For a few painfully awkward seconds, Hannah kept her face between her legs, spreading her buttocks while grinning stupidly.
Then, Louisa snapped at her. “Stand up, you stupid whore. The recording is done.”
Hannah extricated her head and turned back to face Louisa. As the adrenaline wore off, she was struck by a wave of embarrassment. She had just performed naked for an audience of everyone on her phone, meaning that her friends, her coaches, and even her grandparents had seen her pretending to be a wet horny slut. Would any of them ever look at Hannah again without thinking of that video?
Louisa pulled another phone, several models newer than Hannah’s, from her pocket. “Put your name and date in each field,” Louisa said.
Hannah took the phone and glanced at a wall of text. There were three headings, “Confirmation of Prior Verbal Consent,” “Model Release,” and “Assignment of Copyright.”
Hannah typed in her name three times and handed the phone back.
Louisa glanced to check Hannah had signed, then smiled. “Good girl. Of course, once you’re fully on board we’ll have an ongoing agreement that takes care of all that and more, but since we’re distributing this video now—or at least as soon as I hand your phone back to I.T.—we need all that on file. T&A is a reputable firm and we always make sure nothing about our clients is filmed or distributed without full and informed consent.”
Hannah said nothing. She had consented; that much was inarguable. What other choice was there?
“Alright,” Louisa continued, “now let’s get you to your next stop. You’ve got a whistlestop tour today! We will try to get you out by midnight, but that does mean we’ve got to keep moving.”
Grabbing Hannah by the arm, Louisa dragged the teenager into the corridor. Hannah simply let herself be pulled. There was no point resisting. This had to happen. Just think of college and then law school, Hannah reminded herself. That’s why you’re doing this.
Hannah had heard, from friends who had gone to downmarket agents, horror stories of stories of girls being paraded before leering staff, groped and slapped by everyone from the intern to senior partners.
That apparently was not the T&A way. As Louisa hustled Hannah past various offices and cubicles and around various impromptu and excited conversations taking place in the hallway, the sight of a naked, athletic, trembling, sixty-four inch, eighteen-year-old teenager was greeted by complete indifference. For a moment, Hannah actually started to feel a little insulted. Then she remembered the alternative and felt grateful to be ignored.
After a few turns through the enormous maze of an office, a voice behind Hannah called out, “Hey, Louisa, how nice of you to drop by our neck of the woods.”
Louisa stopped and turned, her face transforming into one of radiant flirtation. “Oh darling,” she said, huskily, “I hope you know I find every excuse I can to wander past your office, just so I can catch a glimpse of you commanding at your desk, like a great ship captain.”
The interloper, a tall, slightly overweight, middle-aged man with dark hair and olive skin, laughed. His teeth, like everyone’s at T&A, were Hollywood-perfect.
“If that’s true,” he said, walking up to Louisa and hugging her, “I ought to spank you for not taking the most efficient routes through the office.”
Louisa giggled. “Name the time and I’ll bend over your desk.”
The man glanced at Hannah and Louisa added, “Oh yes, this is Hannah Norris, who, if the rest of the day goes well, is one of our new clients, on Marty’s roster. Hannah, this is Mr. Paul Demetriou, partner and head of strategic development.”
Hannah had no idea what strategic development meant, but it sounded very important. “I’m so delighted to meet you, sir,” she said, putting on her best sexy voice. “And let me say that I can’t wait to earn a spanking from you.”
Hannah added a giggle. It seemed to work, as Demetriou smiled and Louisa looked, for a moment, annoyed.
“Well, you’re in good hands with Marty,” Demetriou said. “He’s a fantastic agent and a great earner. Where are you going to college?”
“Berkeley, sir,” Hannah said. “I’m majoring in poli-sci, and then hoping to go to law school.”
“A future lawyer, eh?” Demetriou said. “Maybe we’ll have you on the other side of the table, in legal one day. There’s plenty of aged-out creators who work here.”
Hannah just smiled and giggled. In reality, she intended her career to be spent working to put the entire industry—and firms like T&A which profited from it—out of business. To get there, however, she had to play the dumb slut.
Demetriou turned to Louisa. “What’s her B.C., honey?”
“None, or so she claims,” Louisa said. “Though I’m skeptical.”
Demetriou laughed and slapped Louisa’s ass. “You are just so filthy you can’t imagine the thought that anyone might make it to eighteen in relative innocence.”
He then turned to Hannah and looked expectantly. When Hannah did nothing, Demetriou cleared his throat and said to Louisa, “Have you told Miss Norris about T&A’s sexual harassment policy yet? It’s such an important part of the client onboarding.”
“Oh, silly me,” Louisa said, still in that annoying breathy voice. Turning to Hannah and changing back to her professional timbre, she said, “Here at T&A we have a very strict sexual harassment policy to protect our clients and ensure a professional workplace. You can rest assured that while in our care, no one at this agency will initiate sexual conduct of any kind, including all forms of intimate touching, with you.”
Louisa paused her spiel and fixed Hannah with an intense stare. “However,” she said, “we also at T&A respect our client’s autonomy and capacity. As a result, we do not have any rules against consensual sexual or intimate contact between clients and agents where the client initiates it.”
Those final words had been said slowly, enunciating every syllable, like a schoolteacher explaining a difficult concept to a pupil.
After a slight pause in which her stare only intensified, Louisa said, still very slowly and clearly, “Do you understand this, Hannah?”
Hannah understood all too well. After nodding to Louisa, she turned to Demetriou and, giggling, said, “Would you like to get a handle on your agency’s newest product, sir? I would love to know if you think I’ve got the tits and ass to make it.”
Giggling again, Hannah squeezed her small breasts together and stepped towards Demetriou.
A lecherous grin on his face, the head of strategic development reached out and grabbed Hannah’s breasts. His hands wandered about. He was squeezing them, slapping them, kneading them, twisting them. Then he was pinching her nipples. It hurt, but Hannah just smiled and added a few strategic moans. Then, after pecking Demetriou on the cheek, she turned and stuck her ass out, twerking slightly. “What about this end, sir? Does it measure up to T&A’s standards?”
Again, the hands tried every permutation of groping and slapping. Then, three fingers had gone up Hannah’s vagina and she let out her first real moan as Demetriou fingered her. Then, he pulled out his fingers, slapped her labia, and turned the teen around. In a moment of initiative, Hannah knelt and sucked her own lubrication off the agent’s fingers. There was a cold sensation as her tongue touched the man’s wedding ring.
Demetriou pulled Hannah up by her throat and lightly slapped her face. “You catch on quickly, kid. Just do what Marty says and before you know it you’ll be boring me to sleep in meetings droning on about whatever stupid laws the Legislature has seen fit to burden us with.”
He kissed Louisa, groping her breasts as he did so, before turning back to his office.
Before Hannah could catch her breath, Louisa was dragging her on, the assistant’s acrylic nails digging into Hannah’s upper arm.
“Not bad, slut,” Louisa whispered once the two were out of sight of Demetriou. “Just be happy your body count is zero or we would be running even further behind, not to mention having to redo your makeup.”
To her relief, no one else paid any attention to Hannah as she was dragged further through the office and down a flight of stairs. After going down another corridor, Louisa stopped in front of a door with a nameplate reading “Harold Chen, M.D.”
Louisa knocked. An Asian man in a white coat, only a few inches taller than Hannah, opened the door. “Finally,” he said, “What took you so long? Get her on the table for me.”
“I’m so sorry sir,” Louisa said sycophantically while pushing Hannah inside. “These whores can be a pain to wrangle.”
Inside the windowless office was some sort of scanner. An MRI?, Hannah thought. Or maybe a CAT scan? What was the difference between those two anyway? And why would either matter.
Prodded by a slap on her ass from Louisa, Hannah climbed on to the bed in front of the scanner and lay down, shivering against the cold metal.
“Let’s get started,” the man in the white coat said, walking over with a tablet in hand. “I’m Dr. Chen and I’m one of the in-house consultant physicians here at T&A, which means I do just about every gruesome thing involved in keeping bodies in the shape that sells them to markets, but today, I’m not actually going to be giving you any medical treatment. Instead, I’m going to be performing an Ejima scan on you. Sign and date this consent for treatment.”
Without bothering to read, Hannah typed in her name and the date on the tablet.
“Now,” Dr. Chen said, “Do you know what an Ejima scan is?”
“Uh, no, sir,” Hannah said.
Dr. Chen grinned. “Well, it’s a giant waste of money that the market absolutely demands, and we do love the market here at T&A. It is a misuse of some imaging technology and machine learning analysis originally designed to check for early signs of cervical cancer. About twenty years ago, one Dr. Ejima, from I think Kyoto, had the genius to adapt that base technology into a system for detecting a woman’s body count.”
“Does it work?” Hannah asked, before she could think better of it.
Chen laughed. “Nope! Oh, I mean it can tell with reasonable confidence the difference between a woman who’s had sex with a few thousand men and a virgin, but so can anyone with eyes! Bodycount isn’t a scientific measure. People assume that it has some relation to vaginal tightness or whatever, but that’s just not true. The Ejima scan is clever, and uses several hundred factors, along with a lot of extrapolation, as very rough proxies for the almost unnoticeable actual effects of penile penetration on the vagina, mouth, and anus, but it’s about as trustworthy as a witch doctor. And, even if it were accurate, which it isn’t, it couldn’t possibly tell if the woman has slept one hundred times with the same man, giving her a bodycount of one, or with one hundred different men, which is a B.C. of one hundred. It’s completely useless.”
“Then why do you do it?” Hannah asked, confused. She had actually vaguely thought the thing about tightness was true. At least that had been the rumor at her high school…
“The markets, of course,” Chen said, laughing again. “For some reason, market research shows that men love very carefully worded language about results of an Ejima scan that obscures the fact that even taking the results at their word—which you shouldn’t—the scan will give a confidence interval of somewhere between zero and fifty as a potential bodycount, assuming each penetration by a new partner. It just sounds scientific and reassures men’s egos. So, the firm pays the ridiculous costs involved in owning this scanner, and makes me, an actual doctor, act as a glorified junior radiographer.”
As Chen checked his tablet again, Hannah asked, “So how do you know if applicants lie about their body count?”
“Why, got something to hide?” Chen retorted. As Hannah blushed, he continued, “I’m kidding; it’s a good question. The answer is that T&A uses methods more reliable than medicine. For a start, they do background checks, send private investigators to ask around your school, scour the internet, and that sort of stuff. Second, we scare you. Remember those big red letters on your application about it being under penalty of perjury? We report a few girls to the police every year who lied about their body count, and they end up in prison… and you know what happens there.”
Hannah gulped. She hadn’t lied on her application—she really was a virgin—but that didn’t make the prison system any less terrifying. She had seen the chain gangs… and rumor had it those naked, whipped, tanned girls were relatively lucky prisoners. At least they got to go outside.
Dr. Chen pulled on some gloves and opened a drawer. “Mouth open,” he said. Hannah complied and he swabbed her cheek. Then, without asking, he parted her labia and put another swap into her vagina. To Hannah’s shock, he then pulled, with surprising strength, on one leg to raise Hannah’s rear from the table and stuck another swab into her asshole.
“Supposedly the Ejima scan correlates the results of these samples with the imaging and extrapolates various conclusions about the relationship between tissue and the microbiome in each orifice,” the doctor said, after putting the swabs in three separate envelopes. “Like I said, it’s a lot of effort for something pointless. Now don’t fucking move, because I hate the noise this machine makes and I don’t want to hear this grinding twice because the image is off.”
Prompted by Chen’s tablet, the bed went into the machine, which started screaming furiously, like a symphony of antique printers and faxes. Despite the cacophony, Hannah found it strangely comforting. She was all alone in this cozy niche, with no one looking at her, no one groping her, no one sticking swabs into her holes. It was a respite.
Too soon for Hannah’s liking, the noise stopped and the bed slid out. “Now fuck off,” Chen said. “The lab will process this stuff over the next week and in the meantime I’d like to use my office to actually practice some fucking medicine instead of slutty pseudoscience.”
Hannah started to get up from the table, and then shot off it as Louisa pulled her by the hair. “Thank you so much, sir,” Louisa said, in her sycophantic voice. “It’s always so nice to watch a brilliant doctor commanding the–”
“Oh shut up, bitch,” Chen said. “Maybe your dumb cunt brain doesn’t realize this but I’m not a partner and don’t have a shred of power or influence here, so there’s no point pretending to want to fuck me because I can’t promote you. So just get the hell out of my office and take the slut with you.”
Louisa blushed, started to say something, and then thought better of it. Instead, she took her embarrassment out on Hannah, pulling the teen out the door with sadistic force.
The dragging continued in the hallway until Hannah grabbed Louisa’s arm. “If you,” she said between pained gasps, “end up pulling off clumps of talent’s hair, do you think you’ll keep your job?”
Louisa glared at her. For a moment, Hannah worried the older woman, who had several inches and considerable weight over the eighteen-year-old, would hit her. Then, saying nothing, Louisa grabbed Hannah’s arm instead and dragged her. It wasn’t pleasant to once again have those tacky nails burrowing into her bicep, but it was at least an improvement over the hair-pulling.
After a shorter journey through various corridors, in which, mercifully, no one showed any interest in inspecting the naked teen being dragged past his office, Louisa stopped outside a pair of nice double doors. A plaque said “Conference & Testing Suite 3”, which told Hannah nothing about what next awaited her.
After a knock, a tall blonde, in her mid-twenties with an improbable figure in an off-the-shoulder green dress with a long slit on the legs and a platinum day collar, answered. “You’re late. We have been waiting nearly fifteen minutes,” she said, in a neutral Californian accent with only the slightest garnish of Scandinavian.
“Blame the whore,” Louisa said. “She’s your problem now. I’ve got to run her phone to IT and then sprint back to reception for the next girl we’re intaking today.”
With only a sharp slap on Hannah’s bottom as a valediction, Louisa stormed off. The blonde eyed Hannah curiously for a few seconds and then said, holding open one of the doors, “Come in.”
Inside was an odd hybrid of a room. Half of it was a traditional conference table, polished mahogany, with T&A branded chairs and coasters. The other half was a slightly elevated platform with lighting and photography backdrops as well as several cameras. At one end of the conference table, a man was pointing animatedly at a computer monitor facing him. He was shorter than Eva, barely taller than Hannah, and slightly pudgy, in later middle age with slightly greying hair. He seemed less put-together than either Brooks or Demetriou. His outfit was just as nice—French cuffs, well-tailored, ties with just the right level of understatement to avoid either blandness or distraction, but the tie was loosened to the point it looked like a necklace, the jacket was on the table, looking like it had been thrown there, and the sleeves were rolled up, raising the question of where exactly the cufflinks were.
“Sir,” Eva said, rolling the word carefully, “may I introduce to you our firm’s new client, Hannah Norris? Miss Norris, this gentleman is Mr. Victor Chastanet, one of our senior team leaders for marketing, branding, and digital strategy. If I may be permitted to embarrass him, he is perhaps the leading expert in the Thylmann-Tasillo type classification system for female talent.”
“She flatters me,” Chastanet said, without getting up. He spoke with a slight Brooklyn accent. “What I do is an art, not a science. And that means it’s more guesswork than expertise.”
He looked away from his monitor and caught sight of Hannah. “No, no, no,” he said. His voice jumped in pitch as he became excited. “That damned glorified receptionist with an alpha bitch complex has been dragging the clients around again. This won’t do.”
Now he did stand up and walked over to Hannah, grabbing her face. His hands were very gentle, if cold. He tilted her head and adjusted her hair by hand, all without ever quite making eye contact with Hannah. “Yes, this won’t do. Oh, we don’t need formal hair, makeup, and wardrobe tests yet—that’s after me—but there has to be some sense of being presentable. I keep telling the senior partners that we’ve got to do something about this psychology that pits every woman here against each other, but unfortunately, they seem to prefer watching really half-baked lezdom and bitchfight content being created and microtargeted at people who work in this office. The cardinal sin in this industry—putting one’s dick ahead of one’s wallet.”
He seemed to lose his train of thought. After a moment, he said, “Eva, dear, go and comb this poor girl’s hair and give her a light touch-up of makeup—we don’t need screen test perfect but I can’t start analyzing her if she’s not even half presentable. Especially after the fad for disheveled chic content faded out so predictably eight or nine years ago.”
He returned to his monitor, and Eva put an authoritative hand on Hannah’s shoulder. “This way, please,” she said, gesturing to the door.
“Please” was a very nice change of pace from Louisa and so Hannah happily walked in the direction Eva indicated. It was strange how rapidly she had become used to simply walking around this building naked, but a sense of familiar resignation to the undignified act was better than constant crippling humiliation.
Eva then directed Hannah into a room on the same hallway, which seemed to be a hybrid of a private bathroom and dressing room, with a very fancy-looking shower and station for makeup, complete with the stage tradition of a line of lightbulbs, mocked up as the old incandescent type, surrounding the mirror.
Hannah sat in the chair and took a look at herself. Her hair was a mess, and her makeup had run in places, although it was not that bad. Her arm had a few marks from fingernails, and she could see traces of red where she had been groped. Still, her lipstick and eyeliner had held and her assiduous use of sunscreen during cross-country practice and meets had prevented her fear of tan lines by her shoulders.
Eva came over, carrying a few hair products and combs. “Do you use any of these normally? I don’t want to put in anything that will clash with your texture or hair care routine.”
It took only one glance for Hannah to see that these products were extremely expensive and not the Target-branded hair products she normally employed. The embarrassment must have shown on her face, because Eva smiled. “Don’t worry,” the blonde said. “I was a poor girl once too. I will improvise.”
As Eva got to work adjusting Hannah’s hair, the teen dared to ask a question of the P.A. “Sorry if this sounds weird,” she said hesitantly, “but why are you so nice to me? I’m not complaining but the other women I’ve met here are, well, without wanting to speak ill of people at the firm…”
Eva laughed melodiously. “You don’t need to worry—talent can always complain about the staff. And the women are absolutely terrible to the new female talent, though they dote over the femboys as if they were newborn puppies, gushing about cuteness. The reason is simple: S.M.V. The women who work here may not be creators, but they are all too aware of the economic value of their S.M.V. to their career, and at least subconsciously aware that S.M.V. is a relative measure. It doesn’t matter how hot you are, it only matters how hot you are compared to the next girl.”
Eva fussed with her hair a little bit more before turning to the makeup kit, speaking as she rustled for the appropriate skin tone. “The reason I know this practical economics is the same reason I’m nice to you: I work for Mr. Chastanet. He, you may have noticed, is a bit fussy. A fussy genius, sure, but still fussy. Somewhere on the spectrum. His eye is the best in the world for this stuff, and I swear he’s memorized the entire Thylmann-Tasillo type book, which is over two thousand possible types, but he really can’t stand almost everything and everyone. Before I came, the firm came close to firing him every few months, keeping him only because no one else had his talent. Then, they found me. And since then, I have made the firm and Mr. Chastanet both happy. The firm doesn’t have to deal with him screaming at partners, and Mr. Chastanet has someone who will fix whatever is wrong—and there’s always something wrong with him.”
