Chapter 4: Catastrophe

Before I get on with a partial history of everybody’s favorite year, I am reminded that, in our story, there is still a need to relate the occurrences of the last ten days of 2019. That should be a pretty easy task. But a lot happened in that short period of time.

It’s easy to describe things at work, especially considering that only four or five of those ten days were actually spent in the office. I met twice with the CEO, defining his vision of the sales department. I made only one demand: that “Clause Eighteen” be revoked. It was obviously only put into place to enrich the head-of-department, and it stifled company growth. I was told that was a task that could only be accomplished by the Board of Directors. I, in turn, told him that I would be happy to present my case to the board personally. And further, that if they refused, I’d quit. Of course, I’d probably be singing a different tune if I actually needed the money, but I didn’t tell him that.

A team of three men from some department or other helped move us up to the eighth floor. The men were more than happy to do it, if, for no other reason, than just to be around Polly for a couple days.

One of the things I had failed to mention to my new sex slave was that secretaries in our company were paid according to the salary of the man or woman they worked for. In other words, a secretary for a VP was paid much more than a secretary for an account executive or some other manager. I had been the company’s most highly-paid sales rep. There were other contractual pay scales involved after that, but I never really gave a shit. What I’m trying to explain here is that Polly’s first paycheck represented more money than she had ever possessed in her entire life. I had established a bank account and direct deposit plan for her, and when she was given her first pay slip, she was absolutely flabbergasted.

The first thing she tried to do was give it to me. After all, she argued, slaves shouldn’t have any money at all. But I nipped that idea in the bud. She’d just have to figure out what to do with it, I told her flatly. And, of course, she decided to give most of it away. I don’t know why I’d never anticipated that. Still, there were a few selfish little indulgences on her part.

On Saturday, December 21st, I answered a knock on the door, and the two porters entered carrying a fresh Christmas tree. Polly followed them, pushing a wheeled cart that was obviously something that belonged to the apartment building. It was loaded with lights, decorations, a tree stand, and other paraphernalia peculiar to the season; and it all made itself at home in the form of a pile of bric-a-brac in the center of our living room. I had never celebrated Christmas. I had never celebrated anything, at all, period.

She, on the other hand, was so excited and so utterly happy that I decided it wasn’t worth my while to argue with this insanity; and I went back to my computer desk and left her to her own devices while she set the thing up, strung the lights and decorated it, all the time humming Christmas tunes and oohing and aahing over cute little knickknacks before hanging them up. When it was done, she found some Christmas music on the internet, called me Scrooge until I finally got up, and she danced me around the room, laughing and singing at the top of her lungs.

Monday, she elicited my help in finding a bicycle shop, and she purchased two new lower-end, assembled “cruiser bikes” to have delivered to her niece and nephew the following day. The kids had always wanted bicycles, she explained to me; and she also knew that there were none in store for them again this year, at least from their parents.

But the worst part of the damn holiday was finding a present for me under the tree on Tuesday. At least she had the decency to let me see it on the 24th. One day’s notice is better than none, I suppose. We went to the office that day, still moving in and getting to know our major duties; and so, I had time during lunch to make my way to a jewelry store and get something for her, in exchange.

She still wasn’t done with me, however, and demanded we swing by a grocery store on the way home, where she purchased a spiral-cut ham, a smoked turkey breast, baking potatoes ... she had a whole list! Two hundred bucks worth!

Christmas Day itself was a rather lazy affair, with her doing almost all of the work, and that included the hour-long session in bed that morning. Slow. Sensuous. Erotic. She knew me well by now, and she kept me on the edge of ultimate passion for a long, long time; milking me with her inner muscles, teasing me with her moans and exclamations of passion. I think that her own orgasm was a gift to me; she knew that submitting to it was something I desired of her. It was one of the more satisfying sexual experiences I can remember; and I was reluctant to rise when it was over, even though it was almost ten o’clock.

She had purchased a Mont Blanc fountain pen for me; and while I realized that it was their cheapest model, I knew that she had spent a significant portion of her wealth on it. I hope I expressed my gratitude sufficiently. I, in turn, gave her a pair of diamond earrings. She cried and proclaimed her love. After that day, I never saw her without them ... well, not for three months, anyway.

Just like she had at Thanksgiving, she insisted on taking a portion of our meal down to the two porters. She put them in two boxes that she’d acquired with that purpose in mind. And, at our dinner table, she told me that she was working with those two men to plan a New Year’s Eve party in the lobby. I thought about it for a moment, and I couldn’t really think of any reason to oppose the idea.

But it ballooned, of course, taking on a life of its own. There was no real prior planning involved. It was just going to be a pot-luck, BYOB type of thing. A few flyers went up here and there. But six days later, it was all anybody could talk about.

It was a huge affair, and the entire lobby was packed with singing, dancing, loud people. There were only about fifty of us in all, but it seemed like twice that number. As I do with all parties, I found the darkest corner of the room and tried to pretend I was part of the walls. That worked, for the most part, but Polly always found me and tried to cheer me up; and, wherever Polly went, others followed along.

The worst part of the evening was when someone (if I knew exactly who, I’d probably plot his demise) suggested we form an “organization,” and the obvious choice of leader should be everyone’s favorite new acquaintance: Polly. I was about to draw the line. No way. Absolutely not. But Polly never even glanced my way. She smiled that disarming smile of hers, thanked them most kindly, and refused. The suggestion died unresolved, and the party went on.

At midnight, twenty-three people kissed my sex slave. I counted them. Twenty-one men and two women. She refused none of them, but kept the smooches brief until she could finally make her way over to me. Ours lasted for a while.

And that was the end of 2019.

By now, I’m sure you’ve figured out where my little tale is headed. Let me preface this by saying that it is NOT my intention here to make a political statement. I think I’ve mentioned previously that I thought everything during that timeframe seemed to be measured in political terms; and it was not at all odd (in my opinion) that this “something” would be included in that “everything.”

Part of the politicization process is the durability of facts. The facts I am about to relate might not align with your recollection. You, having lived through this, might remember things differently. Once again, I just don’t give a shit. Look it up if you don’t believe me. Our individual belief systems don’t really matter. But, as it all turned out, these facts DID matter to me; I just didn’t know it at the time.

On January 21st, the Chinese government acknowledged something that the World Health Organization had first addressed in a memo written on the same day as our apartment building’s New Year’s Eve party: that a “pneumonia of unknown etiology” had been detected in Wuhan that was highly transmissible. It was later revealed that the Chinese government knew about (and had actively been trying to suppress) the virus since about mid-December. The WHO itself released a formal statement on January 9th. The CDC confirmed the first case in the U.S., also on January 21st.

It had been almost immediately determined to be a SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) type of virus. One of those had been responsible for the last “pandemic” scare, seventeen years before. That had resulted in about 900 deaths, worldwide. Following that, substantial sums of money had been allocated in the U.S. to produce large stockpiles of medical supplies that could be used to combat a large-scale nation-wide medical emergency. However, almost immediately, those programs were defunded in favor of more politically lucrative initiatives, and the vast majority of those stockpiles never materialized.

That put the present government in a very uncomfortable position. On the one hand, they needed money and resources to fight this. Fast. And nothing happens fast in government circles, where things often take decades to accomplish. Secondly, they felt they needed to alleviate panic among the citizenry to head off any economic repercussions. And so, a national health emergency was declared on February 3rd to get the funding started; but at the same time, the disease was being downplayed, with officials often comparing it to common influenza.

Travel restrictions were implemented in several countries. Beginning February 2nd, the U.S. began establishing restrictions on travelers coming into this country; but those restrictions were inconsistent among departure points, and they almost always had exceptions. (More on that later in our story.) It’s foolish to underestimate the human spirit. If a person really, really wants to get somewhere, then (barring incarceration), he or she will eventually find a way to do it. Often, it simply meant adding two or three legs to an itinerary, working your way to a country that hadn’t yet been added to various lists. For example, all travel was restricted from China to the U.S., but that did not apply to U.S. citizens. Also, anyone could still travel to dozens of European and Asian countries from China, and they could then travel on from any of those countries to the United States.

Also, the U.S. has two extremely long boarders that people can literally walk across (illegally), if they can just find someone willing to guide them to an unguarded place to do it.

But then, inexplicably, after the first week in February, very little occurred for the next month and a half. Well, that’s not true, of course. In medical laboratories the world over, hundreds of thousands of scientists were working around the clock on this thing; but news programs could only show so many videos of eyedroppers putting something into test tubes. Science is slow. It was going to take months to come up with something. And we didn’t have months left.

Also, to be perfectly fair, inaction is an action, too. There were a few things that MIGHT happen all by themselves (and without government intervention) that would save us from facing this thing. The virus might disappear as quickly as it had cropped up. Or, a “miracle drug” that was already common might prove effective. Perhaps prayer would stop it. Many people felt we ought to be able to buy our way out of danger. After all, the world had acquired more wealth than it had in its entire history.

For most of us, it was like an accident unfolding in slow motion; and it was increasingly apparent that there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Health organizations around the world gave virtually the same dire projections every single day; the statistics rising slowly, slowly ... and then not so slowly any longer, but more and more quickly. Here it comes, they all told us. Here it comes. And then, suddenly, here it was.

The big shift came right around the middle of March. Up until then, it had only been the national government that was (or wasn’t) doing anything. A couple state governments, New York and California, started investigating the use of mandates to slow the spread, even though that spread hadn’t quite gotten there yet. But by mid-March, it was here ... and that “here” was just about everywhere. The WHO declared it officially a pandemic on March 11th. The president declared it a National Emergency on March 13th. On March 14th, we got our first two cases of Covid here in Allegany County.

And now (finally!), it’s time to get back to our story.

In those first couple of months on the eighth floor, my biggest question was: Why did I keep her? I mean, she had already served her purpose. My whole plan was devised to get me where I was now. Plans are like that. Sometimes, they fall flat, right out of the starting gate. Sometimes, it takes them twice as long as they should to reach a successful conclusion. And sometimes they put you right where you wanted to be sooner than you ever expected.

Oh, I still had a couple steps to go to the top, but I could easily do that on my own. I didn’t really need her anymore. Months before, I had even scouted out two other prospective clients that I intended to woo using her charms. But there was no need to do that now; Rodriquez’s quarter billion-dollar contract had accomplished my goal in one fell swoop.

The biggest reason to hang onto her, of course, was that I had more or less promised to keep and protect her ... until she voiced a desire to leave me. And THAT was the contractual stipulation that would allow me to be rid of her, if I so wanted. I still hypnotized her every night; I had done so since the beginning of all this. And thus, I could easily make her fall in love with just about any person I chose. I mean, hell; all it took was one night with Rodriquez, and she fell in love with HIM. There was little doubt that I could have her married and pregnant in a house with a white picket fence by year’s end. There were about a hundred guys in this company alone who would jump at the chance.

Rodriquez was the only sound reason to keep her around so far. He had requested to see her again in January, and they had spent the allotted twenty-four hours in the exact same hotel room. Polly came home from that excursion in much the same state of mind as she had on the previous assignation: stary-eyed, almost dimwitted with excess love, as well as resolved to help him reunite with his wife so those two could continue their life together within the boundaries of holy matrimony.

On second thought, there was one little difference with the second rendezvous. I suppose that they were just getting to know each other that first night in December. But after a month of separation, fantasies obviously started to play on our Spaniard’s mind. Polly had no secrets from me. (Well, actually, she did. Sort of. I’ll get to that soon.) And so, after she came home to the apartment following their January tryst, when I asked what he had done to her, she never hesitated to tell me ... or show me. She reached into her purse and extracted a pair of steel handcuffs. When I asked her what he had done with them, she put her hands behind her back, I heard a ratcheting sound, and she was suddenly bound and helpless. Since she had just taken off her clothes (I still insisted she be naked in our apartment), she made quite a sight.

“How do I get these things off of you?” I asked her.

“The key is on a string around my neck,” she replied, meekly.

The string had become entangled with her other necklace, and it took me a minute to get the two apart. That other necklace was part of the secret I mentioned. Well, sort of a secret.

Alright, alright. I’ll tell you about the secret. Well, sort of a secret. Polly apparently kept a journal, which she’d purchased with her second paycheck. The journal was locked with a tiny key. The tiny key was kept in a locket. And the locket was on that gold chain around her neck. The gold matched the earrings I’d given her for Christmas. The locket rattled whenever she was riding me, female-on-top, during sex. The rattling sound reminded me of two things: Number One: that she had a secret; and Number Two: that all I really had to do was tell her to give me the little key, and she’d do it (just as she’d do anything I demanded). But, so far, I hadn’t told her to do that. And so far, her secret was still a secret. It was an odd little wrinkle in our relationship.

So, anyway, I had to untangle the string from the necklace; and eventually, I put the string around my own neck instead. She was standing before me with bowed head, looking at her bare feet. She often did that, so the posture wasn’t really new; but the cuffs certainly added a peculiar dynamic. I reached out and put the palm of my right hand on her bare side, just below her left breast; and she inhaled intensely, raggedly, and shivered in my light grasp.

“Do you like the way the handcuffs make you feel?” I asked her.

She took several deep breaths, and she spoke so softly that I had to strain to hear. “Yes, sir.”

I led her over to the couch, sat her down and joined her. “And what else did he do to you during your twenty-four-hour enslavement?”

She leaned heavily against me, then she drew her legs up and tucked them underneath her, the way we always sat together. “He used some soft rope to hold me in different positions. Sometimes, he’d blindfold me. And then ... oh, sir ... and then, he’d touch me.”

I shifted on the couch, the front of my trousers suddenly uncomfortable. “How did he touch you?”

“Every way. Any way he wanted. Usually, I didn’t know what was coming. Soft touches that made me gasp. Or, he’d maul my breasts. Or, he’d tickle me ... my feet or my sides. Or my nipples. Or between my legs. Sometimes, without any warning at all, he’d just shove his cock all the way into me. All at once. And then ... he’d make me beg.”

I cleared my throat. “Beg for what?”

“To come inside me. I’d beg him ... oh, how I’d beg him ... to please, please, please come inside me. Fill me up. Use me. Use my body for his pleasure. I needed ... oh, how I needed ... to feel his pleasure inside me.”

I had to swallow a lump in my throat. “And I suppose you want to feel that way with me.”

That made her look up and into my eyes. “Sir, I feel that way with you all the time. Well, not helpless. Not physically. Like this. Like the way I feel now. But I constantly need to please you. All the time. Every minute.” She tried to find the words. “That’s one of the reasons I love you. When you want pleasure from me, you take it. But yesterday, last night, he denied me that. He made me beg.”

I nodded. “And what else do you need from me?”

“Can you put me to sleep, sir?”

“Not now. After dinner. I think I’ll leave the cuffs on. I’ll feed you. Before bed, I’ll bathe you. I think I’ll let you make me hard with your mouth, but I’ll leave you handcuffed. I’d like to see how hard you’ll work at it. I’ll take the pleasure I want from your helpless body. And then, maybe then, I’ll let you beg me to put you to sleep.”

She writhed against me, trying to get closer. “Oh, sir. It’s so good to be home.”

February was a month of growth. Once again, the economy was a runaway train, and the only thing that could possibly slow it down was something no one wanted to think about. There were deals to be struck, contracts to be signed, commissions to be earned.

The Board of Directors didn’t even blink at my demand to void Clause Eighteen. They all raised their hands when it was time for a vote, and it was done. Just like that. Since I was there, they had other questions for me: policy questions, operational questions, payroll and transportation and accounting questions. Questions that were not rightly mine to answer. And it finally struck me: They’re testing me. They’re grooming me. They’re preparing me to join them. VP-Sales was not eligible for a seat on the board. But ... VP-Operations was; and old man Bukowski didn’t have very many years left in him. Whatever test they thought they’d given, I seemed to have passed. They weren’t smiling. (Nobody ever smiles at me.) But they were obviously satisfied.

Everybody on my sales “team” was down on the sixth floor. Once again, it was not a very efficient operation; it’s just the way it had always been. When I went down there for some reason (which should have been about four times a day), all work stopped, and the temperature seemed to drop about thirty degrees. I scared them. I didn’t want them to hate me ... I wanted them to respect me. But I just didn’t seem to have the capacity to make that happen.

So instead, I sent Polly. She had the exact opposite effect on the temperature. I’m not sure she demanded the respect I sought; but I had to admit, love was better than hate in a work environment. And eventually, she started getting things done. I found out later that they’d nicknamed us “The Angel” and “The Troll.” I’ll let you figure out which was which. Soon, it became common knowledge: if you didn’t do what The Angel said, you could expect a visit from The Troll. And I soon stopped having to go down there at all.

One afternoon, near the end of the month, I saw a secretary from the third floor giving Polly some money. When I inquired, it turned out that my executive assistant had loaned a friend money in an hour of need. That, as it turned out, was happening more and more often. I asked her to explain the operation to me, and she did so; showing me a locked metal box inside a locked bottom desk drawer, and a ledger with neat entries. It was a truly insane way to do business. She made no interest, and she forgave almost a third of the loans due to “hardship.” By rights, she should have nothing left.

“Where is the money coming from?” I asked.

“People donate to the fund,” she answered. “I put in a hundred every paycheck. Others who have been helped pay back a little extra when they can. It adds up.”

I called her crazy. Then, the next day, I gave her twenty fifty-dollar-bills to add to her little “fund,” with the stipulation that no one ever know I’d done so. It earned me the best blowjob of my whole life. It also added to her reputation. She was becoming “The Angel” to the entire company.

Rodriquez next visited us on February 19th, which was a Wednesday. We actually had business that had to be done before he whisked Polly off to the same hotel. Their days together were starting to be routine, at least in my mind. I suppose clandestine love affairs, no matter how unorthodox, tend to take on that sort of persona in most people’s minds.

Two days later, on Friday, sometime a little after noon, I heard a loud moan that I recognized as Polly in the grip of intense pleasure. I got up and walked to her desk, where she was frantically looking around. She was shaking all over, and beet-red in complexion. I laughed. “What in the hell are you doing?”

She was still glancing everywhere, obviously panic-stricken. “Oh, sir! Do you think anybody else heard that?”

I looked around, too. It appeared that everyone had gone to lunch.

“What’s going on?” I pressed, still bemused.

“Please, sir! Please don’t make me show you! I’ll let you see it as soon as we get home, I promise! Please?!”

Disgruntled but mystified, I allowed her to get back to work. But the poor girl never did regain her natural coloring. She blushed (and blushed hard) for the rest of the day. I’d never seen her so distracted.

As soon as we arrived back in the apartment, I demanded to see whatever she was so nervous about. I rather thought that Rodriquez had made her wear something that had somehow given her an orgasm. If that was the case, I was going to really lay down the law! I had given him my girl for a day only. He should have no influence over her the rest of the time!

She disrobed, just as she disrobed every time she came home. It was one of my rules, after all. But instead of revealing something hidden on her person, she walked to the dining table and opened the laptop that was always there. It took about a minute to completely boot up. I watched as she opened her personal email program, and she then clicked a message from Rodriquez. In it, there was a link at the top, and some text underneath. I didn’t have time to read it. She clicked the link.

It was a porn site. Immediately, a video started. It took me a long time to figure out what I was looking at; but finally, the perspective snapped into focus in my mind. It was a woman’s vagina. Her butt was resting on a bed, and her legs were raised. Ropes had been tied at her knee joints, spreading her wide. I could see more rope higher up on her body, and it dawned on me that her entire body was being restrained in that position. However, almost the whole frame of the video was that shaved vagina. At first, nothing at all seemed to be happening. But then, slowly, slowly, a large dollop of oily moisture formed at the top, all around the clitoris; and it oozed downward, coating the labia and outer lips, then disappeared into the bedding below. Just as slowly, another large droplet formed and worked its way to the bottom of the frame.

The fingers of a man’s hand suddenly appeared and began playing with the labia, stroking and tugging and pulling. Fingertips spread the lips wide, then let them close, then spread them again. Two fingers together probed into and out of the orifice; and the exercise was repeated; spreading, petting, stroking, plunging in, pulling out. Eventually, the entire vagina seemed to relax, seemed to accept, seemed to settle into this natural state of wet, glistening arousal and openness.

The fingers disappeared for a moment, and then they were back, holding a small white plastic vibrator. It started circling the clitoris. Almost immediately, the vaginal opening flared wide, gaping, cavernous; then it clinched tightly closed; then dilated wide again; then clenched shut. And then, finally, through the laptop’s speakers, Polly’s voice moaned loudly, hesitated, and moaned again. The video ended. It had been running three minutes fifty-two seconds.

“Oh, sir,” Polly whispered. “What am I going to do?” She was shaking.

I stood her up and took her into my arms. She clutched me desperately. “I assume you didn’t know you were being recorded.”

“No, sir! I was tied up! Blindfolded! And I was SO turned on! I couldn’t even think!”

“Do you want to press charges against him?”

“Good heavens, no! I’d die, sir! I’d just die!” She tried to get control of herself. “He says that this is the most popular porn site on the internet. He says that it’s almost a certainty that someone in our company has seen this. So ... when a man walks up to me, I can’t be sure; he might have seen me like that. I’ll never know.”

I held her tighter. “Polly, only Rodriquez and I have ever heard you make a sound like that. We are the only people who can appreciate the fact that this is you. No one else is ever going to know. You realize that’s true, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” She shivered again. “But still, if a man...”

“I know of several women who would get exceedingly aroused by this, too.”

She sighed deeply and shivered once more. “Oh, my God.”

I laughed. “Do you want to stop seeing Rodriquez?”

She thought about that. “No. I want to keep going until I can figure out how to get him back together with his wife.”

“Then what else is there to do?”

“You could fuck me, sir! Hard! Right now! I think I’m going to go crazy if you don’t!”

And so, I did.

On March 13th, two things happened. First: Rodriquez contacted our office and said he wanted to spend a day here the following week. As you might guess, that was sort of a code we used. Polly let me know that he would be using her on Friday, the 20th. It went pretty much as planned. What we hadn’t known at the time was that he was visiting his parents in Seville. He flew out of Madrid on the morning of the 20th on a flight that was mostly empty. That was because of the second thing that happened on the 13th: The president had banned all passengers from Europe (except the U.K. and Republic of Ireland). Oh, yes ... and except for U.S. citizens. Rodriquez was born in New York, and had a U.S. passport, so he got to fly. (Most of the Non-U.S. citizens bound for this country still got here; but they rode a train to France, took the Chunnel to England, and flew out of Heathrow.)

I eventually learned that he hadn’t been tested for Covid, either in Spain before departure or at Dulles Airport, where he went through customs and then connected to PIT. That made sense, too. Covid tests were pretty scarce back then; and, after cases started mounting, most test kits were sent to hospitals for use there. If there was any airport “testing” at all, they simply used a digital thermometer to take your temperature. But in this case, they hadn’t even done that.

Rodriquez was pretty wiped out after the long trip over, but he was still able to please, and be pleased by, my lovely sex slave.

Polly got sick on March 27th.

One of the places on a sociopath’s “Least Favorite” list is anyplace medical. And, if you wanted to follow that list to its unmitigated pinnacle, it would be the emergency room. Any emergency room in the world on March 29th was unadulterated, utter bedlam. I kept her at home for two days, until she had begun having trouble breathing, before I took her in. That’s what they were urging us to do. So, that’s what I did. I waited until I couldn’t wait any longer.