April had led me to the door, which stood ajar. She turned back to look at me. After passing by the receptionist, I had let my expression go a little bit. April’s unexpected glance must have shown her my apprehension—or perhaps she just remembered how she had felt two years before, maybe at this very door.
I swallowed hard at the sympathetic look in the other girl’s eyes.
“You made the right decision,” April said softly, putting out a reassuring hand to touch my shoulder. Then a smile brightened her face. “Hey, I think I’m getting good at this sponsor thing.”
I had to laugh at that, but the little bit of light humor seemed to undam the tears of anxiety and embarrassment that had lurked behind my eyes for the last few minutes. I felt them well up and seep out of my eyes, and April’s expression turned instantly back to compassion.
“It’s going to be alright,” she said gently. “Let’s go in, and I can tell you more about why I’m so sure it will work out fine for you, like it did for me and Scott.”
When April knocked and pushed the door all the way open, though, what I saw had the opposite effect to the reassurance she had seemed to promise me. I knew from glimpses into such rooms at other day spas and aestheticians’ salons that such rooms contained padded tables, like massage tables, that could be bent into chairs, more or less. When April had mentioned straps, I had imagined that you could put lengths of webbing across such tables to keep the person on them in place.
What I saw made me turn around and try to escape despite my decisions to resign myself to this fate.
Two chairs that resembled the exam chair at my gynecologist’s office more closely than anything else I could think of. Because of the stirrups for the knees of the girls sitting in them. The straps were on the stirrups, to hold my knees raised and open. I could see another strap, a stout belt to go around my waist.
I turned and ran.
Tried to run, because the security guard… the big, friendly-looking security guard… was standing right there.
Behind me, April said, “Mandy, I know it’s scary, but it’s for the best. They… they always know. Why don’t you go ahead in and take off your clothes?”
CHAPTER27
Mandy
I gave a little sob. The security guard smiled at me.
“You should take Mrs. Dennison’s advice,” he said in a voice that conveyed only a desire to help. “I don’t have to report this if you get undressed like a good girl. Otherwise I have to tell the office and the office has to tell your husband.”
I felt my face crumple. To my dismay, Stan—I had dropped my eyes a split second earlier to see that amazingly enough the security guard was actually named Stan—changed his smile to a commiserating look. I suddenly wanted to ask him if he was married—if he made his wife come here, too, to have her pussy bared for him, to make her feel more submissive the way Rick had told me he wanted me to feel.
The thought of giving voice to those words made the idea of Stan having to fasten those straps around my knees and my waist much, much worse. I thought of April, of how Stan or another guard like him had done that to her, and then taken off her panties. I wondered if April’s backside had shown the same unmistakable signs of old-fashioned family discipline mine would.
I gave Stan one more teary look and I turned around.
Reba, a kind-looking woman in her fifties, closed the door behind us after April had followed me in with a “Thank you, Stan.”
Terrycloth robes hung on one wall. I watched April go over there and start to get undressed. I followed her, biting my lip.
“Easiest thing is just to take off everything but your bra,” she told me, as if anything about this experience could be easy. She had her shoes off, and she proceeded to remove her beautiful floral print dress, too, and to drape it on the hanger that accompanied the robe. I tried desperately not to look, but her lacy red lingerie drew my eye like a magnet, before she put the robe on and turned away to take her panties off.
I forced myself to start taking off my top, thinking with embarrassment of my own cotton briefs.
“You like my lingerie?” April asked, smiling over her shoulder at me as she put the skimpy panties in the robe’s pocket.
“Um,” I said, starting to undo the waistband of my skirt with trembling fingers.
“Well,” she continued, “I have a surprise for you—a present from Rick, actually. I’ll give it to you after we’re finished.”
Oh, no.“Oh,” I said out loud, unable to think of anything else I could possibly say.
I heard Reba chuckle from her stool, across the room and behind me.
“You’ll look so sweet for your hubby tonight, Mrs. Williams. I’ll make sure you do.”
I felt my forehead crease hard. I got my skirt off, turned away toward the robe on the wall. I pretended I was alone. I remembered Rick making me undress in front of him before my punishment and to my surprise that made me feel a little better about having to get undressed here at the day spa, with a comfy robe waiting for me.
I wondered if they had let April have a robe, when the security guard had carried her in.