Cocoon

In what Ani presumed to be the morning, Rose's mistress instructed her to go back to her own cell. Ani wanted to ask if she could ever see her again, but instead she just hugged her. Rose reciprocated, and for a few precious seconds they just stood there, their arms around each other.

"Thank you for a fun night. I won't forget you." Rose lightened up a bit and that smile Ani had fallen in love with returned. "I _love_ your boots."

Shortly after Rose left, Ani's owner let her gag retract and she put it back in its drawer. It then gave her clothes back, and she put them on before the cell door finally opened for her. She took off the headband and made her way back to the lobby, ready to face the real world again, a new woman.

She tried to convince the receptionist that she had fallen in love with a woman called Rose, one of the other guests, and wanted to contact her. The receptionist said that Ani had fallen in love with someone she had only ever seen in a corset and stockings who came to her specifically to have sex with her. Just as Ani wasn't a sex-obsessed slut, the receptionist said, neither were any of the other guests. The woman Ani was with existed only in that building, just as the naked, gagged, owned Ani only existed there. _If_ she was given the phone number of Rose, which she wouldn't be, she'd find just a regular, shy woman. Ani said she understood all of that but this was _love_ she was talking about. The receptionist said she'd heard it all before a dozen times. In the end, Ani managed to convince her to pass on her phone number to Rose, rather than try the other way around.

The one other thing she _had_ to ask the receptionist was who owned her, in the cell. She couldn't even tell their gender let alone who they were.

"You owned yourself. All those orders were your inner desires. You were just forcing your conscious self to do what you always wanted to. The headband you were wearing let our computers read your thoughts. That's how we can be confident that you won't actually end up doing anything you _truly_ don't want to. That's why the service we provide is so good for self discovery."

After paying for the room, Ani made her way downstairs and out of the building. She shuddered at the cold weather outside, but as the rain poured down, she soon managed to hail a cab. She had planned on going straight back home, but instead decided to go to a local lesbian book store that she'd always been too intimidated to go in before.

"Sheesh, you're not one of those dykes, are you?" the cab driver asked her. "A pretty girl like you?"

"Yes, I am," said Ani. She smiled for the first time in weeks.