Chapter One
Helen’s owner, the fabulously successful investment banker Xavier Serteau, brought her to the restaurant in a way clearly calculated to make her think he wanted her to get to know some of his colleagues. Helen, after all, worked as his secretary as well as submitting to him in his enormous four-poster bed, and it made sense for her to meet some of the men whose phone calls she fielded and whose concerns she must herself occasionally try to address, in the absence of her owner.
She had even thought that perhaps the other men in the private dining room would have brought girlfriends or concubines, and it might prove a social occasion. Helen’s state of indentured servitude to Mr. Serteau was unusual, certainly, but it was by no means unique; she felt sure that at least one of the other five men at the table had an indentured concubine of his own. She would never meet the wives of Mr. Serteau’s colleagues, of course, just as she never met Mrs. Serteau, who lived in the suburbs, but he had definitely left room for her to think that she would not be the only girl in the room full of men.
Still, Helen didn’t think very much of it when Mr. Serteau introduced her at the beginning of lunch as “my girl Helen, whom I’d like you to get to know.” She met Mr. Ferrers, Mr. Porter, Mr. Lindgren, Mr. Veau, and Mr. Klee in quick succession, by no means sure she would remember their names. All wore dark suits, and all possessed a self-assurance that Helen thought she had already learned after only six months of serving Mr. Serteau could only come from wealth and success. All of them save Mr. Lindgren seemed very close to her owner’s age; Mr. Lindgren, who said, “Call me Eric” (none of the others gave a first name) seemed in his mid-twenties, and Helen wondered how he had made his way into this middle-aged set.
She had no time to think about such things, though, because it quickly became clear that if Mr. Serteau wanted her at this lunch to get to know his colleagues, the knowledge they would acquire of her and she of them had nothing to do with conversation. The men all sat, but no one had provided a chair for Helen, nor did anyone move to call the waiter to bring one. The waiter arrived nonetheless, bringing cocktails, but none of them was for Helen, who stood awkwardly next to Mr. Serteau’s chair as the drinks were placed around the table and she became more and more aware that the men’s eyes had fixed themselves upon her, and that those eyes looked hungry, if in a refined and even ironic way.
Except for Eric Lindgren’s eyes, whose hunger had not irony but mingled wonder and even a little shyness in it. Helen found herself looking back at him as she began to understand that this business lunch had very little to do with business, wondering whether this younger man had understood the status of the girl he had bid call him by his first name.
She saw herself through their eyes—through Eric’s eyes—though she tried to resist the inner vision. Eighteen, blonde and lithe, 5′3″, rounded beyond girlhood but still slim thanks to her daily workouts with Mr. Serteau’s personal trainer, whose most important job, according to Mr. Serteau, lay in keeping Helen fit and attractive, so that her owner’s money didn’t go to waste.
Helen knew her blue eyes made her look innocent, even in the sophisticated blue dress she had on, of the shade that matched them so perfectly, chosen by the fashion consultant Mr. Serteau retained for the purpose of dressing his concubine.
She knew that people she passed on the street, and friends from home who sometimes came to meet her in the city, would never suspect that she belonged, in body if not in soul, to the titan of finance whose private secretary she seemed to be. Romance they might suspect; indenture lay beyond their ken—but even if they had known about the provision of the corporate laws for the indenture of young women into sexual servitude, Helen’s blue eyes would have allayed any idea that she might be Xavier Serteau’s bound plaything.
Before the waiter had even left the room, though, Mr. Serteau removed any doubt his colleagues might have—and, Helen realized with a hot blush, any doubt in the waiter’s mind as well. “Turn around, please, Helen, and raise your dress. Show my friends your panties,” he said.
The waiter left, closing the door behind him. Helen wondered if this sort of thing happened often at this restaurant, whether the waiter, a man of about thirty, would go to the next private dining room and find another girl being used by several wealthy men, her body already rendered entirely naked for them as she was fucked among the plates, her mouth silenced by a cock so that her cries of submission came softly to the waiter’s ears.
Such little moments of fantasy were the sort of thing that had allowed Helen to pass the test that opened to her this terribly ambiguous world. The law provided for extensive medical—psychological in particular—vetting of candidates for this particular sort of indenture. The counselors at the indenture center had spent a very long time ensuring Helen’s informed consent to become the possession of a man who would enjoy her as he pleased for the following three years, and the presence in her mind of images like that of the other girl in the other room made a significant part of their assessment.
“Your consent is very complicated, of course,” one rather gruff female counselor had said during her final evaluation meeting, the day before Helen had gone to the little room for the silent, invisible auctioning of her body. “Because you do not know what your owner will ask of you, and you do not yet understand what it is to be truly punished by a man, or even to belong to him completely. But when you sign your contract of indenture, those things will be a reality for you, and you will not have a choice. It’s frightening, I know, but I can assure you that our evaluation shows that you will benefit from it in the end, Helen.”
“Okay,” Helen had said tentatively.
“I think you mean, yes, ma’am,” the counselor had said sharply. “You need to get used to your new status. Once you sign, you will be inferior to full citizens. I’ll have the right and responsibility to punish you for disrespect.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Helen had replied, quailing back in her seat and wondering what the woman meant by punish. She supposed now that she hadn’t ever really learned, but once sold to Mr. Serteau she had learned very quickly what he meant by punishment.
Nor did it seem, here in the private dining room, that her owner’s ideas on the subject would differ very much from those of his colleagues. Helen could see it in their eyes, before she turned to face the beige wall. She could feel it flowing from them as she reached down, her face burning, to lift the hem of her dress to show the special underwear Mr. Serteau dressed her in, almost daily, through the services of his housekeeper Mrs. Foley, who came to Helen’s room each morning to tell her what she must wear that day: black seatless panties with a pretty lace border around the opening that framed Helen’s eighteen-year-old bottom-cheeks. Thigh-high black stockings, with matching lace around their elastic tops. The moving combination of black satin, translucent lace, and creamy bare flesh that Helen confronted in the mirror of the little bedroom appointed to her in Mr. Serteau’s palatial city apartment, knowing somehow that the contrast moved her owner deeply—though he never uttered words to this effect, or many words at all that weren’t peremptory commands, always accompanied however by the word please.
“On your front, please, over the bolster.” Then the pounding of his hips as he fucked her from behind, her room silent but for her cries of forced pleasure, his soft grunts, and the wet sounds of a hard penis having its way inside an eighteen-year-old pussy.
“Bottom nice and high, please, for the cane, naughty girl.” The terrible sound of the rattan through the air, the crack of it across Helen’s backside, her vain sobs of contrition for forgetting to kneel as soon as he entered her room.
“Open your mouth, please, for my cock.” The soft, moist chucking of his long, hard shaft pressing to the back of her throat as he held Helen’s head still so that he could use her mouth as another pussy.
Helen heard him stand up from his chair in the private dining room, then she felt his hand on her bottom. She breathed in sharply through her nose, but she remained still despite her hot blush. She had never imagined that her indentured sexual service could involve this depth of humiliation, but she also knew that what her owner now did lay entirely within the rights granted him by the corporate laws, thanks to his generous contribution to the administration’s favored charity and his rather less generous but still life-transforming contribution to Helen’s education after her three years of service.
“Look at this bottom, gentlemen,” Mr. Serteau said. “I know some of you keep girls of your own, and all of you get as much young pussy as you want—especially you, Eric.” A ripple of laughter went around the room behind Helen. She couldn’t help wondering if Mr. Lindgren was joining in, and what the younger man’s eyes looked like now, whether they had moved to Mr. Serteau, or remained fixed on the little bottom he stroked.
“You’ll see I caned her the day before yesterday. She’s a naughty little thing, but her pussy and ass are so tight they’ll send you to the moon. We widened the ass her first month, so even Eric probably won’t have any trouble getting in there, though I’m sure the girl won’t walk comfortably tomorrow.”
Helen couldn’t suppress a little cry of shame and fear now, as a further wave of mirth swept the men behind her. Mr. Lindgren must be laughing, too, for it could only be he who said, in a pleasant voice that didn’t have the same arrogance that seemed to imbue everything Mr. Serteau said, “That’s just a rumor, Xavier!”
“It’s a rumor as far as my wife is concerned,” said another voice. “But you know we all saw the truth of it last month at George’s place when we banged the Norwegian girls. That little one’s eyes got so big when she saw you that I thought she might try to run away.”
The voice that could only be Mr. Lindgren’s said, “Hey, now. I was gentle with her. She went away smiling.”
Now Mr. Serteau spoke again, with a chuckle. “But not walking quite right.”
Helen felt faint as she tried to imagine what they meant: she knew of course to what the men must be referring, but when she attempted to picture what it would be like when she came into the position of the Norwegian girl, her imagination—usually so active and facile—failed her. Her heart pounded in her chest, and the heat between her thighs matched the heat in her face—that involuntary arousal that had qualified her for her glimpse into a terrible world of masculine pleasure.
Her owner continued. “As I said, Mrs. Foley and I widened her back here. Helen, bend over and spread those cheeks, please. I’ll hold the dress up.”
There was just enough room between her and the wall to bend, and lower her head until her face hung at the level of her knees. She reached back and laid her fingertips along the inner surface of her bottom’s tender valley. The nearly healed welts from her last caning tingled a little, but to Helen’s distress that tingle contributed to her helpless arousal at the awful scene.
How foolish am I, that I thought I was coming here to meet Mr. Serteau’s friends as colleagues, rather than as cocks?