Old Habits Page 5

  For me, thanks to Master’s brainwashing and re-wiring and unhinging, it was that I could come just from serving.

  As I started jerking my tits up and down the man’s shaft, I reflected on it as I’d never been allowed to do when I was a sex slave. (One of my most deeply-ingrained commands was not to think about things that might free me, and thoughts about the nature of my programming certainly seemed to fall under that umbrella.) I don’t think Master cared about my happiness, and I’m certain he cared nothing for my sexual satisfaction. If I had to guess, I would suspect that it had something to do with how I’d been programmed for obedience, using pleasure as a reinforcement mechanism.

  Because as a free woman, I certainly never found myself quaking with orgasms as I tit-fucked someone.

  Psychological arousal – that is, the link between climaxing and thought processes apart from physical stimuli – is obviously a phenomenon for most people. We all have our things that get us off, whether it’s a visual thing like some guys have for big boobs, or maybe a foot thing, or just knowing you’ve made it with your crush. For me, it was knowing I was getting someone off. The part of me I was using to do it always came alive with sexual energy, just from knowing I was fulfilling Master’s programming.

  My breasts were like two gigantic clits on my chest, and I never wanted him to stop.

  Unfortunately, he was a young man with a hair trigger being tit-fucked by a gorgeous woman, and stopping was exactly what he did.

  “Sorry to have to run so quick, lady, but hey, you ever looking for a good time you know how to reach me, OK?” he said, tugging up his pants while I sat back on my ass, legs spread, dragging a finger back and forth through the blobs of his slime on my chest as if to savor the texture. It was inelegant and undignified and largely bad form for this character, but like most of my triggers, it adapted to the man and his preferences. This man wanted to fuck a slut’s tits and run; my job was to assure him he’d done a good job of it.

  “And if y’all’re ever lookin’ for a place to hang your hat or whet your whistle, I reckon you know right where to find me.” I smiled graciously.

  “Damn, you’re one crazy bitch, lady,” he said, though with mild affection.

  “Aren’t you just the sweetest thing, sir” was my reply.

  He shook his head and shut the door behind him. I listened to him go down the steps, peered out the window and saw him go back to his car, watched it peel away from my apartment complex. He was gone.

  I watched a little longer. He wasn’t coming back.

  The trigger ended.

  I, Harmony Reed, free woman, was standing in my living room wearing half a slutty dress and all of the cum her delivery guy’s balls could hold. No longer focused on the needs of my hostess, I became aware of my old clothes scattered around the living room and the scents wafting from a box of cooling food by the front door.

  Over the next few minutes, the sensations passed and my mind righted itself. I had been used. Being used, I reminded myself, wasn’t something to feel proud of. I needed to clean up and dress myself again. I should be angry.

  Go wash up. Don’t eat that stranger’s cum, I ordered myself.

  Hopefully before long the endorphins would be flushed out of my system and I could be angry. For now, I had tits to wash off, and Chinese takeout to eat before it got any colder.

  Chapter Four

  Master had not often indulged clients with violent appetites. Sentimentality towards any of us slaves had no part in it, certainly, though we never received a rationale for turning away such men either. I suspect it’s because the brainwashing process was some combination of expensive and labor-intensive, and he had no desire to let someone destroy one of his masterpieces for a quick buck. Regardless, it meant that whatever else I could complain of during my years of enslavement, being beat up wasn’t part of it.

  Even so, Master trained his slaves to resist fear. Again, I can only surmise, but it seems likely Master preferred us not to panic about our fates as slaves to a ruthless brainwasher. It kept the ranch quiet, certainly, which was fine by me. Even if I was mere chattel, I preferred to be enslaved in peace.

  When I was twenty-three, I had a repeat customer who made me grateful for the training. He was crazy – and I don’t mean kinky or giggly or eccentric, but who-left-the-back-door-to-the-asylum-open crazy. He used to like to roleplay that he was a super-villain and that us slaves were super-heroines, and then torment us and rape us and mwa-ha-ha-ha his victory over us. Even aside from however he compensated Master, the man must have spent a fortune in props, from revealing costumes to magical ropes and alien alloy chains and any number of insidious traps. It was like an Adam West era Batman cartoon, except he never laughed.

  Mind you, a super-heroine fetish was just his kink, not what made him crazy. No, I discovered his madness right there in the depth of his eyes as wielded his prop knife at me, screaming that he would carve out pieces from my super-cunt and eat them so that when he went down on my blood-filled pussy his mouth could survive the white fires of Vandelon.

  (See? Crazy.)

  Even then, even lying there bound and helpless and at the utter mercy of a lunatic who I had no doubt would mutilate and murder me if he could… there was no real fear. I faked it, screaming and struggling and fighting to close my thighs before he could infest me with his demon seed, but I never actually felt the real surge of panic.

  That’s not to say I’m incapable of the emotion; I still had my intense dislike of public speaking, still got scared if someone jumped out and said boo, still got my heart racing the time this jerk in a beat-up Subaru ran a red light and almost broadsided me. I just don’t sit and fester in it. Unless there’s some kind of immediate threat, I rationalize away my anxieties really quickly. Adapt and handle it, my training went.

  That all said, what happened in my apartment yesterday had me as close to terrified as I got.

  I’d been over and over it, and none of it made sense. In the entire course of my enslavement, I’d never been triggered by anyone but Master. Nobody else, not even me, knew the phrase that would turn me into a good doggie, or a blow-up doll, or dozens of other sets of behaviors. Heck, it’s entirely possible there’s some lurking in my brain even I don’t know about.

  But yesterday, a delivery guy had come to my apartment, spoken a few words, and reduced me to a gracious Southern tit-slut.

  I looked again to my list of theories I’d scribbled on a notepad, seeing if maybe something would click, unlike the hundred other times I’d been over it. My first theory, flimsy though it was, was the one I liked best – that I’d simply mistaken whatever he’d said for my trigger and it had all been an accident. Possible? Sure. He’d had some kind of Asian accent and worked for a Chinese restaurant, so maybe he’d said something in Mandarin that I’d just misheard.

  Likely? Hell no. Only a complete moron would invest all manner of time and energy in making a human slave only to have their behavior keyed to something someone would say conversationally. Master had been no moron.

  My second theory, no more probable but almost as hopeful, was that a combination of sounds had hit me and it had again served as my trigger. I didn’t live in the best building and the walls were pretty thin. Maybe whatever he’d said over the intercom coincided with the TV in the apartment below me and the argument my next-door neighbors had been having?

  And so on, until I ran out of theories rooted in wild coincidence and started listing the things I simply dreaded. Of that, I saw two possibilities. The first was that Master had left some trace of his work and someone had discovered it. The second, my hand had shaken so much with anxiety that I could hardly write it down.

  Master is alive.

  It seemed impossible. Hell, it was impossible. I’d seen him die with my own two eyes. Only, I’d also seen what he could do to my brain, turn my thoughts and desires into soft clay to be molded however he liked. Could he have faked his death somehow? Why would he? If he had, why return now?


  On a second page of the notepad, I’d written another heading. What do I do now?

  On that page, those words were as far as I’d gotten.

  For now, I decided to treat it as an isolated incident. Nearly isolated, at least; there had been the episode at Dr. Kovacs’s office. Still, there was no connection between the two that I could see. For there to be any link, my shrink would’ve had to have learned that particular trigger phrase, declined to use it himself, then somehow passed it onto my delivery guy between the time I ordered it and the time it showed up. It was a bridge too far.

  Wasn’t it?

  The fact that for the first time ever I’d had a memory of my conditioning at Master’s hands, even as brief and seemingly meaningless as it had been, was something I couldn’t even begin to deal with yet. The dread I’d felt at displeasing Master, my burning need to do the right thing (where “the right thing” was synonymous with Master’s will), the needles and the burning of whatever he’d injected into me… I had no idea what to do with it, so for now, I did nothing.

  In fact, for the time being there was little to do but go back to my life. After all, that’s what this was all about – trying to hang on to the normalcy I’d fought so hard for. I went to work at school the next morning, then pulled a shift at the car wash by evening.

  I’d figured I’d be looking over my shoulder all day, but honestly, people were glad to see me back. One of the kids from the special needs classes that I’d bonded with a little had even made me a card, and I’d only been out for two days. I fell back into my rhythm, and found I wasn’t paranoid in the least.

  In fact… I felt pretty good. Really good, if I’m being honest.

  A little too good.

  I should tell you, I’ve had a rather nonexistent sex life since I regained my freedom. I don’t want to have some kind of weird flashback to Master’s ranch in the middle of making out with a guy and suddenly start acting like some kind of nymphomaniac. (Or worse – I can only imagine what would happen if my “unwilling” mentality was triggered.)

  So maybe it was just that, having a few good orgasms. From having a guy come between my breasts. Maybe that’s all it was. Regardless it was done and over, and I just needed to focus on work. My friends were a little worried about my absenteeism too, and it was getting high time to stop putting them off.

  I masturbated to orgasm six times that night. Six more the next.

  Finally, I couldn’t put off my social obligations any longer; the gang was moving from concerned to crabby at my keeping them at arm’s length. Even I had to concede that even as much as I wanted to fritter away another night on idle fantasizing, normalcy was important, and I needed to get back into normal habits.

  There were five of us, usually, though it was common enough for someone to bring along a date to our outings. Miguel and Justin were inseparable, step-brothers with different fathers but practically twin souls. Despite what men had done to me, I found them impossible not to love, and not long after we’d been introduced, it was like we’d been friends since grade school.

  Then there were the girls – me, Hannah, and Vivian. Hannah was a little older than the rest of us, in her mid-thirties, and had a son who was a senior at my school. Accordingly, Hannah was basically the mom of our entire group, keeping us in line and counseling us through our dramas. Vivian was my age (three weeks younger to the day, in fact), and the beneficiary of a whole lot of that mothering. While some might have called her hell-raiser, I stopped short at mere wild child. When the group got hard on her after she’d gone on a week-long trip with a guy she’d just met, I had to speak out on her behalf.

  After all, if they were that concerned about her screwing one stranger, imagine what they’d think if they ever found out about what all I’d done.

  Miguel and Justin picked me up at my place after work. (I had a car, but it was not reliable and best avoided. Besides, always nice to have a DD.) They were two of the very few men left whom I trusted; Justin was gay, and Miguel and I had gradually reached an understanding that neither of us were in the market for the other. Cliché as it sounded, I valued his friendship too much to risk having a go at him. Plus, I knew full well I was damaged goods, and he deserved someone who wasn’t a closet nymphomaniac.

  Which was a good thing for him, because I was looking dangerously good that night.

  We’d decided to hit our favorite bar for a few drinks, then go dancing at a place Vivian knew in the city. Sure, I had work in the morning, but I figured it’d do me good to have some simple fun. To that end, I’d squeezed myself into a little white dress that was damn sure to get me some attention. While the dress wasn’t full-on slutty, my ample curves lent it the title for the evening. It wasn’t clingy except across the chest, where it hefted just enough of me up and out; the skirt was all breezy and flowing, but just tight enough in the hips that every move I made had it twitching to my own personal rhythm. Add on a pair of stilettos and a pretty killer makeup job, and I was dressed to kill.

  My sexiness makes me feel powerful, you see. This was true before I was enslaved, and held true after. It was something I had that no one could take from me, something I could subtly lord over people the way some of the teachers unintentionally did at work with their advanced degrees.

  Did you go to college, Harmony?

  Oh, I got my PhD in blowjobs at the University of Master’s Ranch.

  It made me feel confident, and I desperately needed that right now. Also, Hannah and Vivian knew me well enough to know that I dressed according to my mood, and this get-up would reassure them that I was feeling A-OK.

  I basked a little in their ooh’s and aah’s, and had to dole out some genuine praises in return. Miguel might not have his brother’s raw good looks or the ability to pull off the stubble-beard he was trying on, but he cleaned up damn good. We were a crowd of head-turners, for sure; Hannah bragged that she’d be the milfiest lady in the joint. She wasn’t wrong. Not to disparage Hannah’s fashion sense or fitness regimen – just that we fast learned that Vivian’s intel on this place might have been a little bit off.

  “Wait,” said Justin, “so this ‘amazing little place in the city’ was called Tucker’s Country Junction, and you didn’t think that was worth mentioning?” He frowned up at the sight of the neon cowboy glowing over the entrance.

  “They just said Tucker’s! I didn’t know it was a country place,” she protested.

  “We’re going to fit in about as well as that cowboy would at the The Gate,” Miguel retorted, referencing one of the more upscale clubs in the city, a place where even girls like me were practically commonplace.

  “Well it’s not like I did it on purpose – I’m overdressed as much as the rest of you!” Vivian insisted.

  The bickering went on like this, but I heard little of it. I’d gotten dressed up, and dammit, I was going to have fun. I heard their voices trail off into stunned silence as I sauntered up to the front entrance, presented the rough-looking bouncer my ID and the cover fee, and went inside.

  I’d been to country joints before, and this was an exemplar of its type. Open barn-like feel, rodeo decor, and of course, the music. The floor was surprisingly full for a weeknight, a mix of seasoned veterans who knew all the moves and goofy newcomers laughing themselves silly trying. I joined the latter group immediately, and for the first time in days, forgot my troubles entirely.

  If I got a few sidelong looks from people at being out of place, the explanation (that my well-intentioned friend had heard great things but not specific things) was more than enough to pacify them, and even let them have a good-natured laugh at our plight. By the end of the first song, my friends had joined me. By the end of the second, their scolding expressions had evaporated, replaced my implacably giddy smiles.

  We danced, we drank, we danced some more, all the while entertaining and fending off flirtatious admirers. Miguel and Justin were nearly the only Latinos in residence, and us girls ribbed them about how they had suddenly become exot
ic and sought after. As for the ladies, we didn’t pay for a drink all night. Vivian had found a guy to make out with, and Miguel had settled into a booth for some heavy flirting with a pretty little blonde. Hannah and Justin were one another’s dance partners, a common enough arrangement and happily made.

  Myself, I was sitting at the bar politely but firmly rebuffing away the admiration of one such fellow, a burly guy pushing fifty (but pushing it hard) in a trucker’s hat and a flannel with the sleeves ripped off, when he leaned over and said something quietly in my ear.

  I only had enough time for one thought – No. Not again. – before I was triggered, and my thoughts were no longer mine to squander on futile resistance.

  I marveled inwardly at how quickly my brain rewrote itself; the man had barely sat back upright in his stool before I had become what I had been told. I recognized my own thought processes too well; this trigger had been one the more common requests at Master’s ranch.

  – burning sensation as his concoction entered my bloodstream; Master and I waited silently for it to infiltrate my brain and make me pliant.

  Master spoke the words. I frowned, confused; I didn’t feel any different, and Master’s triggers always made me feel different. “Master?”

  “Tonight we’re going to crack you open and see if you can’t learn to do as you’re told.”

  “I always do what you tell me, Master.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because you are Master. I obey Master.” This was a truth ingrained as deeply in me already as my need for air.

  “Twist your nipples, Harmony.”

  I did; they were already hard, and bare, and it seemed only natural. As soon as Master said it, I found it was what I wanted to do on my own.

  “Do the splits.”

  I could do them sideways, front to back or standing with one leg held over my head; presently, I did the first. It felt right. This was where I wanted to be, doing the splits bare-assed in Master’s training chamber.