Diana Avery found the shop entirely by accident; on her first day in an office high above
the traces of what had once been Upper Thames Street. She’d been sent out, as are very
junior and new General-Office-Assistants the world over, to buy sandwiches for someone’s
working-lunch…
“There’s that terrific little sandwich-bar place down by the river, Diana – you can go
down Canada Lane…” The medieval Canada Lane is now in two parts, interrupted in the middle
of its windings by sixteen storeys of glass and concrete; Diana Avery circumnavigated the
vast new building, sought the re-beginning of Canada Lane on its other side – turned
instead into Muscovy Place – another even earlier lane – and lost her way. The only sign
that there was nothing but more glass and concrete around and above her was the single
small shop-window beneath a sign reading ‘Captive’. She was the ‘new girl’ in the office
on her first day and on her first day she was going to be late back with a simple purchase
because she’d lost her way: being shy and nervous by nature, she was beginning to enlarge
that fact out of all proportion. The place called ‘Captive’ looked like a shop; perhaps
they could direct her back into Canada Lane and to Tickles’ Sandwich Bar?
Approaching the shop’s door from the upper end of Muscovy Place she had to pass the
little window so she glanced in to see what sort of shop it might be – and didn’t pass the
window; she stopped, mesmerised.
Behind the glass in a dark space no bigger than an old-fashioned double wardrobe was a
naturalistic, tall, elegant display-model in a red dress, softly spot-lit. Nothing else.
The window was some two feet above the worn stone paving of the lane so Diana found her
eyes travelling up from piled swathes of the scarlet-silk dress-train, up a column of
tightly-shaped scarlet-silk full-length hobble skirt to a tiny waist. She looked further
upwards more slowly, anticipating this to be a sumptuous evening dress on an impossibly
beautiful model. So it proved to be – bare creamy shoulders, long elegant arms, scarlet
silk gloves from fingertips to upper arm… The model’s slender neck was encircled by a
silver slave-collar with a silver D-ring to the front beneath her chin and the bodice of
the dress was little more than a scarlet silk shelf on which lay two perfect, bare,
prominently-nippled breasts, ivory white, full, exposed…
At once there were two young women called Diana standing at the window of the shop,
although an onlooker would only see the one. Diana the General-Office-Assistant, glancing
quickly round to see if she was observed, her pale face colouring-up with her habitual
embarrassment at being confronted with ‘sex’; the scarlet dress was ‘sex’ in the raw. The
other, unseen Diana – the ‘Other Diana’ - looked at the dress and saw herself in a bright
and detailed mental image, wearing the dress, feeling the dress, feeling the excitement it
would provoke in her whole body. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. To stand
somewhere, free, open, beautiful like that, throwing away all convention and to be
herself; her secret self, the Other Diana.
She had grown-up believing she was ‘not right’, even ‘wicked’ because of her precocious
– but rigidly suppressed – sexuality and was still, at eighteen, laden with guilt, but the
advent a year back of a present - from an uncle - of a year’s rent of a tiny flat in
London, a laptop-computer plus a year’s subscription to an ISP had changed everything. The
flat was to enable her to seek work in London instead of in the dull outer suburb where
she had been brought-up; the laptop and Internet connection were to aid in the search: the
uncle in fact knew nothing of such things but had heard that it was the way young people
looked for jobs these days. On the Internet Diana Avery found Sex. At first she was
desperately embarrassed at what she saw - not shocked but embarrassed - embarrassed and
miserably guilty at being unable to stop ‘surfing’.
‘It’s all right,’ she persuaded herself, ‘if I just select images of beautiful women’ -
in sexually-provocative clothes nonetheless – ‘so I can, well, just imagine they are me.
That there’s this Other Me who’s really the most beautiful, most sexual person it is
possible to be. Just for myself, of course, just secretly. I’m like Superman, an ordinary
person, not very good at anything – but I have the Other Me only I know about. Superman
was a super-strong saviour of the poor, fighter against injustice, everything like that,
the perfect super-hero though; the super-me, the Other Me is just – is just Sex. No, not
sex, Sexuality…’
Slowly, over time, with the guilt piling, she began to mentally place herself in other
clothing illustrated on the laptop’s screen; in leather, in latex, in plastic… Could she
imagine wearing that? Would she like to do that? How would it feel? With increasing
frequency the mental answer was ‘exciting’. It became a challenge to consider every genre
of image in the ‘sexual’ areas of the Internet and to grade them mentally as ‘impossible’
or ‘possible’ or ‘yes’, the latter meaning that in her increasing, secret fantasies she
saw herself wearing-that, posing-like-that, doing-that. Experiencing-that. On every
downloaded and printed ‘possible’ and yes’ image she began to create a little yellow
square, fantasising that one day she would be able to tick the squares as ‘done this’ or
‘been that’.
Ridiculous, just fantasy. The weight of guilt arose with the steady increase in the
number of images she moved from ‘‘possible’ to ‘yes’; even some ‘impossibles’ became
possibles as the fantasy ‘Other Diana’ challenged her objections. Could she be roped,
naked, like that? Could she be hung chained and naked like that? The corners of fetish
yielded such things as ‘Could she pose like that, as an ‘adult–schoolgirl’ in
replica-school-uniform, touching her toes, exposing her ‘school knickers’ for a
hypothetical, ritualistic caning? The Internet CP sites said that being caned – or more
commonly, caning someone – was sexual; she was scared at the thought of being caned, of
course, but even if it was a sexual act only for the caner, then her fantasy-other
‘perfect sexual self’ had to know about it and, in fantasy, ‘do’ it. In private, total
privacy of course, all to prove – to ‘check out’ – the limits of the Other Diana’s
‘sexuality’.
She lingered, but only briefly, at the window displays of the more-expensive sex-shops;
she began to mentally criticise the designs and styles of things-sexual; ‘that skirt’s not
short enough – can’t see her crotch’ – ‘those pierced nipple-bars should be one, a
straight bar through both’ – ‘that gag leaves her teeth showing – that’s not sex, just
crude’. Diana the office-girl became a secret expert on such things and became also a
nervous, shy, increasingly inward-looking personality, totally immersed in guilt: only at
her laptop did the Other Diana emerge – confident, able and absolutely openly sexual. Not
with sexual-preferences of any kind; all things seemed to be sexual, so all sexual-things
were to be considered, evaluated, rejected – or absorbed into the fantasy female that was
the Other Diana.
Then the reaction would set in and she would often cry quietly because all of it was
fantasy, ‘bad’ fantasy; she was a shortish, brown-haired, nobody office-girl, no real
friends – because she couldn’t help probing any new friend to see if there was a similar
mind there and there never was. A total of three past ‘boyfriends’, a total of five empty
sexual experiences with them. She’d probed them as well; two had walked out because her
tentative outspokenness about sex had undermined their so-called male superiority; Steve
had gone in a temper because sex to him was copulation with a female body and anything
else was ‘weird and disgusting’. What had been ‘weird and disgusting’ had been a cheap
little thing the Other Diana had made her buy in a wild, trembling, nervous moment in a
cheap little sex-shop – a ‘crotch chain’ that covered her there with a thin triangular
plate of chromed tinplate; it had a silly, cheap, oversized padlock, the key of which
she’d hung round her neck. ‘You some sort of pervert or something?’ is what he’d said when
she’d dangled the key, grinning…
Quite quickly, because the long hours in her tiny flat of indulging in her fantasy were
hours where the everyday worries of the real world never intruded, she began to think of
the Other Diana as her real self and the ‘Office Me’ as an unavoidable, deceitful
imposition. She learned not to expose the Other Diana though; outwardly she continued to
be to be the shortish, brown-haired, nobody office-girl with a nice figure and breasts
that were not to be allowed to hint of their full, firm, heavy existence. In the daytime
at work, in the street and out and about, flattening bras and dull clothes kept thoughts
of the Other Diana away but in private in her tiny flat, sitting surfing the Net the
fantasy, as will all long-term and unrestrained fantasies, began to insidiously change her
private behaviour. She began to take to her bed earlier, naked and with her hand between
her legs, eagerly to explore the mental images; she began to sit at her desktop computer
naked, watching the images and watching too the reflected image of her breasts in the
screen. The reflection of the ‘real’ Diana, the Other Diana.
So the fantasy grew and it began to utilise her Guilt to introduce another angle to its
script; the Other Diana was now ‘compelled’ – ‘forced’ - to mentally ‘experience’ every
one of the collection of images and to judge her own ‘performance’ . Only a ‘Pass’ noted
on every one of the hundred or so prints would mean that Diana Avery was, secretly,
‘Perfect’. Not for others, for herself, ‘for ‘me’’. It began to occupy every spare waking
moment so that she would hurry home from work, skimp a meal and fly to screen and mouse to
argue with herself that the image she’d rejected the previous evening was really a ‘yes’ –
that the Other Diana would think nothing of the chains and the metal-frame and the chair
on which lay a whip. There was never any third party in the images which she selected; it
was fantasy and for her alone; no onlooker or participant was needed…
So when she saw the model in the window of the shop, the proud model in the magnificent
red silk dress; the model challenging with her bare breasts and hard, locked, collar it
was simply wonderfully, sexually, right. But at that time and in that place reality and
her errand and ‘the office’ prevailed; ‘ask the shop for directions to the sandwich-bar…’
She tried the door – it wouldn’t open but someone inside called ‘just a minute…” At
once she was embarrassed, pink-faced – she hated ‘disturbing people’ but now, if she fled,
it would be rude…
As she waited nervously she read the printed square of pasteboard in front of her at
eye-level;
LADY SHOP ASSISTANT WANTED
Must be Eighteen-plus. Hrs 12 noon to 8 pm.
Good salary plus generous discounts on shop-items.
Phone for interview
Positively no applicants without prior appointment
The card gave a mobile-number. The door opened and an impressively-big, bear-like,
pleasant-looking, non-threatening man appeared.
“Hullo.” An even, cultivated voice. “Just upstairs trying to fix a jammed window. Oh.
Now I shouldn’t think you’re a customer – perhaps you’re interested in the job? You have
to phone me first you know…”
“I – I wondered if you mi-might tell me how to g-get to Tickles Sand-sandwich bar?”
He was more than a foot taller than her and was looking down, seeming to study her
curiously…
Richard Cope is forty-nine, long-ago-divorced, big, naturally friendly and the owner of
‘Captive’; a shop, a ‘sex shop’ which he had slowly and successfully developed away from
the usual establishment of that nature into a highly-profitable, even ‘exclusive’ supplier
of bespoke fetish-wear for those – male or female – who needed such items and who were
sufficiently wealthy to have their exact requirements made specially.
Sixty-percent of his business and ninety-percent of his profits came from his limited
list of ‘special’ customers, the remainder from sales of the things found in ordinary
high-street sex-shops; two hundred or so customers a week explored his ground-floor shop
with its crowded shelves, a good week would produce perhaps five ‘specials’, strictly by
appointment, in the quiet, luxurious consulting-room atmosphere of the first-floor
special-customer area; maybe three on Monday when the shop was officially closed, others
outside normal hours. The special-customer area provided a comfortable settee, easy
chairs, a large, low, glass-topped table, a video-screen, an Internet connection,
leather-bound folders of photographs of ‘specials’ made for previous customers, coffee
always to hand; sketch-pads on which to suggest ideas, swatches of materials – fabrics,
leathers, latex, plastics… Measuring tapes and glittering callipers – for it was not
uncommon that a customer brought to Richard’s shop the subject, the woman or the man,
young or old, for whom the purchase was being made. At one end of the room were always
displayed one or two of the latest ‘specials’ awaiting collection. Behind these was a door
to a narrow stone stair leading to the genuinely Roman-period cellar, a long, dark,
cobwebby place but now, just recently, Richard’s ‘Dungeon’ where were displayed a few
large items of ‘heavy’ apparatus – a suspension device, an X-Frame, fetters bolted to the
wall, birching-stools, a rack. Made to his designs, made in sophisticated materials;
twenty-first century versions of the originals. Nothing displayed in the Dungeon sold for
less than a thousand pounds and a powered X-Frame or a powered rack could set back the
buyer several thousands. Above, leading upwards from the ‘consulting-room’ there is a
modern stair to a stock room, above which is Richard’s spacious apartment…
“The sandwich-bar? Yes of course,” then, “I saw you looking at the red dress. Did you
like it? It’s called ‘Property’…”
“No – er – yes, yes. I was just looking…”
“Sure you’re not interested in the job? Some people are shy about a job in a sex-shop
and don’t like asking…”
“No – I was j-just looking at the dress… I mean, I have to get s-some sandwiches.”
“Pity. I get all sorts but mostly sex-starved or professional long-blondes. I really
want a quiet, sensible, ordinary young woman just like you – oh, not that you’re in the
least ordinary. Sorry, probably I meant an uncomplicated employee or something. Sure
you’re not interested?”
‘Pretty little thing,’ he thought, ‘an ordinary, sensible girl. In the shop in a really
good little black dress; exactly right for the hoi-polloi’; the hoi-polloi was what he
called the everyday casuals, to differentiate them from the specials. ‘Don’t see many like
her in this business. Pity…’ and then he thought, looking at her with more interest ‘and
sexy as hell - now there’s a surprise…’
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