Silken Slavery

by Christina Shelly

  They laugh. He laughs. He relaxes a bit and manages to look at Donna. The youngest of the three, at thirty-five, and easily the most attractive. A beautiful, petite blonde, her hair sparkling in the late morning light and spilling over her shoulders like a honey waterfall, she is dressed in a very tight white sweater, a very short red skirt and white tights, her feet wrapped in red patent leather stilettos. Even by her somewhat brazen standards, this is a particularly sexy outfit, and poor Chris feels his knees buckle beneath him as she turns her chair to face him and crosses her legs in the process.

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  He laughs nervously and moans a rather pathetic, ‘Seems so,’ unable to pull his eyes from her legs.

  ‘Probably spent the weekend with his secret girlfriend. She’s worn him out.’

  These words come from Anne, the third member of his support team. Slightly older than Helen, Anne is a tall, green-eyed redhead with a sharp, sarcastic manner. Dressed in a loose red blouse and very tight jeans, her hair tied in a bun, she makes no secret of her general indifference to the pathetic rules of office life and has already been issued a formal warning by Katherine for her abrupt manner with other staff. Chris, despite knowing that Katherine is keen to get rid of her, has failed in every way imaginable to enforce the standard disciplinary procedures.

  ‘More coffee?’ Helen asks, standing up.

  Her powerful musk perfume washes over him and he nods weakly. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What about this girlfriend then, Chris?’ Donna continues. ‘Why is she such a big secret?’

  ‘I haven’t got a girlfriend. I’ve told you before. Seriously.’

  Donna smiles, her eyes seeming to fill with relief.

  He wants to tell her how fantastic she looks, how much he wants her, about the terrible power of the dream and how desperately he wants it to become reality. But instead, he says nothing and fights the urge to run back to his office.

  ‘What about a boyfriend?’ Anne teases. ‘Perhaps he’s gay. I’m sure there are plenty of horny homos who’d go for a pretty boy like Chris.’

  Donna shakes her head and slowly uncrosses her legs, her beautiful sky-blue eyes never leaving his. ‘He’s not gay. I can see that a mile away.’

  ‘Well, there’s something funny going on. Come on, Chris – tell us what it is.’

  Anne’s change of direction catches him by surprise.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re rambling on about.’

  ‘Perhaps he dresses up in women’s clothes,’ Anne continues, laughing loudly as poor Chris turns bright red and swallows very hard, a terrible, humiliating panic flooding over his body, his heart suddenly pounding violently. How on earth did she…? But then Anne is laughing in a much more sarcastic manner and Donna is smiling a blatant ‘got you’ smile. More teasing. Just a bizarre, horrible coincidence. No need to panic, no need to run screaming from the building.

  Helen brings the coffee. Chris thanks her and returns to his office, still shocked by Anne’s words. Yet he is also more excited that ever. He wonders what would have happened if he had confessed the truth, if he had pulled down his trousers and revealed the dreadful reality of his strange desire.

  He is still pondering this bizarre possibility when there is a knock at the door. To his surprise, Donna enters the office, looking less confident than usual, her full, cherry-red lips curved into a slightly nervous smile.

  He coughs and sits up, trying not to leer.

  ‘There’s something I want to ask you,’ she says, now avoiding his already unsteady gaze.

  ‘Fire away.’ Ridiculous words, even more absurd from his mouth.

  ‘Do you really not have a girlfriend?’

  He swallows and nods, then utters a weak, desperate, ‘Yes, really.’

  This seems to cheer her up. Her smile broadens. ‘Do you like me?’

  Stunned, his heart going into overdrive and a fine sweat of nervous terror suddenly breaking out across his forehead, he can only nod weakly.

  ‘So you do…like me?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I mean –’

  But he can’t say it, what he has always wanted to say to her. The barrier of his terrible, unending fear rising up like a vast prison wall.

  ‘What?’

  He squirms, he swallows, he chokes. Then he looks at her, at this stunning woman. Suddenly he stares directly into her startling blue eyes and the wall collapses.

  ‘You’re beautiful. I think…you’re very beautiful. I’ve fancied you for ages.’

  It is as if another being has entered his head and taken over his mouth, a confident and direct being, a real person. And as he confesses his desire, her lovely smile widens even further and she moves closer to the table. His erection swells up angrily and suddenly he feels very dizzy.

  ‘Well, then,’ she says, her voice now filled with its usual sensual confidence, ‘why don’t you ask me out?’

  ‘I haven’t…I can’t.’

  ‘You can’t? Why?’

  ‘I’m too frightened.’

  His pathetic reply, his all-too-true reply, brings a terrible, surprised laugh. ‘Frightened? What of?’

  ‘Of being turned down, of being laughed at. I don’t know. Just frightened of making a fool of myself.’

  She laughs again, this time gently, more sympathetic. ‘There’s no need to be frightened, Chris. Not of me. Just ask me out.’

  And so he does. His voice shaking, his mind racing, his heart pounding, he asks her if she would like to go for a drink after work, and she accepts without a moment’s hesitation.

  As she walks from the office, his eyes eat up her gorgeous, sexy body and he nearly faints as a tidal wave of elation and desire crashes over his body.

  He spends the rest of the morning remembering the dream and fighting a tremendous urge to masturbate. He replays the utterly amazing conversation, her lovely smile, her promising, hungry gaze. The dream was, it seems, a prophecy.

  He spends his lunch break walking around the city centre trying to calm down. By the time he returns to the office, he feels much more relaxed and is even able to smile at his three beautiful assistants, all of whom seem deeply amused. But his good mood is quickly spoilt by the arrival of Katherine.

  Katherine Grainger, his boss, a particularly mundane nemesis. An aggressive, career-obsessed woman. Two years younger than Chris and a year junior to him. Promoted over him when it became apparent he was merely an indifferent time-server. A tall, masculine woman who hides whatever traces of her true sex remain under what often looks like a man’s business suit and the most boringly sensible of shoes, her black hair cut short, her face a no-go zone for make-up, her brown eyes always filled with grievance, her voice always a second from anger.

  ‘We’ve had another complaint, Chris,’ she snaps, matching into his office without knocking, standing over him like some grim harbinger of doom. ‘About Anne. You really are not helping with her. It’s your job to supervise her. To discipline her, if necessary. If she won’t do something about her bad attitude, then you’ll have to get rid of her. If you won’t, I will. And if I have to, I’ll make sure the people upstairs know about it.’

  Strangely, he feels little fear of Katherine. Maybe because she tries so hard not to be a woman, maybe because there isn’t the sexual presence and the threat this seems to pose for him. He stares at her, sighs, then slumps a little further down into his chair.

  ‘She’s a good worker. Just because –’

  ‘Look, I don’t want any more excuses. Either deal with this complaint or I will.’

  After throwing a memo onto his desk, she storms out. Chris picks up the piece of paper, crushes it into a tiny ball and throws it into the bin. As he does so, a smile returns to his face: in a few hours, he will be alone with Donna.

  * * *

  He meets her in the pub around the corner from the local government offices, just after six. He has been sitting in the virtually empty pub for twenty minutes by the time Donna walks in, and is already on h
is second bottle of German beer. Despite the alcohol, he is still terribly nervous and, when Donna sees him, smiles brightly and walks over to his table, he fights a very powerful urge to rush from the pub.

  She is still dressed in the very sexy attire that had tormented his eyes earlier, and the other patrons, all men, stare at her with a sad longing that Chris tries to ignore.

  ‘You started without me,’ she says, her eyes filled with teasing curiosity.

  ‘Sorry…I…’

  She laughs. ‘Don’t apologise. I’m joking. Want another one?’

  He nods weakly. She buys the round, two more bottled German beers, and returns to the table, sliding onto the leather-backed seat beside him, her beautiful, musk perfume washing over him and sending his desperately pumping heart into his mouth and very effectively gagging him. But even though he is struck dumb, his eyes say all that needs to be said: they caress her splendid body with a loving hunger and his erection burns into his trousers like a rod of molten iron.

  They spend the next two hours talking and drinking. At first Donna talks and Chris listens, still amazed that he is actually sitting in this pub, with this glorious woman, this woman he has so desperately and secretly desired for over a year.

  She talks about the office, her life, her history. At thirty-five, the single mother of a seventeen-year-old daughter, the father a long-forgotten teenage fling who she had no intention of involving in her child’s upbringing. She talks of her daughter with an intense pride and Chris listens with genuine interest, his eyes fighting to meet hers rather than eat up the fine curves of her white nylon-sheathed legs and her very firm bosom. Then she tries to get him to open up about his life. But, even with the beer, Chris is reluctant to talk about himself. He alludes to dead parents, to being an only child, to his university years and his accidental imprisonment in local government administration. He is far more forthcoming on his dislike of work, but only hints at his feelings for Donna. Yet she quickly seizes these hints and confesses to having secretly liked him for a very long time. To his astonishment, she confesses that she was always convinced he had a girlfriend, that such an attractive man must be involved with somebody. She tells him she finds his shyness ‘sweet’, that she has always had a very soft spot for ‘sensitive, clever types’.

  It is nearly ten when, after maybe six bottles of strong German beer, she asks him to come home with her.

  ‘Lesley’s out at a friend’s,’ she says, her eyes filled with a slightly drunken promise. ‘The house is empty. Come back with me, spend the night. I know you want to.’

  He can only nod, suddenly dizzy with an intense, alcohol-fuelled desire. She leads him from the pub, out into the warm evening. She hails a taxi. Then they are in the back of the car and her hands are pulling his beneath her skirt and she is pressing her hot, wet mouth against his. The shock is immediate and total. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, he is locked in a sexual embrace with a woman, his hands caressing her nylon-sheathed thighs, bathing in the moist heat of her flesh, journeying towards her greatest secret. They kiss, fondle, cuddle. He is lost in her and in this dream made reality. He is almost deliriously happy.

  By the time they get to her house, she is almost ripping the clothes from his body, laughing, panting, her eyes glazed over with a powerful drunken sex-need. He tries to push her back so he can reciprocate the act of undressing, pulling at her sweater, lifting her short skirt up over her thighs and hips to reveal juice-soaked panties and very damp tights.

  It is as he stares in mad hunger at the large damp patch around her sex and she unzips his trousers and begins to pull them down his legs that that word comes back, that flashing red light word: tights. But it is too late: she has pulled the trousers down over his thighs and revealed his own panty clad, ultra-stiff sex and hose-encased, baby smooth legs. A strange moment of absolute numbness follows, a moment in which he is frozen solid inside a terrible humiliation. Her eyes are widening, confused, amused…amazed.

  ‘What’s…what’s going on here, Chris?’ she asks, her lovely blue eyes wide, her sexy mouth curved into a surprised half-smile.

  Then the ice is broken and the horror is flooding in. He hauls up his trousers, tears welling in his eyes, and tries to push past her, saying nothing, his body rigid with a terrified embarrassment. She pulls at his shirt, but he shrugs her off. She shouts his name, but he is soon out of the corridor, out of the door and out onto the street, her voice loud yet muffled behind him. But he doesn’t listen – he knows she is screaming outraged obscenities at him. All he wants to do is run. And he does run, down the long, sodium electric streets of a summer’s evening into an oblivion of despair, all the time wondering in stunned horror how he could possibly have forgotten about the tights and panties and knowing, even as he replays the question, that the simple answer is sex , the drug of desire combined with too much booze. You fool, you absolute bloody fool.

  He staggers into his flat just after midnight, tears pouring from his face. He rips all his clothes off, tearing the tights into shreds and cursing his sick cravings, realising that his dark, twisted desires have lost him the transformation of his life, the first true experience of the most intimate human communication.

  He sits in the shower for over an hour, soaking himself in steaming water, trying to wash away the terrible, tormenting memory of Donna’s startled face and her smile only seconds away from a declaration of disgust.

  Eventually, at around two in the morning, the tears still flowing down his red cheeks, he collapses naked onto his bed and falls into a fitful sleep filled with a hundred nightmare recreations of his ultimate humiliation.

  Two

  He wakes just after 6.00 a.m., hung-over and engulfed by the appalling memory of his dreadful exposure. A sickening wave of embarrassment washes over him as he recalls, yet again, the look of amazement on Donna’s beautiful face and his own near-hysterical reaction to this bizarre revelation.

  He stares up at the ceiling in a semi-trance for nearly thirty minutes, tormenting his mind with the incident and contemplating the awful day ahead. At first he seriously considers not going into work, but knows that, in the long run, this will only make matters worse. So, eventually, he pulls himself off the bed and staggers into the shower. But this morning there is no elaborate washing and shaving and, after the shower, no delicate and ritualised dressing in delicate feminine undies. There isn’t even a breakfast: at just after 7.00 a.m., he walks like a ghost out of his flat and into a very unsure future. And by 7.45 a.m., he is sitting in his office, over an hour early, staring blankly at his door, awaiting his doom with a pounding heart and wild, fearful eyes.

  The knock at the door comes just after 9.00 a.m. He tries to mumble a nervous ‘Come in,’ but his desert-dry mouth can deliver only a pathetic gasp of despair. Then the door opens and, as he had expected and feared all along, Helen, Anne and Donna enter the office. They line up in a grim cinemascope row before his desk and he feels his face burn a bright, deep and very humiliated shade of crimson. His eyes bore into his paper-strewn desktop and tears begin to well up in his eyes. This is the moment of ultimate despair, and there is no escape.

  ‘We’ve come to talk to you about last night,’ Helen says, her voice surprisingly calm, even gentle, without a hint of the contempt or disgust he expects.

  He nods painfully, still not looking up, tears now beginning to trickle from his eyes and down his burning cheeks.

  ‘About what happened at my house,’ Donna adds, her voice also quiet, even concerned.

  ‘I know,’ he mumbles. ‘I’m sorry, I…I can’t help myself.’

  Then the tears are pouring from his eyes and his voice has collapsed into loud, pained sobs. He tries to turn away from the women, to hide in the corner, to shrink down to the size of a pinhead and disappear. But then there are hands on his shoulders, gently pulling the chair around, bringing him slowly back to face his fate. But then his face is being pulled into the soft, large cushion of Helen’s shapely bosom. Suddenly his f
ace is submerged in the warm, lilac scent of her and from miles away he can hear her voice, her maternal reassuring voice, telling him that there is nothing to worry about, that all they want to do is help him. Then Donna’s voice and Donna’s beautiful smell. She too is close and comforting, almost begging him to forgive her!

  ‘I didn’t mean to laugh, Chris. It was just such a shock. Exactly what I wasn’t expecting. I tried to get you to stay. I wanted you to stay so bad…’

  He pulls his head out of Helen’s chest and she steps back. He wipes the tears from his eyes. This is all wrong, yet, of course, it is also all right. Through a teary blur he beholds the three women, all smiling, all clearly here to talk and sympathise rather than mock.

  ‘You mean, you don’t mind?’ he asks, a question directed at Donna, but which all three answer with a resounding chorus of ‘No!’, ‘Of course not’ and ‘Why should we mind?’.