Chapter 5: Big City Girls
The boutique’s air grew thick with the heat of bodies and the scent of cheap perfume clashing with nervous sweat. What began as a solitary humiliation had curdled into a spectacle. Josie’s quiet, insistent commands from her plush velvet chair had drawn a crowd. A man in a rumpled suit, pretending to examine leather belts. A pair of women with sharp, curious eyes, sipping takeaway coffee. Three young guys who didn’t bother to hide their leering grins. They’d drifted in from the street, moths to the flame of Annie’s exposed skin.
“The cerise chemise next,” Josie directed, her voice a bored murmur that somehow carried. “Then the velvet teddy with the open back. And we’ll finish with the final piece I selected.”
Annie moved like an automaton between the dressing room and the window. Each outfit was a narrower strip of fabric, a more daring reveal. The cerise chemise was sheer silk, her nipples and the dark triangle between her legs starkly visible through the rosy haze. She walked. The velvet teddy was a strap of plush fabric that cupped her breasts and plunged to her navel, tied together by a single string at the back that left her buttocks completely bare. She walked. The audience shifted, their breathing part of the store’s soundtrack.
Her mind had detached, floating somewhere near the ceiling lights. She focused on the physical details to avoid the crushing weight of the eyes. The scratch of lace on a rash forming on her hip. The chill of the air conditioning on the damp skin of her lower back. The blister forming on her heel from the repeated trek on concrete. This was just another type of labor, brutal and demeaning. She could endure labor.
“Last one,” Josie announced, holding up a garment that seemed to be made of nothing but black string and two triangular patches of lycra smaller than postage stamps. “The microkini. I’ll help you with it. It’s… technical.”
Annie followed her back into the dressing room. The space was now fetid with the smell of her own anxiety. Josie’s fingers were cold and efficient as she took the previous outfit from Annie’s numb hands.
“Arms up.”
Josie slipped the top over Annie’s head. It was two tiny triangles on a string that tied behind her neck. Josie’s knuckles brushed Annie’s spine as she fastened it, the tie so short it pulled her shoulders back, thrusting her chest forward. The triangles barely covered her areolas; the stiff peaks of her nipples protruded past the edges.
“Now step in.”
The bottom was a sling of black string. Annie lifted a foot, wobbling. Josie steadied her with a hand on her thigh, her grip firm, impersonal. She guided the string up Annie’s legs. The front was a narrow strip that disappeared into her cleft, a floss of fabric that vanished between her labia. The back was a string that rode up the groove of her buttocks, barely wider than a shoelace. The sides were ties at her hip bones.
“There,” Josie breathed, her eyes running over Annie’s body like a quality check. “Perfect. It’s not meant for swimming, you understand. It’s meant for seeing. For knowing. Now. The window.”
Annie looked at herself in the mirror. She was fundamentally naked. The black strings only served to diagram her nudity, to trace the contours of her sex, to frame and highlight what they barely concealed. A flush of pure shame, hot and debilitating, rose from her chest to her throat. She choked it down.
She pulled back the curtain.
A soft, collective intake of breath came from the small crowd. One of the young guys whispered, “Holy shit.” The man in the suit adjusted his trousers subtly.
Josie’s smile was a thin, satisfied line. “The full circuit. Slowly.”
Every step was an agony of exposure. The front string of the bikini bottom rubbed directly on her clit with a maddening, precise friction. Her breasts, constrained and lifted by the tiny top, felt swollen and heavy. The plaza beyond the window was busier now, the golden hour light flooding in, turning her skin to honey, making the black strings look painted on. She was a living, breathing obscenity.
She reached the window. A crowd had gathered outside, phones raised. Flashlights popped, white stars bursting in her vision. She saw her reflection superimposed over their hungry faces—a pale, string-bound creature, eyes dead, mouth set in a flat line.
“Turn,” Josie called, her voice clear over the music.
Annie turned, presenting her bare back, the string bisecting her buttocks. More flashes. A wolf whistle cut through the glass.
“And back.”
The walk back to Josie felt a thousand miles long. Every cell in her body screamed to run, to cover herself, to shatter the window. She kept walking. Her calf muscles trembled with the effort of keeping her gait even. She stopped before Josie, who looked up from her phone, where she’d undoubtedly been capturing every angle.
“Adequate,” Josie pronounced. “You can get dressed. Your old clothes. We’re done.”
As Annie turned back to the dressing room, the main door to the boutique chimed. A new presence entered, and the atmosphere warped instantly. The casual voyeurism of the crowd snapped into something sharper, more fearful. They began to disperse, melting toward the racks, suddenly very interested in accessories.
Levi stood just inside the door, having watched the final moments of the display. He was still in his suit from the office, his tie slightly loosened. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes were fixed on Annie, taking in the microkini, the raised phones outside the window, the lingering heat of the spectacle.
Josie was on her feet in an instant, her composed mask back in place. “Levi. I was just finalizing her wardrobe essentials. I was about to call for the car.”
“I decided to come myself,” he said, his voice quiet, cutting through the music. His gaze never left Annie. “Go wait in the car, Josie.”
“Of course.” Josie gathered her things, a flash of something—panic? resentment?—in her eyes before she smoothed it away. She swept out without a backward glance.
Levi approached Annie. He didn’t touch her. He just looked, his eyes doing a slower, more intimate version of Josie’s scan. “You drew quite a crowd.”
Annie said nothing. She stood there in her strings, past shame, into a hollowed-out defiance.
“Get dressed,” he said, finally. “We’re going home.”
In the car, a suffocating silence reigned. Josie drove, her eyes on the road. Levi sat beside Annie in the back, his thigh pressing against hers through the rough fabric of her jeans. She’d pulled her old clothes on over skin that felt permanently stained. She stared out the window at the blurring city, seeing flashes of light that weren’t there.
At the condo, Levi directed Josie to unload the bags and leave. He took Annie’s wrist, his grip not cruel but inescapable, and led her not to the guest room, but to the master suite. He closed the door.
The room smelled of him—of sandalwood and the morning’s coffee and the faint, clean scent of Josie’s perfume. The memory of the reflection in the television screen, of Josie on her knees, was suddenly vivid in the space.
“Show me,” he said.
Annie blinked. “What?”
“What she bought you. Show me. All of it.”
It was a different order. Not a public performance for strangers, but a private audit for him. The audience of one. She numbly went to the bags Josie had placed inside the door. One by one, she put the outfits on, paraded before him where he sat on the edge of the bed. The lace bodysuit. The mesh top and skirt. The velvet teddy. She saved the microkini for last.
When she stood before him in the strings, his eyes darkened. “Come here.”
She took two steps forward, stopping just out of arm’s reach.
“Closer.”
She stepped until her knees almost brushed his. He reached out and hooked a finger under the string at her hip, pulling gently. It bit into her skin. “This is what they all saw,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “My property. On display.” He didn’t sound angry. He sounded possessive. Satisfied.
His other hand came up, his thumb brushing roughly over the peak of her nipple where it spilled from the lycra triangle. She flinched. “You’re aroused,” he stated, feeling the tight bud under his thumb.
She wasn’t. She was raw and scared and humiliated. But her body, traitorous and confused from the constant friction and the adrenaline, had reacted. A slickness that wasn’t hers alone, born of the boutique’s forced march, lingered between her legs. He misinterpreted it. Or perhaps he understood perfectly.
“On your knees,” he said, his voice dropping.
Her head jerked up, meeting his eyes. “No.”
It was the first real resistance she’d offered since the farm. A single, flat syllable.
A flicker of something dangerous crossed his face. Then it was gone, replaced by a calm so absolute it was more terrifying than anger. “You gave me your virginity in a hayloft, Annie. You came apart on my fingers and begged me for more. You belong to me. Now, get on your fucking knees.”
The memory was a physical blow. The scent of hay and her own blood, the blinding mix of pain and shocking pleasure, the desperate sounds she’d made… He weaponized it, and it worked. The fight seeped out of her, leaving a cold, compliant vacuum.
She sank to her knees on the plush carpet, the strings of the microkini digging in.
He didn’t touch her head. He simply unfastened his trousers, freed himself. He was already half-hard, thickening to full erection as he looked down at her. “You watched Josie do this. Now you do it. Take me in your mouth. All of me.”
Her first attempt was clumsy. Her lips stretched, her jaw ached. She gagged immediately, pulling back with a wet choke.
“Again,” he commanded, his hand coming to the back of her head, not forcing, but present. “Relax your throat. Take it like you mean it.”
She tried again, focusing on the mechanics Josie had so effortlessly demonstrated. She used her tongue, flattened it. She took him deeper, fighting her own reflex. Tears sprang to her eyes as the head of his cock pushed past the barrier of her throat. He held her there, his pubic bone pressed against her nose, her airways constricted. The world shrank to the smell of him, the salt-and-musk taste, the unbearable fullness.
“Good,” he grunted, and began to move.
He set a relentless, deep rhythm, using the grip on her hair to guide her. There was no pleasure in it for her, only a drowning sensation, a struggle for air in the brief moments he pulled back. Saliva dripped down her chin. Gagging sounds echoed in the quiet room. He fucked her mouth with a focused intensity, his other hand gripping her shoulder, his hips pumping.
“Look at me,” he gasped.
She forced her tear-filled eyes up. His face was a mask of carnal concentration, watching himself disappear into her. The voyeurism was complete. He was witnessing his own use of her.
“Swallow me,” he ordered, his rhythm becoming erratic, brutal. “Take my come down your fucking throat.”
The hot, bitter pulse hit the back of her tongue. She choked, tried to pull back, but he held her firm, emptying himself in deep, throbbing spurts. She had no choice. She swallowed convulsively, the alien fluid burning a path to her stomach.
When he was spent, he slid from her mouth with a soft pop. She knelt, gasping, strings of spit and semen connecting her lips to him. She was hollowed out, used.
He tucked himself away, fastened his trousers. He looked down at her, a spent, kneeling mess in the ridiculous black strings. He reached out and wiped a streak of moisture from her cheek with his thumb.
“You learn,” he said softly. Then he turned and walked into the adjoining bathroom, turning on the shower.
Annie stayed on the floor. The taste of him was a coating in her mouth. The ache in her jaw was a brand. The memory of the hayloft, once a secret treasure of her own awakening, was now just the first link in a chain he had methodically forged. She had given him her virginity. Now he owned every response, every humiliation, every forced surrender that came after.
She heard the shower running. He expected her to join him. To be cleaned by him. The final act of the day’s reclamation.
Instead, she pushed herself up on trembling legs. She walked past the bathroom door, past the guest room, out to the vast, empty living room. The city lights glittered, cold and distant. She went to the stack of remaining unpacked boxes from the farm. She dug past the books and the trinkets, her hands searching in the dark until they closed around something hard and cool and familiar.
She pulled out a worn horseshoe, heavy and solid, a rusted nail still wedged in one hole. The weight of it in her palm was an anchor. It was real. It was hers.
She clutched it to her chest, the cold metal a shock against her skin, and stared out at the endless, consuming lights, waiting for the sound of the shower to stop. It did. He didn’t come looking. She heard the faint rustle of sheets in the master suite, then nothing. The silence felt heavier than any command.
The next two days were an empty echo. Levi left before dawn, his departure marked only by the soft click of the front door latch. He returned long after midnight, smelling of night air and distant boardrooms, sliding into bed without touching her. He was a ghost in his own home, and the condo became her gilded, sterile cage. She used the time like a prisoner might, with a grim and focused purpose.
She unpacked every box. She folded her flannels neatly beside Josie’s purchased silks in the dresser. She lined her veterinary manuals on the shelf, their cracked spines a rebuke to the glass art objects. She placed the jar of wildflowers on the windowsill, their dried petals brittle and brown against the bright city. The horseshoe she hid under her pillow, its weight a secret rebellion. She scrubbed the already-spotless kitchen, rearranged the furniture an inch at a time, and stared at the walls. The humiliation from the boutique, the feel of him in her throat, it all curdled inside her, fermenting into something else.
On the third morning, he was drinking espresso at the island, scanning a tablet. She leaned against the doorway, still in her sleep shirt.
“Josie hasn’t been by,” she stated.
He didn’t look up. “She’s been needed at work. The Singapore deal is closing. Do you need something from her?”
Annie studied the sharp line of his jaw, the impersonal focus. She remembered the fear in Josie’s eyes in the boutique when he’d arrived. A thought, cold and sharp, crystallized. “Yeah. I do. Send her by. I want to go shopping. And I’m hungry. She can cook.”
Now he looked at her, a faint flicker of appraisal in his gaze. “Alright.” He set the tablet down, finished his coffee. “I’ll let her know.” He left without another word, the door sealing shut behind him.
A few hours later, the key turned in the lock. Josie entered, her movements stiff. She offered Annie a smile that looked like it hurt her face. “Good morning. Levi said you had some errands? And you were hungry?” Her voice was sweet, utterly false.
Annie crossed her arms, leaning against the kitchen counter. “You get kicked in the head by a mule on the way over?”
Josie’s mouth tightened. Her eyes, usually so full of calculated venom, flashed with immediate, instinctive insult. Annie saw the words form and die on her tongue. Josie looked down, her shoulders slumping a fraction. “No, ma’am,” she said, the title sounding alien and bitter.
A slow, understanding warmth spread through Annie’s chest. The forced compliance. The clipped ‘ma’am’. It was a role reversal, and it was intoxicating. Annie decided to test its limits.
“I’m in the mood for some bacon,” Annie said, her tone casual.
Josie mumbled something under her breath that sounded like “of course you are,” but she moved to the kitchen. She opened the fridge.
“Oh,” Annie added, watching her. “Do it topless.”
Josie froze. Her hand gripped the refrigerator handle. She turned her head slowly, and Annie saw it—the pure, undiluted rage, and beneath it, a stark, animal fear. It was the most honest expression she’d ever seen on Josie’s face. Without a word, Josie reached up with trembling fingers and unbuttoned her silk blouse. She shrugged it off, letting it fall to the floor. She stood there in her skirt and a lace bra, her tanned skin goosebumping in the condo’s chill.
“There’s no bacon left,” Josie said, her voice flat, her eyes fixed on a point past Annie’s shoulder. “I’ll go pick some up.”
Annie smiled. She let the silence stretch, savoring the sight of Josie’s bare shoulders, the proud lift of her breasts constrained by lace. The power was a dark, sweet liquor in her veins. “You know what? Changed my mind about the bacon.” She stepped closer. “Seeing you like that… it reminds me. I miss milking my cows.”
Josie’s eyes snapped to hers, confusion wrestling with the dread.
“Get on your hands and knees,” Annie said softly. “Let’s see if you’re any good as a stand-in.”
The fear won. Josie lowered herself to the polished concrete floor, moving with a humiliated, robotic grace. She got on all fours. Annie pulled a stool over and sat down beside her, grinning. She reached out and gave one of Josie’s breasts a soft, mocking squeeze through the bra.
“I’m always gonna remember this day,” Annie chuckled.
Josie locked eyes with her, incredulity breaking through the submission. “You are not seriously going to try to milk me.”
“I am,” Annie said, her smile widening. “But I should warn you. I’ve been told I’m pretty rough on the udders. My farmhand Billy, he had the gentler touch.” She raised her hands, fingers poised near Josie’s nipples.
Josie squeezed her eyes shut, her whole body tensing, bracing for pain, for some grotesque violation.
Annie didn’t move. She dropped her hands. “Why are you being like this?” The laughter vanished from her voice. “The plastic smile. The ‘ma’am’. What the fuck is going on?”
Josie’s eyes opened. They swam with a fury that was now mixed with a desperate relief. The words spilled out in a low, venomous rush. “He’s punishing me. For the boutique. For the window. He said I put his property on public display. He threatened to fire me, to cut me off completely.” She sucked in a shaky breath. “The only reason I’m here is because you asked for me. His orders are absolute. I have to do anything you say, anything, until he decides to forgive me.”
Annie absorbed this. The pieces slid into place. Levi’s possessive anger hadn’t been about her humiliation, but about the public claiming of his privacy. And now he’d handed her the leash to his most devoted hound. “Well, cut that ‘ma’am’ shit out for a start,” Annie said. “And stop smiling. It’s creepy. Be yourself.”
A real smile, small and sharp, touched Josie’s lips. “Being myself involves telling you that this is a pathetic little power trip from someone who still smells like barnyard.”
“Better,” Annie nodded, a strange camaraderie flickering in the hostility. “Now get up. And take the rest of it off. All of it.”
Josie stood, shedding the skirt and bra with defiant glances, standing naked in the middle of the kitchen. Annie led her to the guest room. She yanked open the bottom drawer of the dresser, pushing aside her own folded flannels. Her fingers found the thin, hateful strings.
She pulled out the microkini.
She tossed it at Josie. “Put it on.”
Josie stared at the minuscule garment, then at Annie. “You have got to be joking.”
“I’m not. We’re going shopping. You’re wearing that.”
A real spark ignited in Josie’s eyes—a familiar, combative fire. “This is petty. This is kindergarten revenge. You think this compares to what you went through?”
“I don’t really give a shit what you think,” Annie said, leaning against the doorframe. “Put it on, or I’ll call Levi and tell him you’re refusing a direct order. I wonder how he’d feel about that.”
Josie’s jaw clenched. She dressed in the strings with furious, jerky movements. The effect was just as it had been on Annie: a graphic diagram of nudity. The black ties accentuated every curve, the patches doing nothing to hide the dark thatch of her pubic hair or the deep brown of her areolas.
“Fuck you, you redneck cunt,” Josie spat, adjusting the string that bisected her ass.
“Probably not,” Annie said, tilting her head. “But we’re gonna be making a lot of stops today. Grocery store. The bank. Maybe that fancy little bakery on the corner you like so much.” She turned and walked toward the foyer. “Let’s go. You’re driving.”