Chapters Dollhood: A Woman's Choice Book 1 Chapter 13
After Christmas Day and an admirable showing of family numbering in the low dozens for dinner and Mass, our day-to-day routine at home was largely uneventful. Such was the life of a Doll, the constant lessons and classes of St. Werburgh’s were the exception, not the rule. When not in mealtimes, Althea, Chas, and I would join Mother in the pink and cream Doll Room upstairs, sitting silently on the edge of the chaise whilst Mother was on her stand, buzzing away. We were not yet designed to accept the inserts on the saddle, nor were we in need of its effects, according to Dame Henderson. It would break our virginity, and we were only allowed such penetration once our ownership and marriage was consummated. This led me to the realization that, modified as I would be that coming April, until I was promised and wed to a husband, my body would receive no relief in the interim weeks, perhaps months if I was unlucky. To a young woman already swimming in amplified hormones, this was not something I was looking forward to.
The last seven months had been life-altering in that department. It was like my body was suddenly awake to its own needs, and many nights had been spent spread out in security and purity, wishing the emptiness between my legs was filled, wishing that just one of my bracelets would unlock, run its energy dry, something; anything to see what it felt like down there. I found myself in bed on such a wistful night when there was a fumbling hand at my door, and a gentle open and close. Now remember that Chastity and I slept with our gags in, with our eyes covered, so I was momentarily frightened of an intruder in the night before I remembered I was home, so it could only be Pappa or a maid, until it very surely wasn’t.
A whisper in the blackness, “Hope! Hope!”
It was Althea, tip-toeing on the floorboards, half for stealth and half because her achilles tendons had probably shortened a bit over the two-plus years of constant heels, like mine had. I realised she probably couldn’t tell which twin was which, so I shook my head to the room but dared not make a sound.
And then I felt her warm, unrestrained body join me under the covers. Oh my.
She removed my blindfold and I lifted my head to allow her to unfasten my gag. As the pressure slowly released in my mouth I tested my strained jaw, before whispering to the classmate cuddled up to my splayed out body in the tiny single bed. “What is the meaning of this visit? How did you get free?”
She used my outstretched arm as a pillow and looked up at me, wearing nothing but a nightgown, loosened stays, and the impressions of the day’s strict attire still printed into her fair skin. “Your old man visited me after I was put down for the night. Don’t worry, he didn’t do anything indecent, we just talked, or he talked to me I should say, but he didn’t secure the bracelets correctly when he put me back in bed, and our watchers are still charging for the night.”
This was the first time I had been able to speak with Althea since our arrival nearly two weeks before, so a million thoughts blazed through me, all vying for priority. Laying there, I wanted out of my own bonds, but I knew not of the unlocking codes, and of course neither did she. Althea had been terribly lucky.
I noticed Althea was holding onto me tightly in a way I wasn’t used to. Actually I wasn’t used to having this much contact with anyone, and it felt almost overwhelmingly good. But there was something more to her touch, something which my education had taught me to be very fearful of; yet I realised fearful was not an apt description of the feelings in my chest at that moment. “Wait, pray tell what my Pappa discussed with you!?”
She looked pensive. “Well, it just so happens that he would like me to be Companion to your mother after our graduation. I’m under no illusions of what that would entail, seeing her picture from before… and then now… so I don’t know. I’m not like you, Hope. My chances of a respectable husband picking me are very slim, and your Pappa seems like a good man. And… don’t think me pitiful, but there’s something I haven’t told you, part of the agreement I made back home to get away…”
She traced her fingers across my clavicle, her mind elsewhere.
“Living there for my childhood, having a roof over my head once my Mum was gone, I was racking up a debt I could never pay off, the same kind of debt she had, that my aunts have. If I don’t find an owner, my aunts’ souteneur1 will try and claim me for the brothel, and with the Delights and Property Act passed a few years ago, he would have a legal right. That’s why he let me accept the scholarship, because having a house Doll was too good of an opportunity to pass up.”
This was all a shock to me, but in hindsight there had been signs of both Pappa’s request and the nature of Althea’s predicament. I didn’t know how I felt about such an offer, Althea being the same age as me, but objectively I knew that such age disparity was far from abnormal in the Society, or in Leisurely marriages for that matter. Then there was the factor of my mother, who now lived in a new body, in an empty nest, surrounded by silent maids. She could use the company. But then again, Althea had… desires. I could feel the heat of her body pressing into me and almost imagine what a man must feel when looking at her, or any of us. I had never thought of my father, with his thinning hair and glasses, as one to sate such things.
But then I remembered that I shouldn’t think at all, I should just be happy for Pappa and Mummy and my friend. This would surely keep her close in my life!
“Oh my!! I don’t know what to say!” And I didn’t, her life was so complicated whereas all my decisions were made for me well in advance. Maybe that was the solution, to simplify things. “My Pappa decides my arrangements, but as a scholarship recipient, who selects yours?”
Althea’s hands were absent-mindedly drawing on my chest now and I could barely concentrate.
“I’m not sure. Some of us are sponsored, so whoever paid for our schooling decides. Those girls usually go to that household. But my scholarship came from the St. Werburgh Trust. Maybe the Headmaster? Yes, I think so.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. The weight of responsibility was indeed on neither of our shoulders. “Sir Wainwright is a good man, he will know where you belong.”
Althea got quiet. “But, Hope… I… I already know where I belong.”
If there was any doubt left to what she meant, her tightening hold on me under my covers left none. It wasn’t a moment before I gasped, pulled at my bracelets, and her lips were about to join mine. I followed my training, ceased my struggling, and went to proper doll form, staring at the ceiling with lips plumped as much as I could.
“No, not like that.” she said, using her tracing hand to direct my face back downward. I gave in and looked back into her eyes. “That’s not how real people do it. I’ll show you.”
And she kissed my lips deeply, cradling my cheek in a gesture so serene that I folded into my very human desires, and kissed her back. There was no owner or owned, user or used, just the two of us, and it felt so good, especially when her hand started exploring my virgin body, when it drifted from my small breast down over my stays to my womanhood, ripping off my dry nappy to get access to that sacred place. I had never been touched like this. I had never even had a chance to touch myself like this. And it was doing things to me that dispelled all doubt, cleared my mind. This. This was how I was going to get my bliss, to be good like Chastity.
I returned her kiss as deeply as I could manage but broke away to look at her. “Althea, we can’t. It’s wrong, it’s a sin.”
She didn’t stop, actually she started to circle two fingers around a weird little bump down there in a way that drove me mad, pulling at my bracelets as hard as I dared, desperate to retrieve my numb hands and feet from their traps, though if they were unbound I don’t know whether I would have stopped her or tried to return the favour.
“It is, my dear, innocent Hope. But it’s worth it, I promise. One of my aunties taught me how when I was getting my first… uhm… urges.” Her fingers sped up and I almost cried out, so close that she even put my gag back in, albeit hastily inflated and still untied. Now I couldn’t even ask her to stop, as she kissed at my neck and pressed herself closer.
Whether I wanted it or not, I was a Doll in that moment. Receiving pleasure and desperate to return it, yet unable to do so, but it didn’t feel contrived or hollow. It felt real. Shockingly real and full and overwhelming and then I felt myself climax for the first time! Oh it mustn’t be sinful, I saw God!
She laid with me there for a while, held me as I came back to earth, and I tell you, keeping myself quiet in that climactic moment was one of the hardest things I had ever done in my life. But I eventually calmed, and even though I wanted to reciprocate, tugging at my unfeeling hands and feet, locked without a hope, Althea told me there would be time for me to learn how.
“When? We are destined to be Dolls, we may never get this chance again!”
And she looked deep into my eyes and smiled. She had a plan, a plan to get us out and free and live a normal life. She kept on calling it ‘a normal life’ but such a fantasy was the farthest thing from normal to my ears. How would a girl like I, who had never even cleaned her own behind, fare in the world of commoners? What would I do without the protective eye of Pappa? Of the Society? She laid out her plan to smuggle me out the next chance she got, to hide us away in the backrooms of her brothel home, wait for a man to scramble our identity implants, then move out to the countryside, more rural than even this estate, to change my name, get me some plain clothes, to live as lovers.
Lesbianism is of course illegal in the King’s domain, but she just told me we would cross that bridge when we came to it. I see the plan now as it was, two naive girls heatedly whispering about our confident futures after our first throes of passion, but at the time she had my heart. She told me it would be worth giving up her chance at climbing the social ladder, worth giving up her aunties’ plans for her to escape their circumstance too, we would just elope the old-fashioned way.
She left in the thick of the night, and though my gag and blindfold were reseated correctly, sweet Althea forgot to put my nappy back on. Thoughts and possibilities racing as they were, I did not think of it until the morning when it was much, much too late.
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Also known as a guardian or owner, but those terms are more closely tied to wedlock or familial responsibility. A brothel-owner and manager. A pimp, if we are being crass. ↩