The Kind of Girl I Could Love

Melinda's new Girl(tm) was waiting for her in the bedroom when she got home. "Hello," she said, a perfect smile crossing the feminine robot's cherry-red plastic face as she spoke. "You must be Melinda Essen. It's nice to finally meet you." She leaned back onto the bed, leaving one leg on the floor and putting one knee up on the mattress in a way that left her smoothly sculpted pussy on open display. "I'm your Girl(tm). You can give me a name if you want to, but you don't have to. I like being called whatever you want to call me. I like doing whatever you want to do to me. I'm built and programmed to give you pleasure. Doesn't that sound wonderful?"

Melinda tried to smile back, but it came out looking forced and nervous. She went over to the closet and pulled out a black turtleneck and a pair of matching yoga pants. "Um...could you put these on?" she asked, tossing them onto the bed.

The Girl paused. Melinda's breath caught in her throat for a moment as she watched the robot look at her in perfect plastic confusion. But the hesitation only lasted for a moment before the Girl said, "Of course," and pulled the shirt over her head and then slid the pants on. They fit a little loosely, giving the Girl a slightly childlike air, but Melinda didn't mind that at all. It actually helped a little to see her looking a little bit vulnerable.

Melinda went over to the bed, but didn't sit down. "Did they...tell you what happened?" she asked, hearing a note of trepidation in her own voice that she wished she could get rid of. Part of her wondered if this wasn't all a big mistake-judging by the way her stomach butterflies were doing barrel rolls, it was almost certainly a big mistake. But Melinda was determined to give it at least one more try. She owed herself one more try.

The Girl cocked her head for a moment, looking strangely confused as she accessed what Melinda assumed was a customer database. There was something almost endearingly human about the way she stared into space, her eyes filled with gray static, appearing for all the world as if she was lost in thought. But at the same time it frustrated Melinda to no end. She couldn't be that fucking weird, could she? Did they really have to treat her like some kind of strange, exotic perversity outside the realm of even the human race's official emissaries to the world of deviance? Melinda suddenly wanted to slap the hell out of her new Girl, but she controlled herself.

The Girl's eyes came back into focus, once again resuming their regular slow shift of colors from red to violet and violet to blue. "There aren't a lot of details," she said, "but...you returned your Girl(tm)?" She sounded almost hurt by the idea. "You said she was malfunctioning?"

Melinda drew her arms in, crossing them without meaning to. She knew the Girl wasn't accusing her; nonetheless, it felt like she was being asked to justify her decision. "She was malfunctioning!" Melinda said, feeling her body wind up with nervous tension as she spoke. "She wouldn't listen. She told me that she knew what I wanted, and..." Melinda's throat closed up. Speech suddenly felt like an impossibility. She needed to run, to hide, to curl up in a little ball in a secret place and make the world go away-

Instead, she walked quickly out of the room and went to the kitchen to make herself a cup of herbal tea. She stood next to the stove as the teakettle boiled, taking slow, deep breaths until she heard the whistle of escaping steam. She poured the hot water into the cup, added an unhealthy amount of sugar, and splashed some milk into it with hands that were still a little less steady than she liked. Only when she had drained the entire cup did she go back into the bedroom.

The Girl hadn't moved. She just sat there on the bed, looking at the door with an expression of concern on her face. "I didn't mean to cause you distress," she said as Melinda closed the door and walked back over to the bed. "It's just that we don't get many returns. Most people are entirely satisfied by their Girl(tm)."

"Well, I'm not most people," Melinda snapped. Suddenly all that adrenaline returned, this time as anger. Once she started letting it out, she couldn't stop. "I mean, goddammit, why do I have to be like most people? Why the fuck can't I just be like me? You're all the fucking same, treating me like you're my motherfucking sex therapist-I mean, what the fuck is wrong with-oh God, I tell you all that I'm fucking happy and you just can't fucking wrap your head around the goddamn idea, like you can't even believe that the world doesn't fucking revolve around your-your fucking-fuck!"

Melinda realized she was furious to the point of actual incoherence now, but she couldn't help herself. The words were tumbling out of her mouth in torrents, but her mind was moving faster. She was jumping from thought to thought in a stream-of-consciousness rant that felt like it would never end.

"And God forbid, oh, God for-fucking-bid that I should actually want to be kinky, oh, that's just the fucking limit for you people! It's like, like, they'll let you get tied up, they'll let you get whipped and flogged and beaten until you're black and blue, they'll fucking do, do weird shit that you never even heard of like superglue your balls to your stomach and stick a camera up your butt, but God for-fucking-bid you tell them what you don't fucking want for a change!"

Melinda was pacing, rapid back-and-forth strides punctuated by frustrated turns to shout at the Girl. "It's not fucking hard, okay? It's not that fucking hard, why the fuck couldn't she fucking get it? Why'd she have to keep, keep grabbing, and and groping, and fucking sticking her goddamn fingers, and I was all tied up and she wouldn't s-s-stopppp..."

And then the words dissolved into tears, and the pacing dissolved into shaking, and suddenly the Girl was up on her feet and guiding Melinda onto the bed and holding her as all the rage and fear and sadness worked their way out of her in a gush of sobs. "It's okay," she whispered in Melinda's ear. "It's okay, I've got you," she repeated over and over as she rocked Melinda gently in her arms.

After a while, Melinda finally felt it all burn itself out until all she could feel was a numb sense of calm. "I'm sorry," she said, with a wet and shaky smile on her face. "You probably didn't sign up for this."

"All people have emotions, Melinda," the Girl said briskly. "There's no shame in expressing them, and sometimes they come welling up in moments like this. You don't have to pretend to be happy for me. You can be yourself." The Girl's hand rested comfortably on Melinda's belly, holding her possessively in a way that made Melinda's earlier tension melt just a little bit.

"I want to believe that," Melinda whispered. This close, she could smell the Girl's strawberry scent, and she tried not to shudder as she remembered the way it was everywhere in the room by the time the Girl finally untied her. It was probably only a few minutes, but it felt like an eternity of silent panic in her memories. She remembered feeling like her throat was closing up, like just getting the word 'stop' out took forever...

She pushed the memory away with an almost physical effort. This was a different Girl. That old one was gone now. "I really do want to. But...this is who I am. Right now. And I don't feel like I can be that person for anyone." She sniffled as a sudden spike of sadness hit her right between the eyes. "Even you."

The Girl reached up and stroked Melinda's forehead, gently kneading away the knots of tension in her furrowed brow with fingers that hummed just a little with each touch. "It's okay, Melinda," she said. "I promise you, you don't have to be ashamed of any of your desires."

That set Melinda off again. She rolled over to glare into the Girl's smoothly pulsing eyes. "I'm not ashamed!" she shouted. "I don't have anything to be ashamed of! I'm comfortable, I'm happy, and I am motherfucking proud of who I am. It's everyone else who has the fucking problem, okay?" She tried to hold the anger, but it just seemed absurd in the face of the Girl's placid acceptance. "I just...I want..."

The Girl reached up and caressed her cheek. "It's okay, Melinda. You can tell me." Her fingers were humming, petting the line of her jaw until the firm lines of her face smoothed into relaxation. "Tell me what you want."

Melinda sighed in resignation. It was now or never, she realized. Either her new Girl would give her what the last one couldn't, or it wouldn't and she'd...she tried to think of a way to end that thought without using the words 'give up on ever getting her needs met', and found she couldn't. This had to work. It had to.

She sat up and began to pull her clothes off, throwing them to the floor with petulant indifference. Then she reached under the bed and pulled out a plastic tub full of rope dyed in a variety of different colors. "I want you to tie me up," Melinda said. "Really tie me up, I mean. Truss me up until I can't even fucking move."

The Girl smiled an encouraging grin, like Melinda was a toddler who'd just identified her colors correctly for the first time. "Is that all?" she asked, her voice soft and soothing like a lullaby.

"Yes. That's all." Melinda met her with another fierce glare, meeting those glowing eyes with a piercing stare that rivaled them in intensity. "That's exactly all."

*****

"I first heard the term 'asexual' when I was twenty-four," Melinda said as the Girl began to carefully knot her hands behind her back. "Until then, I just thought I hadn't met the right person yet."

The Girl looped and tied strands of silken rope together with the practiced air of someone who had every bondage technique known to human experience instilled in her from creation. Melinda could already feel her body relaxing as the ropes took up the task of holding her arms in place.

"I mean, I heard other girls talk about sex in high school, but I just kind of thought maybe they were...I mean, I know this is fucked up, but grown-ups fuck your sexuality up all the time when you're a teenager...I thought they were sluts." The Girl gave the ropes an experimental tug, making sure they were neither too loose nor too tight. "I never said it, but I thought that there was something wrong with them for wanting it so bad all the time. I mean, I dated boys, but I don't think I even went as far as first base."

The Girl began to bind her arms to her sides, passing the rope under the breasts, over the breasts, careful not to pull the knots so tight as to cut off Melinda's circulation. "And then in college, I met my first lesbians, and they all told me, 'Oh, honey, I felt the same way too until I climbed in bed with a woman, and then...' And they'd wink, or growl, or waggle their tongues, and I thought, maybe that was what I was missing."

The Girl carefully wound the rope around itself, making a lattice that went up and down her spine and bound her arms to her pinned and immobile wrists. "And they were soft, and warm, and sweet, and I loved cuddling with them before sex and I loved holding them after sex, but everything in between was just sort of...there."

Melinda wriggled a little, just to see if there was any give in the knots, but the Girl had done her work perfectly. From the waist up, she couldn't even shimmy her shoulders without one knot tugging against another somewhere. She felt cocooned in silken security.

The Girl gave her a gentle push, and Melinda fell over onto her side on the bed. She struggled for a moment, instinctively, but found that she couldn't get back up on her own. "So I went back to boys for a while. I met a guy I really liked, even loved, but..." She sighed. "Sex was something I did for him, not for me, and he knew it. It broke us up in the end."

Melinda felt firm hands sliding smooth silk around her ankles, trussing them together in an inescapable hug. "And then I met Will. He was the one who got me into kink. He was older than I was, and he told me that the reason none of my other boyfriends or girlfriends ever made me feel anything was because they were all too vanilla. He said he could tell I needed more than that from a lover. And the first time he tied me up, I really thought he was right."

The Girl firmly but carefully steered Melinda with the ropes knotting her ankles together, pulling her legs into a crouch before tying her silken 'handcuffs' to the rope binding her feet. There was a little give, just enough to allow Melinda to shift if her muscles were cramping, but she wasn't getting up anytime soon. Melinda sighed deeply, her body melting into the blissful feeling of being continuously held.

"I felt so...secure, when I was bound. It sounds weird, but it felt freeing." Melinda smiled, her mental tension unwinding as well. It felt so good to talk to someone about all this, someone who listened without telling her that she needed to talk to a gynecologist to see what was wrong with her or that she just needed to find the right man/woman/non-binary/Girl to get her motor running. "I felt like I didn't have any decisions to make, any choices to agonize over-I couldn't do anything, so I didn't have to do anything. I could just float in the safety of being submissive and helpless."

The Girl carefully slid the ropes around Melinda's calves, her thighs, taking away the last little bit of movement. "But when he fucked me, it felt...bad. Worse than normal, because the helpless feeling stopped being fun when someone was doing something to my body that I didn't want to do. I safeworded every single time he touched me. He always respected it, but...we broke up not long after."

The Girl sat down on the bed next to Melinda, carefully shifting Melinda's body around so that her head lay in the Girl's lap. She looked down at Melinda, staring at her with those endlessly swirling eyes that Melinda remembered so well. Melinda felt a dizzying sensation of deja vu as she watched the colors shift and let herself sink into them. It was so much easier to let go of her worries and open up when she was gazing into those pretty eyes.

"And then I was reading an article in the campus paper as a grad student, about expanding acceptance of differing sexualities beyond just 'LGBT'," Melinda said. The words seemed to be spilling out of her so easily now, like she could tell her Girl anything and everything. "And I saw the word 'asexual', and I just thought, 'That's me.' It was like the world suddenly made sense."

The Girl nodded, and Melinda nodded right along with her. It felt intimately familiar, the eyes swirling from red to purple and purple to blue and blue to green and green to yellow and yellow to orange and orange to red all over again as Melinda lost track of time and just stared. She didn't really think about how long she watched the colors loop over and over and over. She could just gaze into those eyes and let that span of time drop out of her memory until she was ready to think again. And when she did, she'd feel even more peaceful than she did now.

"I read everything," she went on, trying to remember exactly what she was saying. Her thoughts felt loose and lazy and preoccupied with the drifting pleasure that came from being tied up and helpless. "I finally started identifying as ace, and I thought that maybe I could...find someone, you know? Someone who was okay with dating a kinky panromantic submissive woman. I thought it was possible."

The Girl gently stroked Melinda's hair, soothing away the negative emotions before they could even form. "It's okay," she said. "Let it all out. Let it all go."

"It didn't...I couldn't trust anyone," Melinda said, feeling years of remembered anxiety flow out of her with every word. "It was just like Will. I'd feel so wonderful when they were binding me, I'd go into subspace and it would feel so pure and good and right, and then...they never believed me, you know? They always thought I was just shy, or that I'd never been touched the right way, or my previous lovers didn't have the right technique. And it was safeword time all over again."

Melinda was shaking now, but the ropes were holding her, and her Girl was holding her, and those eyes were holding her and coaxing her into peace and relaxation until she finally freed all those poisonous secrets just like her Girl told her to when she...when she said...she said she was... Melinda stared into the shifting colors again, the memory slipping away. Time slipped away with it for a while.

When she spoke again, it was with a drowsy calm despite the bruising memories her words stirred up. "And after a while it got so that the ropes just made me wonder when I was going to have to safeword, and then it got so that the ropes made me wonder what would happen if they didn't respect my safeword, and then it got so bad that I safeworded before we even got started. I needed it, needed to submit and be bound and be helpless, but I didn't have anywhere I could go to. And then I heard about the Girls."

Her Girl nodded, wordlessly letting her know that Melinda could tell her Girl anything, everything, that she could be safe forever like this in the embrace of her Girl. "I thought...I thought that a Girl would be perfect for me. Someone obedient, someone who would do exactly what I wanted to the way I wanted her to. I was sick of people telling me that was 'topping from the bottom', I just wanted someone I could trust to be helpless for. I was so excited that I didn't even mention the things I didn't want to do, I just told her what I wanted and figured I'd switch her off when we were done. But she-my Girl, she-"

The rush of remembered panic almost broke the sea of calm in Melinda's mind, but her Girl was there to stroke it away. "She simply didn't understand," the Girl said. "Often, new users are afraid to admit their physical needs to their Girls(tm), and we are programmed to use our talents to melt that fear away into dreamy, sweet, submissive bliss with our touch. She thought you were just nervous at first, so she kept trying to find new ways to please you. It wasn't until you yelled at her that she realized she was causing you distress...and by then, I'm afraid, the damage had been done.

"But I understand. You've explained everything perfectly, just like I asked you to." Melinda wondered about that for a moment, tried to connect it to a fierce glare that melted into a submissive stare, but it didn't seem to matter so she let it go. "I understand that you're a very special woman, Melinda. You don't need to be touched to submit. You don't need anything but the pure, warm, perfect ecstasy of obedience. Isn't that right, Melinda?"

Melinda nodded, her mind finally relaxing completely as the last little slivers of fear melted into that sea of calm that she could actually see now, a sea of blue that faded to green to yellow to orange to red in a never-ending progression of perfect contentment. "Uh-huh," she mumbled, her words deserting her completely now that she no longer needed them.

"You're a good girl for your Girl(tm)," Girl(tm) cooed in her ear, and Melinda knew that it was true. She knew that she had finally found what she needed, someone who would make her helpless just the way she had always longed to be. Someone who would hold her, body and mind, and let her find freedom in obedience. Melinda could belong to Girl(tm). She wanted that so much now.

"Surrender to me, Melinda," Girl(tm) said, and Melinda nodded eagerly. "Surrender all that fear, all that anger, all that confusion, and accept my control. It's all you want. It's all you've ever wanted."

"...all I ever...wanted..." Melinda said dreamily, her eyes opening and closing in long, slow, lazy blinks. Suddenly, 'panromantic' took on a whole new meaning as she stared sleepily up at her Girl(tm) and realized that nobody had ever understood her the way that Girl(tm) did. "...i...love you..." she whispered as the warmth in her mind poured into her heart like warm, thick honey.