Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 66851 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 334(@200wpm)___ 267(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66851 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 334(@200wpm)___ 267(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
Swindler. Yes, fine. Confidence artist. Swindler.
Well, really, I supposed, not at this point: my swindling days had clearly reached their just conclusion, at least from the standpoint of the monstrous corpo-legal system that governed everyone’s lives, except people like the woman I had tried to swindle. I would never be an actual confidence artist, if the pseudo-court had anything to say about it.
I had tried, though. I had tried very hard.
Pamela Jonas, senior vice president, or executive vice president, or something like that, of one of Selecta’s infinite divisions, had taken a liking to me at a career event at my educational facility. She had asked if I wanted to have coffee to discuss opportunities—something she had also done with several of my classmates. I had gone, because why not.
And because the calculating side of my brain, my smarts as I thought of them, had kicked in when I saw the way Pamela looked at me, one of the prettiest girls in my class according to just about everyone. At ten, my smarts had helped me get ice cream cones from strangers at Dairy Queen. At nineteen, I had a feeling it might get me a lot more than that.
Pamela clearly thought I had something Selecta could use—my smarts or my looks or who knew what. Our coffee-date had gone brilliantly, thanks to my intuitive understanding of what older adults want out of younger adults—a promise, more or less, to try to be like them. Right there at the table in the coffee shop, Pamela had set me up with an interview with one of her colleagues for an entry level position.
I also had strong enough romantic radar, as I thought of it, to know that Pamela was attracted to me. She had tried to hide it, and I had been able to sense that she considered herself much too ethical to make a pass at a nineteen year old. My smarts, however, told me that I had the chance to make a great deal more than the entry-level job would pay, if I encouraged her interest.
We ended up back at her elegant, enormous apartment in the heart of Chicago. I took a lot of pictures to make sure I could verify that I had actually been there. I didn’t have to pretend to be nervous, because I had never had sex with anyone, let alone an older woman: my previous experience had consisted of getting kissed and felt up by a football player behind the EF. It had felt fine, I guessed, but I hadn’t felt the need to repeat it anytime soon with a boy, or a girl—or a man or a woman. That anxiety, of course, did a fine job of hiding the deeper anxiety involved: I hadn’t ever blackmailed anyone, either.
Nor had I actually blackmailed Pamela Jonas. I had taken a selfie of myself with my shirt off in her apartment, and then I had made an excuse and left. I had bought a burner phone and texted her my demand for one hundred thousand dollars, or I would send the pictures to Selecta with a story of abusive behavior.
Thirty minutes later, I had been in jail. Two hours after that, sentenced to Corporate Rehabilitation Services, I had arrived here in this examination room.
CHAPTER 2
Marianne
The nurse had finished baring me between my thighs. She turned the clipper off, and silence came back to the room. It seemed bizarre to me that the thudding of my heart somehow hadn’t become clearly audible. The doctor glanced down at his tablet and then back up at me.
“Alright, Marianne,” he said with the disdain clear in his tone, “let’s confirm Selecta’s assessment of your fitness for service as a sexual relief device.”
Instantly, a chime came from his tablet—at the very same moment I felt my body betray me. The buzzing vibration of the clipper had distracted me, but even a nineteen year old with smarts like me understood at least a little about how sex works: I had known the naturalness of my pussy’s response to that stimulation. Any girl forcibly strapped down naked to an exam chair and shaved between her thighs and ass cheeks would have found the clipper distracting: despite the horrible indignity of the position and despite my heartfelt desire to keep all such physical reactions at bay, any girl would have felt the warmth and the tingling in her clit and in her nipples.
I did not think, however, that any girl’s pussy would have clenched when a doctor told her that his duty lay in assessing her suitability to become… my mind pulled back from the memory of the doctor’s words, because to my horror I knew it would redouble the betrayal.
Then the force of whatever insanity had apparently gripped me pushed me forward into those words, and I heard them again as if in an echo chamber, over and over.