Lightweight Package

Thirteen dutifully licked her silver dog dish clean, wiped her face with the back of her hand, and then proceeded to lick the back her hand clean, as well.

She stood, brought her bowl to Mistress Zero's desk, and added it to the stack on the floor. As she walked back to her locker, she slid off her lycra armband, and placed the smartphone into its charger. She turned, crossed the room, and joined Nineteen and Twenty-One on the shower block to the near side of the locker room.

Nineteen, a stunning, dark-haired girl of obvious Italian descent, was seated on the tiled floor beneath one of the shower heads, her legs splayed wide open and her pussy covered in the white lather of shaving cream. She had a razor in one hand, and was entirely focused on making sure that her pussy was meticulously devoid of any hint of pubic hair. If she'd passed inspection that morning, Thirteen doubted that Nineteen could have anything like a "twelve o'clock shadow," and suspected that this was being done only at Mistress Zero's instruction. It was probably entirely pettiness on the part of their supervisor. But as the cold water splashed against Thirteen's nipples, she was forced to recognize that she hadn't escaped Mistress Zero's pettiness herself.

She wondered if nipple clamps rusted.

Thirteen hadn't bothered to take her hair out, the pigtails bouncing mockingly in her reflection. This wasn't a full, top-to-bottom shower like she'd taken first thing that morning, like she'd take again that evening, but rather a quick rinse - enough to wash the sweat and grime of the morning away, enough to at least offer a temporary reprieve from the smell of body odor and the musky, feminine stink of pussy. She soaped herself up, rinsed herself down, and did her best to ignore the tiny little aftershocks of her most recent orgasm as her hands ran over her naked skin. She paid particular attention to the soles of her feet, which had the tendency to turn dark and dirty from the poorly-cleaned stairs between floors.

While all the girls delivered mail barefoot, Thirteen had actually been allowed to wear shoes on her deliveries one day in late July. No, "allowed" was probably the wrong word. It had been a punishment, dreamt up by Mistress Zero, and her footwear had consisted of a ridiculous pair of stiletto heels. Her delivery deadlines had been adjusted accordingly, but by the end of the day Thirteen's feet had ached like never before. No thank you, she thought herself; she'd take any number of paddlings or any amount of time in these nipples clamps over that particular hell again.

Once she was toweled off - with deodorant, perfume, and make-up re-applied, with her teeth brushed, and with the smartphone and armband back in their rightful place around her arm - Thirteen glanced at the clock, and confirmed she still had a few minutes before she had to take her place at her locker. She snuck behind her mistress and peed at one of the open toilets, and then crossed the locker room to Ten's open locker. Ten had apparently been on First Lunch - with Seven, Thirteen recognized jealously - but the cocktail dress she'd promised was hanging in her locker. There were two, in fact, and Thirteen couldn't have been sure which dress Ten had intended to loan her, and which dress was for Ten herself. Neither, though, were anything that Thirteen would have picked out on her own - one had a neckline that guaranteed Thirteen's cleavage would be spilling out of, and both had hemlines so short that she'd be tugging them down all night, and on-guard to keep from inadvertently flashing everyone at the Imperial's bar. There were any number of girls who went out to Friday night Bitch Sessions without panties, and Thirteen had joined in on this trend more than once. But, tonight, no matter which dress Ten let her borrow, Thirteen knew they'd be a necessity.

Leaving the cocktail dresses be, Thirteen crossed back to her side of the locker room, and clipped herself back onto her leash. She took her position on her knees, and waited for the clock to reach the bottom of the hour, for Mistress Zero to release her back into the wilds of USF Plaza. Her mind drifted back to her cell phone, and back to her sister, and she cursed herself for having even glanced at it. Sophie's drama threatened the zen-like peace Thirteen sought - the blank, empty-headed mindset and pure Point-A-to-Point-B functionality of a mailgirl. So, instead, she chose to focus on her nipples, still being pinched and squeezed, and her buttocks, still stinging from the attention they'd received. This was Thirteen's life - not the quarter-life crisis of a second-year dental student stressing over her upcoming nuptials.

And, as she focused on her own sore and aching body, she felt another familiar ache. She knew that she was already wet again.

As much as Thirteen kept trying to refocus herself on her life as Mailgirl Number Thirteen, her other life (her real life?) kept intruding. Perhaps it was simply a result of the fact that she was now only a few hours short of being set free. Perhaps it was the pain of not being able to get back to her sister when she needed her. The fact that her next delivery was to Kim Kinney in Investment Banking on the 41st Floor, where she'd inevitably run into Drew Wagner, certainly didn't help.

Her first call after lunch was down the stairs to the actual mailroom on B-2. In earlier iterations of mailgirls, the mailroom and the girls' locker room had been one and the same; in fact, the term "mailroom girls" pre-dated the now much more common "mailgirls." Oftentimes it had been a simple garden hose, or a janitor's closet and mop sink, which had served the purposes of making sure they girls were all showered and shaved. And the girls had gotten undressed and lined up in the mailroom itself, under the supervision of whoever just happened to be in charge of the actual mailroom at the time. And, while there were still plenty of companies that continued to follow that model, a new generation of programs had built specific facilities for their girls - palatial, by comparison. USF had adopted this later model, converting an underutilized fitness center into something akin to mailgirl terrarium, with lockers, showers, sinks, and even bathroom facilities (such as they were) all visible through a wall of mirror glass on the 2nd Floor.

The separation made sense. The girls often managed to make the rounds and deliver all of the day's regular mail by mid-morning, and maybe seventy-five percent of Thirteen's time was otherwise devoted to running interoffice envelopes from one floor to another, or carrying electronic messages on her smartphone from place to place, or restocking supplies. Hiding the girls away in the basement, moreover, missed the very point of the girls' presence entirely - they needed to be visible, they needed to be out in the open, they needed to be something everyone was reminded of as much as possible.

But, in taking over the bulk of the regular mail duties, the mailgirls had displaced a number of previously employed mailroom staff members. Which was perhaps why Paul Hooper, the nominal head of the mail room, didn't seem to enjoy the opportunity to rub elbows with the girls as much as one might have expected; he'd been forced to let a good number of his friends and employees go, and seen his span of control shrink accordingly.

"Look at those fucking pigtails," Hooper said aloud, to no one in particular. "They're like fucking handles. I bet someone upstairs is holding on to them while he jams his dick down her throat."

Thirteen took the abuse with a smile - a smile Hooper couldn't see. She was in her "Feet" position, standing with her arms behind her and her legs spread, but with her back to the rest of the mailroom and her face only a few inches from the wall. As a general rule, USF advised their employees against such direct, verbal abuse of the mailgirls - though it still happened regularly. Hooper, though, had reasoned he could get away with it if that abuse wasn't specifically directed at a mailgirl, but rather spoken aloud, to himself, while the mailgirl faced away from him in the corner of the room. It was likely only a loophole in Hooper's own mind; but the girls hadn't reported him, and Hooper knew enough to knock it off if Mistress Zero or someone else was around.

He was a mean son of a bitch, too. There were twenty-four mailgirls at USF, plus a few more that had come and gone, and every single one of them was drop-dead gorgeous, plucked from the cream-of-the-crop here at the Plaza. And, still, Hooper always managed to identify that one particular body issue that managed to get under a girl's skin - Five's teeth were uneven, Seven's nose was too big, Nine's hips were too wide, Fifteen's ass was too high. And so on, and so on. He'd managed to tease Thirteen for "not belonging," for the idea that USF was just letting "anyone" become a mailgirl - insinuating that Thirteen wasn't quite as pretty as the rest of the girls, something that she'd been anxious about ever since she'd first volunteered. It was a ridiculous assertion; even in her least confident moments, one would have argued that Thirteen was objectively more attractive than at least eight or nine of the other girls. But Hooper had nonetheless managed to sniff out her particular neurosis, and needle her accordingly.

Despite the abuse, however, the girls had turned a corner with Hooper relatively early on, and his derision and scorn was met with nothing more than mock horror and a sense of humor. Among the stories swapped back and forth at the Imperial on Friday nights, more than a few revolved around the horrible things that Hooper had hurled their way, shared with shrieks of laughter. They'd even begun to call him "Master Hooper" behind his back, embracing the absurdity that they were all now just slave girls in his little fiefdom. When one of the girls had slipped, and accidentally referred to him as "Master" to his face, Hooper took the title and ran with it; it was now expected that all the girls refer to him as "Master," rather than "Sir."

But if Thirteen got off light that afternoon, in terms of verbal abuse, Hooper had nonetheless found another way to torment her. She had tried to beg off a run to the 41st floor earlier in the summer, and he hadn't forgotten; there was little doubt that he'd called for her, specifically, to handle a lightweight package headed that way that day after lunch.

"Enjoy," he smiled at her cruelly, when she was beckoned over to take the package. No, he hadn't forgotten.

"Yes, master," Thirteen answered, with a lump in her throat.