sat up atop the bar.  Beside her, Park
Place Six was similarly engrossed in a similarly situated Plaza Eighteen.
Plaza Eighteen sung out the redheaded mailgirl's victory loudly, to cheers
and laughter and applause around the room, when Park Place Six got her over
the crest.  If Sarah was disappointed in her-and-Twenty-One's second place
finish, though, she got one hell of a consolation prize all the same.

   It was one thing to have her stepsister excuse herself, to hang back at
the loading dock to greet old friends.  It was another thing entirely to
watch her cum in a crowded room full of naked mailgirls, on the losing end
of a cunnilingus race.  Though she was currently re-assigned to a bit of
forced time off here at USF, Sarah Scott was still technically a doctoral
candidate at Yale.

   "Oh!" Sarah had called out, her eyes wide open and her chest heaving. 
She held tight to the back of Plaza Twenty-One's head, and refused to let
go - even though the race was over.  "Oh, fuck.  Oh, fuck!  Fuck!  Fuck! 
Fuck!"

   "...stare, if you want to," Sophie had told Erin earlier in the evening,
in reference to Nine masturbating under the shower.  "She doesn't care. 
Some of us like the audience." Sophie might very well have been referring
to her own sister, apparently.  Erin and Sarah locked eyes as Sarah peaked.
Gone was Sarah Scott, the PhD-to-be.  In her place was only the wild,
desperate, animal lust of Mailgirl Number Two.

   Now, though, Sarah seemed be feeling a little more shame than Mailgirl
Five and Visitor B were exhibiting.  She caught Erin's eyes again this
morning, and then quickly looked away.  Plaza Seven squeezed her hand,
kissed her lightly on the lips, and waited with her to be unlocked.  Erin
wondered if things would ever be the same between her and Sarah again.  She
didn't see how they could be.  Thankfully, she was distracted by the
arrival of Mistress Rei and her whip.

   "Crack!"

   With barely a flick of her wrist, Mistress Rei had snapped her bullwhip
and landed it perfectly upon Erin's right buttock.  Erin barked in pain,
the sting more surprising than painful, and she instinctively put her hands
out in front of her as if to stop another blow.  She'd been spared the
riding crop last night, but she wasn't so lucky that morning.

   "Stand and wait like a mailgirl!" Mistress Rei ordered.  "Legs apart! 
Shoulders back!  Titties out!  Eyes down!"

   Erin was far from the only naked girl "out of position" as she waited to
be unlocked.  But, apparently, it was just her turn to receive attention
from her new mistress.  She winced as the Japanese woman cocked her wrist
once more, but she did as she was told, all the same.  She fought back a
tear and braced for another kiss from the whip, though it didn't come.  Not
yet, at least.

   Instead, Mistress Rei reached out and grabbed her violently and
viciously by her left nipple, tugging her whole torso downwards and towards
her, so they were face-to-face.  Even with the other woman in heels, Erin
still had a few inches on her.  Without releasing her grip, Mistress Rei
proceeded to lick Erin's cheek from jaw to temple, and whispered in her
ear, "Have you been nice?  Or have you been naughty?"

   "Naughty," Erin whimpered softly.  "Naughty, Mistress Rei."

   "Louder!"

   "Naughty."

   "Louder!"

   "Naughty, Mistress Rei!  This girl has been naughty!"

   "I knew it," the woman hissed.  "I know what you are.  I could smell it
on you yesterday."

   Erin willed Mailgirl Thirteen to hurry with the keys.

   "I could smell it.  Smell your dirty, naughty cunt.  You don't fool me.
You're not a visitor.  You're a mailgirl." She leaned back in to Erin's
ear, so that only Erin could hear her.  "Tell me what you did.  Tell me how
you were naughty."

   "I...I...I..." Erin began, and was treated to increased pressure upon
her nipple between her mistress's finger and thumb.

   "'This girl...'" Mistress Rei corrected.

   "This girl..." Erin parroted back.  "This girl...touched...touched
herself in an empty cubicle."

   "'This girl fucked herself.'"

   "This girl fuh..fucked herself."

   "'This naughty girl finger-fucked her wet, dirty pussy.'"

   "This naughty girl finger-fucked her wet, dirty pussy."

   "'This naughty girl finger-fucked her wet, dirty pussy the first chance
she got.'"

   "This naughty girl finger-fucked her wet, dirty pussy the first chance
she got."

   "Louder."

   "This naughty girl finger-fucked her wet, dirty pussy the first chance
she got!"

   "Louder."

   "This naughty girl finger-fucked her wet, dirty pussy the first chance
she got!!" Erin yelled out.  Catherine would know about it now.

   Mistress Rei released her grip, and Erin did her best to catch her
breath.

   "Were you alone?"

   "I...I...I..."

   "Crack!" Erin felt the sting of the bullwhip once more.  It stung.  It
was painful.  But Mistress Rei exhibited enough control that it didn't
out-and-out hurt so much as Erin might have expected.

   "This mailgirl was with her!" Sophie called out, coming to her rescue.
Erin would have lied, and said she was alone.  Sophie knew the consequences
for lying.

   Mistress Rei cocked an eyebrow.  She looked to Sophie, and then back to
Erin.  "'This naughty slut finger-fucked her wet, dirty pussy with her
sister.'"

   Step-sister, Erin corrected her mentally.  The distinction, though,
didn't seem to matter in the here and now.

   "This naughty slut finger-fucked her wet, dirty pussy with her sister!"
she yipped.  A tear streamed down her face.

   "No need to cry," Mistress Rei assured her with mock comfort.  "We've
got nothing but naughty sluts here.  Santa still made his rounds." She
laughed.  "Tell me.  What is it that you want from Santa?  More than
anything in the world?"

   Diamond earrings, she told herself.  A pearl necklace.  A new car.

   "This girl wants to be a mailgirl," she mewed.

   "That," Mistress Rei smiled appreciatively, "we can do."

   Panic set in.  What had she just done?  What had she just said?  Was
that how this began?  She had just blurted it out.  She thought that was
what Mistress Rei wanted to hear.  Whether it was true or not...

   "But not here," the woman went on, and gestured to her hip.  "Tattoo. 
And -" she added, emphasizing, "too slutty.  Too much of a slut even for
us. You want this too bad.  You reek of it."

   Too slutty for a room full of girls finger-fucking themselves and each
other for the better part of the last twelve hours.  Mistress Rei's
dismissal stung her more than the whip.

   "I'll see what Santa can do," Mistress Rei said.  "We have friends."

   Erin shuddered.  She screamed inwardly at herself.  She wanted to beg
and plead to take it back.  She wanted to pull out her hair.  She wanted to
run screaming from this room, and back into Ben's waiting arms.

   "Thank you, Mistress Rei," was all she offered in response.

   The horror she felt was reflected in the faces of Sarah and Sophie, when
Mistress Rei walked away and Erin finally dared to look up from the floor.

   "No!" Sarah whispered at her angrily.  "You don't want this."

   "I...I...I..."

   "No," Sarah repeated forcefully.  "Ben."

   Ben.  Erin began to whimper, and she knew more tears were coming.

   "Mailgirls don't cry," Sophie said, and grabbed her by the hand.  "Don't
let them see you cry."

   "You don't want this," Sarah insisted.  She looked away, and then back
to her stepsister.  "Don't do this."

   Erin sniffled, and held back a sob.  "I just don't know..." She trailed
off.

   "They'll fuck you.  I promise.  They'll fuck you," Sarah said through
clenched teeth.

   "Don't sign anything," Sophie added.

   "They might not need her to." This from Plaza Seven.  "I'm sure there's
something in the agreement she already signed."

   There wasn't.  Erin knew the visitor's agreement forwards and backwards.
She'd been through it over and over and over.  Ben had even forced himself
to read through it, to make sure.  He had started and stopped three times,
getting too angry to finish, before finally buckling down and barreling
through.  But...maybe...maybe she'd missed something.  Maybe she hadn't
understood something.  Or - she gasped - maybe they'd slipped something
into the agreement she'd re-signed at the security desk yesterday?

   "Whatever they put in front of you, don't do it," Sarah went on. 
"Whatever it is.  Promises to pay off your mortgage.  Promises of some big
payday."

   "Threats," Sophie said.

   "Threats," Sarah agreed.  "Whatever they say.  You've got Ben.  You'll
be alright.  You don't want this."

   "You don't want this," Sophie echoed.

   You don't want this, Erin told herself.  Do you?

   Mailgirl Thirteen arrived at that very moment, looking as pale over the
exchange as Erin was sure that she herself did.  She reached out, and
gently unlocked the leash from Erin's collar.

   "Thank you," Erin croaked.

   To say that the back-and-forth with Mistress Rei had been a mood
dampener was an understatement.  This all suddenly felt too real.  Too much
like a nightmare, whereas before it had been only fantasy.  There was now a
very real possibility that she wouldn't be flying home to LA tomorrow.

   But spirits seemed low, all around.  Gone was the unbridled exuberance
Erin had witnessed when the mailgirls got through with their shifts
yesterday.  Gone was the wildness and sexiness and over-the-top orgy
atmosphere that had defined the mailgirls' Christmas party.  All around
her, the locker room was calmer and quieter than it had been before.  Even
the handful of girls Erin saw masturbating in the shower did so joylessly,
more utilitarian and reluctant than as an outlet for pent-up sexual energy.
They were all hung over, Erin supposed, and suffering from a lack of sleep;
if it was five-and-change now, Erin doubted that she could have gotten more
than three hours of sleep last night.

   Erin's head was spinning, but she knew it wasn't just the peppermint
schnapps and cherry liqueur.

   Though they all were to experience the first-of-its-kind "day off" here
at Park Place, the reality of the mailgirls' normal morning routine had a
sobering affect upon them all.

   There were just six showerheads for a sum total of thirty-three naked
girls, and so there was a bottleneck in the girls' efforts to be ready in
time for "inspection." They improvised, though, by often doubling up and
hurrying along to the best of their ability.  Erin, for one, had no
interest in lingering beneath the ice-cold water the girls were allowed for
their morning showers, but she was forced to remain there for a good
duration all the same.  Though she and Catherine both, independently, had
gone and gotten waxed before their trip to New Jersey, Sarah insisted that
Erin still needed to "make a show" of shaving her pubic region before
submitting herself to Mistress Rei.

   "I'll do you.  You do me," Sarah suggested, almost apologetically. 
"It's faster."

   What was Erin going to say?  As awkward as her stepsister's hands
between her legs might have been, it was no more or less awkward than
anything else Erin had submitted herself to since arriving at Park Place.
And, it appeared that this was a more common practice among the Park Place
mailgirls than was going it alone.

   "I'm sorry," Sarah offered quietly under the shower.  She was down on
one knee in front of Erin, at crotch-height, and gently sliding a razor
across the inside of Erin's thigh.

   "Sorry for what?" Erin asked.  Had Sarah accidentally cut her with the
blade?

   "For everything," Sarah answered.  It was heartfelt.  And intimate, in a
way that was only somewhat diminished by the fact that there were other
naked girls on either side of them.  "I didn't mean to come off that way,
so judgmental, just now." She swallowed.  "And I'm sorry
about...about...last night.  I just got carried away."

   Oh, so they were acknowledging it now?  The eye contact, that is.  As
Sarah had climaxed and locked eyes with her stepsister.

   "It's okay," Erin replied meekly.  "It's okay."

   Sarah hesitated, and ran the razor through the shaving cream on Erin's
groin once more.  There wasn't any stubble to be found, but Sarah was
meticulous all the same.  "It's not.  It's my fault - all of it.  None of
you would be here now, forced to do any of this, if it weren't for me.  Not
you.  Not 'Mailgirl Number One.' Not 'Visitor E.' I feel like I infected
you all with this."

   "You didn't force me to do any of this.  In fact, you did your best to
tell me to stay away.  But I wouldn't listen."

   "But if it weren't for me..."

   "If it weren't for you, I might have gone barreling headfirst into all
this, anyways.  I mean, it's kind of a thing.  Kind of an obsessed thing.
Kind of an obsessed thing that I can seem to shake.  I needed to do it, and
see it for myself.  If it weren't for the 'visitors' program here, I might
have already signed a full-on contract back home.  I'm not sure I would
have been strong enough to resist it."

   "Come on..."

   "I'm serious.  Seriously serious.  You heard Mistress Rei.  She can
smell it on me."

   "A: I'm pretty sure she was fucking with you.  And, B: I'm pretty sure
it was your vagina she was talking about..." She paused in what she was
doing, inspected her work, and then looked up at Erin.  "Which..."

   "Shut up!" Erin laughed.

   "You can rinse," Sarah instructed.  "I'm pretty sure were fine
beforehand, but they're pretty strict about this."

   "Okay." Erin stepped back under the ice-cold water, and used her hands
to wipe the remainder of the shaving cream away.

   "You don't have to do me," Sarah said to Erin, standing and asking
Mailgirl Seventeen to pass her the can of shaving cream.  "I've got a
little more going on.  And I'm a little more practiced at this."

   Erin didn't necessarily want to get so up close and personal with her
stepsister's crotch.  But they'd had a tit-for-tat deal, hadn't they.  "Are
you sure?"

   "Uh-huh.  It's fine.  I know what I'm doing." Sarah squeezed a liberal
amount of shaving cream into her palm, and began lathering herself up on
either side of her slit, and up above.  She got back to her knees, and then
down her backside, before spreading her legs wide open and beginning her
routine.  Two showerheads over, Mailgirl Eleven and Visitor I were in the
same position, doing the same thing.

   Sarah's stubbly pussy didn't need the entirety of her attention,
however. "Alright, well, I'm sorry for jumping all over you just now, then.
I don't know what's going on with you.  I can't see inside your head.  And
I'm the absolute last person to judge you if this is really and truly
something you need to do.  You know, long-term."

   "You're looking out for me."

   "I'm looking out for you," she agreed.  "This," - meaning Erin's visit -
"isn't what this is like most of the time.  Last night?  We get that once a
week.  And it gets taken away from us if the demerits start piling up, or
if they just want to fuck with us.  No food, either.  Not real food.  If
we're hungry for something to eat, it's just more chow."

   "I kind of figured..."

   "It's hard.  It really is.  We have an EVP here, on the sixth floor,
that the girls all call 'Captain Buttplug.' He's got a toy - a couple of
them, in fact - that I think has made the rounds, into each and every one
of us."

   Erin blanched.  "I thought that USF didn't..."

   "It gets a little more gray the higher up the food chain you go."

   "Ugh."

   "Ugh," Sarah agreed.  "There's also this absolute, fucking bitch in
Clearing who likes to decorate us with binder clips."

   "Jesus."

   "And I think you saw what they did to Six?  When you first got here?"

   "I did.  We did."

   "It gets worse.  I got left upside down in a St.  Andrew's Cross - don't
ask - and ended up passing out.  Outside.  In November."

   "Were you okay?  I mean, obviously..."

   "Yeah.  No.  I mean, I was fine, in the end.  But, what I'm saying is
that this all can feel exciting.  And exploratory.  And, fuck, I mean it
is. But there's this thin line between sadomasochism and just out-and-out
sadism.  Sociopath shit.  And, honestly, I'm worried that that line keeps
getting blurrier." She paused.  "You don't want to do this."

   Erin just nodded.

   Sarah was almost done now.  She rinsed.  She inspected herself.  She
went back one more time for a touch-up.

   "Last night," she began.  "With Twenty-One.  And then you were there..."

   "It's okay."

   "Okay.  I just, I don't know, I got caught up.  And having you and my
mom here?  It's just, like, I don't know, like all of this on crack."

   "It's okay," Erin assured her.  "I promised I'd give you space.  It's my
fault."

   "No, no.  It's not.  I can't promise you that it won't happen again. 
With the other Seven here, I'm not sure that I can...I'm not sure that I
want to stop.  You don't need to disappear, is what I'm saying.  It is what
it is."

   Sarah finished, stood, and rinsed.  Erin reached for the knob, and
turned the water off.  Both of them wrung out their hair.  As they stepped
from the shower block, bodies dripping with cold water and skin covered in
goose bumps, Erin asked, "Are you going to stay?" That is, would Sarah stay
with USF, even after her contract was through.

   "So...who knows if I even have a choice in the matter," she answered
glumly.  "But, no, I want to go back and finish my PhD."

   The two girls helped themselves to the scratchy white hand towels and
began to dry off.  "And then?"

   "And then, I don't know.  The paper I wrote is getting a good amount of
attention.  Good and bad.  But I'm in this niche now, one that no one is
really looking at from an academic standpoint.  And certainly not from an
insider's perspective.  I mean, my reputation is just completely and
totally trashed now.  The mailgirls thing is just absolutely radioactive on
college campuses, so I'm not sure I'm going to get the faculty position or
the fellowship I might have wanted.

   "Which sucks because it's good work.  And work that the field -
Sociocultural Anthropology, that is - really should be doing.  And maybe,
in a couple of years, if and when mailgirls as a concept really and truly
goes mainstream, and assuming Congress doesn't pull the plug on the whole
fucking thing next month, maybe I'll get the sort of opportunity I thought
I'd get - that I talked myself into thinking I'd get - before I got
undressed that first time back in June.

   "Until then?  I don't know.  I've really only got my experiences here at
USF to speak to.  I've been thinking that maybe I need to go somewhere
else. Somewhere where they do all of this a little differently, and in
their own way.  Maybe some place that's, I don't know, maybe even a little
rougher?"

   This startled Erin.  "'Rougher'?  Like, 'providing relief' sort of
rougher?"

   Sarah shrugged.  "Maybe.  In for a penny."

   "You'd do that?"

   "Like I said, my reputation is shit anyways.  No one's going to think
any less of me.  What's the harm in getting my rocks off, and really going
deep?  Really going all the way?  If I'm going to get called a 'slut' and a
'whore' no matter what I do, why not drop the whole 'look-but-don't-touch'
shit and own it.  Really and truly.  And, afterwards?  Let the world catch
up, and accept me for who I am."

   "Wow," Erin said.  She took the already soggy towel, and did her best to
dry her hair a bit more.  She hesitated, and then asked pointedly, "But not
me?"

   Sarah met her stepsister's eyes.  "You have Ben.  Who loves you.  I'm
sure if you asked, he'd be happy to spank you and whip you and do whatever
else it is you think you're missing out on.  There are people who are into
this sort of thing, without having to become full-on mailgirls."

   "Enough chit-chat," Mistress Rei bellowed in their direction.  "Kiss and
say 'I love you' later.  Hair and make-up.  Weigh-ins.  And then back your
spots."

   It was gross to share underarm deodorant.  It was grosser still to share
a toothbrush.  But Erin still dutifully readied herself for inspection. 
She'd choked down a healthy serving of mailgirl chow before her shower,
hoping to quell the churn of a stomach that had been treated to too much
alcohol the night before.  But she discovered that doing so before weighing
in was a rookie mistake; the girls were all measured to within a tenth of a
pound, and the difference between a full stomach and an empty one could
potentially lead to demerits.  As the scale synched with Erin's profile on
Sophie's phone, she noted that she registered a little heavier than the
night before - negligibly so, and within such a margin that she might never
have noticed it at home.  But an uptick all the same.

   While the visitors had been allowed the freedom - such as it was - to
choose where to bed down the night before, inspections were a little more
formal, and visitors were expected to secure themselves with their hosts.
The Plaza girls were directed to distribute themselves between the two
empty eye-hooks on the other side of Nineteen, however, and so it was just
Sarah, Sophie, Catherine, and Erin locked in together on this side of the
room.  One big, twisted, happy family.

   Inspection was one thing.  Though it wasn't particularly pleasant to be
up on her toes, with her hands behind her head, as Mistress Rei ran a
finger over her body to check for stubble, Erin had already been through
this once before, the previous afternoon.  The "confessional" portion of
the exercise, in which the girls were required to report any and all
instances of sexual activity that had occurred the night before, was a new
and fresh hell.  While Mistress Rei stood before them with her tablet,
tapping it all in and saving it for posterity, each of them confessed their
sins.

   "Once, by myself," Sophie offered, starting it all off.  "Ten minutes.
Two orgasms.  Three, and then a two." Session.  Duration.  Count. 
Intensity of each.

   "Once, by myself," Erin stated flatly when it was her turn.  "Ten
minutes.  Five orgasms.  Four, maybe, on a scale.  Three?  And then two,
two, and two." It might have been fifteen minutes; Sophie was finished
before her, after all.  And it might have actually been six orgasms - Erin
wasn't sure - but she thought it preferable to low-ball the number.  Same
with her guesstimate on the intensity of each; her first, when she'd been
caught in the act, was decidedly a five.  Three's and two's were on the low
side, as well - Erin couldn't remember having cum like that before last
night.  The need.  The desperation.  The release.

   Mistress Rei smiled wickedly, and observed, "You are a naughty little
slut, aren't you?"

   "Yes, mistress," was all Erin offered in response.

   "Just like your sisters," the Japanese woman purred.

   Stepsisters, Erin said to herself.

   "Once with Plaza Seven and Plaza Ten," Sarah said when it was her turn.
"Fingers and oral.  Fifteen minutes.  Two orgasms.  Five and five, both."

   She went on.  "Once with Plaza Twenty-One.  Oral.  Five minutes.  One
orgasm.  It was another five, mistress."

   But she wasn't done.  "Once by myself.  Five minutes.  One orgasm. 
Another five."

   Erin knew about the first.  She'd witnessed the second.  But she'd been
with Sarah for the remainder of the night, and wasn't sure when her
stepsister had had an opportunity to sneak that last one in.  Could she
have...no!...but, could she have...?  Could she have gotten herself off on
the floor last night, after they'd bedded down, with Erin sleeping just a
few feet away?

   Erin shuddered.

   The revelations were far from over.  "Once," Catherine answered next,
and Erin stiffened.  "With Visitor F.  Oral.  And...uh...fingers.  Fifteen
minutes.  One orgasm." The older woman hesitated, but then offered, "Five."

   No more wondering about why Catherine and Angela had turned in early
last night.  No more wondering if something had happened between Catherine
and Mailgirl Fourteen's mother.  It was all out there now.

   It was more than Erin had ever wanted to know.  Maybe she should have
been upset at her stepmother for cheating on her father, even if it was
with a woman.  Erin didn't linger on this question, however - these were
extenuating circumstances.  Erin had no interest in breaking the news to
Patrick Ryan.  Erin had no interest in confronting her stepmother.  Erin
had no interest in thinking about Catherine and Angela going down on one
another here in the locker room.

   After all, was she really in any position to judge?

   The girls were restricted from speaking during inspections.  And so this
news, this confession, hung out there awkwardly as Mistress Rei moved on to
Mailgirl Number Three.

   Most of the girls had something to confess, it seemed.  There were a few
- Mailgirl Seven, Visitor C, and Mailgirl Fourteen, for instance - who had
nothing to report.  But the vast majority had, at the very least, gotten
themselves off on their own.  And there was a tangled web of who had slept
with whom that Erin tried to keep straight - even if the numbers, letters,
and duplicates from the Plaza made it a difficult exercise.  Mailgirl Six's
number got called out more than once, though everyone in the room -
everyone but Mistress Rei - knew that there was some artificial inflation
in her sum total.

   "Once, with Mailgirl Number Six," Mailgirl Five had lied, after first
copping to the solo session earlier in the evening.  "Fingers and oral. 
Ten minutes.  Three orgasms.  First was a Five.  Second was a Four.  Third
was a Four."

   "Once, with Mailgirl Number Six," Visitor B said when it was her turn.
"Fingers and oral.  Ten minutes.  Four orgasms.  Five, four, five, and
five."

   "You do get around," Mistress Rei cooed at Mailgirl Six.

   "This girl is good at what she does," Six replied snarkily.

   The night before, in the aftermath of the "race" between Plaza
Twenty-One and Six, Erin overheard a snippet of conversation between Sarah
and the mailgirl from downtown.  "Don't beat yourself up - that was
amazing," she reassured Plaza Twenty-One, consoling her for the
second-place finish.  "Six has had a lot of practice.  A lot, a lot, a lot
of practice.  It was her way of making it up to the other girls, for
putting them on her list of mailgirl candidates."

   Whether or not Five and her sister had clued Six in on the lie ahead of
time, Six covered for them.  She listed each of their designations when it
was her turn.  Her own list was expansive, and Erin wasn't sure if she
should have been offended that Six hadn't tried anything with her.

   It was some time before Mistress Rei made it all the way down the line.
Not only were there fourteen extra girls whom she had to inspect, but there
were also fourteen extra girls for whom she needed to play confessor, and
whose disclosures she needed to enter into the system for record-keeping.
Erin doubted that this exercise usually took this long; last night had
apparently been a wild one, even by Park Place's standards.

   When they were finally, mercifully, let up off their knees, there was
only one thing that Sarah and Sophie wanted to talk about.  But detail into
Catherine's confession would have to wait, at least temporarily.  The Plaza
girls were instructed to remain behind, but Mailgirls One and Two, and
their other guests, were assigned responsibility for cleaning up the
employee lounge on the 2nd Floor.  A handful of others, including Mailgirl
Fourteen (and by default, her mother), were to report to the gym, for being
over their weights, even if only marginally so.  Another few were sent back
to the troughs for another serving of mailgirl chow for being under.

   "Ten o'clock," Mistress Rei barked, and punched the deadline into her
tablet.  The smartphones affixed to the mailgirls' arms all came alive at
once, registering the assignment.  "1st Floor atrium, by the Middlesex
Courtyard.  For gifts.  Don't be late."

   It was nice, in its own twisted way, to get time alone as a family, away
from the rest of the mailgirls.  Even if that time away was spent mop
in-hand, cleaning up the excesses of the night before.  Sarah and Sophie
led the way, sprinting up to the 2nd Floor.  They didn't have a deadline to
meet - not for this exercise, at least - but it was almost a force of
habit. Sarah would later explain that if she didn't get a jog in, she'd
start going a bit stir crazy.

   The smell of sex - of pussy, more accurately - was overpowering when
they first entered the employee lounge.  The girls hadn't trashed the room
completely, but there were empty bottles of booze and half-drunken cocktail
glasses everywhere.  The mailgirl mats needed to be collected and
redistributed throughout the building, and the furniture all needed to be
put back in its proper places.  What remained of the hors d'oeuvres and
desserts would be trashed, and what little remained of the liquor needed to
be boxed up and brought back down to Mistress Rei's room on B2.

   First, though, Sarah poured a shot glass full of the vile cherry
liqueur. She slid it across the bar to her mother.

   Erin, along with Visitor H, had each been awarded such a drink.  It was
a ritual the mailgirls celebrated, for when a girl "popped her cherry" and
masturbated in public the first time.  Erin had played with herself in a
far less public setting than had Visitor H; but she'd done so all the same,
and it seemed impolite to protest and point out the difference.

   "Be careful," Sophie had warned her.  "The first time is a gateway
diddle."

   "To the slightly less embarrassing nature of subsequent sessions of
self-pleasure!" Sarah had cheered, toasted, and slugged back a drink of her
own, to the roar, applause, and participation of the rest of the room.

   Now it was Catherine's turn.

   "It's seven thirty in morning," she protested.

   "Do the crime..." Sophie began.

   Knowing she was licked, Catherine grimaced and took the glass.

   "It'll help wash the taste of breakfast out of your mouth," Erin offered
helpfully.

   Catherine shot her stepdaughter a skeptical look, and then knocked the
drink back.  She scrunched up her face, stuck out her tongue, and coughed.
"I think I prefer the taste of the mailgirl chow."

   They all laughed.

   "So..." Sophie teased.  "...Visitor F?"

   Catherine smiled, and said demurely, "She was gentle." She chuckled to
herself, and then went the other way.  "No, she definitely wasn't."

   "Ew!  Ew!  Ew!" Sarah came back.  "No, let's not do this!"

   "You're one to talk!" Catherine replied.  "Anyone here you didn't sleep
with last night?"

   Sophie raised her hand.  Erin, too.

   Catherine hinted around the details.  And though Sarah and Sophie both -
but Sarah, in particular - made a show of recoiling and acting weirded out
by their mother's admissions, neither could help herself from asking
follow-up questions.

   "You know there are cameras in the locker room, right?" Sophie asked at
one point, while stacking the mailgirl mats by the door.  Erin hadn't
noticed the cameras, herself, but it didn't surprise her in the least. 
She'd seen pictures of the Park Place locker room online, but they were all
amateur-style shots, taken through the mirror glass.  Human Capital,
though, likely had thousands of hours of footage stored away somewhere,
perhaps for the purposes of contract renegotiation somewhere down the line.
"The stairs.  The hallways."

   "I'm sure they're in here, too.  This place is probably crawling with
hidden cameras and bugged to shit," Sarah added.  She looked up from the
box she was squatting in front, where she was gathering half-filled bottles
of liquor.  Addressing the room, and asked, "Isn't that right, Will?"

   "The bathroom.  Or one of the cubicles.  That's where you should have
gone," Sophie went on.

   The revelation didn't seem to bother Catherine all that much, however.
"We didn't leave the party thinking anything was going to happen."

   "Maybe you didn't," Sarah replied.  "Fourteen's mom is here every couple
of weeks.  It's like a fetish she and Fourteen's dad have."

   "But maybe better you than one of the other girls," Sophie offered. 
"She lured Seventeen back here once, back before Seventeen and Eighteen
were a thing."

   "Thirteen, too," from Sarah.  "I think she's got kind of an Asian thing.
Usually."

   "Alright, alright," Catherine said, throwing up her hands.  "Not
important.  But I didn't leave the party thinking it was a foregone
conclusion.  I just wanted to give you girls some space, some privacy. 
And, honestly, I was tired - it was a long afternoon."

   Whatever Angela Giannini's game had been, and however much she might
have preyed upon Catherine, it had been a slow and subtle pursuit.  They'd
gotten ready for bed, used the bathroom one last time, and chosen to go to
sleep on the far end of the room, leashing themselves to one of the empty
eye-hooks as far away from Sarah and Sophie's usual spot as possible. 
Neither had been able to fall asleep.  Both complained about the hardship
of their older bodies trying to get comfortable on the tiled floor.  Both
confessed to being excited and aroused from their exposure, of being seen
as objects of sexual desire to people other than their own husbands. 
Somewhere along the way, Angela had cuddled up to Catherine.  Somewhere
along the way, Catherine had begun caressing Angela's hip.  And then,
before any of the other girls had returned from the party upstairs,
something else had happened, and Catherine hadn't been able to slow it
down. She hadn't wanted to.

   She had no regrets.  Of Erin's father, she offered, "Even if I told him
- and I'm not going to - I think he'd forgive me.  For being with another
woman, at least." In Erin's direction, she added, "Ben would, too."

   Erin didn't bother turning around.  She continued scrubbing the counter
with a sponge.  She deflected, joking, "I don't want to sleep with
Fourteen's mother."

   "You know what I mean."

   "I know what you mean," Erin conceded.  Ben didn't have a single jealous
bone in his body, a virtue that Erin had twisted into a fault on more than
one occasion.  A virtue that she was taking advantage of, undressing in a
lobby full of strangers and parading around naked in an office building on
the far side of the country.

   She was curious, of course, about the idea of being with another girl.
She didn't know any of her friends who hadn't confessed to that same
curiosity, and she knew of a few of her sorority sisters who'd realized
said curiosity at one point or another before graduation.  Soft skin.  Soft
lips.  Soft touches.  Sure, it was a fantasy.  But, though Ben might very
well have been perfectly fine with the idea, and might have even been
turned on if she'd confessed to such a dalliance when she got home, it
wasn't something she was going to act on today, tonight, tomorrow morning.
She'd already given in and masturbated here once.  There was a begrudging
certainty that she'd do it again, before this little adventure was through.
But she didn't need to add to her sins by getting hot and heavy with
Mailgirl Six, or Mailgirl Fourteen, or one of the Plaza girls.

   "I think Ben will just be happy to have me home, with all this out of my
system," Erin said, finally.

   If she were allowed to go home.

   If Mistress Rei didn't help her make that morning's Christmas wish come
true.

   If there were any chance that "all this" would ever be out of her
system.

   She swallowed hard, and continued to scrub.

   Catherine wasn't through, however.  "I think he'd surprise you," she
told her stepdaughter.  "I think he knows you better than you think he
does."

   No, Ben didn't have a jealous bone in his body.  When she'd told him
about Ethan Weiland - an 11th grader in her second period class last year -
and how she'd caught Ethan trying to look up her skirt one particular
morning when she crossed her legs in front of the class, Ben had just
laughed and offered the boy praise in absentia for his boldness.  Erin
hadn't confessed that she had been more excited and aroused than creeped
out by the violation.  But she had scolded Ben for not being more jealous,
all the same.  How could he not be jealous?

   "Let him look.  Let him fantasize," Ben had laughed.  "It's me that gets
to sleep with you when the day's all through."

   Would sleeping with another girl violate that laissez-faire attitude?

   "I'll wait for you," Ben had told her at the airport.

   Sweeping and vacuuming was one thing.  Cleaning up empty glasses and
collecting the assorted porno mags was fine.  As Erin scrubbed the
counters, however, she found herself wondering how much of the sticky mess
was spilled drinks, and how much it was pussy and sweat.  She wondered what
Ben was doing that morning.  She wondered why she had insisted upon
spending Christmas morning this way, doing this, away from him.

   Erin needed to pee at one point, and needed Sophie to escort her.  Or,
more accurately, needed the smartphone on Sophie's arm to let her through
the locked doors and out to the men's room.  They passed by Erin's cubicle
from the night before, and Erin couldn't resist a peek in, to see it in the
full light of day, and to make sure she hadn't left any sign of her own
bodily fluids behind.  There was no sweaty outline of her bare behind on
the rug, and any imagined whiff of pussy could very well have been coming
from either her or Sophie here and now.

   In fact, it struck Erin how mundane and boring the site of her crime
was. How regular.  The office chair was still scooched over to one side,
leaving just enough room for a fully-grown girl to lie down on the floor
beside it.  But it was like any other cubicle anywhere else in the world -
a stack of print-outs piled neatly in one corner, a pair of pens lined up
alongside the mouse pad, a phone and a computer and a keyboard.  A picture
of a couple was tacked to one wall, as was a comic strip Erin didn't
recognize.

   "Heidi Pomeranz," the nameplate by the entrance read.  A woman's
cubicle, after all.  Erin wondered who Heidi Pomeranz was.  What she did.
How she'd react if she knew a naked mailgirl - a naked mailgirl wannabe -
had gotten herself off at her workstation over Christmas break.

   "We're going to have to clean in here, too," Sophie remarked glumly as
they entered the men's room.  There was a plastic party cup, still
half-filled with booze, on the counter.  There was another that had spilled
by the trash.  One of the urinals was unflushed, and had been very
obviously been put into use by one of the girls last night, in a feat that
Erin wasn't sure she understood the mechanics of; a few splashes on the
floor signaled it hadn't been done completely without error.

   Erin glanced at the counter.  She hadn't witnessed the incident herself,
but it had been the source of gossip and whispers all night.  And Visitor B
had been cheered and toasted, and treated to her own shot of cherry
liqueur, for the heinous act with her sister.  So it wasn't exactly a
secret, even if Mailgirl Six had been inserted into the story when they had
recounted it to Mistress Rei that morning.  What could have possibly
possessed Visitor B and Mailgirl Five that they'd crossed that line?  How
did such a thing even happen?

   Erin propped her stall door open, like a good mailgirl, and sat down to
pee.  Sophie did the same in the handicapped stall beside her.

   "So...Mailgirl Five?" Erin asked.  She wasn't sure what she was even
asking.  She supposed she just wanted to gossip with Sophie about what had
happened.

   She was greeted with silence.

   No, Erin told herself.

   No, no, no.

   No.

   No!

   No!!

   What?!!

   Sophie's silent pause spoke volumes.  The pause said more than Sophie
ever could have.  The pause spoke to something vile and unthinkable.

   Sophie cleared her throat.  "It's..."

   Another pause.  Another silence.  Another moment for Erin's brain to
explode.

   They met each other at the sinks, and Sophie made a show of washing her
hands, and collecting the errant cup.  She wanted to tell Erin, but she
didn't.  She wanted to explain herself, but she couldn't.  At this point,
she knew that Erin knew, and that her reaction had been awkward enough that
Erin knew the whole thing, even if she didn't know the details.  Sophie
needed to explain herself.

   "Don't tell my sister that I told you," Sophie warned.  "And don't
breathe a word of this to my mother.  "

   "Sophie," Erin replied, "I'm not even sure that I want to know." She
went un-corrected for her use of Sophie's proper name.

   Sophie took a deep breath.  "It's just that you spend your whole day,
hour after hour, getting called a slut and a whore.  And, honestly?  I'm
kind of a slut and a whore.  No, I am a slut and a whore.  I'll own it. 
This exhibitionism thing, this submission thing, this control thing - it's
dirty, it's depraved, it's 'naughty.' And one you're already in that
place?"

   She went on.  "You have to understand.  Whatever the mailgirls are to
people, the idea of sisters is on some other level.  We're like a fucking
circus act.  We're not allowed to touch each other - you know, intimately -
outside of the locker room.  And, even inside, it's...like...just seven
until nine.  Saturdays, too, I guess.  We're not allowed to touch
ourselves, either, when we're on duty.  So there are limits.  We can't do
it.  And they can't tell us to do it."

   "Right," Erin nodded.  She understood that much.

   "But there's a lot of wiggle room, and a lot of freedom, in what you can
ask a mailgirl to do, right up to that line.  A lot of the time, it's just
mean shit - sadistic shit - without it being sexual or sex-related. 
Playground shit.  Number Seven had to eat dead fly once.  But a lot of the
time, most of the time, there's an element of testing the limits.  Like,
'Suck on her nipple' or 'Touch her pussy' or 'Kiss her' type stuff.  Every
single one of us has done that sort of thing with one another.  We've been
forced to do that sort of thing with one another.  With sisters, though? 
It's that, on steroids."

   Sophie avoided Erin's eye contact.  Instead, she looked only at her own
reflection in the mirror.

   "So, Sarah and I...  Two and I.  Don't slap me.  We get dared and
ordered and blackmailed into all sorts of nonsense.  It is what it is. 
Nipple-licking, pussy-touching, tongue-kissing, and all that.  And it's
just - I don't know - we hit a point one night, when it was just the two of
us, and we were both horny as shit, and both going to touch ourselves
anyways, and it just sort of happened.  We've touched ourselves next to
each other like hundreds of times now, and been there in the room when the
other one got off.  But this time, it was different, and it was like a 'I
don't care how dirty this is - I'm just going for it" sort of thing.  It
was a Saturday night.  We were alone.  We'd snuck off, just like you and I
did last night, but into one of the supply rooms.  And, fuck if it wasn't
the dirtiest shit I'd ever done.  But, like, dirty in a way that was hot."

   Erin shook her head.  "I'm not sure I..."

   "I knew it was wrong.  Of course I knew it was wrong.  And she knew it
was wrong, too.  But it was wrong in that exact right way, where it was
happening without a lot of higher brain functioning.  I've been with, I
don't know, like...half of the locker room at this point.  Maybe a third?
She's not a 'technique' sort of girl, even given as much practice as she's
had with the Plaza mailgirls.  She's not as good as, like, Six.  Or
Sixteen. But I came so hard, so fast, so furious - the foulness of it all
was exactly what it made it as hot as it was."

   Erin didn't know what to say.  What was she supposed to say?  How was
she supposed to react to a confession such as this?  "No, Sophie, I get
it," she lied.  "It's another world in here."

   Sophie shook her head.  "So, that was the first time..."

   It had happened more than once.  On four separate instances, to hear
Sophie tell it.  It had been awkward in the aftermath of that first time,
Sophie admitted.  Uncomfortable.  Their only saving grace had been that the
other girls didn't know.  They all knew that Sophie and Sarah might
masturbate with one another every now and then.  And that was weird.  But
not that weird.  Not any weirder than any of the girls masturbating with
any of the other girls - something that was commonplace enough here at Park
Place.  And, so, even when they'd gotten together again for a second time,
none of the other Park Place girls were any the wiser, or aware that
something else had happened between them.

   But then Sophie had spilled the beans to Six, and it was pretty soon
after that that everyone knew.  And even that hadn't stopped Sarah and
Sophie for doing it again.  It was precisely because it was so wrong that
it felt as adventurous and naughty as it had, so warped and so wicked and
so wanton.  Sarah and Sophie didn't have a standing thing.  Each time it
had happened, they'd sworn to one another that it'd never happen again. 
And, yet...

   And, yet...

   And, yet...

   The revelation was head-exploding.  Erin returned to the employee lounge
with her mind still racing, and unable to engage either Sarah or Catherine
in any sort of conversation.  How was she going to carry on a normal
conversation with Sarah, now knowing what she knew?  How was she supposed
to pretend everything was fine when talking to Catherine?  How was she
going to be able to think about anything else?

   She wanted to leave and go home.  Her things were in the basement, a
floor down from the locker room.  Sophie knew where.  She wasn't a mailgirl
- not really.  There'd be no financial penalties if she tapped out.  She
was visiting.  Volunteering.  Here entirely of her own volition.  She could
put back on her skirt, her blouse, and her coat, and wait for Catherine
back at the hotel.  She'd been naked for less than twenty-four hours, and
she wanted almost nothing more than put her clothes back on, and put all of
this behind her.  She wanted to be with Ben and his family in Santa
Barbara, unwrapping presents with his nieces and nephews in her pajamas. 
She wanted to put on a Christmas outfit, and sit down and have a normal
Christmas dinner with her in-laws.

   This didn't seem fun anymore.  This didn't seem like an adventure she
wanted to be a part of anymore.  This wasn't her Christmas wish, whatever
she'd said to Mistress Zero.

   But Erin still dutifully mopped the men's room floor while Catherine
scrubbed the toilets.  She carried the mailgirl mats with Sarah, and
redistributed them throughout the building.  She hefted the boxes full of
half-filled liquor bottles downstairs, and left them outside Mistress Rei's
room on B2.  She couldn't leave.  Not yet.

   There'd been a sense of gloom in the locker room that morning, something
of a hangover - both actual and emotional - from the night before.  Last
night, with a special holiday "Bitch Session" on the 2nd Floor, there'd
been excitement and anticipation and freedom.  Today, though, despite the
fact that they still had the bulk of the day "off" from regular mailgirl
duties, they'd still been expected to submit themselves for inspection, to
make weight, to clean up their mess, to choke down breakfast from the
trough, to handle a myriad of other petty little tasks and chores.  This
wasn't fantasy.  This was reality.

   Sophie's confession had only underlined how wrong this all was - what
USF was doing to these girls, and what these girls were doing to
themselves.

   And so, far from the joy a child might feel on Christmas morning, there
was a sense of dread when they arrived at the atrium for Christmas
presents. No doubt that whatever awaited them would only humiliate them and
de-humanize them that much more.

   But that sense of dread was back-burnered, at least momentarily, when
Erin looked out upon the courtyard and saw that it was snowing.  Her heart
skipped a beat.  She was a California girl, who'd gone to college in the
desert, and then had settled in LA.  She couldn't remember the last time
she'd seen snow.  The courtyard was decked out for the holiday - oversized
plastic candy-canes, wooden gingerbread men with big, fake gumdrop buttons,
and evergreens lining the walkway leading towards a yurt-like structure
done up like an igloo in the center.  Erin doubted that this had been done
for the mailgirls; the greater likelihood was that this was for USF's
regular employees, for some sort of holiday party or event.  Snow was
falling, and was accumulating everywhere, blanketing the scene in virgin
white.  It seemed innocent and pure.  A little gaudy, perhaps.  But it
seemed like Christmas.

   Going out into the snow, wearing nothing but her collar, was daunting.
And, as Sarah opened the door to the outside, a blast of arctic air chilled
Erin to the core.  Her nipples hardened reflexively, and she shivered.  A
path hadn't been shoveled, but there was a trail leading to the igloo all
the same, the snow flattened down the bare footprints of a dozen or more
other girls ahead of her.  Catherine, Erin, Sarah, and Sophie hurried the
igloo, tip-toeing through the snow, with each subsequent step numbing
Erin's feet that much further.

   The interior of the yurt-turned-faux-igloo stood in marked contrast to
the winter outside.  In fact, it was probably a good twenty-some degrees
warmer inside than even in the halls and corridors of Park Place proper. 
After the dash through the snow, it felt positively sub-tropical inside,
space-heaters and body heat ratcheting the temperature up well into the
nineties.

   It was a decent-sized space, but not necessarily one designed to
accommodate thirty-three naked mailgirls and their mistress.  It felt tight
and cramped.  Erin's arm brushed up against a girl over here, and her bare
behind bumped the bare hip of another over there.  A Christmas tree stood
tall against the back wall, with presents scattered beneath it.  And an
imposing chair - gold paint and red velvet - was beside it; Santa's
"throne," obviously.  Seated upon it, and presiding over this deranged
scene, was Mistress Rei, still done up in her outfit from that morning. 
Her bull whip dangled to her right, and she played with the handle
menacingly.

   There were no snacks or treats laid out, like there had been in the
employee lounge the night before.  But there was coffee, hot chocolate, and
even a limited selection of Kahlua, Bailey's, and crÃ"me-de-menthe.  Erin
helped herself to the coffee, sweetened it with four sugars, and added
cream.  She chose to hold off on liquor; memories of last night's
peppermint schnapps and cherry liqueur still had her feeling queasy.

   For the mailgirls, coffee alone was an indulgence.  Outside of Saturday
nights, they drank water - morning, noon, and night.  For many of them,
adjusting to life without caffeine had been every bit as challenging to
adjusting to life without clothes.  Some, more so.

   But there were presents - actual presents - for them to unwrap.  When
the last of the girls had squeezed into the igloo, Mistress Rei barked and
ordered them onto their behinds.  Erin sat, legs crossed Indian-style, and
put her coffee down in front of her.  Catherine was to her right.  Sarah
and Sophie were on the other side of their mother.  Erin was two or three
rows back from Mistress Rei's throne, staring at the bare backs of other
girls in front of her.

   Mistress Rei opened by explaining that she only had gifts for her
mailgirls, and that these were gifts selected by the Director of Human
Capital, himself - albeit with some input from Mistress Rei and the Human
Capital staff.  To the visitors, and the Plaza girls, too, she offered an
apology dripping with sarcasm, but promised that she'd try to make their
Christmas wishes come true, all the same.  She looked in Erin's direction
as she said this, and Erin bit her lip.

   Moreover, the Japanese woman specified that she'd need to confiscate
these presents tonight, before bedtime, but that the girls would be allowed
to play with them and enjoy them as they saw fit until then.  The girls
were forbidden personal items of any kind, but Mistress Rei purred that she
was happy to hold onto them, as party favors for Saturday nights.  Or, as
rewards for girls with low demerit totals.  Or citations for "exemplary
service."

   There was little question as to what the gift-wrapped boxes under the
tree held.  Sex toys.  Erin knew it without doubt.

   And, on that regard, Erin wasn't wrong.  Sophie was called up first, and
given her present.

   "You can fit sex in a box?" she joked, to polite laughter from her
audience.

   Even Mistress Rei cracked a smile.  "We tried," she allowed, smiling.

   She didn't disappoint.  As Sophie delicately tore the wrapping paper
from her box, Erin craned her neck for a better view.  And, sure enough,
Sophie gasped, laughed, and pulled a bright pink, silicone dildo from
inside.  From behind Erin, one of the mailgirls hooted in appreciation.

   Sophie's present was part of a set, however.  The girls discovered this
fact when it was Sarah's turn, and she unwrapped a black-and-pink harness,
to be worn about the midsection.  Borrowing Sophie's dildo momentarily, the
toy snapped into place with a "click." Mistress Rei and her masters had
given the Scott sisters a strap-on.

   Beside Erin, Catherine made not a peep.  Erin kept her eyes forward, not
wanting to acknowledge the presents in the presence of her stepmother.

   And so it went.  Dildos and vibrators, in a variety of different shapes
and colors.  A personal massager.  Stream-lined vibrators and
realistic-looking fake cocks in gaudy shades of pink, purple, and red. 
Butt plugs and anal beads.  Nipple clamps.  A double-headed dildo.  And on
and on.  The mood of the room began to shift sometime around Mailgirl Five,
and took on the air of a particularly naughty bachelorette party.  The
girls weren't as free or abandoned as they'd been in the orgy-like heights
of the party from the night before, likely due to the intimidating presence
of their mistress in their midst.  And no one was so bold as to put their
new toy to use then and there - though a number of them pretended to do so
while laughing and cackling all the while.  These girls were being
humiliated and toyed with once more, but they were complicit in their
embarrassment; the larger world, and the surely mean-spirited nature of the
gifts, were pushed aside.  The girls themselves chose to think about what
they'd be able to do with them later that afternoon.

   Not all of the gifts were meant for insertion, however.  Each of Park
Place's mailgirls received a little piece of jewelry: a new number, decked
out in fake diamonds and other assorted bling, to wear on their collar. 
Mistress Rei replaced the old numbers - delicate-looking silver tags that
stood in marked contrast to the ugliness of the collars - on a few of the
girls, and then granted the rest the freedom to do so for themselves or for
each other.  Erin felt a pang of jealousy as Sarah and Sophie were fitted
with theirs, weirdly disappointed with the simple, unadorned letter "D"
that hung from her own collar, a loaner.

   There was a glittery ball-gag that one of the girls unwrapped.  A
paddle. A set of eye-masks that had been bedazzled with the words "Slut"
and "Dyke" and "Juicy." A spreader bar, not entirely dissimilar to the one
that Six had been outfitted with yesterday in the stocks.

   For Six, there was even a pack of Parliament Lights, and a lighter to go
with it.

   "You owe me a few of those," Mailgirl Eleven laughed.

   "Outside," Mistress Rei warned them.

   "Fuck it," Six answered back.  She elbowed her way towards the door, and
announced, "If anyone else wants one..."

   Erin could feel the sense of disapproval from her stepmother as she
joined the contingent by the exit.  Erin didn't smoke.  Not really.  It had
been months since she'd last lit up with one of the other faculty members
at her school.  It was a pastime she'd never fully succumbed to, but one
that was an occasional indulgence, all the same.  She felt that she'd
earned it, though.  That she needed it.  Even if that meant standing
outside and enjoying it in the snow.

   The cold was bracing as Erin stepped from the igloo.  But - at least at
first - it was a welcome relief from the hot and sweaty interior.  She and
Six weren't alone; they were joined by Mailgirl Eleven and Visitors H and
I. Six lit two cigarettes at once, passed one to Erin, and thenhanded the
pack and lighter to Eleven.

   They huddled close together, luxuriating in the smell of tobacco and the
feel of smoke in their lungs, while suffering the cold, wet misery of that
December morning.  Erin danced from foot to foot, and rubbed her arms in a
futile effort to stay warm.  Six put her arm around Erin's waist, and
pulled her close, goose-flesh upon goose-flesh.  It was worth it.  It felt
like she was being a "bad girl" in a whole different way.

   When they came back inside, Erin found her coffee cup - or what she
believed was her coffee cup, as there were dozens of them here, there, and
everywhere - and filled it back up.  This time, she gave herself a liberal
dose of Irish cream.  She hardly ever smoked.  But when she did, it was
usually when she was drinking.  One went hand-in-hand with the other.

   What these girls really wanted, Erin bet, was an escape.  A "Get Out of
Jail Free" card.  A holiday.  A day pass, even.  The opportunity to get
dressed and leave the building - even just for a few hours.  Neither Sarah
nor Sophie had worn clothes since August.  For others, it had been nearly
as long.  As much as Erin had wanted to be a mailgirl, the mailgirls no
doubt wanted out.

   Sarah shook her head, when Erin suggested as much.  "Don't get me
wrong," Sarah replied.  She was distracted.  She was laughing and watching
as Sophie, wearing the harness and strap-on, pantomimed a quick fuck. 
Catherine was blushing, a hand over her eyes, but giggling along.  "Don't
get me wrong, I want it.  I'd love to be done with this, and on the other
side.  To put on clothes and go home.  To be by myself, in the privacy of
my own bedroom.  But a day pass?  To leave and then have to come back?  I'm
not sure I'm strong enough for that anymore."

   To hear Sarah tell it, it was easier to be a mailgirl at Park Place than
it had been at the Plaza.  It was counterintuitive, she conceded.  But it
was true.

   At the Plaza, Sarah had twelve hours on, twelve hours off.  Maybe it had
been more like thirteen or fourteen hours on, she admitted, once she
factored in time spent in the locker room before and after her shifts -
showering and shaving, among other things.  But at the end of each day,
she'd been allowed to get dressed and go home.  She was released back out
into the real world.  And, for a few hours, she could wear clothes and
pretend she wasn't a mailgirl anymore.

   Only, she couldn't.  Any sense of relief she felt at the end of her day
was short-lived, as she almost immediately began counting down to the start
of her next shift the following morning.  She dreaded it.  She feared it.
The following morning, she'd have to strip down and submit all over again.
She'd have to surrender her clothes and surrender her dignity anew.  It was
like having to make the decision to become a mailgirl again, and again, and
again.  In the face of all that, and with the Whitestocking encampments
just outside the building's doors, the simple choice of showing up at work
or not was torment.

   At Park Place?  Sarah was a mailgirl, through and through.  She wasn't
trying to balance another life outside of this one.  She wasn't faced with
the temptation to run screaming into the arms of the Whitestockings.  She
wasn't forced to go through the ritual of undressing each and every
morning. She was in it.  She was in it all the way.

   Jersey City hadn't lost a single mailgirl recruit since the program
began.  The Plaza, by contrast, seemed to suffer a defection every month or
two.  The girls of Park Place weren't prisoners - not really.  They were
welcome to walk out and leave this life behind whenever they decided they
couldn't take it anymore.  But they stayed.  They stayed because they were
mailgirls, twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week.  They stayed
because this was who they were now, and there was no hiding from it.  No
half-in and half-out.  No part-timers.

   Erin took a sip from her cup.  It made sense, in its way.  If she were
to do this, if she were to become a mailgirl, she supposed she should do it
all the way.  Could she go home every night to Ben, tell him about her day,
and then do it all again the following morning?  It seemed kinder - to him
and to her, both - for there to be some distance.  For her to stay on-site.
For her to surrender to this life totally and completely.
   She was wet just thinking about it.