“Is that okay?” Megan whispered.
“Christel doesn’t care,” Shanea said, “as long as it doesn’t…”
“… bother Paul.” Megan sighed. She really wanted nothing more than a good night’s sleep and there weren’t enough pillows for that. They’d have to be constantly in contact. On the other hand, she rather doubted that Shanea was there for Megan’s comfort. After a moment’s thought, Megan pulled the low desk out of the way and led the girl inside.
“The active term here is ‘sleep,’ ” Megan muttered as she pushed the desk back into place.
“I know,” Shanea said settling down with her back to the wall and Megan on the outside. The girl laid her head on Megan’s shoulder and put one leg across her thighs. “I… just like someone to hold at night.”
“Remind me, if I ever learn how to sew, to make you a teddy bear,” Megan said, shaking her head.
In remarkably short order, Shanea was snoring very faintly. It was unpleasantly regular but Megan put it out of her mind and mentally composed herself for sleep.
I have got to get out of this place.
After the events of the first day, things mostly settled down. Their sewing project was not disturbed and the clique around Ashly seemed to have decided to ignore them for the time being. Megan slowly learned to sew and as the days passed discovered the true horror of the harem: boredom.
There was nothing to do and, of course, nowhere to go. Their day was a regular, monotonous routine. Get up in the morning, clean themselves and their rooms, have breakfast, which was usually very tasty, flaky rolls with fruit, fruit juice and milk, play games, talk or work on sewing projects all morning, lunch, generally light, more killing time in the afternoon, dinner, more killing time, bathing, lights out.
She found herself unable to sleep at night after the stresses of the first few days wore off. More often than not Shanea came by, scratching at her door. She’d at first expected the clique around Ashly to attack her in the middle of the night. Then she’d dreaded it. Then she’d anticipated it as something to break up the monotonous routine.
Christel left the harem to more or less run on its own. She spent all her time in the inner sanctum. Which left Ashly to run things. Badly.
Megan had taken to leaving the main room for most of the day, although Shanea was aghast at that as well. It Just Wasn’t Done. But Megan had to get some exercise. She retreated to her room and would spend hours in there, first limbering up, then doing katas, which segued into dance. Snatches of tunes would come to her mind and she danced to all of them, running one into the other as they could be recalled. She didn’t sing, she didn’t hum, she just danced, sometimes furiously, for hours.
She was getting to be in the best shape of her life. And she still was bored out of her gourd.
From time to time there had been verbal jabs from the girls around Ashly but since the incident with Karie nothing more. Then, at the end of the second week, when she had finished her sewing project, she returned to her room one afternoon, planning on getting in some solid exercise, to find that someone had placed the skirt and top on her pillows and then peed all over it and them.
She was pretty sure it wasn’t Karie. The girl was a bully of the first order and unlikely to want to brave her wrath again. But it meant it was probably one of the girls in Ashly’s little clique. And the way to deal with that was to kill the rot at the source.
She picked up all the material and walked through the main room to the baths with a sad expression of woeful misery on her face. Once in the bathroom she attacked the material, cleaning it as well as she could. The silks were too stained to be worth using, though, and all her work was ruined. She also couldn’t get the smell of pee entirely out of the pillows. It infuriated her that she’d have to live with that smell for who knew how long.
Somebody was gonna pay.
CHAPTER FOUR
Megan waited a few days until the others had decided she’d decided to take the injury lying down. She had started work on another outfit and planned on making sure that this one was wearable. Then, one day, she noticed that Ashly was getting a bit squirmy and casually got to her feet, headed for the toilet.
The toilet was just off the bathroom and just as well appointed. There were more vanities inside as well as four stalls with doors so the girls could have some privacy. Megan waited in her stall until she heard someone come in and then walked out. When Ashly emerged from her stall, still adjusting her panties, Megan looked at her with eyes wide with sadness.
“Ashly, I know I’m not your friend, but it wasn’t nice for somebody to pee all over my bedding,” Megan said in her meekest little-girl voice.
“Well, I guess some of us just don’t like you,” the girl said dismissively. She was a head taller than Megan and carried herself with assurance.
“I was just hoping that maybe we could be friends,” Megan said. “I’d like for us to be friends.”
“Why would I want to be friends with a little turd like you?” Ashly said, brushing past her.
Megan waited until she was almost past and then drove a knuckled fist into the other girl’s solar plexus. When Ashly doubled up, choking, Megan lifted her by one shoulder and drove her fist into the girl’s stomach twice more.
“Well,” Megan said, neutrally, as she grabbed the girl by her long, blond hair and drove a knuckle into her kidney. “For one reason, I wouldn’t beat the shit out of you.”
Ashly fell to her knees and whimpered.
“Christel’s gonna…” the girl started to say, just as Megan grasped the base of the girl’s nose and pinched, hard. There was a very sensitive nerve juncture there and clamping down on it effectively ended rational thought for Ashly.
“Christel is going to what?” Megan said, sweetly. “I don’t think Christel is going to hear about this at all. Because if she does, you’re going to find out that this is love taps. Now, you’re going to talk to all of your friends. And you’re going to explain that the little games are stopping, aren’t you? Because if you don’t, we’ll have to… talk again. You might think that you can gang up on me, but if you do that it will be obvious. Besides, you might want to have a quiet chat with Karie about what happens when I get really angry. And then Christel is going to know. And then she’d better mind-wipe me. Because otherwise, you’re not going to be good for anything but a kitchen slut. Do I make myself clear?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She just pinched the nerve point so hard the girl must have thought she’d been hit by a neural lash and then walked out, twitching her robe into place.
She didn’t know if the girl would take it lying down or not. But when she got back to the main room she gave Karie a significant nod and then strode over to Mirta.
“Hi,” she said, squatting down in front of the seamstress.
“Hi,” Mirta replied neutrally. “Could you move over, you’re in my light.”
“Sure,” Megan replied, moving over. “What do I have to do to get you to make me something?”
“Oh, I think you’ve already done it,” Mirta replied, lightly. She was hand-embroidering the edge of a bra that was made of silk so transparent it was like glass. “I’ve been waiting for months for someone to take down that arrogant bitch.”