Ashleigh and the Governess, Ch. 7

What stopped him from going mad?
	His evil stepmother had him by the balls and was dragging him through an endless parade of torments and indignities. She was talking about getting Ash vocal cord surgery, to give him a quieter voice that would be more pleasing to her ears. Sometimes the pain from the blue balls was so bad, it was like being split in half and he was still expected to work without missing a beat at such times. Then as he worked, the pain would subside; that was the cycle. And he had nothing to show for all his work. Everything he did was for the sake of loathsome Aleksandra and her social circle of uptight, customer service-obsessed women.
	His lavish home was now just a very sophisticated prison that could monitor his every footstep and the slightest movement of a hand.  He couldn't figure out a way to escape but even if he could, what then? Go and complain to everyone that his stepmother had him tongue-polishing her shoes? Judge Tanaka wouldn't care. It was infinitely more likely that they would silence his complaint and make him sorry he ever dared to resist. Could he get in front of another judge, or report the abuse to some other branch of authority? He thought about that a lot, but wasn't optimistic that he could outmaneuver the Sister's network of spies. At any time, he could have picked up a phone and called 911 and requested to go to prison instead of serving out his sentence in this home. But he just couldn't face the idea of going to a men's prison looking the way he did. He was terrified of the prospect that he would have to keep the symbiote regardless, and still needing to complete Aleksandra's drug program once he finished his jail sentence. It was just too awful to think about. He was a prisoner, denied the things he thought were human rights, taking a one-way trip down the social ladder in front of everyone he knew.
	This was the thing that gave him hope: he met a girl.
	Her visits to the tea house became the highlight of his life. Her name was Chelsea. She was so lovely that she helped him withstand the horrors that Aleksandra and Yusra put him through. He would think of Chelsea when, for instance, Yusra would make him stand completely still while his symbiote made his balls horrendously itchy. The sensation was worse than poison ivy, but if he so much as moved a finger the device would deliver a zap that practically shut down his nervous system. During such torments, he would think of her long brown hair and and her expressive face – she was one of the only customers who didn't immediately write him off as a servant.
	He thought it came from the fact that Chelsea did so much charity work: she gave out meals and clothing to the poor, sometimes helping them with legal advice. Additionally, she served at a nonprofit helping climate refugees get work / citizenship contracts that were modeled on the Kafala system (although she was careful to point out that her charity removed all the potential for abuse that dogged the Kafala system in countries like Jordan). Ash liked the way she would talk about herself and her work, and the way she asked him for things like she was talking to a friend. She was a very attractive and petite brunette, several years older than him.
	So that gave him a little bit of hope.
	He was adapting to the new circumstances of his life, and was surprised to find that his mistresses would actually be kind to him, sometimes. Well 'kindness' might not be right term. One time, Marisol noticed that Ash had become distracted and forgotten to hand-mop the baseboards in one section of the hallway. Usually, this was grounds for ten swats to his butt courtesy of her house slipper, followed by him kneeling on grains of rice, holding that same slipper against the wall at about waist height using his nose and face to keep it there. But now, there was a small chance that Marisol would forego that punishment and just admonish him instead – and Ash would be so grateful to have dodged that odious ritual, that he would nearly cry with happiness.
	When Marisol, or Yusra, or Aleksandra showed him this kind of 'mercy', they generally accompanied it by pointing at their feet. It was a nonverbal command that he should shower their feet in kisses to express his gratitude. They had trained him to be creative and to find out what each particular woman liked: Yusra enjoyed it when he nibbled on the insides of her ankles, and Aleksandra liked it when he flossed his tongue between her long, slender toes. It created this absurd dynamic wherein Ash never felt safer or more comfortable than when he was adoring a woman's feet, particularly after she had shown him mercy. And while he was touching their feet, his cock would become excited because it knew this was one of the rare opportunities it could do that without being tormented by the symbiote.
	All of this was profoundly confusing for Ash, and the narcotics they had him taking were not helping things. The football-shaped yellow pills didn't change his gender, as he had originally feared. At least they didn't seem to. Yusra wouldn't tell him what they were for but he had grown to loathe the sight of them. If she was making him take the yellow medicine, he knew he was in for a rough day.
	The most noticeable effect was that the drug greatly slowed his perception of time. Yusra took advantage of this by making Ash take one of the pills before making him do a full eight plus hour workday in the shoe closet which stretched it from an unpleasant task into a nearly unbearable ordeal. Ash was reminded of the quote by Einstein saying that if you sit with a pretty girl for two hours it could feel like two minutes, but if you sit on a hot stove for two minutes it would feel longer than any hour. That was sort of how this drug messed with his sense of time that this job was like spending 8 hours on a hot stove because of the depth by which he despised it. That was his situation right now: he was cleaning shoes while on medication.
	He always found the shoe cleaning 'job' disheartening and terrible, but when he had taken one of those yellow pills it was like comparing an unpleasant hike to a death march. How did the pills accomplish this? By daydreams, was his best guess. It felt like some dam inside of his mind broke open and released a flood of intrusive daydreams into his thinking that always swept him away. He could not hold on to a detailed memory of these dreams but they left certain impressions. They were either good impressions, which brought to mind feelings of pleasing his Mistresses. Or they were bad impressions of guilt and overconfidence and failure – being painfully out of his place in life and feeling a desperate need to crawl back behind his stepmother's aprons.
	The drug also gave him a heightened interest in things he would normally consider mundane, which resulted in things like the unfathomable urge to look for patterns in the little tiny bits of grit and leather he'd have to nibble off of the tattered, reeking dance foot thongs. Based on his experience with street drugs, he considered the yellow pill a combination of Adderall and very mild LSD. Some of the daydreams were definitely sexual because his cock was hard much of the time he was doing this task leaving him to wonder how much he was 'crossing his wires' here, so to speak. Could a person develop a fetish like this?
	She left the price tag on each box of shoes she assigned him to clean, just to remind him how much of his fortune she had spent so far. He noticed a tag, hanging from a cardboard box filled with shoes like it was a tag on a present. In Aleksandra's writing, it read $160,000 to some ballet troupe in Dallas and it was all the company's leather socks and toe pads from their last two seasons. Some boxes had signed headshots of all the dancers which Ash could look through. There were also artsy close-ups of them wearing the shoes included in the photos.
	'At least I've become a philanthropist,' he thought to himself, with irony.
	They never mentioned his name in the 'thank you' cards.
	Inside the closet, there was a photo of Aleksandra up on the wall. It was taken from a worm's eye perspective looking up at her with the sole of her shoe in the foreground. She had the faintest smile on her face, and took a very confident pose as she glared down at the viewer. The photo was displayed on one of those electronic screens that could switch to other photos or even turn into a television / Internet feed. Sometimes the photo would swap to Yusra sitting in that same position, or Elizabeth, Dasha and even Marisol. Each of them put their own style on the pose. Then the screen would show photos of other women in that same pose – so many different stock models that they would broadcast for hours without repeating one.  These photos took up a lot of his attention because they were the only sensory stimulation in an otherwise extremely dull atmosphere. The way they loomed over him left a lasting impression on the Caldwell boy – like his humiliation was intimately linked to their personal authority over him.
	But as bad as the yellow pill was, he would a million times prefer it over taking the blue pill.
	The black collar around his neck lightly zapped him to indicate that someone in the house wanted his attention. He checked his wrist monitor. Elizabeth was using her zero gravity pedicure chair to do an hour-long guided meditation and she wanted him to massage her feet while she did it. This was a welcome break from his current job, so he hurried over to her room.
	The platinum-haired Instagram influencer had this idiosyncrasy where she liked it when someone cradled her feet. She used Ash for this purpose very often; and she frequently talked about how she liked living in this house specifically for that reason.
	"It makes me feel adored. And safe," she said, and she also liked it when he lightly tickled the soles of her feet as she did other things.
	This was probably the reason she liked Ash to sleep curled up at her feet at night. He went into her room and, upon seeing her bed, was thrown into a fit of bad memories about the hot, sweaty nights he spent beneath in sexual purgatory beneath those silk sheets. Elizabeth was in the reclining chair already. She smiled at Ash and waved at him with her fingertips.
	"I'm not sure how I feel about this chair," Elizabeth said.
	She was dressed for lounging around the house comfortably in tight khaki short shorts and a green tank top.
	"You don't like it?" Ash asked.
	"I mean, I enjoy your massages and the fact that I'm reclining so low, I'm just not sure the LED lights or the meditation makes it any better. But I have to do this for an hour a day as part of my contract with them. If I didn't have you doing a massage for me, I'd probably find this very boring."
	Ash felt a little surge of pride, that he was making Elizabeth's life better.
	"Which oil would you like me to use for the massage?"
	"Chamomile, please. With just a drop of juniper berry."
	On top of her dresser, there was an apothecary worth of herbs, oils, and crystals. Ash had become familiar with them over the course of working for her. He mixed something up and took a seat at the stool by her tanned, size 10 feet. She wore a platinum toe ring over her second toe, and  she had holographic silver pedicure on her toes, which had very shapely nail beds. His heart was racing and his cock came to life because he knew what was about to happen.
	About fifteen minutes into the meditation, it started.
	Elizabeth traced one hand down her body and undid the button on her shorts. It was a very beautiful thing for him to watch – he liked the way she caressed herself in a sensuous and self-confident way, like she was loving and honoring her beautiful young body. She started to play with herself without a care for his presence, but appreciative of the fact that someone was cradling her feet. Ash became hypnotized by the quick rise and fall of the fabric of her short shorts; they were so tight and stretchy that he could see the outline of her lips. He could tell when she was playing with her clit by the way her middle finger tented the wet fabric out more. There was a visible wet spot forming from her efforts. She made the sudden decision to stop touching herself for a brief moment, only to do a little tease for Ashleigh's sake. She took her glistening fingers and wiped them on the outside of her shorts, right around the crotch area. She did this in a playful way, dragging her fingertips across the fabric around the obvious bulge of her camel toe.
	It set his soul on fire to watch her finger herself like this, but not be able to do anything about it. Ash was still on the effects of the yellow pill; it felt like he was massaging her feet and watching her play with herself forever as he drank in every detail and got lost in so many erotic fantasies. But he couldn't just remain complacent and watch this amazing show. He had to dutifully massage Elizabeth's soles using very precise acupressure strokes that Dasha had taught him that supposedly made a woman's orgasm stronger. Yusra had told him one thing about Elizabeth; it was the thing about her sister. He knew that this was the sister of Mara Alsace, the Duchess of Wessex. Did the duchess's soles wrinkle like that when she sickled her royal foot?
	"Rub harder, peasant!"
	Elizabeth would say things like that but only when she was sitting in this chair. The acupressure strokes were very demanding on his fingers and forearms, which burned with use as he kept up the pressure.
	Elizabeth curled her toes and pointed her feet as she became more carried away with herself – her shorts were completely wet and she was getting louder and louder. He wanted so badly to reach down and stroke himself; or better yet crawl onto the bed and fuck her. But the symbiote reduced him to a passive spectator, cradling and massaging her feet in a specific way to make her orgasm even better. He wondered what Elizabeth could possibly dislike about this machine, which made her cum so hard that they could hear her in other parts of the house. Ash never felt more dispossessed as he watched Elizabeth help herself to orgasm after orgasm, her taut young body going through all manner of sexual delights while he was trapped forever wanting.
	After these 'meditation sessions', Elizabeth would lazily take the earphones and eyemask off, and giggle as she examined how sodden her shorts were. Then for a short while, she would be in a good mood – a rare thing to see.
	"Thank you for holding space for me," Elizabeth said.
	She put her palms together in front of her heart and bowed slightly to Ash, who did the same thing in return. Then she dismissed him back to the work that she had pulled him away from. He would have much rather preferred to stay out here and do something else, practically anything else,  but he obediently hurried back to the closet because his cock was rock hard from that encounter and the symbiote was torturing him for the erection. It felt like fire ants were trapped between the latex and him and they were crawling around biting him. And they were fire ants because everywhere they crawled they left a burning trail which was distinct from the stinging pain that came from a bite. In spite of the torment, his erection refused to go down. He thought it had something to do with the way the symbiote was torturing his cock – like the ants weren't crawling randomly but in such a way that they teased him with pain.
	He hurried even though he was was dreading the destination. Despite his moral misgivings, Ash practically dived down to a pair of ballet slippers and put his lips against them, which extinguished the fire ants and immediately relieved the pain in his cock. It was impossible to deny how good this felt, although he was perturbed by the fact that a 'high point' in his life was now just an easement of suffering that happened when he conceded to put his face in an old slipper that some young woman had danced in for sixteen hours a week for months, years. The stench was unimaginable and it got worse the more he licked them and agitated the leather with his tongue. But at least the fire ants were gone and they became a memory, then a daydream. But the chief daydream was his mind replaying the memory of Elizabeth playing with herself which he could recall down to the most excruciating detail. She would be the only person he would have contact with that entire the day.
	**
	'I thought that having all these women around to take care of Ashleigh would make things easier. But I am more involved than ever!' Aleksandra thought to herself.
	 She had decided one day to track the amount of time she spent thinking about her step son and overseeing his treatment. It surprised her to be confronted with how much of her time she was devoting to this project. The mission was creeping into her life and monopolizing more and more of her attention. Even when Aleksandra was spending time with friends she would be on her phone checking in on what Ashleigh was doing. She was this involved because she enjoyed the process, but she still wanted to have a conversation with Yusra about a time line for her pulling back her attention. She wanted Ashleigh to basically be like one of those robotic vacuums that she could set to work and forget about. She asked Yusra when that might happen.
	"You are thinking like a capitalist," Yusra said with some disappointment,
	"Do not worry. His assets will be completely yours by the end of his initial sentencing. At that point, we will have him so cowed that he will agree to work for you indefinitely, under the exact same circumstances as he is doing now. He will even agree to keep the symbiote... As for when you will be able to step back from being so active in his conditioning? Perhaps around his first anniversary of imprisonment."
	"I don't mean to sound unappreciative," Aleksandra said, "I'm sorry if it came across that way. I just feel more safe knowing that there is a definite time when I am winning. You understand?"
	"Yes, of course," Yusra replied.
	But Yusra had communicated her point: that she didn't appreciate hearing critical questions like that. Seeing as that they lived together, and worked together, and were lovers, it was difficult to disentangle one relationship from the next and sometimes she felt like Yusra used this to her advantage. The Sisters of Diana had their way of doing things, and Yusra was their representative, and Aleksandra had agreed to playing along with all of this no matter how she felt about it day-to-day. For the most part, she greatly enjoyed her new relationship with Ashleigh. It put her sex drive through the roof seeing him on his knees all the time and Yusra was getting to intimately know her body from all the time she spent pleasuring her. These were some of the most fulfilling days of the woman's life so far, and it was easy for her to overlook the fact that she was sort of trapped here along with Ashleigh when their circumstances were so different.
	Everything was going so well!
	But then she started noticing things that bothered her. The most conspicuous problem, that anyone would have recognized, was that the Sisters were shaking her down for money more and more. They knew that she was basically a captive customer; it's not like she could file a complaint somewhere about this criminal conspiracy she was engaged in. And a lot of their expenditures were valid and helpful, but there were also times where they'd ask her for like $250,000 and not tell her what it was for. Relative to the Caldwell fortune, that was a trivial amount of money, but it was still annoying for her to be on the hook for however much they wanted, whenever they wanted it in addition to the % cut they got for laundering Ashleigh's money to the Lipka Group. Small fees were adding up – and Yusra was calling HER the capitalist?!
	But Aleksandra did get a sexual thrill out of spending large sums of money, so she couldn't be completely mad about this financial arrangement. Part of her loved to squander Ashleigh's fortune and she additionally liked that she was helping the Sisters of Diana financially. She would have really liked someone to talk to about these developments in her life, but found herself increasingly isolated. Her life became marked by a sense of overindulgence: champagne brunches and two-hour body massages and sapphic trysts with Yusra that were wildly satisfying except for the woman's new, obnoxious habit of making her say, 'Please' again and again when she was about to cum, otherwise she would pull away even if it resulted in a ruined orgasm for Aleksandra. Yusra explained that this would make her cum harder, which it did, but she still would have preferred to do it the normal way because she didn't like chanting the word 'please' in such an intimate context. Not to mention the fact that someone else was imposing it on her.
	It almost became a point of tension between the two of them but the Ukrainian trophy wife relented and got used to moaning the word 'please' and dealing with the frustration that came with edging. Yusra was a difficult woman to resist, even for Aleksandra, and she had a way of exerting pressure over time to sway someone. The overbearing governess also had a big advantage because when Aleksandra was horny she was easier to convince about certain things; a fact that she was becoming embarrassingly aware of. When Yusra would whisper into her ear, "Do you want to cum, little girl?" Aleksandra would nod and slip into that role: a younger woman in the hands of a more experienced lover. She found it really hot to relinquish her authority for a while. She did not realize that she relinquishing it for longer and longer periods of time.
	The blonde beauty was living in a fantasy and constantly discovering new forms of sexual sadism to try out. While she was doing this, it was also moving her achieve her goal of owning someone, and making them constantly aware of that painful fact. She would spend her days swanning about the house in fetching outfits and full makeup even if she was just going downstairs to get a shoulder massage as Elizabeth helped her discover her Enneagram personality type.
	Ashleigh stood behind her now, reaching over the back of the sofa to massage her shoulders as she tilted her head back and answered question after question from Elizabeth. She was distracted by the fact that she was having difficulty finding women she knew to pimp Ashleigh out to. This wasn't exactly due to a lack of interest, but because Yusra deemed it as too risky to involve people they personally knew after Julie hadn't really joined the Sisters the way they wanted her to.
	It ended up that they brought Chelsea on to take that role. Aleksandra liked to think that she could tell when her stepson was thinking about the woman he had a crush on; it made her want to laugh out loud thinking about how he was pining away for this person who was secretly working against him. It would be a great moment when he saw his hopes dashed, and if he saw the true nature of Chelsea's consultancy work, he probably wouldn't have thought of her so positively. She had come onto their radar as part of their PR campaign to get people more accepting of servants.
	Chelsea's nonprofit was just a high-tech way for people in wealthy countries to 'import' laborers from poorer and/or climate-stricken countries. The high-tech aspect of it was an app and rating system that was really skewed to favor the employer over the migrant worker. The nonprofit seemed to believe that it was doing a good thing, here. Their 'about us' video featured a middle-aged housewife in Savannah looking through profiles of maids from Greece and Vietnam, swiping left and right on photos and reading backstories to find a servant who would cook and clean for her to earn money to send money back home. Critics of the nonprofit pointed out the fact that it had countless rules for the worker to follow, and almost none for the employer. Maids were forced to sleep on a cot in the kitchen sometimes, or in a small windowless closet – the exact sort of abuses that happened in the Kafala system, just covered up slightly better.
	So their contact with Chelsea put Aleksandra in a good mood. She was highly intelligent and quickly getting on board with the Sisters of Diana – a natural convert. She had a lovely voice, and a way of speaking softly and emphasizing words in an elegant manner.
	"Ah, Ashleigh! This massage is very good. Thank you," Aleksandra said, patting his hand appreciatively as he continued working on the knots in her shoulder with trigger-point strokes.
	"Perhaps the next time you mess up, we can skip giving you the blue pill. I think you are making tremendous progress in your drug treatment."
	"Thank you Miss Lipka," he replied demurely.
	She giggled. That was how she showed him affection: by capriciously withholding one of her many nasty punishments. The blue pills were downers. They would make him get lost in painful memories, and ruin his whole day with unrelenting melancholy while he couldn't so much as frown because of the Botox. She took a moment to enjoy the deferential tone Ashleigh took when he addressed her, the way he spoke in a defeated whisper. She was always one who could enjoy the little details, like the virginal white nail polish that adorned Ashleigh's nails. Tomorrow he would be the ball boy for her and Dana in another friendly game of tennis. Aleksandra was happy, and she tried to ignore the nagging fear in the back of her mind that the Sisters were clearly much more powerful than her, and focus on the fact that they were giving her everything she had always wanted.