You will find that this makes more sense if you have read the previous part of Odile’s Story.
You can find all the episodes here.
It was possible, with effort and ridiculous awkwardness, to get the slip on, but not the bangles, the choker, nor the terrible high shoes— she couldn’t manage the buckles (couldn’t remember taking them off, either, she must have been half asleep). Nor could she operate the hairdryer or use a hairbrush.
She dithered, then made herself do what she knew she must, which she desperately wished not to do; refusing to let herself think about it. Opening her door awkwardly, without even considering using her hands, she went into the kitchen she shared with Lauren, and stopped dead.
Lauren was with some guy— a man Odile might or might not be expected to know (Lauren had so many guys). They were lazily working their way through a breakfast, probably winding themselves up for more sex, knowing Lauren’s weekend habits.
It was novel, for Odile, to have a man’s eyes so rapidly home in on her breasts, then her groin, to have him smile directly into her eyes, a happily insolent grin on his face, as he accepted the offer of her presentation of herself as entirely for his benefit; assuming that she was therefore accessible to him.
A few days before, even if she had been dressed as she was, in just the near translucent slip, her stiffened nipples obvious as dark patches, she would have met such a grin with a cold stare, masking fear or outrage; if feeling particularly strong, she would have made a sharp remark.
But everything was different. Here was one who could perhaps be encouraged to rape her. Was she supposed to make herself obvious to him? She froze; there was no way she could do anything more overt than to simply stand there, lower her eyes, hope to hold a reasonably acceptable pose, and let him look. I will never be able to do this, she thought.
She could feel Lauren staring at her, too, and she wanted to run back to her room and hide; but Nadia would be arriving in such a short time, and …
She forced herself to look at Lauren, speak;
“Umm … can … can you help me?”
Lauren had a dangerous glint in her eyes; she was not jealous of her guys— they came and went, she was not interested in them apart from the sex— that’s what she said, in any case, and indeed they changed so rapidly that it could be true. So the glint was not about that, but about Odile; and it was obvious why. Odile had never done anything like this; not dressed like this, not let a guy look at her like that, not asked for help in such a weak and earnest voice…
Lauren lived for fun like this; she was super-smart, but had told Odile she made no effort to get promoted— she had enough money to have the fun she liked, and fun was what she wanted. She was always bored, always looking for something new and dangerous. Not that Lauren took risks. She made those around her do that, and was vastly entertained by the results.
Odile had been a very boring housemate, but even Lauren could be persuaded that this was a good thing— she liked her apartment to be under her control, and Odile did nothing to challenge that, even if she was a little dull.
That morning, though, was interesting; everything about Odile was different— not just the way she was dressed, but her body language, too. Lauren was intrigued;
“What’s up, honey?”
“Umm with … with getting my shoes on, and … and some other stuff.”
“You need help putting shoes on? Weird— but OK, bring them over.”
Odile was about to ask if Lauren would come to her room, and then realized that this was not acceptable. She had to give the man every opportunity. It was non-negotiable. But, if she brought the shoes, she would have to carry them awkwardly, and that would bring questions, and …
It was non-negotiable.
Heart thumping, Odile ran to her room, gathered up the shoes, the bangles and the choker, clamping them between her wrists, and ran back, hyper conscious of the way her unfettered breasts moved in the slip, the way the hem was riding up her behind, the knowledge that, far from attempting to minimize these things, she was required to be obvious about them. She found herself letting out one of those weak girlish giggles that she never heard from herself before meeting Andrew.
The guy shifted in his seat, sitting up straight, grinning now, after taking a shifty sideways glance at Lauren— checking she wasn’t going to be angry. But Lauren, too, was enjoying the show— and sucking in detail, too; something was going on with boring little Odile, something intriguing.
“Why are you carrying shoes like that? And what on earth are these other things?”
Odile wanted to run away; either that, or go to her knees and tell everything. But neither were possible, and so, her voice hesitant and husky, she tried to explain;
“It … its my … it’s this … this man. He … He has … requirements.”
… and then seeing how inadequate this was, how unconvincing, Odile blurted out, with a rush of blood to the head;
“… and I really want to please Him and His assistant is coming to get me in a few minutes and I have to be ready and … and He doesn’t like me to use my hands and I have to dry my hair too and … plee-eese?”
Odile was bright red. Her voice pitch had risen steadily throughout this little speech until she sounded like a little girl, and she was quivering visibly, tears bright in her eyes, though they did not fall.
Lauren looked at her, eyes wide, for the longest time, until she made some decision; then, she had turned, smirking at her guy, enjoying teasing him and Odile at the same time;
“Out, mister— back in the bedroom, shut the door and I’m locking you in. Take your breakfast with you, there’s a dear.”
Lauren’s companions were generally very much ‘under her thumb’, and this one was no exception; after a stunned moment, he stood up, adjusted his boxers in a futile attempt to conceal a very obvious hard-on, took his plate and went, affecting to smile happily.
“OK, now, Odile. That’s far too much, and nowhere near enough, all at the same time. Man? what man? I haven’t heard of him. He tells you what to wear? Really? He doesn’t like you to use your hands?? Really? Really?? And what kind of man sends his assistant to pick a girl up? Something is really off here— and from you, too— little miss careful and quiet, suddenly appearing in a heart-attack sexy microdress with her nips bursting out all over, no bra, and I’ll wager no nickers either.”
“Oh, no! No help for you without you telling more.”
Odile was frantic. Nadia would have no patience at all with delay, she was sure.
“OK, OK, please— I promise I’ll tell you everything, when I get back, but I … I just can’t be late. Ple-eese!”
A long stare from Lauren; Odile couldn’t meet her gaze, her cheeks were flushed. She was pathetic, and she knew it. At last, Lauren took pity on her;
“OK then. But it’s a promise, mind— I want to know everything!”
And then she was all efficiency, helping Odile get ready, working quickly.
“Thank you Thank you … and … now I … I have to go and do some … some finishing touches …” Odile was desperate not to be found wanting. It was humiliating enough to know that the state of her pussy would be checked, but it would be infinitely worse to fail that test— and unthinkable for Lauren to know anything about it. She needed time— and, how? How could she do it to order? She had been thinking feverishly, but had come up with nothing better than the terrible stool— she could not let Lauren see her doing that; she had to escape.
“OK then missy, I’ll get the door and make small talk if you need a moment.”
… and Odile had scuttled back to her room, to lean against the door, heart racing, looking at the stool, appalled at the memory of having fucked herself silly on it just hours before, unable to think that she might do so again.
Until two things occurred to her; a tingling between her legs— she was on the way already; something about confessing to Lauren, the shame of it, had set her off, the knowledge that more would be winkled out of her later— and also, the feeling of the door-handle against her thigh … if she moved, just a little … she could just…
She turned, pulled the slip hem up with her wrists in what was becoming a more elegant and sexy manoeuvre every time she practised it, went up on tiptoe and pressed her sex into the bend where the handle met its spindle; horrified and turned-on at the same moment. Such a slut to be grinding her clit against an inanimate object, getting herself hot in such a mechanical way. And then she managed to make just the right move, and …
Gods, but it felt good! I can do this, she realised, and then Oh, but it’s so bad that I want to do this so much. Her forehead slumped softly against the door, her hands went back, almost automatically, and her hips took charge, knowing what to do; just exactly what to do, just exactly what she wanted … and faster too, until;
“Hello?” Lauren’s voice, from just the other side of the door— “Are you alright in there? Your ‘friend’ is here. Is the door stuck? The handle, it’s … Oh!”
Odile realised that she had been rattling the handle in her urgency! Shame nearly overwhelmed her completely; She tottered back, frantically smoothing the slip down, stammering; her voice shaky, somehow unable to dissemble about her state, but equally unable to tell the truth; stuck …
“Oh! It’s … er I was just … er Oh! Oh! OK… umm… Can … can you open it?”
When she saw both Lauren and Nadia, both looking at her, interested in their different ways, she felt she must melt from the heat of her blushes, making silly little noises in her throat, unable to speak, unable to hold their eyes, only stare down at their feet.
They knew. They knew what she had been doing! It was in their eyes. She was on fire with shame. She had got carried away, and been thrusting herself violently against the door-handle. Had she been moaning? She had no memory, except of sensation— the surprising and wonderful sensation of the cool hardness of it, the dirtiness of it reminding her of the stool the night before, the neediness of her sore sex…
She was lost. No going back. She felt she must die of it, She felt sick, certain that something terrible must happen as a result of this. Lauren would revile her, throw her out in the street, refuse to give her a reference for a new place— at the very least…
“Thank you Lauren,” said Nadia, cool and smooth as always; “I’ll just help Odile out, as she seems a little … unsteady— and then I’ll come back for a little chat, if I may? Yes?”
And even Lauren, even in her own home, even when she was clearly burning with curiosity, had to give way before the force that was Nadia’s polite, uncompromising certainty.
“Uh, OK, sure, yes, thanks.”
More evidence, if Odile had needed any, of the certainty that, if she was to survive, after what He had done to her, she needed the protection Andrew’s mastery and wealth could give her. She was not just His through assent, any more; rather, He; His people, owned her, since she was, truly, ruined. She was a whore, a dirty wanton slut. She had either been made a whore, or made to see that her true nature was to be a whore— it didn’t matter which, because either way, a whore needed protection from the disgust of other women, and from the violence of men.
When, in the silence that stretched (she had been in such a desperate panic to be ready for Nadia that she could hardly believe the long calm of those moments— realising that this was another benefit of Andrew’s control over her; this sense of there being always time. There would be turmoil, inside her, always, but there was never any sense of hurry from Andrew; always patient, always in control, while she quivered, and trembled, and agonised, constantly aware of the eyes on her, on her breasts, her legs, her lips; was she looking ugly? Was she offering herself sufficiently elegantly? It was torment, but equally, it was the most astonishing feeling— to be so abjectly dependent upon the unknowable opinion of the other, so vulnerable to their next whim, so vulnerable, so disempowered)— when, eventually, Nadia spoke, it was to consolidate and emphasise Odile’s ruin;
In a voice that was as close to kind as Odile had heard from her, almost gentle, quieter, slower, more intimate than usual, Nadia said;
“You’ve fallen quite far, quite fast, haven’t you, pretty? Less than 24 hours since I saw you, and you’re humping yourself on a door handle in order to have a wet cunt for me to inspect, as if you were some farm animal.”
“If you have any shred of self-preservation in you, you will find that card M. Strauch gave you, and get yourself out of this. Because helpless little sluts like you can be taken so far down that they lose everything. He is ruthless with pretties like you— more especially because you look so delicate, so vulnerable in your despair; you will be taken; down, endlessly down, to places unthinkable to you now, however dark your imaginings. Places so deep and dark that you will never find your way back. And you will help Him do it to you, if you don’t rescue yourself.”
She paused, waiting, patient, of course, while Odile did nothing; nothing but tremble, waiting, and Nadia’s voice was cool and hard again;
“Of course, if you are truly the slut I think you are, you’ll take a few steps to your right, then lean forward, put the backs of your arms up against the wall, make your hands prettily useless, bend your head down, and spread your legs wide; open yourself up, so that I can check that you have readied yourself for rape.”
The terrible words worked on Odile like acid; from burning with shame, she was cast into awful torment. Nadia despised her, heaped humiliations upon her, and yet, once again, she was being encouraged to free herself from this— what was it?— a nightmare, or the most intense dream ever? But it was neither; it was real, and physical, and cruel, and she did really smell of it, and her pussy was hungry for fucking and her nipples were deliciously stiff, and she was fully, deeply, physically caught up in it all, trembling helplessly…
And yet the warnings, the dire warnings. They— He and all those people — all these people would work to destroy her… (for the night before had shown her that there were many, many people in Andrew’s circle of Hell who would aid and abet Him as He destroyed her, that she would be helplessly subject to all of them, the object of all their petty viciousnesses, their perverse desires; it was not just Andrew, but a whole little world of its own, where girls like Maya could be treated with utter disrespect in public, subjected to terrible abuses, where, despite their pretty smiles and willingness to please, nothing and nobody would save them; indeed, would, rather, heap praise and respect on those who most savagely abused those helpless girls).
She was visibly shaking, then, but refusing to let the tears fall. The contempt of a woman was much, much harder to bear than the cruelty of a man, she realised. And yet, nothing, nothing came; no strength, no desire to do anything at all except…
Except to obey, to accept another defeat, this one very overt indeed.
And then it came to her— the card was lost, now, in any case; mixed into the detritus of her life, the black sacks containing all of whatever small meaning Odile had acquired. Soon it would be in the back of a dustcart, then burnt.
A little burst of energy came then, a tiny defiance— not of resistance, but of black humour, at least, and she looked up, looked Nadia in the face, even managed a weak little smile (knowing that she was about to lose all rights to look any woman in the face again, about to betray her sex);
“I couldn’t if I wanted to; I … I threw it away, with the rest of my rubbish”— and her hand flapped, weakly, at the sad little heap of black sacks.
Then, it came to her to say something more— saying goodbye to Nadia, not to anyone who cared about her, not even to Lauren, saying goodbye to herself, really, to the Odile she had been;
“I’m already lost, I think. I think I always was lost. Please, if He is interested, tell Andrew to do … everything … Everything with me that He desires. And thank Him for me, from … from the bottom of my soul. And … oh this is silly, but … but … say that I would like Him to require perfection of me, force me to become exactly what He wants of me, so … so that He might keep me for as long as possible?”
No goodbyes were ever said by Odile to anyone else. Nadia took control of her ‘phone, went through her papers, researched her family and friends, and— writing to them as if she were Odile— arranged for them to understand, over the course of several months, that she was withdrawing from contact, that she was concentrating on finishing her PhD, that she would soon leave Paris and find a quiet retreat in which to work. They should not expect to hear from her much, if at all, in the future. Since she had not been particularly close to anyone, these messages were accepted without much protest, and so Odile did not so much leave the world, as simply fade out of it, unremarked, so that the abuses, the degradations which occasioned such terrible screams, such drowning torment, such grinding despair, such destructive, howling orgasms, meant nothing to anyone— apart from to herself, who had by her actions, and later by explicit agreement, already consented to be abused, to be made to scream, to be tormented, amounting to nothing more than a passing entertainment to those who caused her to suffer.
Nadia’s impassive face did not alter; there was no response at all; she simply looked back, patient; waiting for what they both knew was inevitable.
It took a massive effort for Odile to keep the tears in check then, as, once again letting herself lose, letting defeat have her, she turned, made a couple of steps, and turned again to face the wall, understanding how Nadia wanted her, off balance, dependent upon the wall for support, deeply disempowered, with the backs of her forearms against the plaster, and her head down, her legs open wide, for inspection.
More like a slave than a farm animal, she thought, and instantly saw that this was true. That she was to be a slave— in practical fact, whatever the legality of it.
It appalled her and, perversely comforted her, too, that there was no resistance in her to the word, to the idea that she, Odile, was being enslaved, right there and then, as Nadia walked into the room, closing the door behind her. That the word ‘slave’ was almost welcome in its solidity, its finality, its denial of everything, of anything ‘personal’.
“Now pretty, you’re going to have to do better than that, if you want to keep M. Strauch interested. The point of a pose like this is for you to display, to the maximum extent possible, how deeply submissive you are. Your head needs to be lower, much lower, smeared against the wall; your feet need to be further apart, and the elegance and obvious uselessness of your hands should be exaggerated— find a position for your arms that is not only expressive of weakness and foolishness, but also stressful— one that will be difficult to hold for any length of time.”
“Since you are not generally permitted to speak to him, you will need give him as many messages as you can with your body, to tell him how low your opinion is of yourself, how eager you are to please Him.”
So saying, Nadia matter-of-factly implemented the changes she had recommended, unceremoniously kicking at the insides of Odile’s ankles, hard, until Odile felt the tendons at her groin tautening, felt her sex lips split apart, then, with a hand in Odile’s hair, forced her head right down the wall, twisting Odile’s neck roughly, before taking Odile’s wrists, one at a time, and spreading those wide, too.
“Better; you’ll practice, of course, whenever you have time.”
