Tease to Please Ch. 02

Author's Note: If you haven't read Chapter 1, you should. Otherwise the characters and scene won't make as much sense.

Chapter 2: Monday June 3rd

Elise stepped off the BART train at 8:30AM and began her walk to the address of Dr. Peters' laboratory. Since it was her first day, they had arranged to meet outside the lab's delivery door. Doctor Peters had explained that the building had no lobby or formal visitor's entrance because it was never open to the public.

When Elise arrived at the address, she noticed that the building was gigantic and nearly windowless. It occupied an entire city block. She gave the metal doorway marked 'Deliveries' a firm yank, but it seemed locked.

"Well," she thought, "I guess I am a few minutes early."

Elise dropped her backpack onto the cement loading ramp and hoped up onto the metal handrail to wait. She'd worn a conservative pair of blue jeans, old sneakers and a simple cotton blouse. Doctor Peters had said he didn't care how she dressed, so she had assumed casual attire would be okay. In any case, she reminded herself, she didn't own any business attire. But waiting there, alone in the early morning sunshine, it suddenly crossed Elise's mind that Doctor Peters had always worn a tie during their Skype chats. Her heart flashed with sudden self-doubt. What if she'd screwed up already?

A loud bang from behind the metal doorway made Elise jump off the railing. The double-doors swung inward on heavy motorized hinges. Doctor Peters strode out wearing a big smile, corduroy slacks, a white dress shirt, a red tie and highly polished loafers.

"Hi Elise!" Arthur beamed, thrusting his right hand toward her. "Welcome aboard!"

"Hi Doctor Peters," Elise answered cautiously, feeling tiny, young and unserious in her battered sneakers. The doctor's firm handshake swallowed her hand entirely.

They exchanged pleasantries and Elise apologized for her shoes. She was relieved when Doctor Peters brushed that off without any hesitation. He even offered to carry her backpack for her.

"Oh, no worries, Doctor Peters" Elise demurred, "I've got it. It's mostly empty anyhow. I just brought it since I figured I'll need to drag all those clothes back to my friend's apartment tonight."

"Sure, sure," Arthur replied with another broad smile. "Well, anyway, come on in and I'll show you around."

Arthur led Elise inside. The heavy motorized doors swung shut behind them as they walked inward along a wide concrete hallway. Elise followed a few steps behind, taking in the full measure of how large Doctor Peters was. "He must be over a foot taller than me," she thought to herself, "and double my weight!"

The tour was brief. It covered only the first floor because Dr. Yamamoto's section was upstairs. First Arthur led Elise into a huge laboratory occupied by six long tables that were piled high with equipment. Loud fans twirled on the ceiling above. He introduced her to his two research staffers; middle-aged men who looked like they hadn't seen sunlight in years. Then there was an office kitchen, one conference room, various service corridors lined with utility closets, and a large unisex restroom.

Lastly, on the far side of the main corridor, was Doctor Peters' private office. It was huge. It also looked, to Elise's eyes, very homey -- almost lived-in. There were tables and desks of various sizes scattered about, a large leather sofa against one wall, a television on the opposite wall, storage and filing cabinets beneath the TV and a stationary exercise bike in the middle. Doctor Peters' personal desk was at the far end, overlooking the room. The wall behind it was lined with overflowing bookcases.

"Wow," Elise said, "You've sure made yourself comfortable in here."

Doctor Peters smiled in reply. Then he pointed to the least-cluttered desk in the room and declared it to be hers. "The computer on there is for you, too. It's got internet, but it's not connected to our private network, so there's no corporate espionage in your future I'm afraid."

Elise laughed. She was feeling more comfortable with each passing moment. Doctor Peters seemed really easy-going for a scientist type, and she liked the way his huge bear-like hands were always gesturing. She watched him talking and almost giggled because he looked like he was trying to draw pictures in the air of every word that came out of this mouth.

Elise dropped her bag onto her new desk and then followed Doctor Peters around the room as he explained his various filing systems and the projects she'd be working on over the summer. They reviewed her daily schedule and some of the more mundane office-tasks he wanted her to handle. Eventually that brought them to the pile of little UPS boxes on the floor.

"Aha!" Arthur joked with a smile, "Here's the part you've been waiting for: your new clothes!"

"Yeah," Elise answered with a wry smile and a roll of her eyes, "Lucky me!"

"I didn't open them. I figured you'd want to do that. But, you better get moving because Dr. Yamamoto is coming down at 10:30 to meet you."

"Shoot! Okay, yeah, I better get started. I sure hope all this stuff fits after all that work we did."

"Here's a box-cutter. I'll let leave you to it."

With that, Arthur retreated to his desk and pretended to read his email. He had installed thick carpeting wall-to-wall across the back third of the office, under his desk and bookcases, in an effort to warm up the room and soften the load on his feet. In the process he had built an elevated wooden dais to raise the carpeted area a few inches up off the concrete floor. His desk therefore had a commanding view of the entire room. It was easy for him to keep one eager eye on Elise as she sat cross-legged on the floor cutting open the boxes and unwrapping her new clothes.

Arthur was delighted with her so far. Her beauty matched his most optimistic hopes. She had wide hazel irises flecked with radial streaks of feline gold. A constellation of pale freckles decorated her little nose and cheeks. And the compactness of her torso allowed her legs to be far longer than her 5'3" height would have otherwise permitted. Arthur also noticed the amazing way her slim lower body animated her jeans; so dexterous and supple-jointed.

As he watched Elise unwrap a frilly pair of stockings he felt the need to remind himself that there could be no funny-business between them. He had screwed up his life once already with a younger woman. He wasn't about to make the same mistake again. Especially not with a girl who now worked for him... and extra-especially not with Sylvia's daughter! No, this time he would be very content just watching the show... without, so to speak, touching the merchandise. He forced himself to open an email and actually get started on his workday.

"Ugh..." Elise groaned a few minutes later from within a growing circle of packing materials and clothes. "I still can't believe this part is actually real. These clothes are just wrong!"

"That door there," Arthur said, pointing to the nearest of the three doorways on the south wall of his office, "is a walk-in closet. Feel free to try stuff on in there if you need some privacy."

Elise held up one of the mini-dresses for Arthur to see.

"Look at how short this is Doctor Peters," she exclaimed. "It's a size zero... It was supped to be a 2!"

Arthur feigned surprise. Elise kept working her way through the boxes. Soon she had all the clothes unpacked and neatly folded into piles on her desk. Then she began breaking down the torn packages and carrying the paper and cardboard out to the recycling bins in the hallway.

By the time she finished it was nearly ten o'clock and her skin glowed with a light sheen of sweat. Partly, Elise knew, she just had a case of the nerves. Doctor Yamamoto was coming downstairs to meet her at 10:30AM and that didn't leave her much time to pull together her first uniform.

Elise recognized that it wasn't only her impending near-nudity that was freaking her out. After all, her body was in great shape -- she had worked hard to achieve that and was proud. Her physical conditioning had become quite central to her self-confidence and motivated her interests in yoga, dance and massage. And she'd had the confidence during her final years of college to wear skimpy outfits when she went out dancing. So that wasn't it.

No, what made her uncomfortable was failing to live up to the expectations of others. Her most humiliating memories had all been self-inflicted navigational errors that exposed her to the cruel verdicts of social norms she didn't recognize. She felt she had a blind spot a mile wide when it came to complex social interactions. And she hated public speaking. Debate class in high school still gave her nightmares.

"Boundary-issues," her mother constantly remind her, were the source of all her mistakes. And for Elise the price of those mistakes so far had been high. In the year leading up to this internship she had graduated from college and turned twenty-two but she felt nearly friendless. Guys, she reflected, had always been easy to get along with initially but then it always went badly as soon as they misinterpreted her physicality as flirtation. That made other girls jealous of course, and panicked guys into either stupid come-ons or terrified avoidance.

She felt she had been accused of being a tease by more people than she could remember... including every guy-friend she hadn't slept with. The ones she had hooked-up with, on the other hand, became obsessive. But none of them ever held her interest for long, so she'd had to initiate all her own break-ups. That, combined with girls being generally predisposed to hate her out of sheer competitiveness, left her with only a handful of real friends.

This coming summer was a chance to break that cycle. A fresh re-start after her disastrous senior year at college. A new job in a new city would allow her to mingle with normal (she hoped) adults. No more college geeks and sorority bitches... and especially no more married Professors to get entangled with! She was determined to handle this next three months with care.

"Um, Elise?" Doctor Peters called out from behind his wide desk, "Aren't you going to get changed? It's 10:15."

"Shit!" Elise blurted, derailing her own mental train, "I lost track of time!"

Elise quickly grabbed the pearl stilettos, a pink and white candy-striped skirt, a white blouse and some stockings. How long, she wondered, had she been standing there daydreaming, looking like a slack-jawed fool? She glanced sheepishly at Doctor Peters and pleaded: "Where can I change?"

"Right in there," Arthur reminded her, pointing again to the door nearest his desk.

Without further discussion, Elise rushed into the big closet, found the light switch and pulled the door shut behind her.

Arthur tented his fingers and smiled. He was about to witness the fulfillment of two months of anticipation. His face contorted involuntarily into an obscene grin.

The closet door was about three yards from where he sat. He could overhear Elise inside, cursing at all the fussy plastic tags and stickers that had to be removed from the new clothes. There was a crash that sounded like she had knocked something off a shelf. This was followed by more muffled swearing.

"Sorry!" she called out. "It didn't break!"

Arthur shook his head and chuckled. He felt like he was waiting for Christmas morning. The anticipation of seeing Elise in her first uniform made his heart pound. Eventually he heard the sharp clack-clack of her high heels hitting the concrete floor inside the closet.

"Jesus!" Elise exclaimed in muffled panic. Then, more clearly: "I think I'm ready Doctor Peters, but don't laugh, okay?"

"Okay!" Arthur called back to her. He rolled his leather swivel chair out from behind his desk for a better view.

The door opened and Elise tip-toed out into the room.

"Do you have a mirror somewhere?" she asked, apparently unaware that the look on Doctor Peters' face already reflected everything she needed to know about her appearance.

"Ummmm....." was all Arthur could manage. His brain was too busy soaking up the methane-refinery-in-flames level of hotness searing his retinal nerves. "Yeah, uhhhh. A mirror. I might have one somewhere... I'll have to...um."

"Is this okay?" Elise asked him, walking closer. "I know I still need a bow for my hair, but how is the rest of it?"

Arthur let his eyes wander. Elise may have been 5'3" before, but now she was 5'7" showing a bare midriff and nearly a yard of leg. Her candy-striped miniskirt was daringly short and so elastic across her hips that horizontal folds persistently bunched the fabric upward with her every move. The white frilly bands atop her stockings were pulled up as high up as possible on her slender thighs, but still the skirt refused to entirely cover them. Elise continued to teeter nervously toward him in her tall sandals. Then she stepped up onto his carpeted dais.

"This stupid skirt is another size zero," she fretted, tugging the hemline down because it had ridden up dramatically higher when she stepped up onto the dais. "I can't believe how tiny it is!"

"Yes," Arthur replied gently, trying to retain some composure. "Probably not what you're used to, but it's not totally indecent... I guess."

Elise stopped within an arm's reach of Arthur and did a slow turn, tugging and adjusting various parts of her outfit into position. "How does it look from the back, Doctor Peters? Do you think Doctor Yamamoto will say it's similar enough to the picture?"

"I really have no idea what he'll say," Arthur replied, relishing the free tour of his intern's nubile figure.

Elise's ass looked absolutely incredible under the seamless stretchy miniskirt -- like a swollen peach wobbling atop two narrow stems of leg. It rocked from side to side with each shift of her weight. The skirt's vertical stripes followed every curve of her hips and butt, exaggerating their roundness before ending abruptly at her gluteal crease. Arthur felt a perceptible gravitational pull toward the revealed gap between her upper thighs. The four-inch high heels kept her ankles in plantar flexion and tipped her pelvis forward to such a degree that she had to arch her lower back to maintain balance. The pale thigh-high stockings highlighted the athletic definition of her legs. Her midriff was naked above the low-riding waistline of the skirt, all the way up to her ribcage. Arthur marveled at how slender she was. All the muscles in her stomach and lower back were clearly defined, covered only by a thin layer of skin. The top she had chosen was a white cropped blouse with baby-doll sleeves that clung precipitously to the outermost edges of her shoulders. It ended in a wide band snug around her ribcage, just below her breasts. Above that, the material was looser but so thin that Arthur could clearly see her white bra through the gauzy material. She had fastened every button up the front of the blouse, but its wide boat-neck still left her collarbones and bra-straps proudly on display.

Arthur slowly clawed at his beard with both hands and whispered, "I don't see how he could complain."

"Okay, good," Elise giggled, looking down at her outfit once more. "I really hope this is enough, Doctor Peters, because I don't think I can wear any less!"

Arthur's mind reeled at the thought.

Suddenly Elise squatted down in front of him to fix the ankle clasp on one of her shoes that hadn't fully closed. This treated Arthur to a narrow V-shaped show of pink underwear framed between the naked flesh of Elise's uppermost thighs. He felt something stir beneath his corduroy pants and slowly rolled his chair sideways to hide behind his desk. When Elise straightened up, her skirt clung so high on her hips that it revealed the entirety of her legs from feet to pantie. She quickly smoothed the skirt back down, but in spite of her efforts the tiny garment still refused to cover the lace bands atop her stockings.

"My God," she laughed nervously, "I think if I stand perfectly still I MIGHT be able to avoid flashing everyone, but if I have to move... Yikers!"

Arthur just smiled from behind his desk.

Elise tip-toed back down to her own desk and dug through her backpack until she found a couple of clips to hold back the loose strands of her long auburn hair. Then she used a length of satin ribbon to tie a large bow behind her head at the base of her ponytail. Lastly, she put on some silver hoop earrings and refreshed her subtle pink lipstick.

"I'm ready," she announced, turning toward Arthur's desk once more. "How do I look?"

"Fantastic,' Arthur replied honestly. "And you seem to be enjoying this, at least a bit, which is a big relief for me. I was worried about how this whole uniform deal was going to make you feel."

"Oh, that's sweet Doctor Peters but you don't need to worry about me. I wouldn't have come out here if I wasn't cool with it. They're just clothes after all."

"Well, good. You've got a good way of looking at it, I guess. So I won't lose any more sleep over your uniforms, then."

Arthur smiled inwardly at his little joke. He had already lost plenty of sleep fantasizing about Elise's uniforms, and after today he was certain he would lose many more hours lying awake in his lonely bed doing exactly that. That was, in fact, exactly his plan for the evening.

"Oh gosh no," Elise assured him, "Please don't worry Doctor Peters. I do appreciate it, but I'll be fine. Now... what time is it?"

Arthur checked his watch. "Ten twenty-nine. Doctor Yamamoto should be here any second."

Elise bit her lip. Despite what she had just told Doctor Peters, she felt really nervous. But now that she had seen how relieved Doctor Peters was that she felt okay, she didn't want to reverse herself.

"What a sweet man," she thought. It was so flattering that he was worried about her -- that felt good. But this outfit felt way skimpier than she had expected. Elise told herself to put on a brave face and be more confident. But then she began to wonder if Doctor Yamamoto would be offended that she wasn't dressed more professionally for their first meeting. She quickly re-fastened the metal clips holding her hair back, regretting that there was no time to brush it properly after it got disheveled working through all the recycling. She felt the onset of a familiar, creeping uncertainty that usually precipitated some awful mistake or misjudgment.

"My God!" she thought, silently panicking, "I wore dirty sneakers for my first meeting with Doctor Peters, and now I'm dressed like a sloppy hooker to meet Doctor Yamamoto. I must be losing my mind!"

A sharp knock on the door made Elise spin around.

"Doctor Yamamoto!" Doctor Peters' voice called out behind her. "Come in, please! Meet Elise."

In the doorway, standing stiff as a board, was a short, wide Japanese man with a waxy mustache and round wire-framed spectacles. He stood so utterly still that, for a moment, Elise thought he looked fake. But then Doctor Peters' bear-like body rolled past her and went right up to the door to greet him. They exchanged a few phrases awkwardly in what Elise assumed was Japanese, and then shook hands. Elise felt unsure what to do. Was she supposed to walk to the door to great him too? Or wait here? She had no idea which would be more polite, but it suddenly seemed vital to make the right choice. She reminded herself not to stare, but she couldn't tear her eyes away from Doctor Yamamoto. There was something so... formal... about his demeanor.

Doctor Peters was doing his usual wild hand gestures and smiling broadly as he spoke with the squat wall-shaped man that was Doctor Yamamoto. Elise noticed the Japanese doctor's necktie was made of gorgeously thick silk and perfectly knotted around the stiff white collar of his dress shirt. Draped over his dark suit was a long, blindingly-clean lab coat that hung down past his knees. The hair on his head was oily black and parted to one side so precisely that Elise imagined he must have done it with an old-fashioned comb. Maybe he had a professional barber on staff at home, she thought. By the looks of him he could certainly afford it.