Phaze Fantasies, Vol. VI

by Jude Mason, Yvette Hines, Jessie Verino

  Unused ... yes, there was something of the virgin about her, something of the nun in the way she acted. Even her outfit—she was wearing her habitual office-costume of starched white blouse and black knee-length pencil skirt—resembled a nun's habit. Even her hair, framing as it did that deliciously beautiful, that delectably—disturbingly—innocent face, had a cowl-like look. If it wasn't for her fierce blue eyes and that firm chin she would have been almost beatific in appearance.

  What was the simile? Like a nun with a switchblade?

  That no one had used her, had fucked her until she screamed; that no one had whipped her or corrupted her was a dereliction of erotic duty. Leaving her pure and unsullied was almost sacrilegious.

  There was that religious motif again. Maybe he worshipped this paragon of saintliness ... or maybe he worshipped the idea of corrupting this awful perfection. If ever there was a female made for the darker side of eroticism it was this one. Even now, standing tight behind her, the temptation to snake his hands around her and to rip her pristine, chaste blouse from her body was almost overwhelming. She was so, so perfect. And it was a perfection that cried out to be mutilated, to be marred, to be perverted.

  Yes ... consider that flawless platinum hair: then imagine the joy of wrenching it back, stretching her forehead and bringing tears of torment to her eyes.

  Yes ... consider her limpid, crystal blue eyes: then imagine them wide with shock and pain, the pupils pin-sharp with amazement, as a gasp of erotic agony escapes her lips.

  Yes ... consider her pastel coloured lips: then imagine them painted a malevolent black and encircling your engorged tool as you slam into that pretty little mouth, pushing yourself deeper and deeper into her, making her gag and writhe.

  Yes ... consider that slim, slight body writhing under your own, as you pummel and pound your hard urgency into her.

  Yes ... consider that perfectly rounded and pert arse, naked and bent over a stool, ideally positioned so that you can whip it, and whip it, and whip it...

  Oh, how he would like to vandalise her body.

  Stop...

  Enough...

  The want squeezed his lungs and crushed his chest. He let out a gasp of breath, trying to deflate the tension building under his ribs and in his groin.

  All that this fantasising was achieving ... was nothing.

  Nothing, except to arouse him to such a pitch of unrequited desire that just standing in that crowded elevator was becoming both emotionally and physically painful. He shuffled his feet surreptitiously to reposition his uncomfortably erect cock. It wouldn't do to come in an elevator, aroused to climax simply by the thought of possessing this pristine beauty.

  That would be terribly non-U, and not really a very good example for his staff. He had a strict, unbreakable rule that he would never, ever, have a sexual relationship with one of his staff. It was bad for morale, and it was bad business practice.

  And, the pain was all the more unbearable because deep inside this girl, he knew, despite her winsome ways and her delicate demeanour, she wanted to embrace submission, she wanted to taste pain. He had been around the BDSM circuit long enough to spot the tell-tale signals emanating from an “oh-I-could-never-let-you-do-that-but-if-you-insist” would-be Bottom. Every time he met her he saw the demurely down-cast eyes, saw the legs being coiled suggestively around the chair-leg, noted the come-hither toss of the hair: these and a myriad of other signals yelled, screamed ... use me, pain me, violate me, suppress me. This was a girl who would welcome the joy of abasement.

  How, though, to convert this girl's dormant desires into reality? How to have her embrace the pleasure of pain, how to encourage her to bring her fantasies (and he suspected she had extreme fantasies) into existence?

  That was the challenge.

  There were so many people living lives which were sexually unfulfilled because they had never been encouraged, had never been seduced into taking that one little step that would convert fantasies into realities. So many remained “nearly people": the people who had nearly tasted their desires ... but hadn't.

  There was no way he would allow this girl—this embodiment of physical perfection—to proceed through life sexually neutered. If everyone else was incapable to fanning the flame of her outré sexual fires, then he would do it himself.

  But not as her boss...

  The question though was how?

  He inhaled deeply, once more enjoying her prim, unsullied bouquet. A slight smile touched his lips: perfumes were becoming an all-absorbing fascination for the Agency, tendering as they were for a major account. Was it a mistake by the powers-that-be—him as it happened, he did, after all, own the Agency—to have given the responsibility of pitching for the perfume account to this girl? Oh, she had talent, she had intelligence, and she had drive, no one doubted that; the campaigns she had directed before had always been effective ... but they had always been so very prosaic. Would she be able to find a way of enunciating the eroticism that he knew dwelt inside her, and of communicating it? Perfumes were, after all, just erotic promises distilled into scent.

  If he could just find a way of releasing her inner darkness...

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter One

  Svetlana was perplexed.

  Perplexed by the reaction of her team to the ideas she had regarding the campaign for the perfume.

  They had never questioned her judgment before, and it was her judgment that had, after all was said and done, led them to being considered one of the brightest and the best creative teams in the world of advertising. The shelf in her office groaned under the weight of the awards they'd won. But this time they'd been decidedly under-whelmed by her concept. What had the Boss said? That it was a campaign that sold the steak and not the sizzle.

  Svetlana's lips set in tight annoyance, but she determined that as a professional marketer and businessperson she would rise above such arbitrary and ill-considered criticism. She straightened the pens and notepads on her desk until they sat in serried, parallel ranks, and took a moment to clean the screen of her computer. Order and discipline were essential in business and Svetlana always had her best ideas when she was in an environment, like her office, which was ordered and disciplined. Okay, so some of the office wags had christened her office “Svetlana's Sterile Surgical Suite", but they were just being infantile.

  It wasn't sterile. Hadn't she had found space on the wall for her framed cover of “Advances in Advertising” which had a really quite flattering picture of her under the headline “Meet the Princess of Promotional Constructivism"? If she were to be frank though, she'd admit that she'd wondered about the wisdom of displaying the cover. Delighted though she had been to be awarded such a signal honour as a cover feature by a magazine as prestigious as “Advances", she'd never been too happy with the accompanying interview. In her opinion, it made her sound much too inflexible in her thinking, and made rather too much of her Russian antecedents. It was all very well for the journalist to laud her as an “advertising constructor” and “a proselytiser of an ideology that puts product functionalism at advertising centre-stage", but he did rather play down the fact that her application of the philosophy of Constructivism to marketing had been highly successful and had helped sell an awful lot of burgers and power-tools.

  Sipping on her green tea, she tried to impose tranquillity and calm on her troubled psyche. She closed her eyes, placed one hand on her chest and one hand on her stomach and breathed deeply and slowly. Her relaxation counsellor had advised her that breathing from her diaphragm was a marvellous technique for curbing anxiety, but even after five minutes of slow rhythmic breathing, she was still as cross as ever.

  She felt baffled and bamboozled by her team's almost childishly peevish response to her proposal regarding the marketing of the perfume. She was mystified by this sort of a non-empiric, emotional reaction, and equally mystified that even when she'd enunciated the market research statistics and the customer profiling data that underpinned
her thinking, they had still been less than enthusiastic about her ideas. They just didn't seem to get it. They just didn't seem to get that they were selling a product, and that the selling of a perfume was no different to selling a house or a power drill or ... a burger.

  Using Constructivist techniques, she could churn out advertising and marketing campaigns with ease. Facts and data poured in at one end, Svetlana cranked the creative handle and an efficient, effective marketing programme popped out the other.

  Until now, that is. Now the team was demanding that they be allowed to think outside the Collectivist box.

  Just because they were selling a perfume, you'd think that there was magic involved. But, as Svetlana had told the team at length, magic had nothing to do with it: forget magic, think functionality. Okay, so the target audience was a trifle nebulous (even when pressed the Client hadn't been able to narrow it down to specific demographics, and “innovative", “independent", “free-thinking", “aspirational” and “female” just didn't, in Svetlana's opinion, cut it as an accurate customer definition). When they'd interviewed these sort of women they had been very definite in what they wanted from a perfume. They wanted a perfume that was nicely scented, was long lasting, was attractively packaged and, ideally, had been endorsed by a celebrity.

  Understanding this, as far as Svetlana was concerned, made promoting a perfume a no-brainer. The biggest decisions were the design of the bottle and which celebrity they should select to front the campaign. Yet even here, she'd been at odds with the team.

  Of the three proposals young Jake, the Senior Designer, had made regarding the styling of the perfume bottle, she had favoured the steel-grey, smoked-glass cylinder. It was attractive and serviceable, allowing women to see just how much perfume they had left and was relatively cheap to produce. The criticisms—mainly from her team's younger element—that this design wasn't “cool” and was short on “street cred", she dismissed as vague posturing, countering that the cylinder was attractive (albeit, Svetlana did concede, in a sort of utilitarian way) and was certainly very cost-effective. The discussion had petered out in an unpleasant, unresolved, resentful intellectual impasse.

  But, if the debate about the bottle design was fraught, the arguments that had raged about the choice of celebrity to front the campaign had been ... well, almost distasteful.

  Certainly there had been no excuse for the comments made about her preference for the lead celebrity. Juli Sands was a famous, award-winning actress, whose profile with the public, confirmed by the Agency"s own Attitudinal Survey, showed that she was seen as glamorous, successful and environmentally conscious. The endorsement of a star like Juli Sands was exactly what, in Svetlana's opinion, was needed to make the perfume's campaign a resounding success. There was certainly no call for some of the comments from around the table that greeted Svetlana's suggestion. The one from her copywriter, Joanna—"Is she still alive?"—had particularly hurt, as had the aside from Tony, the art director—"I've never seen her in anything other than black-and-white shots". Even when she'd looked to the Boss for support and encouragement she'd been disappointed ... very disappointed. For him to say that Juli Sands was “about as hip as a hernia” was unhelpful to say the least. And then he'd compounded this by warning that if the campaign was to use Juli Sands as lead celebrity it might find itself wandering into Heidi territory...

  Well!!!!

  She'd had to adjourn the meeting when tempers (and some of the language) became heated. But, notwithstanding this rebellion, she would put her foot down. They (or more accurately she) would present this campaign to the Client as it stood. She would remain resolutely behind her opinions, her ideas and her beliefs, confident that her vision was the correct one for the perfume. She would rise above the hurt caused by the criticism.

  Thus resolved she fired-up her computer to check which e-mails had arrived whilst she had been away from her desk.

  It was one of those cowardly, anonymous e-mails.

  No name, no signature but lots of innuendo and insinuation.

  And, whoever had written it knew his or her audience really well. Had known how vulnerable and how unsure she would be. Had known she was only twenty-four years old, only a year out of Business School, still with no real friends, still with no boy friend, and two thousand miles from her (old) hometown and her old home country.

  A stranger in a strange land. And there were few lands as strange as New York City.

  The opening lines of the e-mail had been the worst:

  "You're about as sexy as a Popsicle, and you're gonna lose the perfume account."

  She had re-read the words perhaps a dozen times, hoping that somehow she was misreading them. The contemplation of losing the account—of failing!—was like a steel band squeezing her heart.

  It could not be!

  It would not be!

  She would do anything and everything to keep the account...

  She read on:

  "The Boss thinks you're a frigid automaton built out of parts left over from the Cold War. He thinks you can't handle the promotion of anything sexier than drills and burgers. You're on your way out of the Agency, Svetlana-ski. But I like you ... so I'm gonna give you some advice."

  And the e-mail suggested an intriguing, a tantalising answer to Svetlana's supposed problem:

  "If you wanna show the Boss that you can play sexy, why don't you check out So-UnReal-Ism on a Tuesday night and see for yourself what real flesh-and-blood men and women get up to? The Boss, I hear, is a great fan of So-UnReal-Ism! Yeah, check it out, that is, if an up-tight, narrow-minded Ice Princess like you can bring herself to visit a disreputable place like So-UnReal-Ism ... and can get in!"

  Svetlana slumped back on her chair and tried to settle herself, breathing deeply and loosening the tight collar of her starched blouse. A thin sheen of nervous sweat had settled on her body, and she shivered in the chill of the air-conditioning.

  "Think,” she cajoled herself.

  But thinking was difficult when rational thought was being swamped by emotion, by desperation. “Up-tight” and “narrow-minded"? Was that really what people thought of her? She'd always tried to be the professional, to be exact and efficient in everything she did.

  "Think,” she demanded of herself again.

  The sensible thing to do, the adult thing to do, the best thing to do, she knew, would be to ignore the e-mail, to treat it with contempt...

  But she couldn't do that.

  Not when there was even the slightest, the remotest possibility that the accusations were true. Not when there was the slightest, the remotest possibility that she might lose her perfume account ... might lose her job. Her mouth set in a determined line: she wasn't about to lose either the account or her job, not without a struggle, not without a fight.

  Almost unconsciously, her fingers began to dance on her computer's keyboard, searching for “So-UnReal-Ism + Tuesday". The results were disturbing. According to the search engine, So-UnReal-Ism was a club that specialised in “nu-Decadence", the cult of extreme hedonism inspired by the philosophical anarchy espoused by Dada. And Tuesday nights were the most extreme manifestation of this dissolute embracing of the quest for pleasure: this was the night when the club encouraged the exploration of the lowest and most bestial instincts of men and women. On Tuesday nights in So-UnReal-Ism there was no place for hesitancy, no place for shyness or for modesty, no place for the sensitive ... and no place for the uninvited.

  On Tuesday nights in So-UnReal-Ism there was only pain and submission.

  Daunting...

  Especially as she'd already decided that she had to go to So-UnReal-Ism, had to see for herself if what the e-mail was saying was true, to see if she was a real flesh-and-blood woman...

  But to do that she had to get into the place.

  * * * *

  She'd done her best to dress sexily. She'd had to: from what she understood only the most beautiful, only the most desirable and the sexiest women got into So-UnReal-Ism. The pro
blem was she had so little experience in dressing to thrill, and she had a sort of innate attitudinal reluctance to be overtly ... overt, so the results were, as a consequence, somewhat half-hearted. Oh, when she'd looked into the mirror before she left the apartment she'd recognised that she looked very good, but the problem was she'd had the objective of looking very bad. Even sporting a ridiculously short leather skirt and a breath-takingly tight top the results had been an ersatz-sleaze: she looked like a virgin in heat. The application of black lipstick and thick black mascara had helped, and, in desperation, she'd even taken off her bra, but all this seemed to do was emphasise that, no matter how you cut it, she was a pastiche.

  Even the black mask she was wearing seemed faintly ridiculous. She'd seen from the photographs that all of those clamouring for entrance to So-UnReal-Ism wore a mask—few people wanted their orientation in the night-time demimonde to infect the role and personae they adopted in the glare of censorious daylight. But Svetlana's need to wear a mask was more prosaic: the last thing she wanted was to be spotted, to be identified in the club.

  But still, she looked and felt like an erotic caricature.

  Her body was making offers that she had no intention of honouring: more, had no idea how to honour.

  Still, she decided, the outfit was probably enough—or less than enough—to get her into the club. There couldn't be many girls attending who had legs as good as hers, nor whose nipples jutted out quite so prominently.

  * * * *

  Bob Wilson was a man defined not by what he was for, but by what he was against. Currently though he was against standing around, freezing his arse off on a diamond cold January night, guarding the door to So-UnReal-Ism.

  Still So-UnReal-Ism paid its security staff really, really well, and the punters were by-and-large pretty docile. But then again it was difficult to get aggressive with someone as big and as Neanderthal as Bob Wilson: especially when you were dressed, as most of the punters were, in something clingy and cutting edge. So the crowd of would-be clubbers who milled around the entrance to So-UnReal-Ism, dressed in their leather and lace, and sporting their masks of many colours, were generally stoically good humoured and peace-loving. They stayed where they were told to stay—anxiously and optimistically on the other side of the rope barrier.