Mailgirl Number Thirteen: Day 01

The next few pick-ups and deliveries passed without any major incidents. They were excruciating for Thirteen, to be sure -- standing in front of various men and women dressed as she was, wearing not a stitch of clothes. She blushed every time someone took a good long look at her, a reaction she hoped would pass. It immediately gave away just how embarrassed she was to be doing this, and deprived her of any attempt to feign confidence. Yet another gentleman commented on her nipples -- still rock-hard after oh-so-many hours of exposure. Another woman took her turn clucking at Seven and Thirteen, and repeatedly calling them as "sluts." A youngish guy in a cubicle -- younger than Thirteen, even -- ordered them up onto their toes, and subjected them to an inspection. Thirteen doubted that she and Seven would have passed a real inspection, but that wasn't the point here; he'd simply wanted to make a show of it, and take advantage of the fact he'd be allowed a closer, longer look.

What struck Thirteen was just how mundane it was. This was all still so new to her, but almost routine to the men and women of USF Plaza. Even the cruelties inflicted upon her seemed practiced and almost old news to the people inflicting them. A handful of times, they were greeted with nothing more than smiles, handed interoffice envelopes, and sent scurrying on their way. As if all of this were normal. As if a pair of beautiful young women delivering the mail in the nude was the sort of thing that just happened in real life.

Not for the first time, Thirteen worried if she'd missed out on something by not being a part of the initial class in April. The program was still in its infancy. She was only Mailgirl Number Thirteen, after all, and not Mailgirl Number Twenty-Four or Mailgirl Number Thirty-Six. But she wondered if she'd missed an opportunity to get into USF right from the get-go by hemming and hawing for as long as she had, or for not waiting to be a part of Barrow's plans at USF's back office in Jersey City. What would it have been like to be Mailgirl Number One or Mailgirl Number Two, and be among the first few naked girls to step out into the building? How had USF's other employees responded? Would her research suffer because she was just another mailgirl being put into service, and not a part of the program from launch?

Maybe she was just being vain. Maybe she was, in truth, seeking validation, as Hooper had accused. She wanted jaws to drop. She wanted tongues hanging out. She wanted the men lusting after her. She wanted the women jealous. She got a few positive comments, to be sure. "You're gorgeous!" and "Look at that body!" But she was just another set of naked tits in a long line of naked tits to be paraded through the Plaza, and it was the indifference she got a number of times that was crushing. She almost welcomed the verbal abuse and the name-calling; at least it was a reaction.

As the afternoon continued on, and the clock got closer and closer to seven, Thirteen got to know more about her new friend. Seven was still twenty-nine, only a few years older than Thirteen herself, but would turn thirty before the year was through. She'd grown up in Massachusetts, gone to law school right out of undergraduate, and done two years at Buckenberger Fuchs before moving in-house at USF's regional office on Dunwich Street in downtown Boston. She lived out in Prospect Heights, but admitted that she'd probably spent significantly more time here at the Plaza even before she'd become a mailgirl. Evening shifts and the occasional Saturday aside, she was arguably working less hours now than she had when she'd been in Legal. No, there was no Mister Number Seven, no prospects on the horizon -- she joked that she was "married to the job."

Thirteen shared, too. No, there was no Mister Number Thirteen, no potential Mister Number Thirteen she was currently seeing. Outside of her faculty advisor, the department chair, her roommate, and a few close friends in New Haven, no one knew how she was spending her summer vacation. She was from the Bay Area. She'd gone to Pepperdine. And, yes, this was the first time she'd ever done anything like this. As divorced as Number Thirteen might have wanted to remain from the life of Sarah Jane Scott, Sarah Jane Scott managed to bleed through.

What Thirteen really wanted to know, what she desperately wanted to ask, was whether Seven had given in and masturbated here at the Plaza. Seven had more-or-less admitted to deriving some measure of sexual excitement out of being a mailgirl, right from their first conversation, when she'd assured Thirteen that what Thirteen was feeling was standard. Thirteen's own apparently burgeoning exhibitionist streak occupied more and more of her headspace, and there was simply no denying that her pussy was begging to be touched.

But how did one ask that sort of question? There simply wasn't a way. She'd just met this girl. "Oh, by the way," she imagined herself asking, "have you touched yourself in public yet?"

The "yet," of course, because it was only a matter of time. If Seven hadn't done so already, she'd do so eventually. Just as Thirteen would. No longer was it going to be purely for academic purposes, purely so that she could fit in among the other masturbating mailgirls. No, Thirteen was going to get herself off at some point, and she was going to enjoy it. Physically, at least, no matter how much the idea of it frightened her.

From the research Thirteen had done, most girls rarely made it a week or two before finally giving in to the urge and touching themselves there at work. Everyone confessed to doing so at home, off the clock and after hours -- the sexual nature of the girls' servitude being simply too overwhelming to ignore. Hell, Thirteen had masturbated herself to sleep the very first time she'd ever heard of the mailgirls concept, way back when she believed the whole thing to be nothing but an elaborate online prank. She hated to admit it, but she'd probably masturbated more times in the last few weeks, in the run-up to today, than she had her entire time in graduate school. But she'd never expected that urge to be as strong as it had demonstrated itself to be today, and had never thought she'd be so deeply under its power as to be tempted by it before her first shift was through.

It was the same thing countless other mailgirls had probably told themselves going in, only to wind up diddling themselves in the stairwells or mail rooms or janitor's closets the world over. It was why rumors about hormones in the mailgirl chow had become so prevalent and so persistent. Oftentimes, Thirteen discovered while reading the accounts of her mailgirl predecessors, a girl finally "broke" after a particularly sexual encounter, one in which the teasing nature of their position was simply too much to deny, one in which the dominant-submissive aspects of their interaction with non-mailgirl employees was naked and raw. And then, out of shame and embarrassment, it might be two or three days later that they "broke" again, always rationalizing and reasoning that - since they'd already done so once -- there'd be no harm in going back for more.

No girl ever masturbated just the one time.

Had Seven done so, though? Thirteen found herself weirdly curious to know if she had, and strangely interested in the specifics.

Thirteen wasn't gay. There were no lesbian leanings. Sure, she might have thought about it. What girl didn't? Could she deny that hearing Audrey moaning through their shared wall, when her boyfriend was down from Cambridge, turned her on? Could she pretend that she hadn't, on the rare occasion, lingered a little long on all-girl online porn? But when she touched herself, at home and in the privacy of her own bedroom, her partner was always male, always equipped with the necessary sexual organs.

Thirteen had never really been around another naked girl before. Not in real life. Gillian had stripped down during one of their one-on-ones, as a show of solidarity, but that was really about it. Audrey had her own bedroom. Erica, Lauren, Jessa -- the girls she'd shared rooms with as an undergraduate, at various different points -- had gotten changed in front of her, sure (and vice versa), but it had always been brief and out of necessity. It wasn't as if they'd lounged around Krown Alpha in the nude. Thirteen couldn't even remember her sister Sophie being naked in front of her, at least not since they were little girls.

Seven was undeniably attractive. How she looked. How she felt. How she smelled. God, how she smelled! The sweat, the deodorant, the perfume -- it was intoxicating. To say nothing of the other odor that hung in the air, the smell of the other girl's sex, intermingling with that of Thirteen's own. The way -- in those few, brief moments of downtime -- she laced her finger's through Thirteen's. Knees bumping as they spread their legs. Bare-skinned arms rubbing up against one another. The warmth of her body. Given that they spent nearly half of their time together ascending the stairs, and that Thirteen was trailing behind through most of that, she'd spent a good portion of that afternoon with Seven's naked backside jiggling in front of her face a few steps ahead.

She could see it in the way that men looked at them when they arrived together, sweaty and out-of-breath. The hint that they'd just come from a lovemaking session in the stairwell, finding refuge and release in one another.

Or maybe Thirteen was just projecting?

Explorations in bisexuality were common among mailgirls, of course. So common that the term "letter-carrying lesbians" was associated with mailgirls every bit as much as "providing relief." Thirteen had read of it at DDE, at Finder-Spyder, at eVendr, and at countless other places she'd researched overseas. These girls, like Thirteen, weren't lesbians, exactly. Most of them, at least. Most of them had never even thought of themselves as bisexual, even. But it was difficult to start a new relationship, or keep an old one alive, when you were a mailgirl; it took a special sort of boyfriend who could be comfortable with the nature of the work. Girls were generally forbidden from seeing their non-mailgirl colleagues outside of the workplace (strictly forbidden, in the case of USF), and it wasn't like many of them had much time outside of the workplace, anyways. By the time that shifts were through, many girls confessed that all they wanted to do was go home, rub one out, and go to sleep. One night stands were commonplace, but so too were relationships of convenience between the mailgirls themselves. No one understood a mailgirl like another mailgirl.

Thirteen had written a paper on "LUG" culture at all-girl colleges, and another on "S kankei" traditions in Japan. She knew the phenomenon wasn't unique to mailgirls, even if it had achieved some notoriety in recent years with the explosion of mailgirl programs across the globe. Unlike masturbating at the Plaza, however - which Thirteen had deemed "necessary" as part of her field study -- this wasn't aspect of mailgirl culture she intended to explore personally. Despite everything she was sacrificing already, from her clothes to her privacy to her very dignity, Thirteen wasn't willing to give up her heterosexuality for the purposes of a research paper.

Still, there was something there, an attraction she felt for Seven. The other girl's warm, oversized smile had an effect on her. No matter the challenge or affront they were faced with, Seven continued to bounce back, and was able to laugh it off. Thirteen wondered if this was for her benefit, if Seven were putting on a brave face for the new recruit. Seven had just five days on her, but she had the demeanor of a big sister showing her younger sibling the ropes.

"Why?" Thirteen finally asked, when they were alone together on the 8th Floor at the end of the day. It was still a few minutes before seven o'clock, and the incoming demands to their smartphones had died out. There was so many things Thirteen wanted to know, but the question she was asking now, specifically, was why Seven had agreed to help write USF's mailgirl contracts.

"So, I could give you a bullshit answer," Seven sighed. "That they didn't really give me a choice. Or that, if I hadn't done it, someone else would have. Why didn't I walk out then and there? I mean, I did pull my resume together. And I went on an interview over at Young & Unglaub. But I wasn't one of the girls who stormed out of here the first I heard we were going in that direction. You know, at the time, I thought that maybe...maybe I could control it. That being privy to it, before it was announced, I could at least put some guardrails up. And, I'd be lying if I told you there wasn't some self-interest there. I convinced myself, at least at the outset, that I was part of the team, part of management, part of the decision-makers. And that, because of that, there was absolutely no way that the company would ever look at me as a candidate, myself."

She went on. "But that was early on. Back then, I'd deluded myself into thinking USF was really looking for honest-to-goodness volunteers. You know, volunteers without any of the pressure. Without any of the threats or blackmail or bullying and all that. And, of course, there was no way I was ever going to volunteer. No way in hell."

"But then..." Thirteen encouraged her.

"But then, I don't know," Seven said. "The lawyer in me kicked in. I wanted to win. I wanted power over these girls. I'm not proud of it. But this is exciting stuff, and I mean that in every sense of the word. Who's doing mailgirl stuff, right? No one on the East Coast.

"No, that's not exactly true," she corrected herself. "Young & Unglaub? The reason they wanted to talk to me? They're launching a program of their own in July. Hobson Morgan McNamara, too, is what I've heard. But, you know, this is last Fall, I'm in on the secret, and USF's going to be at the forefront of this thing here in New York. And, listen, I don't know where this Lindsey Pickering thing is going down in DC, and I'm not sure what's happening with the UAW suit out in Seattle, but mailgirls -- as a thing -- aren't going anywhere anytime soon. I'd have been one of the first few lawyers in the space here in the US. And that's something.

"But it wasn't the only thing. Honestly, I don't know what got into me. It was like -- I don't know -- like I was playing the part of Mistress Zero. When Barrow told me what he wanted to do with the bonuses, that the company wanted to sneak this language in this year, and that he wanted it in every non-compete and NDA going forward, fuck if I didn't get a little thrill out of it. It was like I was dominating these girls. These girls, who weren't even mailgirls yet. I was...I mean, I really was...just, like, turned on by the whole thing."

Seven was a dominant who'd been drafted into being a submissive.

When Thirteen made this same observation aloud, Seven shook her head. "No, that's not it. There's a thinner line between those two things than most people would lead you to believe. But, if anything, I started imagining myself on that other side of the equation, the one being duped into volunteering. And then that was a thing, too."

"A thing...like...?"

"A turn on," Seven laughed. "Like, what would it be like? Could I do it? Could I really, really do it?"

"So you were entertaining it then?"

"No. It was like...like a daydream. Or a fantasy. No way was I actually going to raise my hand in real life. But then Barrow had a meeting with my boss, without me. And that's when I knew. It was just going to be a matter of time."

There was so much more that Thirteen wanted to know. What had that conversation been like? How had Seven reacted? What had her first day been like? What had she thought of Mistress Zero? What had she thought of the other mailgirls? And yes, of course, whether or not Seven had gotten herself off yet here at the Plaza. Thirteen imagined the girl writhing in self-pleasure on the floor of the locker room, legs apart and moaning. It was an image she had a hard time shaking.

But all that would have to wait. Until tomorrow, at least. As much as Thirteen appreciated Seven's offer to take her out to drinks tonight, all she really wanted to do was go home. Put on her clothes and go home. And, for tonight at least, put some distance between herself and the events of the day. But, they'd get drinks tomorrow night after work, just the two of them. And then again on Friday, with a smattering of the other girls.

Thirteen didn't necessarily want to do either. She suspected that she'd likely feel the same way tomorrow at seven as she did today. But she needed to start meeting the other girls, getting to know them and their stories, building relationships with her fellow sufferers in this life. She wouldn't be attached to Seven's hip for long, and she'd soon be spending most of her days out in the Plaza alone, a lone mailgirl making her rounds. Socializing after work -- especially over a cocktail or two -- would go a long way in helping her with her research.

The girls' smartphones signaled their shift was through, and that they were now allowed to return to the locker room, get dressed, and go home. Any further deep, dark confessions would have to wait.

***

Mailgirls Seven and Thirteen, having been up only on the 8th Floor at the end of day, were among the first mailgirls back in the locker room at the end of the day. Mailgirls Two and Twelve beat them down, and Mailgirls Five and Sixteen stepped from the service elevator just behind them. As Thirteen passed through the gauntlet of toilets and into the locker room proper, there was no sign of Mistress Zero.

"She's not always here at the end of the day," Mailgirl Number Twelve explained. "Fridays, especially. She takes off right after afternoon breaks. I'd have thought she would have wanted to be here today, though. What with all of you, and this being your first day and all. But, not to worry -- I've got Evening Shift tonight. I've got her key."

Mistress Zero's key. Thirteen had been wearing her collar for so long today that she'd almost forgotten about it. It had been too tight that morning, when Barrow had first fitted her with it. So tight, in fact, that she worried how she was going to swallow, and perhaps even breath. But, nearly twelve hours later, she'd adjusted. It had become a part of her.

Twelve came up around behind her, inserted the stubby little key that hung from an elastic bracelet around her wrist, twisted it, and popped the collar open. Instinctively, Thirteen reached for her neck, and rubbed the hot, sweaty skin beneath.

"Just leave it in your locker," Seven told her. The other girl was waiting her turn patiently, with Five behind her. Sixteen was using the facilities. "On one of the robe hooks."

Thirteen pulled the collar all the way open, and then off. She thanked Mailgirl Number Twelve.

Thirteen, at twenty-six years old, had displaced Mailgirl Number Twelve as the youngest girl on USF's roster. Twelve was twenty-seven, eleven months older than Thirteen. She had an MA in Communications, and had spent her entire career thus far at USF, primarily in the company's Public Relations department. Similar in height and build to Thirteen (though, one could have said that about nearly all of the mailgirls), Twelve had long, flowing blonde hair that cascaded down past her shoulders, almost to the point that she could have covered her bare breasts with those locks. What else did Thirteen know about her? Her name Allison. Allison Willoughby. And she had a pair of coral-colored, French-cut briefs hanging up on the 18th Floor.

Thirteen made her way to her locker and hung the collar on one of the hooks to the left, careful to make sure it didn't click shut as she did so. Tomorrow morning, she'd have to put it back on herself, and she didn't want to have to go running to Mistress Zero for the key.