Hypnotized and Humiliated - Chapter 8 Part 1 of 2

Hypnotized and Humiliated

By Karen Singer

Chapter 8 Part 1 of 2

Every hour, Phillip was forced to thickly refresh the red lipstick on his face.  If he glanced up at the time and noticed that he was late, then the pain hit his arm, or his chest, or his leg… until he actually started applying the color.  He became so worried about the pain that he started watching the clock more and more desperately.  The taste of the lipstick was getting to be downright awful.  The thick feel of it on his lips was almost worse.  He continuously wanted to rub his hand or arm across his lips to wipe them off, but he knew without a doubt that it would only make more of a mess of things. 

It wasn’t so bad for him when he stayed at his desk or even in the room – getting things off the printer, or putting mail into the distribution box, or even getting himself a cup of coffee.  The women had all seen him… and they had seen him applying the stuff, so the humiliation he felt around them was starting to fade a bit.  The part he hated now was when he had to go to the bathroom which was a fairly long walk – past way too many people who were not in his department.  That was without a doubt the worst thing for him!  What if some guy that he knew saw him?  Fortunately, most of the guys in the company that he knew, worked on a different floor.

He saw another email come in for him.  He opened it.  It was yet another of Mistress Vivian’s jobs that she should have been doing.  He sighed heavily.  He was never going to get out of here tonight!

All afternoon, Marian watched Phillip apply the red lipstick to his face.  Every time she noticed him get up from his seat, she stared at his lips… and felt bad for him.  She especially noticed it every time he walked past her to the printer that was only a few feet away from her desk.  It looked so bad now that there was no way to overlook it.  Her heart went out to him and the way he had to feel. 

The clock wound down to quitting time and Marian watched as everyone gathered up their belongings and got ready to leave the very moment the clock said they could.  Everyone that is except Phillip.  He was still working with his head tightly buried in his computer… as if he was trying to hide his appearance from everyone else. 

“It’s quitting time, Phillip,” Courtney called. 

Phillip looked up at her sadly.  “I’m not going yet,” he replied.

Courtney shrugged and watched the clock again.

The clock had moved and everyone got up and headed for the door… except Phillip and Marian.

“Coming?” Vivian asked Marian when she saw that Marian hadn’t moved to get up yet.

Marian looked over toward Phillip.  “What about him?”

Vivian looked around.  The last of the others were just disappearing through the door.  “He has work to do!” she replied, lowering her voice a little.  “And you would too if you had worn a proper pair of shoes today!”

Marian shook her head.  “That’s not what I’m talking about.  You need to take away his compulsion to keep applying the lipstick every hour!”

Vivian looked at her like she was shocked.  “Why?  Let him enjoy it!” she added with a devilish grin.

Marian shook her head.  “The way it’s working on him now, the poor guy won’t be able to sleep!  Besides, what if he’s driving home and it suddenly gets time for him to put it on again.  He could have an accident!”

Vivian rolled her eyes.  “Oh all right!  I’ll think of something else for him for tomorrow.”

Marian wasn’t happy to hear her planning on something else, but she was very glad that she was going to remove his lipstick problem for tonight.

Vivian walked over to Phillip.  “Phillip,” she said, “you can stop with the lipstick now.  But you better keep it with you and bring it to work again tomorrow.  I was planning on seeing you later tonight, and I may still do that, but if not, I’ll pass on some instructions for you tomorrow though Marian like I did today.  And don’t forget to get here extra early tomorrow.  You’ve got a lot more work to do now!”

With that, she turned back towards Marian.  “Satisfied?  Can we go now?”

Marian nodded and grabbed her bag.  “Thank you,” she said as she got up.  She paused by Phillip’s desk and whispered.  “Don’t work too late tonight.  I’ll see you early tomorrow morning.”  Then she hurried to catch up to Vivian who was already out the door.

“Where do you live?” Vivian asked as they were riding down in the elevator together.  Marian tried to give her a rough idea, only to find that Vivian was familiar with the apartment project.  “I dated a guy who lived there once,” Vivian explained.

A few minutes later, Vivian was following Marian’s car through the city.  She counted herself fortunate that Marian at least lived in the same general direction as her own apartment.  That would make getting back to her own place that much quicker.

A few minutes later, Vivian followed Marian into the entrance to a large apartment complex.  Vivian rated them as looking about the same as Phillip’s apartment… which she would be moving into very soon!  She would be moving up in the world… with a whole lot more money to spend!  She followed Marian’s car all the way to the very back of the complex.  Then, when she expected Marian to turn right, Marian turned left instead… away from the apartments.  Following closely behind, Vivian soon found herself passing very nice looking townhouses – that all backed up to a small lake.  It was in front of one of these that Marian finally pulled into a parking place.  Vivian found an empty spot right next to her and got out of her car.  “You live on a lake?” she exclaimed as she got out of her car.

“My late husband bought it,” Marian explained while she waited for Vivian to catch up to her.  “When he died, the insurance paid it off so I wouldn’t have to worry about it.”  She led the way to her door and unlocked it, holding it open so Vivian could enter after her.  “The bedroom is upstairs,” Marian said as she headed straight for the stairway.  But when she got there, Vivian wasn’t following her.

Vivian looked all around in amazement.  The place was beautiful!  And big!  The view of the lake through the wide French doors was fantastic!

“Coming?” Marian asked, wanting to get this stupid exercise over with.

“You have an upstairs?” Vivian asked, still awed by the place.

Marian rolled her eyes.  “Uh… yeah.”  Leaving Vivian behind, she headed up the steps to her bedroom.

Still looking all around, Vivian slowly followed Marian up the stairs.  When she got to the top, she was immediately faced with the open door to a large bathroom.  When she looked inside, she could see the counter littered with Marian’s things, but the bathroom still looked very nice.  To her right, she saw two other doors, one closed and one open.  She headed toward them.  The open door turned out to be a bedroom – unlived in, she noticed.  So it was most likely a guestroom.  She checked the closed door and discovered a large storage room.  She headed back past the bathroom again and entered the other bedroom where Marian was waiting… and was amazed at how large the room was.  And one whole wall was nothing but closet doors.  “This is all yours?” she asked, totally awed with the place.

Marian shrugged.  “As I said, my late husband bought it for me.”

Vivian shook her head.  Some women had all the luck!  She turned and faced the wall of closets.  “There’s no way you can tell me that with that many closets you don’t have a decent pair of heels!”

Marian shook her head.  “I do have a decent pair of heels!  I’m wearing them!  I’ve been wearing them all day!”

“Bullshit!” Vivian exclaimed softly as she headed for the closets.  Actually, she was totally excited to be faced with that much closet space to search through.  That many doors had to mean an awful lot of clothes.  But when she opened the first set of doors, she was faced with a few old sweaters hung up there and nothing else.  She realized she could see all the way down the length of the closet to the far wall.  But she couldn’t see much since it was so dark down the other end.

She opened the next set of doors and found clothes.  Finally!  But as she searched through them, she found it was almost all slacks and older blouses – and it was all heavy stuff for winter.  The floor yielded no shoes at all.  She tried the next set of doors.  A few dresses – not her style at all!  They looked like something a grandmother would wear!  No shoes there either. 

She opened the last set of doors and found an assortment of more pants and blouses.  She quickly recognized some of them as things she had seen Marian wear before.  So this was where Marian was pulling her clothes from.  The floor there was littered with shoes.  She got down and began examining them.  Flats… flats… flats… flats!  She found a few pairs with a small heel, but they were pitifully small.  As far as she could tell, the dressiest pair of shoes Marian owned was the pair she was currently wearing!  Impossible!   Yet it appeared to be true!

“I can’t believe it!” she exclaimed.  “All this closet space and this is all the clothes you have?”

“What would I need any more for?” Marin asked.  “I’ve got everything I need.”

“How about nicer clothes for work?”

“I’ve got nice clothes for work!  That’s what I wear!”

Vivian shook her head and tried something else.  “How about wearing something a bit more… interesting?  Something more… stylish?  Something to say to the world that you’re a woman?”

Marian shook her head.  “If people can’t see that I’m a woman from just looking at me, then they’ve got big problems!”

Vivian shook her head.  As far as she could tell, Marian was hopeless.  But the fact that she had told Marian to wear her highest pair of heels… and her highest pair of heels turned out to be not high at all… irked her to no end.  The more the thought about the situation, the angrier she became over it.  “Let’s go Missy!” she said as she suddenly tromped off toward the stairs.  “We’re going shopping!  We’re going to get you some real heels to wear!”

What she didn’t tell Marian though, was that she had wanted Marian to wear her highest heels so that Marian would feel very uncomfortable all day.  Well, now she was going to go out of her way to find Marian the most uncomfortable shoes she could possibly find.  And as she descended Marian’s steps, her mind was already picturing some of the shoes she wanted Marian to buy.  Vivian spent half her life shopping.  She knew the inventory of every store better than most of the people who worked in them.  She knew just where to take Marian to get her some “better” heels!

As Vivian drove toward the store she had in mind, she couldn’t get her mind off of Marian’s home.  It was more than a simple apartment, it was a townhouse!  Two bedrooms, lots of room.  And the closet space Marin had was to die for!  And that idiot cow had hardly anything at all in her closets!  What was wrong with the woman?  Well, if she had any say in the matter… which she now realized that she did, Marian was about to change all that.  But that place she lived in.  Beautiful!

Vivian kept imagining what it must be like to have that kind of space.  And somewhere in the middle of her musings, she wondered why she shouldn’t have it.  Why should that stupid cow Marian have something that nice?  She didn’t even use it all!  Why not move in with Marian instead of with dumb Phillip?  She was suddenly very excited by that idea.  She would have it all!  She could make Marian move out of the big room with all the closets and make her use the guest room instead. 

Or… better still… she could make Marian move in with Phillip and she would have Marian’s entire townhouse all to herself!  That was what she needed to do!  That was the perfect plan!  And since Marian owned the place, she still wouldn’t have to worry about paying any rent!

But the problem there was that she didn’t feel like she had the same level of control over Marian like she had with Phillip.  She had hypnotized Phillip into that kind of control.  But Marian wasn’t hypnotized at all.  She was only blackmailing Marian to get her to do what she wanted.  What would happen if Marian suddenly declared that she’d had enough?  Well, Vivian knew that the first thing she would do was to really send every video she had of Marian and Phillip together up to HR.  Marian would be fired so fast she wouldn’t know what hit her… and most likely, she would finally move into Marian’s Supervisor job. 

But doing that wouldn’t get her living in Marian’s townhouse.  So that wouldn’t work.  She needed a way to control Marian more completely – like she controlled Phillip.  But how?  Marian had hypnotized Phillip in the first place.  She had no one to hypnotize Marian like that.  And since Marian knew how to hypnotize people so well, could she even be hypnotized? 

They were troubling thoughts that ran through her head as she pulled into the parking lot and found a place as close to the shoe store as she could get.  She saw Marian parking her car just a short distance away.  Well, now the old cow was going to learn about wearing real heels.  Heels that would definitely make her uncomfortable.  And Vivian couldn’t wait to see her in them!

Marian had a lot of misgivings about following Vivian to the shoe store.  She had no doubt that Vivian would find some absolutely awful looking shoes for her to wear – not to mention uncomfortable.  Ugh!  As she got out of her car she started to wonder if maybe she shouldn’t start sticking up for herself a bit.  Start putting an end to this business.  Yes, Vivian had all those videos of her that would certainly get her fired.  But would she really send them?  Well… maybe it was time to find out.  Joining Vivian in front of the store, she followed her inside.

Vivian knew right where she was going.  As she walked through the store, her eyes continually searched for any new shoes she might not have seen since Saturday, the last day she had been in there.  She was hopeful, but she didn’t notice anything new.  “What size do you wear?” she asked as she approached one of the long aisles. 

“Seven and a half,” Marian told her.

Vivian quickly spotted the first pair she had been interested in and headed straight for the sample shoe on display.  “This!” she said as she picked it up.  “Find a box in your size.”

Marian looked at the shoe Vivian was holding.  Her worst fears were being realized.  It was time to dig in her own heels!  “Vivian,” she said, “they’re ridiculous!  I can’t wear something like that!”

Vivian smiled viciously at her.  “Yes, they are ridiculous!  But you are going to wear them!  Now find some in your size!”

Marian shook her head.  “No!” she said quite plainly and simply.  “They’re stupid.  Especially for work!”

Vivian set the shoe down where she had picked it up from.  The expression on her face went from smiling to positively livid as she dug into her purse and pulled out her cell phone.  With practiced lightning speed, she started texting.  A moment later, she held her phone up for Marian to see.  “Start packing,” she said in no uncertain terms, “because you’re through working anywhere in this city!  And maybe any other city too!”

Marian saw one of the videos Marian had taken of her hypnotizing Phillip, all cued up and ready to send with a short message of what it was.  It was even addressed to one of the managers of Human Resources!

“You wouldn’t!” she exclaimed.

“I wouldn’t?” Vivian replied.  “I want you fired!  Your job should have gone to me!  Finding little ways to make you pay for taking my job is the only thing that’s been keeping me from sending this stuff already!  So you think I wouldn’t?  Think again and watch!”  With that she held her phone up so that Marian could easily see what she was doing.  She reached out with one finger and pressed the send button… or almost pressed it.  Just as her finger was about to come in contact with the send button she heard Marian trying to stop her.

“No!  Don’t!” Marian cried in alarm.  “You can’t!”

Vivian’s finger was all but pressing that button.  She winced because she really did want to send that video.  “Oh, but I can, and not only that, I want to!  I hate you!  I hate you for taking my job.  And I hate you for having so much that I can’t have!”

“What?” Marian asked, unsure of what Vivian was talking about. 

“How much clearer can I be?” Vivian replied.  “I don’t like you!  I want you gone!  End of story!  Now do I continue to play games with you for my own amusement?  Or do you go home and pack your bags and I move into your desk at work?”

Marian just stared at her, unable to comprehend that she would actually do it.  Vivian’s finger just stayed hovering over the send button.

“Oh hell!” Vivian suddenly exclaimed.  “Go pack your bags!”  She turned her attention back to her cell phone again and started to push the send button again.

“No!  Don’t!”

Again Vivian paused, stopping herself from doing what she really wanted to do.  She turned her attention back to Marian again.  “Are you going to start behaving yourself?  Are you going to start doing whatever I say?”

It was a moment before Marian could answer… and all that while, Vivian stood there with her finger hovering over the button.  “Yes,” Marian finally managed to utter.  There was no doubt in her mind that Vivian was out of control and unstable.  And she had no doubt that Vivian would only get worse.  And because of that, she found herself up against the wall.  She found herself with no choice but to do whatever demented things Vivian wanted. 

Vivian stood there with her finger still hovering over the send button.  “I don’t see you looking for any shoes in your size yet.”

Marian stared at her in defeat for a moment.  Then she picked up the display shoe that Vivian had found.  It really wasn’t such a bad shoe.  In fact she was sure that most women would absolutely love the thing since she figured it was perfect for a night out at a club or something.  Most women would love it!  Women who were about twenty years old!  But she wasn’t twenty anymore.  She was forty-nine and would be fifty in a few months.  It was ludicrous for her to wear something like that! 

To be honest, for a twenty-year-old, the shoe was really gorgeous.  It was entirely multi-colored in jagged patches of blue and pink and red and green and black.  The toe was closed and it had two straps that would buckle around her ankle.  But the very tall, thin heel on the thing was entirely a very shiny gold color.  Perfect shoes for a twenty-year-old to party in… although she wasn’t sure how anyone could dance in heels that high.  But they weren’t good at all for someone like herself… especially since she had never worn heels more than three inches high in her life.  And these heels were a lot higher than that!  She was really concerned that she wouldn’t even be able to walk in the things.

“I’m waiting,” Vivian prompted with her finger still all too close to the send button on her phone.

Marian quickly started searching the boxes on the shelf in front of her, and was unlucky enough to find a box proclaiming her size.  She pulled it out of the stack on the shelf and was glad to notice that Vivian had finally taken her finger away from her phone.

“Try them on,” Vivian urged excitedly.

Marian carried the box over to a stool and sat down.  She removed one of the colorful shoes from the box, stuck it on her foot, and buckled the two straps around her ankle.  The darn thing was already uncomfortable… and she hadn’t even tried to stand up in it.  The angle her foot was strapped into was nothing but unnatural!

“Put the other one on too,” Vivian told her.

Not at all happy, Marian strapped her other foot into the other colorful shoe.  Yes, they would look very sexy on a twenty-year-old.  But she didn’t think they looked all that good on her aging feet.

“Stand up and walk around a bit,” Vivian directed.  The excitement in her voice was hard to miss and Marian had to wonder why Vivian should be that excited. 

Slowly and carefully, Marian stood.  She managed to get up, but she wasn’t all that sure of her balance.

“Walk around a bit,” Vivian suggested. 

Marian took one tentative step, wobbled a bit, then took another precarious step.  Darn the things were hard to walk in!  “Um… I’m not sure I can…”

“They’re perfect!” Vivian declared, cutting Marian off before she could finish her protest.  What Vivian liked the best about the shoes was that they were obviously difficult for Marian to manage in.  They would basically be torture to Marian’s feet as long as she wore them.

Marian wondered how Vivian could ever think the shoes were perfect.

“Now we need to find you another pair!”

“Another pair?”

“Of course, this store always runs BOGO sales – buy one, get the other one free.  No use letting that go to waste.  Besides, I want you to have several pairs anyway.”

Marian died a little inside.

The second pair of heels Vivian found for Marian were solid red in color with a small platform under the toes to make them even higher.  They had two wide ribbon straps that crisscrossed just above where her toes would be and more wide ribbon straps that would wrap around her ankle and heel.  The ankle straps ended in a large bow in the back.  They were actually lovely shoes, but the part that worried Marian the most was that the very tall thin heel on them looked like it was even higher than the heels on the colorful shoes she was wearing just then.  And of course, Vivian insisted that she try them on. 

Surprisingly Marian found the red shoes to be a little more comfortable than the colorful ones, but not by much.  And after getting them on her feet, she was definitely sure that the heel was higher.  She could walk in them… sort of… but not easily.

“Good!” Vivian declared excitedly.  “You can wear them home tonight.  I want you to start wearing them to work tomorrow and alternate between those two pairs every day.  By next week, I expect you to have two more pairs of heels just like these to wear to work too.  You’ve never varied what you wear very much at all,” Vivian told her, “so now you’re going to start with your shoes.  A different pair every day!  And Marian, shoes like that are the only thing I ever want to see you wearing from now on.  I never want to see you with heels that are less than… oh… let’s say four inches.  From now on!  Oh… and another thing.  Every pair of heels you buy had better strap to your foot somehow so you can’t just slip them off while you’re at your desk!  Understand?”

Marian was still shocked at everything Vivian had just told her.  She was being positively cruel! 

“Understand?” Vivian asked again, this time with more than a hint of irritation in her voice.

Marian finally nodded.  “I understand,” she managed to whisper. 

Vivian nodded.  “Now go pay for them and tell them you’ll be wearing those shoes home.  I want to see if they got any new purses in yet.”

It was with a heavy heart the Marian precariously stumbled her way to the checkout counter with the two shoe boxes.  She told the woman there that she was wearing one pair.  The woman certainly didn’t mind.  She paid for her purchases just as Vivian returned from the back of the store. 

“Nothing new back there,” Vivian mentioned disappointedly to Marian.  She stared at Marian’s feet for a moment and smiled.  “But I absolutely love your shoes!”

Marian had to catch her balance in the doorway as she carried the large bag out of the store.  Then with tiny teeter-tottering steps she carefully made her way to her car.  She was so glad that she had managed to find a parking place fairly close to the store!  How the heck was she going to manage wearing those shoes to work?  But her mind was mostly concerned with just getting home as quickly as possible so she could get the darn shoes off of her feet!