Chapters A Holsom Women's Social Chapter 5
Cherry stood in the open space that separated the scripted ladies from the larger group, thighs pressed firmly together to keep from dripping onto the carpet. Her eyes were closed and she took deep breaths, trying to will her body out of its misdirected arousal. She shifted her weight on her painful shoes. The conversation had distracted her from the way they squeezed her feet, but now she was actually trying to focus on the pain. Focus on that, and not the memory of Diane’s face, hovering just in front of hers. She had been so close. Cherry could have leaned just a little further forward and—
“Did the scripted ladies bother you?” A friendly voice asked, and Cherry’s eyes shot open. Two women had joined her, one standing right in front of her face and peering at her with concern. “They’re a weird bunch, huh?”
“No, they didn’t bother me.” Cherry assured her, and took a small step back so their tits weren’t so at risk of touching. “They were really nice, actually.”
“Oh that’s good!” The woman, ‘Elizabeth’ by the contacts, smiled at Cherry. She was maybe two or three years younger than Madison’s puppet, pretty but with imperfections that suggested her face had been left more or less as it had been before her wedding. “My sister saw you rush out of their group, all flustered, and she thought they might’ve spooked you.”
The other woman, ‘Jeanette’, who could only be the sister, had a face that was radically different from the speaker. In fact, Cherry doubted Jeanette could speak at all. Her mouth appeared to have been designed purely for her husband’s pleasure, with thick lips formed into a perfect circle around a small hole. It was a modification Cherry had seen before, and she knew that beyond the tight opening lay a soft, toothless channel that more closely resembled Cherry’s own vaginal canal than her mouth.
Peering inside confirmed her suspicions. The tube was currently about the diameter of a man’s finger, but when in use it could probably shrink down to the size of the truly tiny hole in the back. There was a pearl piercing back there, glinting just above the entrance to Jeanette’s throat. A speed bump to tell her husband that he was now blocking her airway, unless Cherry missed her guess. It might be difficult to tell, otherwise. She didn’t take more than a glance, not wanting to be rude. It felt like staring at another woman’s intimates, which she supposed it was.
“Thank you for your concern.” Cherry told them both. “I’m really alright.”
“Jeany says you’re welcome.” Elizabeth said, and then clarified with a nod towards her sister. “That’s Jeany. I’m Liza. Is it just Cherry for you? Or, like ‘Cher’ or…’Ri’…or…”
“Just Cherry.” She was still getting used to introducing herself with her new name, and could see no point in adding a nickname to the mix. Besides, a bestowed name was not to be played around with. To Francis she was Cherry so Cherry she was.
“Ok! Nice to meet you Cherry!” Liza thankfully did not lean in for a welcoming hug. Cherry was just getting a handle on her emotional state and was glad to avoid more potentially hazardous contact. “Jeany says it’s nice to meet you, too!”
“She does?” Cherry asked, looking at Jeany. The rest of her face appeared to be fixed in a permanent state of surprise, with wide eyes and high, arching brows that almost made the ‘o’ of her mouth seem a natural part of her expression rather than a molded pleasure portal. Almost. Those plush, rounded lips made their purpose clear.
“Uh huh!” Liza nodded, “She’s got little buttons under her palate that she can press with her tongue. The messages go right to my contacts!”
Looking closely, Cherry realized she could see Jeany’s tongue flicking around inside the slick tunnel. It was the only motion on her doll-ish face, her eyes lacking even the lazy wandering-through-fog motion of Katie’s as they stared straight ahead. Cherry had seen plenty of dolls before, women locked inside their own minds, utterly incapable of expressing themselves. Or, incapable of using the usual methods to do so, at least. She knew many dolls used some simple gestures and codes with taps of their feet or even patterns in their breathing.
In fact that was how one of her uncles preferred his wife, though as a Redeemer he had religious reasons for demanding female silence that went beyond a mere appreciation for the doll aesthetic. His beliefs mandated the same for his daughters, but thankfully they were otherwise unrestrained. Cherry had spent many wonderful, if quiet, hours with her cousins, using their doll mother as a mannequin for their dress up games. At that age, giggle fits had constantly threatened the girls’ vow of silence; especially Sharon, who managed to have a wicked sense of humor for someone without words. Hipsie could sharply tap her foot to remind her daughters to contain themselves, but not much more. Even if they failed to heed her, though, Hipsie still always gave a quick double tap of “no” later when Uncle Luke asked whether his girls had broken the rules. He always took her word on it, too, even when Cherry knew he must have been able to hear through the door. This was the first time Cherry had seen a doll with a speech capability more developed than that.
“Wow, I’m glad she can still communicate!” Cherry told Liza, not sure if she should instead be speaking directly to Jeany. She didn’t seem to be offended, but Cherry supposed that it might not be immediately apparent if she was. “I’m glad to meet you, Jeany. I really do appreciate you checking on me.”
“She was happy to do it!” Liza relayed after a brief pause and a patient look towards her sister, then she spoke more quickly, indicating that she was using her own words now rather than Jeany’s. “Julia used to put her over there with them before I started coming to the Social, even though she’s not on a script. So she’s kinda sensitive to how freaky they can be.”
Cherry felt an instinct to defend her new friends, but a moment’s thought made her reconsider. Unable to explain her own situation, or ask questions of the other women, Jeany must have had a very different experience with the scripted ladies. “I understand why you might have felt that way Jeany,” she said diplomatically, “but they really are rather lovely when you get to know them.”
“If you say so!” Liza shrugged her empty shoulders, sending a slight bounce through her chest, clearly doubtful. Cherry wasn’t sure if the words were her own, or Jeany’s.
“Isn’t what you’re doing similar to being on a script?” she asked, “You’re speaking the words Jeany sends you, after all.”
“I’m not, like, reading a script, though!” Liza rolled her eyes as though it was incredibly obvious. “I’m just telling you what she told me!”
“Can she only speak to you?” It seemed logical that if Katie could send the lines of her script to whoever spoke to her, then Jeany should be able to type her messages to Cherry directly. That was probably why Julia had assumed she belonged with the scripted ladies—Cherry hadn’t seen any other dolls among them, and there were at least a few more at the Social—but Liza disproved her theory.
“Just me!” she chimed. “Her husband likes her as a doll, so he prefers to leave her thoughts up to his imagination as much as possible. He knows how close we are, though, so he lets her send me messages to keep in touch.”
“He never speaks with her himself?” That seemed terribly lonely, even if she did have Liza to talk to. Hipsie had her daughters and plenty of Redemption rituals to keep her occupied, but Uncle Luke still spoke to her quite frequently as well. Still, Cherry knew that some dolls weren’t so lucky. Am I much better off? She wondered. Maybe Francis would have liked her better if he had made her a doll, instead. At least then she would have had a better idea of what to expect from her married life.
“Oh, he talks to her all the time!” Liza exclaimed, rolling her eyes again but this time clearly not at Cherry. “She’s always telling me jokes he just told her; he loves to make her laugh, and not just because of how it makes her boobs shake! Or sometimes she’ll ask my help if she’s confused and wants to understand why he’s feeling a certain way, but usually she’s pretty serious about his privacy, even with me. She’s his closest confidant!”
“How nice!” Cherry felt happy for Jeany that she could be so close with her husband despite her limitations, and again felt a pang of loss that she might never get the experience of Francis sharing his private thoughts, much less joking with her. He sometimes laughed when she said something amusing, usually by accident, but she couldn’t recall him ever going out of his way to put her in good spirits. Besides offering her the chance to perform her wifely duties, of course. She looked at Jeany’s transfixed face and followed a thick glob of drool as it rolled free of her pneumatic pout, tracing a slow descent to her cleavage. Yet another woman with an enviable life. “So she can talk to you even when you’re apart? And you can reply to her?”
“Yup! I have to dictate to a maid, usually, unless I want to use the suggested replies in my contacts—Jeany says she can always tell when I’m being lazy, as if!—but we can chat even when we’re both at our husbands’ homes. I always know what she’s up to.” Liza leaned towards Cherry, wearing a conspiratorial grin, “Sometimes she forgets to hit the mute button before he puts his you-know-what in her mouth and I end up getting long paragraphs of gibberish!” Cherry couldn’t help but join in Liza’s giggles, blushing all the while at hearing such an intimate detail. “Oh, she’s mad at me for telling you that!” Indeed, though Jeany’s face held its same fixed expression her tongue was working furiously behind her lips. “She says it’s not her fault! He doesn’t give her any warning!” Liza laughed even harder at that, and Cherry realized from Jeany‘s shuddering breath, inaudible but quite evident from the way her breasts rippled, that she was laughing, too. Feeling the humor much more now that she knew the joke was not at Jeany’s expense, Cherry let herself join the sisters for her first full throated laugh in months.
“Ah…” Liza sighed after a while, as the laughter was fading. With no fingers to wipe them from her eyes, she was trying to blink away tears of mirth before they had a chance to fall. “I haven’t laughed that hard since the kids used my makeup kit to draw faces on all the retirees in the house!”
“Oh! Your husband has children?” Cherry grinned, remembering her and her brothers’ antics with the retirees in her father’s home, growing up. They had been frequent participants in any number of games, stoically accepting even the most ridiculous commands, but she’d never thought of drawing faces on them. How silly!
Liza’s smile was radiant with pride. “David has four, with another one on the way! He bred two daughters from his previous wife, and the newer three are from me. All boys, if you can believe my luck! He’s so pleased he’s even letting me name the new one. I can choose between Jon or John, with an ‘h’! I know it’s a subtle difference, but it means so much that it’s up to me, you know?”
“Wow! That is really special, Liza.” Cherry told her, and Liza beamed ever brighter. David was certainly fighting strong traditions to give her even that small influence over the name of his son. A particularly well-loved wife might get to choose a childhood name for her daughter, those would likely be changed later anyway, but for a mother to leave any sort of lasting mark on a son was rare indeed. Jon, or John, would always have a tiny piece of Liza with him. What a wonderful gift David had given her!
“Are you carrying him now?” Cherry glanced at Liza’s flat tummy. If she was, he couldn’t be too far along. Girls were typically removed and placed inside a rented retiree at a breeding facility to develop. They arrived via post, once birthed, either to their father or a different buyer. Boys on the other hand would have a surrogate retiree from within the household, who would be locked in a stationary position and maintained by the rest of its peers until he could be delivered. Cherry had watched the younger of her two brothers grow within one of her father’s maids, it’s belly slowly expanding like a black balloon, as it stood locked in one corner of the family room.
Liza chuckled, noticing Cherry’s glance at her midriff. “Oh, I had him for a little while, before the sex could be determined, but he was transferred to a surrogate months ago. It looks about ready to pop—the tummy is so round the kids actually drew an extra face there, too! A puppy, to go with the doggy they drew up above.”
They all laughed again, Jeany included, at the image of a black, bloated belly with a child’s drawing of a puppy scrawled across it with lipstick. That retiree was actually very fortunate. Delivering a male child was probably the most intimate connection a retiree could have with a person. It was the only time one was ever unsealed, if only partially, and only when it was necessary. Serving as a surrogate for a baby boy was certainly the role most wives dreamed of when they imagined the ideal retirement. It would also nurse him, for a time, before returning to its usual schedule and total anonymity amongst the rest of the retirees in the house.
Young men had a different relationship with retirees in general than girls. Whereas girls were learning to be cared for, maintained, boys were learning to command. Retirees provided a safe target for boys to test their authority, and they could often be quite tyrannical with the household maids. Especially once they reached the age where an almost-womanly form could attend to all sorts of new needs. Cherry wasn’t exactly sure what those needs were, or when that age was, but she remembered her father joking that her brothers had clearly reached it when they each started secluding themselves in their rooms with a maid or two multiple times a day.
Liza suddenly turned to Jeany, looking genuinely touched by whatever message the doll had just sent her.
“Thank you, Jeany. That’s so nice of you to say. I’m sure that Ryan’s daughter would have loved you, too, if she’d had the chance to meet you.” Turning back to Cherry, she continued, “Jeany’s husband had a daughter around the same age as David’s girls, but he sold her on Promise to pay for Jeany. She lives with her betrothed’s family, when she isn’t away at school, so Jeany has never met her. Ryan plans to attend the wedding someday, though, so she’ll get to see her then, at least!”
This time Cherry actually spotted the doll’s flurry of movement behind her lips, and waited politely with Liza, looking at the frozen face that gave no indication of what Jeany was about to say. Cherry kind of wished she could see the messages herself, but at least it was entertaining to watch! Eventually Liza furrowed her brow.
“Oh, Jeany, stop it! The wedding is less than ten years away. Ryan won’t replace you before then and you know it! It doesn’t matter that you can’t give him any more children yourself. The way he dotes on you, I wouldn’t be surprised if you last longer than I do, and I’ve given David three boys back to back!”
Dolls did enjoy more longevity in general than other girls. Their bodies didn’t age the same way as women who hadn’t undergone whatever procedure it was that fixed their features in place. Hipsie was already in her thirties when Cherry had been little, so by now she must be the oldest woman Cherry knew of, if she was still around. And she probably was; Redeemers married for life, another of that group’s odd quirks. There wasn’t any reason a doll couldn’t carry children, though, as far as she knew. Cherry’s cousins had all been bred from Hipsie, after all.
“You can’t have children, Jeany?”
Liza shook her head, not waiting for Jeany’s slow response. “The Board didn’t approve her for breeding because Ryan is technically our uncle—he was only our mother’s brother, so not really related, but apparently the rules for breeding are different for some reason. He didn’t even know until after he’d bought her; how would he? It’s not like he and mommy kept in touch after she married our father. Jeany’s kinda self-conscious about it, you know the stigma around such things, but it’s not like there’s anything actually wrong with her and he doesn’t want more kids anyway, so I really don’t see the problem.”
Cherry could understand why it might bother Jeany to be rejected for breeding, even if her husband hadn’t planned on it to begin with. Francis had never indicated that he wanted children from Cherry, and she had decided not to get her hopes up by even entertaining the possibility. There was no reason he couldn’t, though: she had a breeding permit along with her marriage license, proving that she was of high pedigree. Girls without permits were typically assumed to possess some defect, but in rare cases like Jeany’s it was simply a result of there being too close a relation between herself and her husband. Still, Jeany couldn’t appreciate being lumped in with the lower stock.
Ryan being only so tenuously related probably helped him avoid the stigma that men attached to such marriages, at least. Cherry didn’t really understand why men were so averse to marrying female relatives. A girlhood crush on a father or brother was an almost universal part of growing up, but such feelings were almost never reciprocated as far as she knew. She supposed that the availability of Promised girls explained it, in part.
“Besides, Jeany,” Liza said encouragingly, “there’s benefits to not having kids around. You have so much more time for your poems, and those paintings you love to do!”
“She’s a real artist, you know,” she said to Cherry, “You might not believe it but she can use her brushes as well with her new mouth as she did before her wedding. It’s surprisingly dextrous, on the inside. She needs a maid to swap her colors, and hold the canvas, of course, but the final product is always something profound. According to Ryan, anyway; he’s super proud of her. He interprets her paintings, as like, a glimpse into her mind. Not that he asks her—that would ruin it—but Jeany tells me that he always gets it exactly right, even if she didn’t realize at the time that that’s what she had been thinking while she painted it!”
“I’d love to see one of your paintings someday, Jeany!” Cherry told the doll girl amiably. “I used to paint a little, too, before my wedding. I wasn’t any good, but it was one of my assigned hobbies so I did my best. My father used to put them on the fridge beside my brothers’ essays and exams.”
“Ah, you’re both so lucky!” Liza sighed. “David let me do a redraw for new hobbies when we married. I got birdwatching or whatever, but who has time for that with four kids? Soon to be five!” She hardly seemed too put out by her lack of free time. It was clearly difficult for her to mask the excitement at her son’s imminent arrival.
Still, though, Cherry was a bit concerned by how busy she apparently was. “You don’t… raise them do you?”
Liza looked at her confused, before batting her eyes and smiling pleasantly. “What? Of course not! No, I just tag along with their play and sometimes accompany them during their lessons. You’d be surprised how refreshing those early girlhood storybooks can be! I even go to Tommy’s classes at real school, though mostly because he still prefers to sit on my lap. I can hardly follow what they teach him, and Patrick is another story. I don’t go with him at all anymore, not since he moved up to the third grade. He’s an independent little man, now, or so he likes to think. The curriculum would fly right over my head anyway, and it’s not like I can take notes!” She giggled with an easy shrug that jostled her chest, twisting back and forth to show the surgeons’ work on her shoulders as if Cherry hadn’t picked up her meaning. “Plus the girls are positively bouncing off the walls! They’ve got me by the leash more often than the boys do. Those little rascals want to use me in all their games!”
Her eyes widened slightly and she gasped, remembering something. “Oh! Speaking of little rascals…that reminds me that we were actually on our way to greet our third sister when Jeany saw you, Cherry. We really should get over there before she throws a tantrum. You’re welcome to join us, if you want!”
“Oh of course!” Cherry accepted right away. She had nowhere else to be, and a third sister like Liza and Jeany sounded like someone she’d want to meet.
Find accompanying notes and illustrations on Slothargy’s DeviantArt and Pixiv