by Emily Tilton
“Okay,” Bradley replied, and hung up, still frowning as he opened the mail from the state government with the registration link for Marriage Subsidy, Head of Household pages.
“Welcome to our program for prospective husbands! As the future head of your household, you’re the one who will apply for and receive the funding we have to offer. You’re also the one who must decide whether the program is for you and your bride. As you’ll read about here, under the secret emergency powers act, the governor has invoked certain capacities of state authority that apply even in private homes. Should you qualify, and decide you wish to accept the marriage subsidy, your government will back you up in maintaining order in your home.”
Bradley’s frown deepened considerably. Any lawyer who had come through law school in the past ten years knew that they would probably have to deal with one or more of the secret laws passed at both the state and federal level in the wake of growing societal unrest. They had proliferated in the last couple of years, too, as energy shortages had become more common. Still, Oakville’s sleepy Midwestern state seemed to have taken the matter to an unexpected extreme.
“Reliable studies have demonstrated that a large percentage of couples—anywhere from 10% to 70%, depending on the study—would be happier with better defined roles in the household, and that the traditional roles of husband and wife promote both familial and community harmony. Less-well-known studies, due to the controversial nature of the topic, indicate that the foundation for this happiness lies in the bedroom.”
Now Bradley’s eyebrows rose so high he thought they might ascend to his hairline. Not only did the state want to come into the private home, now, but it seemed the government had awarded itself the power to venture into the bedroom as well.
“As a head of household, you will have the final say over what happens in your and your bride’s bedroom, but thanks to the state’s access to highly advanced biometric analysis, your program officer will have recommendations to make, based on your bride’s social media activity and, later, her medical examination. You may find these recommendations surprising, but your program officer will talk them through with you until you feel comfortable. So sign up today for the free qualification analysis!”
Bradley called Jake Davies back, even less sure that the program would work for him and Zoe, but at the same time even more intrigued than he had been before. As he and Zoe had courted, he had almost tried to force the issue of sex several times—not to force Zoe herself... absolutely not. But forcing the issue would have been different, if he had managed to do it. Bradley had had two serious girlfriends, as well as a few hookups. He had a right to consider himself experienced, he knew.
But none of them had been a virgin when he had met them, and something in Zoe’s innocent-yet-mischievous blue eyes, when he kissed her deeply and she snuggled against him, and something in her protesting murmur when his hand slipped between her thighs and he almost began to unbutton her jeans, made him stop. He could wait. Zoe wanted her wedding night to be special. He would be able to teach her the way he had always heard a virgin should be taught, tenderly, and they could speak about all the mysteries of their marriage bed then.
“You read the HoH section?” Davies asked.
“I did,” Bradley said, endeavoring to sound like he encountered secret government takeovers of private life on a daily basis. “Can you tell me a little more about what’s meant here by your recommendations surprising me?”
Davies had chuckled at the other end of the line. “I can’t really get into that until I’m sure you qualify, but I’ll just say that most prospective husbands—including relatively experienced ones like you—don’t know how much science has told us about young women’s needs. May I go ahead and run an analysis on your fiancée’s social media activity?”
Looking again at the website, Bradley thought those words had probably decided him—how much science has told us about young women’s needs. He felt that if he had known just a little more about Zoe Ralston’s needs, he might have felt more confident about taking their wonderful cuddling further—and about making sure they had a wedding night and a honeymoon to remember.
His office intercom crackled to life, and Bradley sighed, knowing it would tell him his investor, Randall Dosser, was on the line. Instead, the office manager’s voice said, “Bradley, Randall says he’s tied up and he doesn’t mind skipping today’s update. He’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Then, as he thanked the office manager, wondering how fortune could have given him half an hour of free time, he noticed that on the special page for heads of household a link had popped up—something Davies had told him about but, because his schedule would never permit Bradley to take advantage of the opportunity, he had forgotten.
Exam in progress. Click to watch.
Bradley clicked, and saw a live feed from the examination room, where on a relatively noise-free audio stream, he heard the middle-aged nurse say, “Go ahead and take off all your clothes, Zoe.”
Zoe’s sweet, heart-shaped face had the pink hue it got whenever Bradley kissed her.
“Really?” she asked. “I thought... I mean, I didn’t think...”
“Honey,” the nurse said, “this is an exam for the marriage subsidy. It’s going to be a little bit embarrassing, I know, but it’s about marriage, so there are going to be some, you might call them grownup things involved. If you want to follow your future husband’s instructions—remember, he’s the one who signed you up—you need to go ahead and get undressed.”
Zoe’s cheeks had gone beet red. She swallowed hard and very visibly. Bradley wanted to jump through the screen and hold her in his arms to reassure her, but he also found himself fascinated by her reaction, which despite her basic lack of worldly experience he supposed he wouldn’t have expected. It was a doctor’s exam, after all: everyone knew you had to get undressed for them. This one, he knew, would have some strange quirks, but Zoe hadn’t even really heard about any of those yet.
“Okay,” she said quietly. She looked around the little examination room, now—at the back of the door, in the corner. “Where’s the gown?”
The nurse smiled very patronizingly. “There’s no gown for this exam, honey. Get your clothes off so we can get started.”
“But—” Zoe protested.
“Honey, if you want to leave like the last girl did, that’s your right, but I can tell you that your fiancé signed the both of you up for this program, and that you’ve been prequalified, so I know for a fact that you belong here, even if you don’t know it.”
Zoe’s eyes went very wide. “What does that mean?”
Bradley felt his brow furrow. Jake Davies had said that Zoe’s reaction might surprise him, and it appeared the program officer had understood something Bradley didn’t, yet. Zoe seemed to him not actually to be horrified, but instead to be trying to make herself feel horrified—or perhaps his lovely girl did have a part of her that had grown outraged at this strange treatment by the nurse, but she also had another, different part, which had started to say other kinds of things.
“It means,” the nurse replied with a smile whose patience seemed on the verge of getting thin, “that if you want to do as your future husband has asked, you need to get undressed.”
“Can’t I... can’t I leave my... underwear on?”
The nurse shook her head. “You’re going to learn pretty soon, I think, honey, what happens to girls who can’t follow instructions, but at the moment this is your last chance. Take everything off, including your panties, or go home to your fiancé and tell him you don’t want to be part of the program.”
Chapter Three
Zoe’s heart beat faster than she had thought it ever could. Her right hand, which had like the left turned into a little fist against her hip, against the denim of her jeans as if to keep them on, rose a bit into the air. She meant it to ward off the nurse, she told herself, not to do anything else, to adjust herself anywhere else.
Nurse Carter’s eyes
seemed to know, though, into what a dismaying state this terrible conversation had cast Zoe.
Bradley doesn’t know that the exam is like this. He can’t know that this program is making me take off all my clothes.
The thought sounded so absurd in her ears that a part of her wanted to laugh. It was just a medical exam. Doctors and nurses had to be able to look at you, and to touch you, if they were going to figure out how to care for you, right?
Zoe felt a deep crease develop on her forehead as she realized that she didn’t have any reason, really, either to fear this medical exam or—and thinking about this made her mouth twist to the side of its own accord as yet another surge of heat traveled to her face—to feel so strange, down below. Something about it being her fiancé who had sent her here?
About ‘traditional marriage’?
Zoe felt a little shudder go through her whole body at that thought, and she hoped desperately that Nurse Carter hadn’t noticed it. She had to buy some time: she had delayed so long, now, and so she had no choice. She reached her hands down to the hem of her pink cotton top and, turning away from the nurse toward the exam chair, started to raise it over her tummy, then to her shoulders, at the same time kicking off her sandals.
“No bra, honey?” the nurse asked.
Zoe didn’t want to turn her face back over her shoulder. She wanted to put the remark in some category of awkward small talk of the sort that she supposed a nurse could make with a girl soon to marry and join the ranks of adult women who might comment on their peers’ underwear choices.
But something in Nurse Carter’s voice seemed to have more judgment in it than would accompany that kind of small talk. Zoe couldn’t help it: she did turn halfway around, with her shirt up and her little bra-less breasts bare.
“Oh... I... I—” she stammered. “You know, I’m...”
Now she wanted desperately to brazen the moment out, the way she might have at one of the dress fittings to which she’d gone with her best friend and maid of honor Cindy, if Cindy had said something teasing about the size of Zoe’s breasts. Nurse Carter’s eyes, though, had confirmed to Zoe’s dismay that some of the older woman’s judgment both as a nurse and as a wiser, more experienced woman—a mother, probably, and even a matriarch—had gone into the question about Zoe’s underwear choices.
“Yes, dear,” the nurse said. “Your breasts certainly are small, but they’re not small enough to go out in public without at least a halter top on, now are they? Really, you should be wearing a bralette, if not an underwire.”
The nurse’s tone seemed to shift from light banter to censorious judgment and back, in the blink of an eye. The first part of her little speech had made the entire top half of Zoe’s body go hot—even as, again, the feeling below her waist continued to trouble her. Then that tone seemed to give way in the older woman’s voice to mere idle advice of the kind a saleswoman at a department store might give. The smile on her really very pleasant round face seemed to tell Zoe that she only meant it as a helpful hint for a young bride whose mother apparently, if she were around, didn’t feel comfortable talking about the subject with her daughter.
Which is the case, certainly, Zoe thought as she turned back toward the exam chair and finished taking off her top to lay it on the seat, then put her hands to the waistband of her jeans. Mary Ralston hadn’t seemed interesting in educating her daughter on anything to do with the nebulous realm of becoming a woman. Zoe hadn’t minded: it had all seemed fairly straightforward, in sex ed, and not getting anything from her mother except the occasional spare pad, given and received without any communication more explicit than a raised eyebrow and a nod, had seemed to Zoe to furnish a blessed lack of embarrassment between them.
Now, though, she couldn’t help wondering if a little more information concerning lingerie choices might have helped, though really how could even that have averted the terrible dilemma Zoe faced now? Nor was it even a dilemma, really, as much as the knowledge that she had no choice but to suffer much, much more embarrassment in a moment than she had suffered hitherto. Dilemma meant you could decide which of two options would have the worse consequences, but Zoe’s only choices besides unbuttoning her jeans and taking them down and showing Nurse Carter that she had a thong on seemed to be running out of the room bare-chested or trying to start a fire behind the nurse’s back.
Again the rational part of her wondered why it seemed like such a big deal. She had panties on, at least; sometimes with jeans she didn’t, if the laundry hadn’t gotten done in a while. She should feel grateful, she told herself, that even though she hadn’t known about this stupid exam and she hadn’t thought she would have to take off her clothes, she still happened to be wearing a perfectly clean pair of panties—at least, she remembered with a deep frown, perfectly clean until she had paused at the kitchen counter, and until her visit to the clinic had exerted such a strange effect.
She fumbled a little at the button, and then, trying hard to feel normal and casual, she got it open, unzipped the fly, and started to skin down the jeans.
Nurse Carter didn’t say anything. From behind Zoe came a single sound, though, that sent a tremor straight to the place where she least wanted to feel a tremor now. A cluck of the nurse’s tongue against her palate, the sound of matronly disapproval of a young bride’s scandalous panties. Then, so much worse that it made Zoe feel lightheaded, the nurse sniffed the air.
Zoe had to push down a whimper that had almost come from her throat, because she could smell it too. Her pussy, from which she now had to pull down the gray thong panties. When Zoe had pulled down her jeans, the rich, warm scent of a young bride’s need for her husband’s traditional attention had filled the air of the exam room.
Nurse Carter made no other sounds. Trembling, Zoe put her jeans on the table, wishing now that she had just taken off her panties inside them. She hooked her thumbs into the waistband, realizing suddenly that Bradley had never seen her naked and wondering if that were weird—for a bride to have to undress for a nurse before she had ever undressed for her fiancé.
Then even the word for began to seem strange to her, as with her shaking hands she finally started to draw down the cotton panties that left her butt-cheeks so sexily bare. I’m undressing for this nurse, the same way I’ll have to undress for Bradley... when he tells me to, on our wedding night. The way a traditional husband does, when the time comes.
The time. The time for... for sex. The bride’s first time.
The panties whispered against her thighs, her calves, and Zoe had to step out of them awkwardly with the feeling of Nurse Carter’s eyes on her bottom and maybe even between her thighs. She couldn’t keep from bending, and moving so that if the nurse chose, she could see down there, where maybe it even... glistened a little bit.
Biting her lip, she put the panties atop her jeans on the exam chair. She prepared herself to turn around and face Nurse Carter again, but the woman said, in a tone that betrayed a little exasperation, as if for a little girl who should have known better, “Go ahead and put your clothes on the chair in the corner, Zoe. Then you can hop up on the exam chair for me.”
Zoe could hardly feel the additional blush these words caused, on top of all the other humiliation. A moment before she had felt ready to face the older woman, but now as she obeyed the nurse’s instruction and picked up the pile of her top, jeans, and panties, a fresh whiff of the fragrance she had imparted to the cotton of her underwear came to her nose, and another flush of heat in her face with it.
“Wait a moment,” Nurse Carter said. “You can give me your panties, actually. I need to have a look at them.”
Zoe managed only with the greatest difficulty to turn the little sob that rose in her throat into a puff of air from her nostrils. Her whole body froze for a moment as she tried to get the rest of it under control. Then, finding the resolve to keep herself calm, she turned, with her clothes in her arms, and said in what she hoped would sound like a casual voice, “Why?”
The mono
syllable did have a noticeable quaver in it, but Zoe met Nurse Carter’s eyes and, finding sympathy in them, felt momentarily better. The nurse stepped forward from the little desk where she had laid Zoe’s chart, and put her hand out to take the thong by the waistband.
“I know it’s embarrassing, honey, but I need to make sure you’re healthy for your fiancé, and ready for this program.”
Zoe watched in horror—feeling dizzy, even, as if she might actually faint with shame—as the nurse plucked the panties from the heap of clothes in her arms and took them over to the desk. She put the tiny garment on top of the folder and, to Zoe’s even greater dismay, spread the gusset out with fingertips that seemed to try hard not to touch the very worst part of all—the undeniable, quarter-sized wet spot.
Now Zoe did make a tiny sound in her throat, a little whimpering noise that made Nurse Carter turn around even as she picked up the little handheld device she had laid next to the chart and began to bring it up toward her face.
“Don’t worry, honey,” the older woman said, just as Zoe understood that the handheld had a camera in it, and Nurse Carter was about to take a picture of her panties. “A wet spot like that means that you’re very healthy, and you’ll do just fine in the program.”
Zoe felt her face crumple as she watched in mute humiliation, naked and holding her clothes in front of her. Nurse Carter took a picture, and then from her pocket she fished a plastic bag with a strip of paper inside. She took the paper out and wiped it on the wet spot, as Zoe felt she might actually sink into the earth—wished she would disappear that way, if not just evaporate into steam or burst into flames of mortification. The paper strip went back into the bag, which the nurse sealed and placed on the desk next to the chart.
“All done,” Nurse Carter said, picking up the panties by the waistband in an obvious effort not to bring her skin into contact with the evidence of Zoe’s shame. “You can put them over with your other clothes.” The nurse put the thong atop the jeans, and Zoe turned away, more conscious than ever that the older woman could see her bottom, and between her thighs, too, as Zoe bent to put her clothes on the low chair in the corner.