The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Karen Hanley stood and fretted outside the door of the interview room. In her right hand she held her corporate lap-top, and with her left she plucked a few strands of fluff off her uniform skirt. The fluff, it need hardly be mentioned, was entirely imaginary. You couldn’t imagine Karen Hanley letting anything so undisciplined, so unprofessional, as a bit of loose fabric get near her working uniform.

It was not a great uniform, as Karen would have been the first to admit: the jacket and skirt were meant to look like business suits, but the bank, in its usual way, had skimped on the material and on paying for designers who could make something half-way sophisticated. The end result was that the clothes which Karen and her colleagues wore were simultaneously uncomfortable, impractical and unfashionable. Still, Karen figured, just because the raw material wasn’t up to much didn’t mean you shouldn’t make the best of it you could. That was what being professional meant. That was why she was up and out of bed half an hour early in the mornings, making sure that every article of her uniform was immaculately turned out. It was the same with her make-up, which was never flamboyant but always meticulous, and her honey blonde hair which was always beautifully washed and combed before being tied into a ruthlessly tight bun. She believed in looking as good as she could, just like she believed in working as hard as she could.

She believed in these things because she knew that life was a competition and in that competition the prizes always went to those who could prove themselves better than everyone else. It was Karen’s opinion that she was the only person in this small local branch of a big national bank who really understood that. That was why she was looking forward to her annual performance appraisal. Looking forward to it with a mixture of confidence, trepidation and annoyance.

She was confident because she knew that her work this year had been exemplary. Her work was always good, of course, but this year she had really pulled the stops out and her sales figures were head and shoulders above those of her colleagues.

She was suffering from trepidation because, in spite of all the good work she had done, she was not entirely sure that her boss Simon Magister was as impressed with her as he ought to be. Simon was new to the role, parachuted in from outside after the previous incumbent had bowed to the inevitable and admitted that he really wasn’t competent enough to merit the salary the bank had been paying him.

Karen had been working as his immediate subordinate for the past nine months and had been convinced that she was going to be promoted into his place. OK, so she was only twenty-five and hadn’t been doing her own job for more than eleven months but, let’s face it, running a branch like this was really not that hard. She had spent long enough watching what a total pig’s ear old Sandy Saunders had made of it to have convinced herself she could have done it at least five times as well.

She had, quite frankly, been gutted when Head Office had decided to appoint Simon Magister instead, and she had let Simon know this before he had even moved into his office. (Being candid, she always said, was also a major part of being a professional.) She went on to tell him that she was quite happy to overlook the fact that he was doing what really should have been her job and would help him run the office and the other members of staff in the way that they were used to.

Simon had nodded and said that he would be pleased to listen to her input, but it soon become clear that he was either a liar or an idiot because he had not done anything of the kind. Instead he had proceeded to systematically undermine, alter and tear up all the methods and procedures that Karen had put into place and had introduced a load of innovations and alteration as if he actually thought he knew more about how a branch ought to be run than she did.

He had also said things to her which made her think he did not always view her work in an intelligent and appropriate way. He had accused her of stealing sales from other members of staff when all she had done was make sure that her quarterly targets were successfully hit. He had said she was cold and stand-offish, when all he meant was that she didn’t believe in wasting her time in giggling and gossiping with the girls on the counter and on the Personal Banker desk. And one time he had said that she was “not a team player” and she couldn’t even imagine what that was meant to mean.

All in all, even though she knew her work was first rate, Karen couldn’t help feeling worried that her performance bonus and her future prospects were in the hands of a man who was so clearly lacking in judgement.

And, finally, she was feeling impatient because her review was meant to have started ten minutes ago and she was still standing outside. That was just typical of Simon: he insisted on punctuality from his subordinates and could be downright sarcastic if you weren’t where he told you to be when he told you to be, but if when you got there on time he inevitably kept you waiting until he had finished off whatever he was doing.

There was a small sign pinned to the door. It read “Interview in Progress—Do NOT interupt.” Karen glared at it. There would be no need to interrupt anything if Simon had had enough organisational skills to get things finished when they were meant to. And if you were going to write “interrupt” rather than “disturb” you could at least go to the trouble of spelling it correctly.

Just as she was thinking this, an unsettling thought occurred to her. Suppose the closed door and the sign were both some kind of test? She had just come back from lunch so she had no idea if there was anyone in the room. Suppose Simon was sitting on the other side of the door, cursing her for being late. Cursing and having a bit of a smirk at the same time, because, after all, she wasn’t shy of letting him know what she thought about his lack of punctuality. Maybe she should knock. Maybe she should just go straight in. On the other hand, if there was someone in there, if Simon was in the middle of an appraisal, he was sure to say something cutting about how she was always ignoring his instructions.

If only there was some way to find out.

Unfortunately, the blinds behind the dusty glass were pulled all they way down and the door to the room—in contrast to most of the other furniture in the branch—was thick and sturdily built. There was no way you could hear anything that was going on. Not unless...

Karen Hanley cast a hasty, furtive look over her left shoulder. The interview room was at the end of a small corridor set back from the public part of the bank. The corridor didn’t go anywhere except the strong-room where various customer files and boxes were kept. Unless there was a meeting on, people didn’t come down here that often and there was very little chance that anyone would come by in the next thirty seconds. That would be all it would take for her to bend down and put her ear to the keyhole.

Quickly, before she had a chance to change her mind, Karen dropped to one knee. She didn’t even notice the way that her hands moved automatically to the back of her stocking to make sure that the seam was straight. (Karen always wore stockings to work, but that was OK because the uniform skirts were long enough the fact was always hidden anyone apart than herself. She couldn’t abide tights, damned uncomfortable things, never had been able to—not for the past nine weeks anyway.) She pushed her hair back from her ear (at the moment it didn’t seem to matter how long she spent tying it up in the morning; long before lunch it had always escaped into errant and chaotic little wisps) and pressed her ear to the door. For a moment or two she didn’t hear anything and she was about to conclude that the room really was empty when a sound caught her attention. Her eyes and mouth both widened in disbelief.

Oh...my...God

She was still there, still listening, still not quite sure she was hearing what she thought she was hearing when somebody stepped into the corridor.

“Karen?”

Karen leaped to her feet and spun around to face the woman who was advancing down the corridor. It was Julie Watts, the first cashier, a brash bottle blonde with an eager, inquisitive face and breasts which were perpetually threatening to burst free from the confines of her blouse.

“What are you doing down there? Listening at the door?”

“Certainly not,” snapped Karen. “I was checking the state of the floor tiles, I think a couple of them might be loose.” Figuring that attack was the best form of defence she added: “As branch Health and Safety Officer you might have noticed it yourself.”

For a moment Julie looked alarmed. She was the kind of woman who was always convinced that whatever she did she was going to get into trouble. In those rare moments when she wasn’t spreading rumours about the other members of staff she was generally whining about some decision which she had been forced into making (always against her will) and how it was sure to come back to haunt her. She was normally easy to cow into submission and Karen almost thought that she had managed to do so, but then Julie took a long, slow look at the floor where Karen had been standing and another, almost as long, look at Karen.

“Do you want me to fill out a report, then? Get some one down from Head Office to have a look at it?”

Oh bollocks, thought Karen.

“No, don’t worry about it. I’ll do it myself when I get out of my review.”

“It’s no problem at all. I’m quite happy to do it. You know me, always happy to help out a colleague.”

“It’s all right,” said Karen. “I said I’ll do it.”

“Right you are, then,” said Julie. And she smirked. Karen made a fist of her left hand, feeling the nails dig into the flesh of her palm. She knew right then that by the time she got out of her review the story of how she had been listening at the interview room door would be all over the branch. The only consolation (and it was a pretty slender one) was that only she would know that Julie had missed out on the really big part of the story. It occurred to her that she might be able to divert the cashier’s malicious newsmongering by telling her exactly what she had heard through the keyhole.

It was tempting, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. For one thing she had always told herself she was superior to her colleagues with their non-stop prattle about who was doing what to whom and, even in an emergency, she didn’t want to feel she had sunk to their level. For another, she really couldn’t be sure that she had heard what she thought she had heard. OK so it had sounded like someone having sex. Sounded a lot like it. Not the wild, out-of-control moaning and groaning that formed the principal backdrop to porn movies and which men seemed to find so exciting and to hell with the fact that no one in real life ever sounded remotely like that when they made love. No, this sound had been a lot more subtle, more restrained. No gasps, no groans, no “Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!” Just this tight rhythmic gasping. The kind of noise you could just picture a woman making as she lay on her back with her short skirt pushed all the way up to the tops of her thighs and her legs bent back and pulled apart so that the toe of each of her shoes was pointed directly at the ceiling. The kind of noise you could imagine her panting into the back of her hand as she tried to control the tide of rising pleasure and a stiff, swollen prick drove into her, into her, into her...

Karen became aware that her cheeks were burning. She raised a hand to her face and encountered a sheen of perspiration. Good God, she thought. Where on Earth had that come from? Had she really got such a vivid, such a racy, picture from just a couple of noises half heard on the other side of a door? That settled it. She was definitely not going to let Julie in on what she thought that she had heard. Karen was sharp enough and the various gossips in the office were clumsy enough, that she had a pretty clear idea what was said about her round the office. She knew the general consensus was that the main reason for her being “a bit of a bitch” was because she “wasn’t getting enough”. As if sex was like food or exercise and if you didn’t keep having a certain amount of it then things would start to go wrong with you. Well, if she was to start suggesting that a couple of her colleague were (fucking each other’s brains out) getting up to things that they shouldn’t during working hours and it turned out not to be true, then wouldn’t that be grist to the gossips mill? Karen had expected that Julie would be keen to scurry back to her desk now she had got something juicy which she could spread around the place, but the Cashier obviously thought there was more fun to be had from hanging around and observing the assistant manager’s discomfiture than in getting on with her work.

“Are you waiting for your performance review?”

“That’s right.”

“How do you think it’s going to go? Think you’ll get something good?”

Karen felt the flush returning to her cheeks and she licked her suddenly dry mouth with her tongue.

“I hope so,” she said and wondered if her voice sounded as strange and contorted to her colleague as it did in her own head.

Julie nodded towards the lap-top which was still tucked under Karen’s right arm.

“You got your write-up notes on that?”

Karen nodded in turn and said “Uh-huh”, but a rather worried frown had crept across her face. “That is to say, I started it.”

The idea of doing review preparations on the lap-tops was one of the various innovations that Simon had introduced into the branch. In the old days you would get ready for a performance review by filling out a paper questionnaire detailing your opinions about the year that had just ended: what had gone well, what had gone badly, what areas were in need of improvement, stuff like that. God know, since the management invariably ignored it and told you exactly to tell you, but at least it had been a familiar process.

Simon had taken all the stuff which had been on the paper forms and put it onto the lap-tops. He said that it made it easier to collate.

It was probably fair to say that Simon was keen on getting the staff to do more of their business on the lap-tops. In fact, if you were going to be honest about it, you would probably have said that he had something of a fetish about it. So many things that had previously been stored or delivered on paper were now delivered through the keyboard and the LCD screen.

Karen reckoned it was all just a ploy to make the staff do more of what ought to be day-work during their own time. She knew that most of the girls took their portables home with them and spent at least some of each evening reading company circulars, doing meeting preparation and so on. Karen had tried holding out against the trend: she felt strongly that you had your work life and you had your home life and you should do your best to keep the two well separated. (Like a woman’s legs, she thought, recalling that image of her unknown co-worked lying on her back on the interview room desk, and once again felt shocked at the words that had popped into her head. Where was all this stuff coming from?) She had stuck to her resolution quite well to begin with, but lately it seemed that she was spending more and more of her home time with her eyes fixed on the glowing LCD display. There just seemed to be so much to do at work at the moment. Really it was much easier, much more convenient, to do certain kinds of work at home. You could sit down and focus on the job at hand knowing that you weren’t going to get interrupted by the phone or a customer or one of your colleagues. You could relax, focus, get into the groove (play with your nipples) without any risk of interruption.

“Truth to tell,” said Karen, “I made a start on the questions but I don’t think I really got all that far.”

She would not have normally opened up like this to a junior but she was feeling at a bit of a disadvantage right now and she had a vague idea that maybe if she shared a little bit of weakness, a bit of vulnerability with Julie then maybe Julie would go a bit easier when it came to telling the rest of the office what she had seen. It seemed like a fairly forlorn hope, but it was the best that Karen had.

“You did get them all finished?” asked Julie, a note of pretend shock creeping into her voice. (At least. Karen hoped that she was pretending.) “Naughty girl! Simon’s going to be very upset. He was very insistent that all of us got all our preparation done before we went into the review. Very insistent indeed.” Karen looked closely at Julie. It was quite dark in the corridor, but she got the impression that the cashier was shaking ever so slightly. The tip of a pink tongue was poking over the edge of Julie’s full red lips.

“Simon says that it’s important that all of us spend the required number of hour working on the lap-tops,” Julie continued. “He says that it’s a sign of professionalism and commitment.”

Karen could tell from the way that she said it that Julie had got that phrase direct from the horse’s mouth and was pleased to be able to parrot it. A scowl tightened her features and she thought” “If you want to show some professionalism, you could start by getting your boobs a bit more under control.” It was a bit unfair, she supposed: after all it wasn’t Julie’s fault that she was pretty substantial upstairs, but on the other hand the cashier could have made the effort to make sure that her uniform blouse was held together by more than just a single button. Still, she didn’t suppose that the male customers who spent so much time queuing up to get their cash from Julie’s till were going to object too much at the sight of those warm white mounds so generously displayed.

Not even aware that she was doing it, Karen lifted her free hand and slipped it inside the folds of her jacket, running her palm slowly and (quite frankly) sensuously over the swell of her own breasts. Not as big as Julie’s, admittedly, but they were still quite shapely, quite firm, quite... responsive. Hurriedly, she took her hand away, grateful for the concealing presence of the thick woollen jacket. After all, it would hardly do to turn up for a meeting with her boss with her nipples standing up.

“I did put the time in,” said Karen, trying to drag her attention back to the topic in hand. “I must have spent an hour and a half on the lap-top last night.” Although that was probably an under-estimate. In fact, when she tried to think back to the previous evening she wasn’t too sure that she had done anything apart from work on the lap-top. Nothing that she was going to talk to one of her colleagues about, anyone. “It’s just so hard to concentrate, you know. All those swirling lights and colours and moving icons you always get on the documents Simon sends out.”

“Yeah, they’re distracting aren’t they?” said Julie.

“That’s just the right word. You find yourself looking at them and you forget what it is you’re meant to be doing. You just kind of melt away.”

“Yeah,” said Julie again, and the slow dreamy way she said it was a world apart from her normal brisk and forthright manner. “So you didn’t manage to get all the questions filled in then? You’re going to find yourself in hot water, girl.”

“I got most of them done,” said Karen, defensively. She hoped that she sounded more confident about that than she actually felt. The truth of the matter was that she didn’t really remember most of what she had written. Hell, she didn’t even remember most of the questions. She remembered the end of the evening when she had been lying on the bed in one of her new shorty nighties, with her body illuminated by the light that spilled from the screen, ankles pushed through the slats at the end of the bed and her fingers circling relentlessly around her moist and aching entrance, and she remembered coming a good deal harder than she normally did when she found herself on her own but the rest of the evening was pretty much a blur.

Still, she supposed that she must have got most of the questions answered. After all, what else would she have been doing in front of a lap-top for the best part of two hours?

While she was pondering on that, the door to the interview swung open. Julie muttered a quick and rather unexpected, “Hope it goes all right,” and scurried swiftly away. Karen turned just in time to see Alex Lane emerging from the door. The way she looked was enough to make Karen do a double-take. Alex worked in the Risk department: it was her job to look at the cheques which came in that didn’t have enough funds to cover then and determine which ones the bank was going to pay and which ones it was going to bounce. She spent most of her time dealing with angry and exasperated customers and she always looked more than ready to give back as good as she got. Not today, though. Today Alex was flushed and dreamy.

Her normally pale cheeks had a soft but healthy flush and the corners of her lips were tilted in a slow, seraphic smile. Looking at that smile, Karen was unable to stop herself from smirking.

“Good appraisal?” she asked.

The answer came out like a long and amazingly satisfied sigh. “The best, absolutely the best.” Karen shook her head and thought, I don’t know why you bothered to stuff your hand in your mouth. You go back to your desk looking and sounding like that and everyone in the branch is going to know what you were getting up to.

“Are you going to stand there all day?”

The voice from the other side of the door brought her back to herself, made her suddenly jump. “Aren’t you the one whose always going on about how important schedules are?”

Karen trotted into the room, cursing under her breath. Wasn’t that just typical of Simon, she thought. He kept her waiting for all that time—and not even for anything that could be described as working, either—and then he had a go at her for being unpunctual.

“Just plug your lap-top into the floor port will you? And then we can get started.”

She did as he he had told her, still feeling irritated and wondering why the sockets for the network cables always had to be in such inaccessible positions. The one in here was practically under the desk and she could only reach it by twisting her body into a really awkward position. The tight skirt that went with her uniform really didn’t help matters either. She wondered if she should try hiking it up a bit, but then she remembered the stockings she had on (and the bright red suspenders with little black hearts cut out of them) and thought better of the idea.

As she worked, Karen cast surreptitious glances around the room looking for any evidence of the activity which she was now practically certain had been going on in here. There was nothing obvious to be seen. In fact, there was pretty well nothing full-stop: the interview room was sparse to the point of drabness.

There were a couple of old and slightly dog-eared posters on the wall with advertisements for bank products on then. There was a carpet that looked dirty even when it had just been cleaned; a fluorescent light which was too harsh and too bright and made the place feel like an interrogation cell; a pair of business chairs, the small, rather rickety one which would be hers for the duration of the meeting and Simon’s big, black monstrosity which looked like a leather-fetishist’s impression of a throne. There was a high wooden shelf directly opposite the door with various files and folders on top of it. There was a small set of portable steps. There was a heavy-duty filing cabinet, the colour of a battleship which looked so old and immovable that it was easy to imagine that it had been here before the bank had even existed and that the interview room and the rest of the branch had been constructed around it.

The desk which Simon was sitting behind was too large for the room but didn’t look strong enough for the kind of thing which she had imagined happening on top of it.

There were a couple of things on the desk: two lap-tops, Simon’s and her own, both up and running with their black screen lids almost touching each other. There was a pad of writing paper and a ball-point pen beside it. To the right of Simon’s lap-top, next to the writing pad there was a little glass bowl which contained several small, white mints, and to its left there was a plate with various cakes and biscuits and other sticky confections on it.

There were two small china cups, one used the other not, and a large green pot.

Karen sniffed the air, hoping to catch the aroma of recent, vigorous sex but all she could smell was hot chocolate. The thick, creamy scent filled the air and drowned out anything else. The introduction of drinking chocolate into the daily lives of the staff had been another of Simon’s innovations. Before he had joined, the various members of staff had all thrown a certain amount of money into a number of different tea and coffee pots, and vicious territorial squabbles were regularly fought over who had the right to drink what milk or to add it to what brand of freeze-dried instant muck. Simon had done away with all that. With a wave of his managerial fingers he had dispensed with the hot water heater and the plastic boxes with their small, sad stock of stale tea bags and had replaced them with a state of the art milk steamer and a seemingly endless supply of drinking chocolate.

To give credit where it was due, Karen had to admit that the quality of the stuff was very good, certainly head and shoulders above the muck that they had been drinking before. On the few occasions that she had been tempted into having a sip, the taste had been exquisite. The stuff had been so rich that it seemed more like it had been made with double cream than ordinary milk. All the same, Karen had told herself that she wasn’t going to let herself get too fond of it, unlike several of her colleagues. It really was insanely rich. She reckoned there must be four or five thousand calories a cup. She made it a point of principal that she had never had more than three or four cups in a day. Five at the absolute most.

She finished grouting around on the floor and sat back in her seat, directing a barely disguised glare towards Simon. It wouldn’t have hurt him to have volunteered to help her, she thought, but he obviously felt that his managerial dignity was better served by sprawling in his big, black office chair with his hands folded complacently over the his belly.

Besides, he probably got a kick out of seeing women crawling around on the floor.

“Are you ready to start now?” he asked her.

“I’ve been ready for ages,” she retorted a little bit tartly.

He shook his head slowly as if she had disappointed him. “Karen, Karen, Karen, do you really have to be so confrontational all the time? We’re on the same side here, you know. Just ease up a little, have a mug of hot chocolate.”

“No thank-you, Simon,” she said. “I had one just before I came in.”

“All the same, I think you ought to have another one.”

“No, really, I —”

He was already pouring, pushing the mug towards her. Karen picked it up and took a little sip. It seemed easier to do that than to refuse and maybe get her appraisal off to a bad start. And it wasn’t if she needed to have more than a mouthful, just enough to be sociable. On the other hand, she thought, as the thick, warm, sweetness rushed onto a tongue, it probably wouldn’t hurt to have just a little bit more. She tipped the mug a little further forward, letting the sensation flood into her mouth. It really was extraordinarily good. Karen gave a totally unfeigned sigh of contentment.

“Have another one,” Simon urged her, already re-filling her mug.

“No, really, I shouldn’t.”

“Nonsense, just because you’re at work it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t find the time to indulge yourself with a little physical pleasure.”

It was a perfectly innocent remark, but Karen found herself glancing at the top of the desk and felt herself flushing again. She felt a little light-headed, almost as if she was tipsy. Wouldn’t that be a thing, now, discovering that you could get drunk on hot chocolate?

Simon seemed to be staring at her rather closely. “Why not have a bit of cake as well?”

He pushed the plate a little closer too her. It was piled up with éclairs, cream slices, cream doughnuts, various other things all sticky and delicious and terribly, terribly bad for you. Karen looked at then longingly but finally shook her head.

“I can’t,” she said. “I’m trying to watch my weight.”

“You honestly don’t need to worry, Karen. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your body. Believe me, I’ve been studying it a good deal and I can tell you that categorically. In fact, I sent a survey round to all the male members of staff and it was agreed that you were definitely the bedable of the girls in the office. Although it was felt that you didn’t always make as much of yourself as you could.”

Karen blinked. She didn’t know quite what to say to that. On the one hand it was clearly a totally inappropriate thing for a manager to be saying to one of his staff, but on the other hand she couldn’t help feeling a little bit flattered at the idea of all her male colleagues thinking about her, assessing her “bedability”. And giving her high ratings too. She took another long slurp of the chocolate while she tried to decide if she liked that. On the whole, she thought she probably did.

“Simon,” she said.

“You know, Karen. I think I’d prefer it if you called me Mister Magister. I mean, I’m all in favour of informality at work but this is after all something of what you might call a power situation. I am making an assessment of you, making plans for you and a I think a little bit more formality would be good. Don’t you?”

“I suppose so,” said Karen, rather uncertainly. She was surprised at the turn the conversation had taken. It distracted her from whatever she had previously been thinking about. “And are you going to call me Miss Hanley?”

“No, I’m going to call you Karen,” he said with smooth complacency. “I think that’s a more appropriate way for a manager to address a subordinate, a junior, an underling. Especially if she happens to be a woman. What do you think?”

Karen blinked a couple of times and swallowed very hard. She could hardly believe what she was hearing. That was such a chauvinistic, sexist, patronising attitude.

“If you think that would be right, Mr Magister.”

“’Sir’,” he suggested.

“If you think that would be right, sir.”

She realised that her nipples had gone hard.

“I do think that would be right,” said Simon Magister. “And I think that you ought to have a piece of cake as well.”

“I think I’d rather have one of those mints instead,” she said. “Better for the health and all that.” He shook his head.

“Oh no,” he said. “I don’t think that would do at all. Mints are really more of a man thing.” And by way of illustration, he popped one into his mouths.

“Just likes cakes and biscuits are the right thing for the girls. Sweets for the sweet, and all that. I really think that you ought to have a cake. In fact, I think you ought to have two.”

Karen had an éclair. It left a sticky smear of chocolate on her fingers. There was nothing to wipe her hands on so she used her lips and tongue to clean herself up. Simon watched and nodded with approval. “Now, let’s move on. I want to talk about the questionnaire you filled in. I’ve had a look at your answers and I have to say that I’m a little disappointed. Well, more that a little, actually. In fact, to be brutally honest, your answers have significantly failed to satisfy me and I feel that this is actually typical of your attitude to work in general.”

For several long moments Karen just stared at her boss. She was shocked. This wasn’t at all what she had been expecting.

“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“Well, why don’t you open your copy of the document up and take a look for me?”

She fumbled with the trackball control on the lap-top and after a moment or two succeeded in locating and opening the questionnaire. It filled the screen with the usual combination of text and scrolling, rolling icons. Karen sat and stared at it.

After a while she heard Simon calling her name. She jerked in her chair, shaking her head groggily as if she was just coming awake after a long and blissful sleep.

“Huh? Huh? What?” she mumbled.

As her eyes shifted from disfocused back to focused it seemed for a moment as if the dancing icons were going to resolve into a clear textual message but the moment passed before she had a chance to read what is said. She suddenly noticed that her left hand was tucked inside her jacket. Her breasts felt swollen and heavy. Tingling. Hurriedly she removed her hand and put it back in her lap.

“What do you notice about the answers you have given?” Simon said.

“I know I missed a few of the questions out,” she admitted.

“A few? You hardly answered any of them.”

“It’s hard to concentrate when you’re working on the lap-tops. All those lights and images.” To say nothing of those sudden bursts of powerful and distracting sensations from in between her legs. She didn’t know quite why it was but it seemed to Karen that these days she always started to feel horny after working on the lap-top for a while. “I don’t know why we have to use them, anyway. We always used to do things on paper in the old days and that worked perfectly well.”

“Karen,” said Mr Magister firmly. “Computers are the tool of today. They make communication quicker and more efficient and they bring members of staff much closer together. None of the others seem to have any problems with them. In fact, you can hardly keep most of your colleagues away from them. If you find it hard to work with the machines then you’ll just have to spend more time until you can do it better.”

“Yes, sir,” said Karen Hanley.

“Good. And anyway, it isn’t just the fact that you’ve only answered about a fifth of the questions. It’s the answers you have given. I must say you seem to have a very flattering impression of your own abilities and in a number of areas it really isn’t one which I can agree with.”

“What areas would those be, sir?”

“Well, this one for example: ‘Is flexible and receptive to change.’ You’ve given yourself an eight out of ten for that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have to say I disagree. Let me tell you why. A couple of weeks ago I sent an email around the branch giving specific instructions that all female members of staff were to keep documents and forms for customer meetings on the high shelf in the banking hall. And yet, during an interview yesterday I couldn’t help but notice that you still had a whole set of forms in the top draw of your desk. I’d hardly say that showed a flexible and adaptable attitude, would you?”

“But, with respect, sir,” said Karen, meaning the exact opposite, “The rule is really stupid. It’s just so inefficient. If I have the forms in my desk they’re just where I need them and I can get through the interview much more quickly. If they’re up on the shelf I have to walk half way across the banking hall to get them and it just holds everything up.”

“That is not the point at all,” said Simon sternly. “Allow me to demonstrate. Let’s pretend we’re in an interview, a sales situation. I want you to go and get the yellow folder which is up on the top shelf over there.”

Karen sighed, but decided it was best to humour her boss and do what he wanted. Maybe if she kept him sweet he would allow her to have another of those delicious cakes or another mug of hot chocolate. She couldn’t remember the last time she had enjoyed something as much as that hot chocolate—well, not while she had had all her clothes on, anyway.

She got up and walked across the room toward the shelf. She wanted to show him that this really was more awkward and inconvenient than doing it his way so she made a point of bending down low to pick up the stairs before moving then to where she wanted them to be. Then she made a point of not standing on the top step (which was probably a good thing since that sense of dizziness had definitely increased and she wasn’t too sure she would have been able to keep her balance.) Instead she stood on the lower step and showed how she needed to stretch her body to reach then things on the shelf. It did not occur to her that both of these actions cased her skirt to rise up on her thighs.

“Just stop there for a minute, would you,” said Simon. Karen did as she was told.

“I really don’t see why you think doing it this way is better,” she said.

“Because,” said Simon, “when you do it this way you give the male customers are a chance to admire your legs. Nice stockings, by the way. I’m glad to see you don’t ignore all the emails I send out.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She didn’t understand what he was getting at.

“I assume that you’ve changed from tights to stockings in response to the email that I sent out. The one about improving the appearance of customer-facing staff.”

“Not at all,” she said. “I just decided I liked them.”

Now that he had reminded her of it, she did remember the email. It had made her quite indignant at the time. He had suggested that too many of the staff looked “frumpy” and “unattractive” and that as a matter of good business practice they should all do what they could to try and “tart themselves up.” She had angrily dragged the note into the trash can, determined that messages like that were going to be treated with the contempt they so clearly deserved, and she knew that several of the other staff members felt exactly the same. The odd thing was, though, that ever since that message had gone round it did seem that the girls were dressing more flamboyantly and that Karen herself had purchased a couple of new pairs of shoes with heels that were distinctly higher than the ones she had formerly worn. She decided that she wasn’t going to think about that right now.

She said, “And what happens if the customer who’s seeing me is a woman?”

Simon snorted as if he thought that was too unlikely or too unimportant a question to be worth his bothering with.

“Well, you’ll still be putting on a show for your male co-workers, won’t you? After all as one of the senior female employees in the branch it really is your duty to make the place as enjoyable and entertaining as possible for the men who have to work here.”

Karen thought about that. Up until today it had never occurred to her that the main point of her job was to be eye-candy for the men with whom she worked, but now that Simon had drawn her attention to it she was really rather surprised that she hadn’t thought of it before. It was good of him to point it out to her. That was like him all over, really. So kind and always so helpful. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed before. Just like she hadn’t noticed how often he was right about so many different things.

Now that she had spotted it, Karen felt quite ashamed at the number of rude and hurtful things that she had said about him and to him. Not that Simon had ever seemed hurt by anything she said. He always seemed to be more amused by her than anything else. Still, it wasn’t very good of her to have said rude things to her boss. Karen undid a couple of buttons on her blouse and wondered if there was anything she ought to be doing to try and make it up to him.

Simon said, “Actually while you’re up there, there’s something I want to try.”

She hadn’t heard him get up but, all at once he was standing directly behind him. It didn’t seem right that a man so big and flabby-looking should be able to move so quietly, to get from one part of the room to another without her even noticing. It was almost as if her could put her consciousness on hold for a moment or two and then switch it back on, switch her back on when he had finished whatever he was doing.

“Just stand still for a minute, would you?”

She felt his hands on her legs. They started at her knees and gradually rose upwards. She could feel the fabric of her skirt bunching, riding upwards, could feel the bare skin above her stocking top being exposed to the air. A part of her felt outraged and she knew that she ought to knock his hands away, to shout, to do something to protest about this invasion of her personal space. But the thing was, he had told her to stand still and she knew that if you wanted to be a proper professional then you had to do what your manager told you to do. That was what being a junior, being a subordinate, meant.

She had her back to him and was unable to turn round but she somehow got the feeling that he had stepped a few feet away from him. She was pretty well certain that he was still looking at her, still studying her exposed flesh.

“Yes, I was right,” he said. “I thought that skirt was too long and it is. If you can get a couple of replacements made up then I think that would be so much better all round. Do you want to come down now? Oh and don’t forget that file I asked you to bring.”

Karen climbed back down, thinking how lucky she was to have a boss who knew so much about uniforms. As she sat down, she noticed that the icons were still dancing round the lap-top screen. Idly, she helped herself to a cream puff and looked at the moving pictures for a while.

“Karen,” said Simon. He had reached out and taken hold of her hand, drawing her back to herself. His skin was strong and warm against her own. Her gave her fingers an affectionate squeeze as he let go.

“While we’re on the subject of uniform, there’s something else that I need to talk to you about. That file I asked you to get is the current staff regulations document for uniforms. Still on paper you’ll be pleased to note. Could you read it out for me, please. Oh, and help yourself to a macaroon while you do it.”

Karen frowned, feeling a little puzzled. She flipped open the folder and read, “Black or red skirt, black shoes, stockings.” (It had used to read “tights or stockings” she noticed but the first two words had been scored out.) “Red blazer, white blouse (long or short sleeves).”

She stopped. That was all it said.

“Well?”

She frowned. “Well what?”

“What do you notice?”

What Karen was mostly noticing at that moment was that her breasts were aching and there was a persistent trickle of moisture in between her thighs. She assumed that wasn’t what Simon was talking about. He said, with exaggerated patience, “What do you notice that isn’t on that list you just read out?”

“I don’t understand.”

He sighed, as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe the intellectual limits of the people that he had to work with.

“Underwear, girl! It doesn’t say anything about underwear. No bras, no panties, no G-strings. Those things just aren’t part of your uniform, are they?”

Karen sat and stared at him. Admittedly in the last few minutes she had found herself making the discovery that Simon was usually right about what ever he happened to be saying, but surely he couldn’t be right about this. Could he?

“Well are they?” he repeated.

“Well it doesn’t actually mention them as such, sir, but I always thought it was safe to assume...”

“Karen,” he said sternly. “This is a professional organisation. We are governed by a strict range of rules and regulations. We can’t have our staff going around making assumptions whenever they feel like it. Especially not our female staff who are, let’s face it, mostly not that bright. No, if the guidelines do not say anything about underwear then you can take it from me that your uniform does not include underwear. Have you got any underwear on at the moment?”

“Yes, sir.”

All at once Karen felt deeply ashamed of herself. How could she have come to work wearing underwear? And on her review day, too.

“It’ll have to go,” said Simon.

“Yes, sir, it will sir, I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again, sir.”

“That’s not good enough, Karen. I need you to take them off now.”

“Now, sir?”

“Yes, now. Do you think I can let you go back out into the banking hall, let you deal with customers and colleagues without a proper uniform on. What do you think that would do to my authority?”

“Yes, sir. You’re right, sir.”

“Of course I’m right,” said Simon. “You’ll have to take them off right now.”

“Yes, sir. Is it all right if I just nip out to the loo?”

“No it isn’t. You’re in the middle of a review, girl. You can’t just go wandering off whenever you feel like it. If I let you go off right now, God knows what you might get up to.” The implication of that sentence was obvious and Karen would normally have been insulted by it. The problem was, judging by the solid, hungry ache that was coming up from between her thighs, the implication was entirely justified. If she was allowed to go off by herself, Karen had all to clear an idea what she would be getting up to. She knew exactly where Simon was steering this conversation, what he planned on making her do. “You’re just going to have to take your bra and knickers off right here in front of me,” he said. “You really don’t have any choice in the matter, you know.”

“Yes, sir,” said Karen.

She was going to have to do what he told her. She didn’t have any choice. She stood up. She hoped that her hands would stop trembling. She pulled her skirt back up again and then slipped her hands underneath it. It was the work of just a few moment to slip her knickers off.

“Give them to me.”

She did.

“They’re wet,” he observed. “Practically dripping. Are you sexually excited, Karen?”

“Yes sir.”

It embarrassed her to admit it, but somehow that embarrassment turned round on itself and became part of her arousal.

“That’s good,” said Simon. “We should all make an effort to enjoy ourselves at work. Speaking personally, I like to enjoy myself three or four times a day. How about you, Karen? What’s your target, what’s your quota? And while you’re thinking about that, would you hurry up and take your bra off. Don’t turn around,” he added hastily, seeing that she was about to do just that. “Don’t turn your back on me, girl. That would be rude.”

Karen thought as she unbuttoned her blouse, you didn’t mind me turning my back on you a few moments ago. But of course that was different. A few minutes ago he had been wanting to look at her thighs and probably her backside. Now he wanted to look at her tits. He wanted her to show him her tits. And she was going to do it.

He took her brassiere from her and put it in his desk draw along with her wet knickers. She thought, so it’s OK for him to use his desk draw then? But she supposed that made sense. It was beginning to become clear to her that under the new regime in this branch the rules which applied to women and the ones which applied to men were very different indeed. She started to re-button her blouse. She had been going to do it all the way back up and then put her jacket back on but he stopped her before she was even half-way through.

“Just leave it like that,“he said. “We don’t have a lot of time left if we’re going to get to the end of your review.”

And of course, she thought, with me sitting here with my blouse half undone, you’re getting a first rate view of my tits. He thought that it was very probable that he could see her nipples. If he couldn’t actually view them directly he would certainly be able to see the shape they made as they jutted against the fabric. She had always been aware that she had sensitive and responsive breasts, she always enjoyed having her lovers fondle them, but she could never remember a time when they had been quite as alert and excited as they were right now.

Simon said, “And since you’ve shown such a marked improvement in attitude in the last few minutes why don’t you reward yourself by having one of those doughnuts. In fact, why not go ahead and take the lot of them.”

She looked at the plate and hesitated. She always had problems eating jam doughnuts.

“Oh go on,” said Simon. “You know you really want to. Why don’t you just scoff them all down.”

And as soon as he said that, Karen realised that he was right, she did really want to. In spite of the number of sweet things she had already consumed, she found that her mouth was eager for more. She snatched the first of the doughnuts off the plate and bit into it greedily. It was only after all four of them were gone that she looked back at Simon and discovered that a very disapproving expression had come across his face.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

“Look at you! You’ve got jam and sugar everywhere.” It was true. There were longs smears of jam and crystallised sugar all over her skirt and blouse. She was pretty sure that some had run down into her cleavage.

“That’s won’t do at all,” said Simon. “I can’t let you go back into the banking hall looking like that, you’re a disgrace to your uniform!”

“What do you want me to do about it?” said Karen with a tiny spark of defiance. “You can’t expect me to go out into the banking hall stark naked.”

“No,” said Simon, although the way he stretched out the word made Karen think that he was seriously thinking about. Or at any rate he was thinking about how she would look if he made her do it. Karen found that she was thinking about it too. Her legs began to drift a little apart.

“No,” said Simon abruptly, regretfully. “I can’t do that. But fortunately there is an alternative. I don’t know if you know but the bank is planning on releasing a new range of uniforms and it just so happens that I have some early trial versions available. There’s one in the bottom draw of the filing cabinet that ought to fit you. Why don’t you go and put it on.”

By this stage, Karen wasn’t even bothering to argue. She didn’t bother unbuttoning her blouse either, just pulled it over her head and then used a corner of it to dab at the smears of jam and sugar that were over her mouth and body. Her small, round breasts jiggled enticingly as she did this.

Simon nodded approvingly.

“Take your skirt off too,” he said.

“You know, Karen” he added. “During the last twenty minutes or so I’ve really come to see you in a different light. I’ll be frank with you, before this appraisal started I really wasn’t too sure that you were going to fit into the organisation that I was trying to build here. But after what you’ve shown me I think that there is a lot the two of us can do together.”

As she bent down to look in the draw of the cabinet, Karen was more than half expecting that Simon would come up behind her, position himself behind her open thighs. She was so wet by now that she was sure that he would have no trouble in doing what ever he wanted. She was surprised and more than a little disappointed when she glanced over her naked shoulder and saw that he was still in his seat. His eyes were shining with pleasure. She was also surprised to discover that there actually was a uniform in the drawer. Well, sort of. It was more like the kind of thing you would wear to bed than a piece of professional clothing.

Simon said, “The bank asked its male employees what kind of clothes they thought their female colleagues ought to where to work and this was the result.”

Karen could well believe it. As she wriggled slowly into it she couldn’t help feeling that she had been co-opted into some adolescent sexual fantasy. The dress (if you could call it that, it was more like a little twist of cloth) did actually have a skirt but it was so short and cut so high on the side of the thigh that it might just have well not have bothered.

Meanwhile the bodice was cut so low that it was very hard to see how you could wear it and not have your boobs pop out on a regular basis. Furthermore it was so sheer that even when they were covered up they wouldn’t really be covered. And Karen could already see that as soon as the material got even slightly wet it would become completely transparent. Well, she thought, at least while I’m wearing this nobody will need to wonder if I’m complying with all the details of the uniform rules. They’ll jut be able to look at me and see.

“I can’t wear an outfit like this in front of my colleagues,” she said. To say nothing of the general public. The thought of wearing an outfit like this while she was out in the banking hall was making her positively dizzy. She could certainly imagined that if all the girls were wearing costumes like this the number of customers they were getting was going to rocket sharply. To say nothing of the number of hard-ons.

“Why ever not?” said Simon. “It’s not as if you’ll be showing them anything they haven’t seen already.”

“What did you say?”

“It’s true,” said Simon. “Look.” And by way of illustration he turned his lap-top around and showed her what was on his screen. It was a picture of the room. A picture of her without any clothes on.

“You bastard. You’ve been watching me. Watching me—How long has this been going on?”

“Quite a while. Ever since you started giving us something that was worth watching. It’s not just you, though. All the lap-tops have been modified one way or the other. Spy cams for the girls’ machines and high-res video cards for the boys. Haven’t you wondered why so many people have been asking you if you’ve been sleeping all right recently?”

Actually Karen had wondered, but she had never thought to equate the questions and the knowing looks with what she got up to while she was working on her lap-top.

“You... you...”

She was practically lost for words.

“Oh come on,” he said. “There’s really no sense in pretending to be angry. If you’re honest about your feelings you’ll admit that the thought of your colleagues getting stiff by watching you and the other girls is actually exciting for you. Now you know we’re watching you’re going to be spending more time in front of the lap-top. Just like you’ll ‘forget’ your coat on days when it looks like rain just because you know it’ll make your clothes go see-through and add to the excitement for you and your co-workers.” Karen thought about what it would be like to spend the days surrounded by groups of sexually excited males. Of course, if it was her that had got them excited it really ought to be up to her to do something like. You couldn’t leave them like that with their cocks all still and swollen. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be professional.

“Right,” said Simon. “So we won’t have any more nonsense about how upset you are. “There is one more thing, though.” He was looking at her questionnaire again. “According to this, your greatest strength is meeting customer needs. Suppose I was a customer right now. Do you think there might be something that I needed?”

She stepped a little closer to him. She looked into his lap and saw the shape of his prick pressing hard against the front of his trousers.

“I think there possibly might be,” she said. And she smiled.

“And what would you do about it?”

She dropped to her knees in front of him.

“I’d give it to you.”

Swiftly she unzipped his trousers and pulled him out into the day light. She licked the last of the sugar off her lips and then lowered her mouth onto his cock.

She ran her tongue all over him, relishing the sensation and then began to move rhythmically back and forth.

“Do you feel that, little Karen?” Simon asked her, his voice beginning to become just a little breathless and distracted. “Can you taste it? Believe me, darling, that’s the taste of success.”

Karen’s own excitement, which had been building for some time finally became more than she could stand. She flipped the fringe of the tiny skirt to one side and pushed a couple of fingers into her hot and eager cunt. Simon let her get on with it for a moment or two and then he took her wrist and pulled it away.

“If you’re feeling that excited, sweetie, you don’t have to make do with your fingers. That’s just for home time. During work hours there’s something better to be had.”

He pulled her up and positioned her over his lap. “You see,” he said. “If there’s ever anything you want from one of your male colleagues then all you have to do is ask and I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to give you what you want.” By way of illustration he reached down over her jumping belly and began to run his fingers over her engorged clitoris. She gasped with pleasure and increased the pace at which she was grinding herself against his cock.

“As long,” he added, in a sentence which was increasingly punctuated by gasps. “As long as you do the same for them. Mutual. Satisfaction of needs. That’s what it’s. All about. All about. Being. Professional.”