Ashleigh and the Governess, Ch. 6

Aleksandra was sitting at her desk in the Caldwell Building, looking down at her smartphone. On the screen, she watched Ashleigh perform his chores. Right now, he was kneeling in a closet working through the dozens of pairs of dance shoes that the Lipka Organization had purchased for its fundraiser. She giggled at the look of frustration in his eyes, but his forehead was neutral from the Botox. The femme boy had a placid look on his face even though he was doing an extremely unpleasant task of licking dirty ballet shoes clean. Ashleigh's lips were very plump from the fillers, which gave him a pouting look that the Ukrainian woman loved to see.
	  The Lipka Organization had purchased each pair of those 'dead' shoes for lavish sums: thousands of dollars spent on what basically anyone would consider trash. The ballerinas and dancers were thrilled to get such a generous payout for something they would have discarded; Aleksandra wished that she could be there to see the looks on their faces when they learned their studio would be raising $15,000+ just by them donating some old, stinking shoes. The odor was so bad that Aleksandra didn't allow Ashleigh to do this job in her own shoe closet, but instead forced him over to a different closet in a different part of the house with a very low ceiling. And despite how undeniably awful this all was, Ashleigh would be thankful to be here on some level because while he was licking and pampering these shoes, the symbiote gave him a break from an even worse torment.
	This was a highlight of Aleksandra's day: she loved checking in on her little cinder girl, trapped in a tower, slaving away while the wicked stepmother enjoyed the fullness of life.
	Ashleigh had hair extensions in now. They were hand-tied and had pink streaks that were impossible to miss. Ashleigh's hair would drag on the hardwood floor as he did some parts of his job, sometimes – an aesthetic that Aleksandra very much liked to see. Right now, he was wearing some wireless earbuds in his ears in a clam shell pink color. In addition to playing relaxing meditation music, it was also a way for them to give him instructions real-time. For example, Yusra might order him to cradle the next pair of shoes in both hands while he cleaned it, instead of resting them flat on the floor and lowering his face down to do the job as he had been doing. They put other things on the earbuds too, like educational materials about how to clean different fabrics or self help books on how to adopt the 'servant mentality.'
	It was so much fun for her to watch, that she found it difficult to work. But she willed herself to close the stream, to get back to her responsibilities. Starting as a trophy wife, she had maneuvered her way into a leadership role at the Caldwell group. It was an enviable position: lots of prestige, little work, and plenty of people downstream to blame for failures. She didn't want to shake things up too much since she understood this was where her money came from, but she managed to make a few new contracts with female-owned businesses that she was excited to grow.
	One of the contracts went to a PR think tank to find ways of getting people more open to the idea of servants, housekeepers and laundry maids. The PR company accomplished this, among other ways, by throwing lavish parties where they invited Instagram influencers to be pampered in every conceivable way, on camera, to show how nice it was to be served like that. People really liked seeing attractive, photogenic models getting intimate shoulder and foot massages while another person did their manicure, and it helped "create jobs" which was another incentive for it to catch on. This was part of a longer-term strategy of getting the public to accept indentured servitude, and a service economy that looked a lot like vassalage but they wouldn't be there for a while yet. For now, they wrapped it in terms like 'living your best life' and 'being a girlboss' and it turned out that many women shared her desires.
	Yusra was calling. Almost without thinking, Aleksandra picked up the phone.
	"Hi. What is it?"
	"I would like for us to change up our approach, just a little bit. It is time we begin speaking to him in terms of love and affection. We will still control everything he does, but he will come to believe that we know what's best for him. We don't want to be TOO nice to him, but I think it would help if we tossed him a little scrap now and then... What do you think?"
	Aleksandra had heard of this approach before. It made her think of a lady of the house telling her unmarried employee that no, she couldn't go out for drinks at night, because people might see a woman drinking and think she has loose character – so the lady needed to control the maid's behavior in the name of affection. It was better the maid that she spend her Friday night removing the sweat stains from the armpits of her mistress' clothing, and being home to massage her employer's feet when she gets back from her own evening on the town wearing a new pair of open-toed high heels.
	"How can he possibly think we have eating out of a dog bowl, because we love him?" Aleksandra mused.
	Yusra laughed.
	"Because he will cling to anything that's positive right now. Even if he doesn't like us, a kind word will make him feel better than being completely ignored and it will certainly feel better than our displeasure. This way, Ashleigh will become a better servant for you, long-term. Although if you want to continue using just punishments, we can do that."
	"This will be fine to try, this new way," Aleksandra decided.
	"I think you will find it very enjoyable! I will start putting together some medication, for Ashleigh to take to get things moving in this direction."
	She liked that idea.
	As long as Ashleigh still knew his place and continued working obsessively to please her, she could tolerate this change in their dynamic. It wasn't the first concession she had made – for example, they didn't have Ashleigh eating out of a dog bowl in the kitchen anymore, now that Dasha and Elizabeth were in the picture. He still ate out of a dog bowl of course, but they moved it to Aleksandra's closet.
	And once she thought more about it more, she was charmed by the idea that the boy who once disdained her so so much, now living and dying by her smallest word of praise. Truth be told, Aleksandra had used a similar tactic before in her own social life: if someone in her group stood up to her or became a nuisance, she would practically exile them from the group of friends, and get the entire neighborhood to treat them unkindly until they got the message that they had displeased her. After making her point, she would re-admit them to social activities with open arms as long as they remembered their lesson. Doing catty things like that made her feel superior; she did it in the corporate world too by taking down the names of employees who were most likely to stand up to the Lipka Organization and pressuring them to leave. And when she thought about the things that she was doing to Ashleigh – all the power fantasies he would act out for her – she felt bliss.
	The fact that Yusra was bringing up medication was a signal that they had arrived at another phase of Ashleigh's conditioning. The groundwork was done. This next part would take advantage Ashleigh's growing fixation with things like shoes and socks and cleaning and turn them into raging fetishes.The fact the poor boy was sexually famished all the time but completely unable to relieve himself would make him easy to condition. The most ironic part was that she and Sisters of Diane would totally alter his identity and sexual preferences, but he wouldn't have an orgasm the entire time! She giggled to herself when she thought about it. His frustration was like fuel for her. She could only admire the beauty of the footprint she was making on her stepson's life.
	It became too difficult not to bask in that feeling. Pretty soon, she locked the door to her corner office stopped work for a while. Then she re-opened the livestream of Ashleigh licking the dirty ballet socks in a tiny little shoe closet, unaware of the fact that he would soon love this job as much as he hated it. If Yusra was correct, this sort of ambivalence would make Ashleigh more vulnerable and more willing to submit because a part of him liked it. It made her shiver to think about how powerful she would feel with her housebroken stepson, desperate to please her, his (her?) entire identity warped to better suit her lurid needs.
	**
	His work multiplied when Dasha arrived – from the moment she got there, she acted like a princess visiting from Mumbai and that Ash was her personal slave there to wait on her hand and foot during her stay.
	Ash couldn't believe how much baggage she brought with her.
	The plump girl couldn't get dressed without going through six different outfits and she would toss them all over the room haphazardly, so that her room looked like a war zone five minutes after he cleaned it. She liked fresh rose petals to be strewn on the floor when she woke up in the morning, and she never showed any interest in getting to know Ash as a person. For her, it was totally normal to have a live-in domestic servant mopping the floors on their hands and knees. She actually scrutinized his work more closely than Marisol. No matter how much effort he put in, she could find something to complain about and she could really throw a tantrum. At one point she said something like, "This would NEVER happen at the Elysee Palace!" when she saw how Ash didn't line the towels up perfectly when he put them away.
	Practically all of her clothes required hand-washing. This wasn't exactly new; Aleksandra and Yusra had him washing some of their clothes by hand for a long time now. Sometimes Dana would drop off some laundry for him, even. But what Dasha really annoying was her fixation with cleanliness. Some things, Ash didn't need to wash by hand like bed sheets and towels. But Dasha messed that up, because she wanted him to hand-clean the washing machines after every load to deal with any bacteria that could potentially grow there. It was arduous work, but she asked for it like it was a small thing to ask.
	"It really helps with my anxiety," Dasha explained to him in her posh Hindi accent,
	"You can't just run an empty load of hot water and bleach. People think that gets rid of all the bacteria, but it doesn't. The best way is to scrub it by hand... That's how the servants did it in the home I grew up in."
	So even though Dasha was just one person, she created a lot more work for Ash to deal with. And when he was around Dasha or Elizabeth, he had to play a particular role – Ashleigh the live-in domestic, who was lucky to have the job and would do anything to keep it. Ash wasn't really supposed to talk about himself, not that they showed any interest. They seemed to believe that he was an androgynous person who used feminine pronouns named Ashleigh and she was here because of some 'restorative justice' prison program. He spent so much of his time playing this role, it was constantly bringing him low. The same way that the work was making his knees feel painful (housemaid's knee), his thinking was starting to get worse too.
	He was often doing the same routine tasks, which were incredibly micro-managed to the point where he had basically no control of his own destiny. Being stuck doing the same things over and over seemed to make him think the same few things. As he wiped down one of the 7 toilets in the home (he refused to think of it as Aleksandra's house, although she often made him refer to it as such when he was receiving people at the door) he reflected on how different his life was, this time last year. He used to go partying in Budapest. His family owned an island in Croatia. He had gone from toasting the sunrise to waking up before the light of day, to get started on the scrubbing. His life had been wide open vistas and limitless potential – what was it now? Now, he had to think about the best way of begging Yusra to be allowed to use knee pads for the job.
	Through his earbuds, they played an instructional video. He was listening to the audio portion of it by Deborah Teagarten, a popular 'cleanfluencer' who gave good advice to her viewers on the art of housekeeping. Sometimes she would discuss different ways to remove stains, or how to fold bed sheets more crisply, but today she was talking about the service principle.
	"Here's something I do to keep meeting my own high standards," Deborah said at one point, 	"You know how when a person is doing a massage, they need to be careful of their attitude because it comes across in their strokes? Well, I try to embody gratitude towards my employer with each little thing I do for them – I put my heart into every task. That's how I get my best results..."
	She went on like that. To Ash it sounded a little codependent. Like, that mentality would make sense for someone like Deborah who chose the profession of her own volition. But what about him, who had been forced into doing this job in the most exploitative way imaginable? He couldn't understand why someone would choose to do this for a living. It was exhausting, repetitive, thankless work and everyone in the house treated him like he was lower than the dirt on their shoes.
	'Would they treat any live-in housekeeper like this?' Ash thought to himself, 'Or are they just mean to me because Yusra told them to act that way? Or is it because I don't stand up for myself?'
	He knew he should have been more outraged. But what good would it do? If he acted out, they'd make the symbiote torture his captive cock. In fact, the cursed device would torture him if he fell slightly behind in his duties or if he pissed off Dasha or Elizabeth (and SHE was mad all the time, to begin with). Ash had to swallow his pride and adapt to a new way of living where he no longer had the privilege of turning up his nose at something or being mad about the injustice he faced. The best he could hope for was to avoid punishment –  so he put on the humiliating costumes, and performed this demeaning role.
	Ash was becoming alarmed with the changes he noticed within himself.
	He thought it had to do with the way he had to play the role of a smiling maid all the time, even when he felt angry or frustrated on the inside. Yusra had explained the Thai idea of 'jai yen' to him – it meant something like a person should remain 'calm hearted' even under difficult circumstances. It meant that they wanted him to act pleasant and eager to please no matter what sort of demands they placed on him. The governess made it clear that nobody wanted to hear him whine, but unfortunately she defined 'whining' as any attempt to resist the abuse. He knew all of this was wrong, but how could he speak out against it? So he didn't fight back. He started to think about the best ways to please Aleksandra, Yusra, Marisol and the rest of them and resented himself for capitulating. Like they were all on a side against him, but he was also split against himself.
	He was quickly developing a sexual fixation with women's feet and certain items of clothing. This one really messed him up – the chastity device pushed him towards it constantly. For example, if he served drinks to Elizabeth as she was sunbathing nude by the pool and he got hard from looking at her high and firm breasts, the symbiote would punish him (although she didn't mind his looking, she'd even have him apply sunscreen for her which was like heaven and hell rolled into one). But later, if Elizabeth had him sleep beneath the sheets at night to keep her feet warm, the symbiote wouldn't punish him and he would instead have a ruinous evening of his cock getting hard, then going numb so he couldn't finish, then feeling blue balls while Elizabeth's sweaty soles were inches from his face or wherever else. His appetites were becoming out of his control.
	There was no respite from it all. The nearest thing he had was working at the tea house, but that was lousy in its own way. There, he was basically just swapping the intimate abuse he suffered from Yusra and the ladies in his house for an impersonal sort of mistreatment that arises within some employee / client relationships. Especially at a space catering to upper and upper-middle class women, some of them with live-in domestics of their own. But Ash figured that he could potentially meet a nice customer at the tea house even if he was afraid that Julie would come back for another quickie. She preferred getting her pussy eaten in the comfort of Ash's home, though, usually very late at night or when no one else was around. He wondered what it meant, but mostly he was upset to be jaunted from sleep so he could perform oral sex on his ex-girlfriend who always wanted multiple orgasms, even if it meant Ash staying down there for an unreasonable length of time.
	His training was so good that even though he didn't enjoy licking her pussy, he put his heart and soul into it and even obsessively monitored his thoughts so that he was only thinking good things about Julie.
	'This is my Queen. I'm lucky to be here. I'm lucky I ever dated her. I need to worship her just right. I hope she likes this...'
	Those were the kinds of things Ash would think as he Julie out from behind as she was kneeling on the bed, face down ass up. For some reason that was one of her favorite poses, although it really didn't do much for Ash. It just put his face right next to her ass so all he could see was her backside, and the side profile of her face sometimes. It was such a different experience of sex, to just be used for his tongue and fingers without a thought for his own enjoyment. It made him feel used, like he was her sex slave. And if he started to  reminisce about Julie later, he would get hard, and subject himself to an immediate cock and ball torture session -- it seemed like at every step of the way, they were finding some way to torment him. And the only way to fight back was to fawn over the very ladies who were the cause of his misfortune! It was truly baffling, and any attempt to make sense of it just frustrated him more.