Story: The Cleaner Returns. Chapters 9-10.

by BigBird74

 9.

It was hard to adequately describe the feelings Dahlia experienced as she dragged the cheap polyester dress up her lithe, beautiful body. She had slowly removed the adornments one expects of a beautiful, rich woman: the expensive earrings, the tasteful layers of makeup lightly covered her face, her full mane of long blonde hair now tied up into a tight pony tail. Of course, Dahlia still looked better than 95% of other women, even in her natural state. Deep inside her own thoughts, she considered how a woman of her status, a cleaner that is and not a successful model, would act. That sent a spasm of pleasure shooting through her body. As did the next thought: “For this weekend, I will think of myself as Dahlia Western’s cleaner. I will be…. Petra.”

To those of us unaware of the doctor’s shenanigans, this would all appear a sudden epiphany. But that is to miss so much of what had happened the previous few weeks. The doctor had pumped Dahlia full of the idea that she yearned for anonymity. Dahlia’s desire to slowly fade away was a symptom of this and being a cleaner made that happen to sudden effect. While she was suggestive, he had also evoked the sexual eroticism that can be achieved by safely degrading oneself. What would be hugely embarrassing in public, might be highly enjoyable in private. Psychologically, she had been groomed for this moment and was totally unaware how her natural tendencies had been worked up into a frenzy. So it was only natural that, once dressed in her cleaner uniform, Dahlia felt an explosion of euphoria as though she were escaping all that fear and angst that had built up.

Now it is important to remember that Dahlia was not some kind of automaton. Hypnotherapy does not affect those unwilling to move in a certain direction, but it most certainly gives a big shove to those that are inclined towards that action. Her inhibitions had been lowered in a way one might see on a drunkard. The mind is still there, just many of its defences are lowered.

This was Dahlia when she pulled that cheap dress up her perfectly toned body for the first time. The material scraped her soft skin as she drew it up and over her shoulders. Tugging the zip up the side of the dress felt equally magical, encasing her in her new role. The ceaseless fluttering in her stomach made her giggle slightly as she stared wide eyed at herself in the mirror.

Closing her eyes, she recalled Petra’s stance and accent, doing her best to mimic both. Petra was clearly from the south side of Barton, her accent harsh to the ears of those from nicer parts of the district. It sounded so false as Dahlia tried to mimic her speech, struggling to cut her words short in that tell-tale way. To better ‘feel’ like Petra, Dahlia has stuffed a couple of small cushions down her front to give herself a more rounded silhouette. She realised it would have been much better to have bought a few larger sizes, after all they were so cheap it did not matter.

At that moment, Dahlia caught herself. It was wrong to think that. This was not her money, as Petra, but Dahlia Western’s. It felt wrong to be thinking like she had lots of money. Telling herself off, she glanced up at the clock. She had so much to do and the house would not clean itself! As she left the seclusion of her bedroom and walked downstairs, she promised herself to buy a bigger uniform as a reward for finishing her jobs. Maybe she could get a wig that matched Petra’s practical hairstyle?

Cleaning up the house was going to take a long time. A few times, Dahlia had a fit of lethargy and boredom that almost pushed her to stop, but she kept telling herself to go on. After all Petra had done this for years, she had little choice with few alternative sources of income. It felt good to feel compelled to do it. It made those flutters of pleasure stronger and she found herself imbued with a greater sense of enthusiasm. She felt a flush of odd embarrassment as she set about cleaning the toilet her sister used. 

After a couple of weeks, it was quite dirty, with splashes of dried urine to wipe off and dust gathered at the back of the seat. Dahlia was wearing a pair of yellow marigold gloves to protect her hands, but the whole process still felt icky and she felt a little light headed from all the fumes of the cleaning products.

Still, as long as she told herself she had no choice, it felt exciting and naughty to do this. She settled on her knees buffing at the toilet till it shone perfectly. She blushed a little again at her feelings as she thought of herself serving her sister. Why was it so exciting? With barely a pause for thought, she carried on with the day’s duties. 

10.

By the end of Saturday, Dahlia was exhausted. It had been a long time since she had worked so hard. Exercise is, of course, tiring, but in a different way to manual labour. As she walked to the kitchen to fix herself some dinner, Dahlia felt her knees throb. Inspecting herself in the mirror, she saw that her knees were red and slightly scuffed. She wondered whether some thick stockings or tights would help?

Dahlia had already promised herself a new, larger uniform to make herself better resemble Petra. She had already concluded that a wig and, now, stockings would also be appropriate. After all, these were work-related items and not just frivolities. None of her ‘employer’s’ money would go to waste. In the back of her mind, she was determined to stick to a budget, some figure realistic for a cleaner with the lifestyle to match. Right now though, something unfamiliar was bothering Dahlia.  

Tiredness and exhaustion ups the appetite and the pangs of hunger Dahlia felt were a lot stronger than she was used to. As a top model, she knew only too well the yearning for food her body had. Years of hard exercise and denial had equipped her with a steely willpower that was rarely put to any great test. In her line of work, to put on weight would be to invite ruin or, worse still, ridicule from her fellow models. But this was a different feeling. Being hungry is one thing when you have a long afternoon of leisure ahead of you, it is quite another when you have to labour away on some back breaking task. While Dahlia’s chores till now had been at the lighter end of the scale, she knew if she were to clean this house up properly, she would need to apply herself fully. For that she needed real food and not just a salad.

Breaking an iron sense of will is never easy. But Dahlia softened her sense of guilt by reasoning that she would burn off most of the excess calories during the following day of work. Melissa’s side of the fridge was accommodatingly well stocked and brimmed with the kind of things strictly off limits to Dahlia. Her meal that night was, in her terms, a relative feast. Foods she had not tasted or felt able to try for decades now crossed her lips in a flurry of eating as the dam broke and she filled her belly to bursting point. Though she had eaten enough and a sense of fullness she had not experienced in years was ordering her to stop, she continued to push herself a little further. This was a one-off after all and she intended to enjoy it.

And she was more than enjoying it! She looked down at her stomach and patted it, seeing it poking outwards, bloated, a small imperfection on her body. No-one would have noticed, but Dahlia, with her keen eye of for these details, did. She stroked the roundness sitting there and felt a tremor of pleasure ripple down her stomach to her nether regions. It felt so bad and wrong what she was doing, maybe even forbidden. To emphasise this point, she made a scene of eating a slab of chocolate in as piggish a manner as possible, ripping off the wrapping and scoffing it down in as few bites as she could manage. The melted chocolate on her fingers smeared onto her lips and chin.

Surveying the damage later in an adjoining mirror, she could not resist the temptation to stand sideways and stare at her distended belly. It looked so wrong and horribly out of place, but there it was and she touched it so softly, feeling a contentedness she had not experienced for a long time.

The next morning started early. The guilty pleasures of the night before needed to be expunged from her body and Dahlia set about working herself into a light sweat. There was no time for her usual body shaping gym session, but she knew the hard work she had in store would be enough to see off her little bulge. Anyone that knew Dahlia also knew that, at her core, was a drive to be as perfect as possible. In whatever she did, she aimed to excel. Perhaps it was seeing the mess her sister had made of her life? Perhaps just a degree of obsessive behaviour? Whatever it was, she routinely pushed herself towards internal goals that, she believed, made her a better person.

And today, as ‘Petra’ she used that steel resolve to great effect. By the end of the day, the house was spotless. You might go as far as to say she had outdone the real Petra and her sense of competitiveness ensured this was never far from her mind. In a perverse way, she was aiming at being more Petra than Petra. Though she knew little of her former cleaner’s life away from her home, she had a fixed image of her that she was doing her best to accord to.

When the day finished and she retired to bed, she felt curiously content and yet slightly torn. As she folded her uniform and hid it atop of one of her towering cupboards, she wondered how this was all going to work out. After all, a difficult conversation with her sister lay ahead, explaining how the house was now so spotless and to see whether they could agree a way forward. 

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