Parts
CW: BBU general warning, references to noncon, caning, beating, threats of nonconsensual body modification, female whumpee, female whumper, pet whump, panic
Ann is lying flat on her face. Modified Position Twenty-One, her brain helpfully supplies. Then she hears Mistress Colette snap the cane against her hand, a familiar, white-hot, cracking sound, and Ann’s helpful brain goes completely and utterly blank.
Behind her, Mistress Colette clears her throat, and Ann imagines her owner’s face pinched into its customary frown, the way the woman’s skinniness serves to underscore her severity and belie her surprising strength. When she speaks, her voice is crisp, clear, every word over-pronounced as if she’s sure that her boxgirl will misunderstand even her simplest sentences. “So. Ann. What side of you does my husband like the best? Front or back?”
Swallowing hard, Ann turns the words over in her head, trying to be quick about it but not knowing what to say. It seems her mistress’s fear has come true, as it often does. Their boxgirl just isn’t very smart. Letting her eyes fall shut, Ann gives voice to her inadequacy. “I’m – I’m sorry, Mistress, I, I’m not sure I understand.”
An exasperated sigh behind her, and Ann feels the sting of the cane against her thigh. The angle is such that the wood only really contacts one of Ann’s legs, but the pain of it is no less significant for only happening on one side. It takes all of Ann’s focus, and much reliance on her training, not to yelp when that bruising impact cracks across her skin. “It’s simple, Ann.” Mistress Colette sounds irritated, and that doesn’t bode well. They’ve just started this inexplicable little exercise, and already Ann is proving insufficient, annoying. Above her, Mistress Colette raises her voice as if volume is the problem. “Does my husband like the front of you, or the back of you?”
“I-I-I…” Another crack, hard enough to bring tears to Ann’s eyes. When her voice comes, it’s a pitiful little squeak that makes Mistress Colette huff aloud. “I don’t know! I don’t know, Mistress. He doesn’t…doesn’t look at me, much.”
There’s a pause. Behind her, above her, Ann can hear level breathing. It’s hard to read emotion from just breathing, but at least it’s even, calm. Maybe that means something. Ann tries to cling to it.
“Hmph. What do you mean? My husband certainly looks at you enough when you’re around the house.”
Mistress Colette’s voice is dry and disinterested, but beneath her nonchalance there’s a dark turbulent current that Ann must be wary of. Swallowing, she tries to organize her thoughts. Ann hates thinking about the dark, oppressive, impossible nights when Master Gordon comes to her room, but her mistress is asking, and so she forces her mind back into that room with her Master looming over her and clears her throat to speak. “He doesn’t look at me, Mistress. It’s dark in the room, and he doesn’t turn the lights on.”
Mistress Colette snorts, a decidedly undignified sound. “My husband just walks in the door and gets on top of you?”
“Yes, Mistress.” Ann keeps her voice clear and neutral, though what she feels is shame, and distantly, disgust.
The tip of the cane traces over the backs of Ann’s legs, and then comes down again, the hardest blow yet, a brutal strike. Ann can’t help a broken teary gasp from escaping between her lips. Mistress Colette snorts at her again, and the way her breathing is audibly shaky now.
“If you had to guess.” Mistress Colette taps the cane against Ann’s thighs, first one, and then the other. “If you had to guess, which part of you do you think he likes best?”
Heat rushing to her face, Ann’s mouth shapes noiseless words into the floor. She doesn’t want to say it. She really doesn’t want to say it – but Mistress Colette is already angry, and Mistress Colette is holding the cane. “I believe that his favorite part would be…”
“Besides what’s between your legs.”
Squeezing her eyes shut, Ann takes a few quick breaths to try to steady herself. “He seems to like my breasts, Mistress.” It’s more than a minor triumph that she keeps her voice clear and calm, though she wants to shrivel up and cry into the floor.
“Good girl.” Mistress Colette taps the cane against her leg again, and Ann lets her eyelids flutter shut in anticipation of pain. None comes, but there’s the sound of high heels pacing a slow circle around Ann’s prone body. “I suppose I should have assumed,” Mistress Colette muses with an airy sigh. “Gordon’s a simple man. Predictable.”
As Mistress Colette walks her circuit around Ann, she traces the cane over her box girl’s still body. Some people call them Box Babes, but that’s not Ann. She’s no one’s babe, no one’s pretty girl, no one’s prized pet. She’s just a maid. Just a house cleaner. As functional and inoffensive as a vacuum cleaner. That’s what Ann longs for. To be as functional and inoffensive as a vacuum cleaner.
The round end of the cane trails up Ann’s leg, over her back, down one arm. When she reaches Ann’s neck, Mistress Colette raps the end of the cane against the back of Ann’s head, knocking her nose into the ground.
“There’s a vet I know that Janice uses.” Mistress Colette seems to be talking to herself. “He does double mastectomies for anyone willing to pay for them.” She pauses in her pacing, pokes Ann in the shoulder, a hard jab. “Do you know what that is, Ann?”
“No, Mistress Colette.”
When Mistress Colette speaks, there’s a certain vicious pleasure in her voice. “That means cutting someone’s breasts off, Ann.”
That’s not a question, so Ann doesn’t have to answer. Good. Good, because Ann has no breath at all in her lungs. Cut…cut her breasts off?
Ann grows dizzy.
Because Mistress Colette is talking about her. All this talk about Master Gordon, and what he does at night, the envy that runs through Mistress Colette’s voice, as though Ann’s position is one to be envied…now this, using the word vet, talking about cutting off someone’s breasts, changing the very outline of their body. It’s not Mistress Colette’s own body she’s talking about, but another body that just as surely belongs to her.
“Of course, if the vet did it, it would have to be preventative. He’d check you out to see if you were at risk for breast cancer, and if he decided that you were…”
The cane runs over Ann’s shirt, her slacks, her skin.
Ann lies flat on her stomach and shuts her eyes and tries to regulate her breathing. You. Mistress Colette said it, flat out said you. She’s thinking about…she’s thinking about cutting Ann’s breasts off.
Ann wonders if she’ll be able to feel it when it happens. She hopes not, and then she wonders if maybe it would be better to be able to remember something like that.
The cane tracing over her skin, over her body, stops at Ann’s right arm, lifts off, and comes down again with bruising force on Ann’s thigh. She hisses through her teeth as it imperfectly snaps across an earlier mark, the old stinging doubled, worsened. “I won’t do it,” Mistress Colette announces, not a moment later, and between the pain and the relief Ann wants to weep. As is, she bites her lip savagely and waits, heart still thumping irregularly in her chest. Salvation seems so close. She’s not going to make a sound and ruin it now.
“I’m not going to cut your breasts off, Ann.” Mistress Colette says it with a sigh, as if the whole thing is too exhausting for her to even think about. “Even if the vet checked you out, even if I had the piece of paper to say it was medically necessary…ugh.” A groan, another hard blow to make Ann yelp. “No one would believe it. No one would believe it.” Another sigh. “Everyone knows that Gordon’s a dog.”
Good. Good. Good. Ann is weak with relief and glad, so very glad, that Gordon is a dog. Her breath is coming in desperate, having gasps.
“But I could.” Still sick to her stomach, still tense all over, Ann goes right back to being afraid, because Mistress Colette’s voice sounds so very self-satisfied. So certain, so casually curious. Ann’s owner is playing with the idea the same way she’s playing with the cane in her hand – rolling it between her palms, holding it up to the light. “I could always change my mind and do it if I wanted, Ann.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Yes.” Mistress Colette seems to be talking to herself now, as if Ann isn’t there, spread out on the floor, utterly at her mercy. “Yes, if I wanted to, I could.”
After that, Mistress Colette releases her. She bids Ann get up off the floor and for god’s sake, stop crying, no one hit her that hard. With a disinterested wave of her hand, Mistress Colette orders her shaky boxgirl to go make herself useful in the kitchen. Ann bobs her head, murmurs her thank you, and goes right away because there’s no reason not to, after all – no blood to clean up, no significant damage at all. There will be welts on her thighs for a few days, a few of them, scattered, and then they will heal and be gone. There will be no evidence that anything happened at all.
Ann’s lucky. She’s really quite lucky.
All evening Ann catches herself wrapping her arms tight as she can around herself. The tears come in fitful bursts, surprising her with their ferocity, like a monsoon in the dry season. Ann holds her own body in her arms and tells herself she’s okay, she’s alive, she’s fine. Here she is, standing shaking in the kitchen. Here she is, fine and whole for now. Here she is, forced to remember, on pain of mutilation, that her body is not her own.