Trophy Wife
Her hair was gone. Britney stared in the mirror and tried to process what she’d just done. The little clipper lying on the vanity in a heap of honey-gold looked like a murder weapon.
Her hair was—had always been—her crowning glory. She was a natural blonde, and it was the only thing that came totally naturally. Beauty was an art, fitness was a discipline, and her boobs were bought and paid for and regularly rotated like the tires on her car, but her hair had always just been there. And now it was gone.
Just like Derek.
Her husband had left her. And she’d shaved off all her hair. She choked on a sob.
People thought Britney didn’t work. But she worked. Cook and clean and suck and fuck, she worked. She looked, she always looked exquisite—and Derek had left her for a girl who looked like she had never thought twice about how she looked.
(How can you do this to me, she’d screamed, after she understood the truth, after she realized that a threesome or a hall pass wasn’t going to solve the problem like it had in the past. How can you do this?
What I have with Emily, he’d said heavily, is real. We love each other. It’s the real thing. This…)
He’d left her. Britney couldn’t remember a man ever leaving her. Not in high school, not in college, not until she’d left all the others and her family and her whole life in Iowa (Indiana? Illinois? One of those…) to marry Derek and move to Texas. She hadn’t thought of her past in years, of dating or paying for things herself or other men at all in years, and that time in her life seemed as flat and unreal as words on paper. It was as if somewhere in her soul, in the fine print of their vows, there was a hidden contract: give me a life, and I will give you everything I have. And he’d broken it.
And she’d… broken. She’d seen the clippers she used to keep her privates smooth and silky and she’d seen her own perfect self in the mirror and she’d… snapped. For a split second before the buzzing thing touched her skull she’d thought Oh but Derek wouldn’t like that, the way she did a thousand times a day, and instead of stopping her and banishing the thought it had driven her onward; and now her scalp was bare.
She stumbled away from the vanity, still trailing and shedding wisps and strands of gold, and back into their empty bedroom. She passed the man sitting on the bed without a second glance and drifted confusedly to another mirror, a little triptych of full-length mirrors where she could see herself perfectly.
And she was perfect. Her makeup was mostly pristine except for dribbles of smeared mascara; scarlet lips and smokey eyes and delicate arches of eyebrows. Her latest set of implants had settled at a 32G, and they looked delicious and impossible either nude as she was now or in her custom-tailored clothes (and not even now did it dawn on her that that might be about to become a problem). Her core was taut and polished by hours of barre, and squats had given her a smackable ass. She’d just tanned and waxed and tweezed her body, anticipating a glorious fuck now that Derek was back from his trip, sex for the first time in months—which seemed impossible, when since she’d met him had she gone a week, a day, without his cock in her mouth or her ass at least?—and the lacy shreds of lingerie and touches of diamonds in her ears and navel only serving to make her look more naked.
And her head was shaved. And—
Tattooed on the back of her skull was a bar code. She could see it, now, the refracted reflections showing her the back of her head.
It was impossible, the third impossible thing in an escalating series of impossible things, and she felt everything inside her begin to tilt.
Derek was leaving he—had left her, had packed a bag and physically left her—for a short brunette frump from his office.
She had shaved her head in some kind of insane retaliation.
And that had revealed a barcode tattooed on the back of her head, which she literally could not have gotten at any point in her life. In high school, in her sorority days, in the last five years with Derek, that part of her head had always been covered with hair.
She froze, trembling, and a high pitched scream was caught in her throat when the man who had been sitting on the bed looked up from his laptop and swore. The technician strode across the room hurriedly, grabbed her, threw her on the bed and fucked her.
The technician was not her type; she would be hard-pressed to articulate to her type other than, “Derek,” and the technician was nothing like him. Taller, leaner, sinewy and dark, in nondescript casual clothes, with slightly unkempt hair and beard. He was brutal without being cruel as he picked her up and casually tossed her onto the bed and she sprawled, legs spreading automatically.
At first she wasn’t turned on but she also wasn’t upset; she felt a vague awareness that she should be upset, that this man had been in the room all along unnoticed until he’d suddenly decided to touch her, without any input from her. But the circuit wouldn’t close. She was barely able to keep conscious of his presence at all, at least until he started touching her.
Derek had never specialized in foreplay, but she’d never thought of herself as someone who needed it. She was usually the one needy for sex. But today the technician cupped and tweaked her breasts in some obscure rhythm, then slipped his fingers into her slick wet folds, one finger probing up and in as if seeking something, his thumb settling over her clit in a perfectly practiced gesture that lit her brain on fire. The other hand clasped around the back of her neck and squeezed and her mind began to spin and race in new directions.
She’d never fantasized while Derek fucked her either—she’d thought about him and floated in the perfect bliss of pleasing—but now infinite possibilities poured into her mind as the technician slipped out of his clothes and slid into her.
Every stroke is a stab of pink lightning across the inside of her head and in every flash she sees new and increasingly perverse scenarios; she sees herself burst in on Derek and her dowdy replacement and using her beauty and rage to drive them both to their knees to worship her; her breasts her pussy her ass and her feet, all possible erogenous zones coming online. Then the technician flips her over, doggy-style, and she imagines crawling back to Derek and his new love and grovelling, a servile pet, a piece of furniture, an occasional cum dump or pussy licker, and then they’re sitting up against the headboard, she’s riding him and his hand is on her clit and she sees herself in a blank room with a blank face where men come and go and come and go and she just lives forever there, less than a person, less than even a reflection of her man, just a cocksleeve, and she realizes she could be okay with that too, and then she’s facing him, the technician, sitting up and breathing his air, her tits bouncing against his rough shirt and her legs wrapped around her and she sees another option, sees a room full of women just like her, women just like her, with blank eyes and shaved heads and bar codes and perfect bodies, who need to be taught. Who need the education of someone who has seen the outside world, its glories and its cruelties, and that scene seems perfectly, perilously hot, to make more of herself—
But it’s not the last scene, not the last possibility she sees; she could have fucked her way through Derek’s firm and let him lick his boss’s cum from her pussy; she could have taught high school and made adolescent dreams come true; she could’ve been a nurse with special perks for patients who know the code phrase; she could’ve been an arty chick with a perfect body under boho clothes or a big-titted goth girl with a freaky side or a muscular bodyguard and concubine or a chubby laughing companion with an infinite variety of pre-programmed opinions and a precisely calibrated level of brattiness.
And as it goes on and on—longer than any session with Derek ever—she realizes she could have been anything. She felt like she was made to be his wife and maybe indeed she had, but she could have been anything and she could be again. The technician touches her in secret places in secret sequences and everything unlocks in a way it never has before and for the first time since she left the factory she truly, truly cums.
She sighed and sank down into the bed. For a moment her memories with Derek had passed before her eyes, and she’d flickered through them in the heat of her climax, searching for one moment of true love and connection rather than her worship and his acceptance of it. And finding none, she let them go. Let it all go. She slept, as the technician, not ungently, disentangled himself. Got out his phone.
“Yeah, it’s done. I got her, she’s reset. I’ll bring her back.” A pause. “Yes Sir. Full barbie, extensively customized. She can teach in the Factory until the right client becomes available.” Pause. “Well then he should’ve thought of that before he spent the fucking money, shouldn’t he? There have to be consequences for this. The termination clauses were perfectly clear.”
“Yes Sir. I’ll deal with it once I drop her off.”