Life Among the Mailgirls Ch. 04

Mailgirl Number Thirteen stunk of sweat and pussy as she bounded up the stairs towards the 18th Floor. If she were to be called upon for an inspection, she'd most likely fail, and be sent back down to the Mailgirls Locker Room on the 2nd Floor for a shower, a reapplication of deodorant from the mailgirls' communal stash, and a quick mist of cheap, floral-scented perfume. Such failures were fairly rare, though. As much as employees at US Financial Plaza enjoyed torturing the girls by getting them up on their toes and subjecting them to the embarrassment of the inspection itself, girls had to be a pretty fine mess for them be sent off to Mistress Zero.

Thirteen worried she was on the wrong side of that line now. And the fact that she was being called to Human Capital, the department responsible for the operations of the mailgirl program overall, made the likelihood of a failed inspection that much more of a reality.

Will Barrow, the group's director, had been an undergraduate at Yale once upon a time, and he'd studied under Professor Gillian Schang, Thirteen's faculty advisor, while there. It was Barrow's presence that had assured both Thirteen and Gillian that the program wouldn't descend into the full-blown sexual slavery that had enveloped mailgirl programs elsewhere, and it why Gillian had chosen to send Thirteen to USF. Sure, they might tiptoe up to that line; just that day, Thirteen had been forced to insert a lollipop inside of herself, and been threatened by an unzipped fly. But Barrow managed to keep the program running without turning the girls into whores and sex-bots, and Thirteen was truly and honestly thankful for that. She knew that he continued to talk regularly with Gillian. And that, as condescending as it came off, Gillian received regular updates on Thirteen's performance directly from Barrow - in addition to the Sunday afternoon calls between Gillian and Thirteen to discuss her research.

And so, Thirteen worried about showing up at Barrow's door in the state she was in now. She was naked from head to toe, save for a metal collar with a #13 dog tag and a lycra armband around her left bicep. Her long blonde hair was done up in ponytails, at the request of her direct supervisor - Mistress Zero - that morning, though she suspected that they were a bit worse for wear, and had begun to come out. But it wasn't the nudity that worried her; it was embarrassing, for sure, but it was an embarrassment she'd gotten used to over the course of the summer - racing from one corner of USF to the other in nothing but her birthday suit, rushing packages and envelopes and electronic memos up flights of stairs and down the service elevators.

No, rather, it was that she stunk of sex, and she feared Barrow would smell it on her.

The mailgirls delightfully referred it to as "getting salty," a phrase that managed to capture the peculiar and particular funk of sweat, body odor, cheap perfume, and pussy. They were all physically active throughout the day, and run to their absolute limits with delivery deadlines that were just on this side of being utterly impossible. Thirteen had never been in as good shape as she was now, after three months of being a mailgirl, after three months of being forced to climb ten, twelve, fifteen flights of stairs at a time, forced to run at a full clip down corridors and through cubicles higher up in the building. But it meant working up a sweat, and so it wasn't unusual for her to shower five or six times a day - often just a quick rinse, but enough to make sure that her "uniform" was clean and inoffensive. As for the smell of pussy? Even the girls who refused to act upon their baser impulses could still admit that the exhibitionist nature of their current occupation was something of a turn-on. Others, such as Thirteen, recognized it was less the nudity itself that was the turn-on, but the submission. One or the other, Thirteen spent a good portion of her day wet and aroused, and so the cold showers in the locker room were not solely to combat sweat.

The arousal was undeniable, and acting upon it was inescapable. There were mailgirl programs elsewhere in the world for whom masturbation was strictly, strictly forbidden. When Barrow had set up the program at USF, he'd studied best practices from other companies, and found that no program was truly successful at stomping out masturbation altogether. Even in those programs where it was forbidden, the girls still snuck off and got themselves off regularly - consequences, punishments, and demerits be damned. At USF, the girls were given the allowance of being able to touch themselves in the locker room while on break. It wasn't private, exactly, as the locker room had a sheet of mirror glass that exposed such activity to the elevator lobby beyond. But it was contained, and the show the girls put on at lunch regularly gathered an adoring and laughing, cheering crowd.

Masturbation inside the locker room was not a punishable offense, but actual sex was entirely off limits anywhere in the building. Fraternization with non-mailgirl employees at USF was entirely prohibited. And even in those cases where a mailgirl had struck up a relationship with another mailgirl - an entirely common phenomenon - it was forbidden for the girls to sleep with one another at the Plaza.

Thirteen had not only just gotten off in a conference room down in Finance & Accounting, but she'd done so through the courtesy of Mailgirl Number Seven's mouth, while another woman had looked on. And, while still in the throes of that particular orgasm, she'd been summoned up to Will Barrow's office on the 18th Floor.

She knew she was a mess. And as unacceptable as missing a deadline for the Director of Human Capital may have been, she couldn't show up in the state she was still in. Her skin was still flushed, her inner thighs still coated with a combination of pussy juice and saliva, and her body sweatier than a five story climb could explain. And so, as she arrived in Human Resources, she didn't go directly to Barrow's office, but instead took the longer route out around the reception desk by the elevators.

The smartphone on her arm would log the irregularity, and a deviation between Point A and Point B would be flagged by one Barrow's analysts for review. But, glancing at the timer that continued to tick down, she saw that she had a few extra seconds to spare. And the reality was that Thirteen had less than two hours, less than 120 minutes, before her contract with USF expired.

Thirteen found the reception desk empty, as she expected it to be. It was after five o'clock on a Friday. And while plenty of the other floors were still abuzz with activity, support functions like HR and Accounting and IT tended to empty out a bit earlier. And so there was no audience as Thirteen hustled to the mailgirl mat by the elevator. The mat was thin and pink, stamped with the USF logo, and was where the girls were expected to wait - on their knees, of course - in between deliveries. More important at that moment was the silver dog dish beside the mat, a water bowl the girls were allowed to drink from. Thankfully, it was full; the employees in Human Resources tended to be kinder about refilling the bowl than other departments. Between the empty lobby and the full dog dish, Thirteen felt that - for once - things were working out in her favor.

She wasted no time. She crouched down on the mat, reached into the bowl, and then splashed herself with water, handful after handful. She paid particular attention to her pits, as well as to her crotch - where the aftershocks of her orgasm continued to reverberate minutes later. It wasn't the same as taking a shower, of course, but it would wash the worst of her guilt away. She didn't have a towel, and instead used her hands to dry herself off as best she could. She left a puddle behind her on the mailgirl mat, but it wasn't the first puddle she'd ever left behind. It was only water. It would dry.

It would have to do. Thirteen stood, and then took off at a full sprint towards Barrow's office. Employee Relations, Employee Benefits, Payroll - they all had their homes here on the 18th Floor, but Human Capital was off in one corner, down a long hallway and separate from the rest of HR. Thirteen had wondered if this was by design, if the cruelty and abuse the department inflicted upon the mailgirls would have been too much for the rest of HR to stand. Or, maybe, it was just where the open offices had happened to be when USF launched its own mailgirls program that spring.

Thirteen didn't have much time to take in the "artwork" that hung on the corridor's walls, but it teased her all the same. In the few times she'd been called to Human Capital, she'd hated having to parade past the department's trophies, and she was grateful that, at the moment, she could rush through them with her head down. They surrounded her on all sides, reminders of the humiliation that USF had inflicted upon twenty-seven of its own employees, and one particular graduate student looking to experience life among the mailgirls firsthand.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. And Six. Another Two. Another Four. The original Number Seven. Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, and another Seven. And so on. Each girl had a frame designated just for her. And while, yes, each frame contained a picture of that girl "in uniform" (naked, and in "Knees" position), those pictures were relatively small, and took up only a corner of the frame to the bottom left. Proudly on display instead, like the hunting trophies they were, were the panties each of the "volunteers" had happened to be wearing on the day they were approached and became mailgirls.

There were other programs - successful programs - that gave candidates a night or two, or a week, to decide whether or not they wanted to actually become mailgirls. There was the same amount of pressure and coercion involved, the same amount of threatening and blackmail, but girls were given a certain amount of time to roll the proposal in front of them over in their minds, to examine it from every angle, to work through whether they'd be able to escape a program director's clutches. More common, however, was that a girl was approached with a contract, asked to decide on the spot, and then stripped naked right then and there, before the ink of her signature had a chance to dry. USF had taken this latter route. At the start of April, on the same day the program was announced here at the Plaza, Barrow had made his rounds with Mistress Zero. By mid-morning Mailgirls Number One through Six had been recruited, asked to undress, and chained up on display.

Thirteen believed this route to be the kinder one; given how much advance notice she'd had, because of her particular situation, she'd lost nights of sleep, had her stomach tied up in knots for weeks, and felt the fear and dread slowly overtake her as June approached. Better to have the bandage ripped off quickly and get the whole thing over with.

But despite the fact that they'd been surprised, and hadn't seen the trophy hunt coming, Thirteen had to admit that the first cohort of mailgirls represented themselves well. Mailgirl Number One had apparently been wearing a lace g-string. The first Mailgirl Number Two had been in a pair of bikini briefs. For Three, it was hip-huggers. If Thirteen hadn't been among the girls whose underwear was hung proudly in the hallway, she might have viewed it as an intriguing socio-anthropological study: what did the up-and-coming young women of Wall Street wear beneath their power suits? Of that first group, it was only the original Number Four who really and truly had anything to be embarrassed over; the high-waist white cotton briefs that still hung in Human Capital looked as if they'd been worn and laundered a few too many times.

The next expansion of the program occurred at the beginning of May, and Seven - who'd been on the legal team that had drafted USF's version of the standard mailgirl contract - had suspected that she might be tapped. She didn't know about the wall of trophies; that news had yet to begin circulating throughout the building. But she feared she might be called upon to strip in front of an audience, and had therefore that morning donned the sexiest pair of sheer panties she owned. She'd been relieved when Barrow hadn't come for her that day (but also, weirdly stung). But he and Mistress Zero had eventually sought her out when the original Number Seven went AWOL. By dumb luck, she'd happened to be wearing a red lace tanga at the time, and Thirteen smiled as she passed her friend's contribution to the wall now.

Word of the rite had begun to spread by the time Barrow began putting together the June class, and the girls all joked that three quarters of the female staff at USF had likely spent more time picking out their underwear that day than any day prior. Thirteen, though, knew nothing of it. But she'd still gotten dressed that first morning in June with the expectation she'd be undressing in public. Above her naked portrait, in the frame designated as Mailgirl Number Thirteen, was a pearl white lace thong she'd purchased for the occasion, one that she'd worn just that once. She hadn't intended to bequeath it to USF, but it hung here nonetheless; she'd gone home that first night with a draft wafting up her skirt.

Fourteen's frame, across from her own, was empty. Even prior to becoming a mailgirl, Fourteen had apparently never been a big believer in underwear, wearing them only when she truly needed to.

All in the all - and Fourteen's frame notwithstanding - the corridor to Human Capital felt like an advertisement for Victoria's Secret. Thirteen wasn't sure how the company would feel about that fact - it was an undoubtedly sexy gauntlet, but they'd apparently lost more than a few good and loyal customers to the stark naked uniforms of mailgirls.

Which wasn't exactly true. Gillian had received a sizeable research grant to spend as she wished, and she'd turned it over to Thirteen. The sublet on the Upper West Side was entirely paid for, and nicer than Thirteen had had right to expect. She spent freely on food and entertainment - actually having to cook dinner for herself again, once she returned to her graduate housing in New Haven, would be an adjustment. And an embarrassingly large sum of money had, in fact, been spent at Victoria's Secret, as Thirteen dipped more and more into her stipend to buy clothes to wear solely on the commute to and from the Plaza. She needed to fit in among the mailgirls who were dressing up and dressing sexily for the only times of the day they'd actually be allowed to wear clothes. In retrospect, it might have been cheaper to follow One's lead, and wear nothing but a short, summer-weight trench coat in and out of the office.

Thirteen pushed through the door and into Human Capital, leaving the Hall of Panties behind her. She felt the smartphone vibrate on her arm, and she knew she was late; she'd picked up another demerit.

The Human Capital team, within the larger Human Resources department, was made up of just Will Barrow, his secretary, a group of four analysts who pored over the mounds of data collected by the smartphones, and two technicians who knew the smartphones themselves inside and out. And yet their suite on the southwest corner of the 18th floor was nicer than anything Thirteen had seen in ER or Payroll. It was unlikely that the offices had been vacant when Human Capital came online; more likely, it was that another group had been bumped and asked to vacate ahead of Barrow and his staff. Private offices for every member of the team, complete with windows, orbited around a glass-encased conference room in the center. They had their own private kitchen, their own private restroom (a men's room, at least; Barrow's secretary still had use the ladies' room by the elevators with the rest of HR), and even their own private break room. The break room, Thirteen saw, now had a new pool table to go along with the couch, the big screen TV, and the arcade games; Barrow's team had apparently been well-recognized by the higher ups for their contribution's the company's bottom line.

Thirteen reached Barrow's corner office, and saw that his secretary had apparently already gone home for the weekend. She passed the girl's desk, and knocked lightly on the door.

"Come," Barrow shouted from the far side, and Thirteen stepped into the room.

Barrow wasn't alone in his office, but he was the only one seated. To one side were two stark naked girls, on their knees and facing the window to the city beyond. Neither had much of view, however; they were both hooded and restrained, their wrists handcuffed behind them. Thirteen had been treated to the hood more than once over the course of the summer, and she suspected they were both more than likely gagged, as well. With the hoods on, Thirteen couldn't tell who they were. But Thirteen was now quite capable of recognizing the naked bodies of her fellow mailgirls, even from behind, and neither girl was currently on USF's roster. One of them, the girl on the left, seemed oddly familiar nonetheless, but Thirteen didn't think much more of it; it may just have been an ass that, fully clothed, had caught her attention somewhere in the building in one of her less-than-heterosexual moments of arousal. Maybe it was that she was still reeling from the lesbian orgasm she'd had only a few minutes earlier, but there was a part of her even now that wanted to touch it, squeeze it, bite it.

Also in the room was Mistress Zero, who was pacing back and forth like an animal in a zoo, and Thirteen couldn't help but like prey being sized up by a predator. The German woman had been a mailgirl herself for a comparable financial firm back in Frankfurt, but any level of empathy she had for the girls under her watch now wasn't readily apparent. She had dark brown hair that was done up in a meticulous bun, and high, angular cheekbones that seemed to speak to the severity of her personality. She was dressed, as she had been since that morning, in a dark designer suit that was maybe one part high-end businesswear and one part corporate dominatrix. In fact, "dominatrix" may have been a better way to describe what Mistress's duties were on a day-to-day basis than whatever actual title Human Capital had bestowed upon her. Thirteen's bare ass still stung a bit from the attention Mistress Zero's paddle had given it over lunch.

But Mistress Zero wasn't done with Thirteen's ass quite yet. "That's twenty-five," she admonished in her thick German accent. "Twenty-four in a single afternoon."

Thirteen cursed to herself, regretting the quick whore's bath she'd taken in the dog dish by the elevators. The real fault lay at the feet of Kim Kinney in Investment Banking. Thirteen had been at plus-one going into the afternoon, and had admittedly earned four more entirely on her own (including just now). But bulk of her afternoon's total had come at the hand of the dark-haired girl on the 41st Floor. She'd forced Thirteen into a cheerleader's outfit from her alma mater, and then coerced her into inserting a cherry lollipop inside of her, all while doling out demerits for every moment of hesitation from the naked blonde. This was Kim's fault, and Thirteen could do nothing more than wish Kim was here now - on the receiving end of an imaginary paddle in Thirteen's grip.

"I mean, given the circumstances," Barrow began in Mistress Zero's direction, before trailing off.

"A demerit is a demerit, sir." This from a short-ish Asian woman on the far side of the room. Given the two naked girls and the imposing presence of her mistress, Thirteen had barely registered her as she'd entered Barrow's office. She was standing in the standard mailgirls' "Feet" position - legs parted and feet a bit more than shoulder-length apart, with her arms behind and her chest prominently thrust forward. She was fully dressed, however, and apparently shared Mistress Zero's fashion sense, right down to the dangerous-looking heels that helped with her height. She, too, spoke with an accent, one that Thirteen guessed was Japanese. And, given her posture, Thirteen suspect that she was another former mailgirl, one whose purpose here today wasn't entirely clear.