Research Notes

It had been Number Two -- then still Number Thirteen at the Plaza -- who'd set her off initially. Abby had come into the city to provide a report on early progress, and was greeted in the elevator lobby by a naked, masturbating blonde. It was mid-morning, the girl was on her break, and Abby was on the far side of a mirror glass wall, waiting for an elevator to the 18th Floor. True, Thirteen couldn't see her, nor any of the other voyeurs and lookie-loos gathered in the lobby. But she had to have been aware that there were people out there at given moment. And yet she had one hand propped up against the glass while her other worked furiously, rubbing between her legs, as cold water fell onto her from the showerhead above.

It wasn't even the first time Abby had caught one of the naked mailgirls masturbating in the locker room; it had become such a common sight that it was almost rare to not see at least one or two girls touching themselves whenever they had the opportunity to do so. Some of it felt forced, though, almost like a stage show. What Thirteen was doing that morning, in contrast, was honest, desperate, and focused, and Abby had been haunted by it for the rest of that day and into the next. She'd been a psychology major in college, and so it wasn't unusual for her to wonder about what made people tick; what was it that made Thirteen tick? What was she thinking? Was she bothered at all by the audience in the elevator lobby? Was the sex, even just with herself, so good that she'd readily accept the humiliation? Was she fantasizing about some lover, maybe there at the Plaza? Was it a man or a woman? If it was a woman -- and many, if not most, of the mailgirls were rumored to be sleeping with one another when off-duty -- had she been a lesbian before undressing for USF? Was she thinking about being somewhere else, somewhere more private? Or was the exhibitionism in front of the audience an integral part of what had Thirteen so revved up and turned on?

The image of the mailgirl pawing at her pussy had lingered at the forefront of Abby's mind well into the following night, when Abby had been forced to find her own relief -- albeit behind closed doors, in the privacy of the condo that was slowly bankrupting her. It wasn't a lesbian fantasy, though. Nor was it even about that particular girl, exactly. The girl's bare body featured heavily, but it could just as well have been Abby's own; in the heat of the moment, it was blurred. The company's power over the mailgirl was a turn-on, but so too was the girl's own powerlessness; she had been betrayed and embarrassed even by her own body.

Abby, in the aftermath, was embarrassed by what she'd just done. The shame hit her as she worked to catch her breath in the darkness of her bedroom. Her panties were still askew, halfway down her thighs. Her tank top had been discarded midway through, and lay somewhere on the floor beside her bed. She was ashamed at what she just done, and confused about what it had meant.

Thirteen-now-Two wasn't a typical mailgirl, though, and Abby had been granted an opportunity to get to know her better -- through her research notes. Sarah Jane Scott was a twenty-six-year-old doctoral candidate within Yale's Anthropology Department, one whose previous work had focused on social and cultural issues within groups of women and girls. Her summer at US Financial Plaza had been arranged through Will Barrow, who had apparently been a student of Sarah's thesis advisor in New Haven, and whose presence had assured both student and teacher that USF wouldn't descend into the sorts of abuses that had overtaken mailgirl programs elsewhere. Abuses, sure. But, to a point.

Sarah, as Mailgirl Number Thirteen, had documented her life among the mailgirls since June, capturing the sentiments of and insights into the girls' day-to-day at the Plaza, and had flavored her research with her own analysis and self-examination. They were all miserable, of course -- the uptick in engagement and morale company-wide did not extend into the mailgirls locker room. But there was an unmistakable camaraderie that existed among the girls, and almost a culture unto itself. And, being stripped bare of everything that had made them who they had been in their prior lives had allowed them a certain freedom and an opportunity to be honest about who they really were, what excited them, and what they wanted. It allowed them the chance to explore themselves, whether they liked what they found or they did not.

Thirteen had shared her notes with her professor, the professor had shared those notes with Barrow, and Barrow had shared them with Abby. There was restraint and self-censure in the early reports. But the more recent submissions had been filled with very open soul-searching and introspection, confessions that hinted of inner conflict, and anecdotes that were outright pornographic in nature. But it was one throwaway statement, amid an exploration of Thirteen's sex life prior to that summer, that managed to catch Abby especially off-guard, and stay with her as much as the image of Thirteen in flagrante delicto.

"I had never been an overly sexual person," Thirteen had written. "I had never been an overly sexual person," said the girl who'd been fingering herself in the lobby of major financial services firm in downtown New York. "I had never been an overly sexual person," said the girl who then went on a few paragraphs later, in explicit detail, to describe masturbating on the floor of the locker room within inches of another sweaty, naked, mailgirl.

Abby, too, had never been an overly sexual person. She'd lost her virginity as a senior in high school, and had been just a few more men that Thirteen confessed to. She'd met Jonathan Williams, a few years her senior, at business school, and they'd gotten married when Abby was twenty-six. They'd been hot-and-heavy for a time, but Abby hadn't thought much about it as their sex life began to wane. It was two or three times a week for a while. Then once or twice. Then, maybe on a Friday or Saturday night, when she didn't have to get up to go to the gym in the morning. Or, maybe only reserved for a special occasion. It was what happened to all married couples, wasn't it? It was entirely normal, right?

Jon didn't think so. He complained about it repeatedly, accused her of never initiating, and had once had the gall to accuse her of suffering from some sort of sexual arousal disorder. Even that hadn't really phased her, though -- wasn't it common for men to want more sex than women? Wasn't that a staple of sitcom couples and a trope that played out over and over again in marriages everywhere?

Abby should have worried about it more, though. She should have forced herself to show more of an interest in her husband, to make an effort and perform her marital duties. But, in the moment, she often just wanted to go to sleep after a long day. In the moment, she was stressed about how her career seemed to be going nowhere. In the moment, she just wasn't all that turned on. But because Abby didn't share Jon's libido, Jon had begun sharing a bed with a twenty-three-year-old fitness instructor from Brooklyn.

Abby had never been an overly sexual person. But now that Jon was shacked up with Traci-Spelled-With-An-I out in Bushwick, now that he'd abandoned her to a mortgage that was unfortunately in her name only, now that Abby no longer had an outlet in bed beside her -- now, suddenly, Abby had come alive.

It was the mailgirl program at USF, of course. Diane had joked that the whole building had been doused in animal pheromones, but the truth of the matter was that no amount of animal pheromones could have affected as many people as the mailgirls themselves. Among men, it was straightforward -- visual creatures that they were, it made sense that a naked girl dashing past would encourage a wave of erections to follow along behind her. Among women, it was more complicated. Thirteen, given her anthropological training, had speculated that the presence of these naked goddesses had inspired competitive juices to begin flowing among the non-mailgirl female population. Abby wasn't so quick to discard Diane's theory altogether, though; more than once, while working at the Plaza, she'd been treated to the waft of sex and pussy accompanying a mailgirl on her rounds.

What had Thirteen been dreaming of that morning in the locker room? How had she'd reacted when Barrow had extended her contract and shipped her to Jersey City? What was Casey Campbell -- er, Mailgirl Five -- thinking right now? What would go through Kristen Metkovich's head when Abby laid out her new life for her in the middle of Trade Ops? And could any of them be as turned on by all this as Abby found herself, excited about the hunt, anticipating that opportunity to strip another girl bare?

No, Abby had never been an overly sexual person. But that had changed over the last few weeks, after Barrow had tapped her as his right hand. Rare had been the night Abby hadn't watched a dirty video in bed. Rare had been the night Abby hadn't had to touch herself to calm her body down, to fall to sleep. And rare, even, had been the day here at Park Place -- at least over the last week or so -- she hadn't given in and debased herself by masturbating in her office.

Abby was uncomfortable with all of this, of course, and she was embarrassed by her behavior -- even if she hadn't been caught. It had started at the Plaza, but had developed into a full-blown problem here at Park Place. She was ashamed of herself, of what she'd allowed herself to do, of how far she'd allowed herself to go. Part of it was the power, playing the role of the dominant, and having the fates of these girls in her hand. But part of it was the lack of power, as she identified with these very same girls and the humiliations they were to suffer. It all came together in one big disturbed and demeaning jumble of feelings and fantasies. And the idea that she might be caught had only made that initial orgasm on the stairwell of the 18th Floor that much more intense.

Did Barrow know how much all of this was affecting her? She wondered. If he did, or if he'd seen any change in her, he hadn't tipped his hand. True, he'd called out her status as a "Mrs." twice now, which seemed to be about something; Abby hadn't kept her divorce a secret, but she hadn't made it public, and she was still wearing her engagement ring and wedding band. But she'd kept her composure around him. She wasn't so lacking in self-control and self-awareness that she devolved into a trembling, sex-craved monster each and every time she thought about her assignment with the mailgirls. Even if that same self-control and self-awareness hadn't kept her from masturbating at work, at least occasionally.

Ultimately, Abby had presented a list of thirty-six candidates to Barrow for review. He had tossed out seven for various reasons, but he'd kept twenty-nine. He'd shuffled around her rankings, and had disagreed with her on some of the more subjective assessments she'd made. But he'd also complimented her on the job she'd done for him.

The mailgirls locker room in the basement had been built with twenty-four girls in mind, but Barrow only wanted to go after eighteen girls over the next couple of months. He liked the idea of having an open slot or two to instill a certain level of peril in the company's female population, and he looked forward to a more ad hoc approach to roping in a new girl. They'd launch with six in September, six more in October, and then a final six in November. And then see where they were at that point.

Twenty-nine candidates, though, had dwindled to twenty-six this past Monday, when three of Abby's prospects had quit the company after the program was announced at Park Place. Female attrition had gone up at the Plaza, too, when the first few mailgirls were tapped in April. But, weirdly, female attrition there had eventually come down even more significantly than male attrition after that initial spike, and Barrow expected to see that pattern repeat itself in Jersey City. But twenty-six candidates had become twenty-eight when Barrow informed Abby of a last minute audible, and shipped two girls over from his offices in town.

Shipped, in this case, was literal. Girls Numbers One and Two -- sisters Sophie, twenty-three, and Sarah, twenty-six -- had arrived stuffed into a single pet carrier on the back of a delivery truck that Saturday morning. Stark naked, both, sweaty and disheveled, and sore from having shared such cramped and uncomfortable quarters with one another since late the previous afternoon. They'd spent the night in an un-air conditioned loading dock at the Plaza, and they seemed to be relieved to finally be free of their tiny prison. Even if it was only into the larger prison of the new mailgirls locker room at Park Place.

Abby had had to come in on Saturday, to sign for the delivery. As the Scott sisters emerged, already inked up as Mailgirls One and Two, Abby was seated in the employee cafeteria, on the far side of the one-way mirror. Mistress Rei was there to greet them, though, and introduce them to their new home. The first allowance both girls were given by their new mistress was the chance to pee.

Pissing girls had certainly never been Abby's "thing." Not now, not before. But she wasn't going to judge, and she recognized she could just look past it. She wondered if it had been Barrow's kink that kept the mailgirls from being given even that one opportunity for privacy over at the Plaza or here at Park Place. She'd heard of kitty litter boxes and repurposed mop sinks being used by mailgirls elsewhere, though; even if this was a fetish for Barrow, it was apparently a fetish shared by others. He had, because of the 24/7 nature of this new program, given in and allowed a pair of open toilets to be installed around the corner and out of the line-of-sight from the cafeteria. These, however, were a gift only for the girls to use when moving their bowels; otherwise, as both One and Two demonstrated that Saturday morning, the girls were to utilize the row of six, Japanese-style squat toilets directly behind the shower block and visible to the cafeteria beyond.

Unlike the locker room at the Plaza, which had fours showers on either side of room, the locker room at Park Place had a single shower block dead center, up against the mirror glass. It was fitted with just six showerheads, total; if Jersey City ever expanded to a full complement of twenty-four girls, those showers would get crowded. There were three sinks on either side of the shower block, where girls would be expected to comb their hair, brush their teeth, and apply make-up.

Absent were the spanking benches that stood guard on either side of the locker-room entrance at the Plaza. Girls were still very much expected to receive some level of discipline in the locker room, but the benches -- along with a set of stockades, a pair of St. Andrew's crosses, and a few other frightening options -- were upstairs in an open courtyard in the building's East Wing. Abby wasn't sure how it was going to work in the dead of winter, but she supposed she, at least, would be watching from inside, looking down upon the girls below.

Also missing were the lockers that may or may not have been required for this to accurately be described as a "locker room." The girls were not dressing and undressing each day, nor did they have any personal items outside of a storage locker up state. The smartphones and lycra armbands the girls were issued when on-duty would be distributed daily by Mistress Rei, with no girl guaranteed to have the same unit or band two days in a row.

But while Park Place didn't have the spanking benches or lockers of the Plaza, the locker room in the basement here in Jersey City did have a row of sinister-looking eye hooks that stretched from one end of the locker room to the other, lined up in a neat little row on the floor. There were twelve of them in total, thick and menacing, and planted deep.

The look on the two girls' faces had made Abby snicker cruelly. They'd been promised a dormitory. Instead, they found themselves in a room smaller and tighter than the locker room at USF Plaza. It was a locker room with no lockers, a dormitory with no beds. They went to sleep that night on the hard, tiled floor, each with a short stretch of leash chaining them to a single eye hook on one end of the room.

Barrow had apparently intended to send the elder of the two girls, the famous Mailgirl Number Thirteen, over to Jersey City for some time, and had made all of the arrangements with the university in New Haven on his own. The second sister, though, was a rising second-year dental student out in Los Angeles, who had just happened to fall into Barrow's lap earlier in the day on Friday, before he'd sprung his trap on the first. Neither were true USF employees, per se, but Barrow believed the program at Park Place would benefit from having an already trained, already broken mailgirl in its initial cohort, to help impart some of the Plaza's "culture" upon the new recruits. Marie Partee and Jill Johnson, Abby's prospective numbers five and six, got bumped down the list, and would have to wait until October. With Casey, Abby and Barrow were now up to five, and Kristen Metkovich would round out the first class as Mailgirl Number Six.