Priscilla stepped forward so quickly her leash went taut, the sensation uncomfortable but not painful, and she stopped until Sandy stepped forward, following her as Priscilla joined Cooper at the wall and scanned the space.
A second wall marked the other end of the cage area, but none of the walls separating the 10 cages had been built yet, their places marked with nine strips of blue masking tape. The lab was going to have the plumbing installed first, Priscilla concluded, and that work was virtually a toilet, a bidet, a sink, all of white porcelain, organized in 10 sets, one for each cage. Two men, presumably plumbers, were working beneath the sinks at the far end of the area, some 50 feet away, both focused on their work.
Priscilla tried to imagine the space after the walls had been built between the cages and she’d been assigned to one cage, waking up and looking through the bars and through the window to the rest of the world.
“It’ll be bars, right?” she asked. “At the front of the cages?”
“Yes,” Cooper confirmed. “But solid walls on the sides.”
“Okay,” Priscilla said.
“Is that disappointing?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Priscilla said. “I don’t think I’ll mind the privacy.”
“But I know they let you interact with other inventory through the bars.”
“On rare occasions, yes,” she said.
“But you like it.”
“Yes,” Priscilla confirmed.
“We can make other arrangements,” he said. “We’ll figure something out.”
Both plumbers were staring now, apparently surprised to hear a female voice, and their eyes found Priscilla and paused there, and she looked back at them, two middle-aged men who, she realized, had probably never before encountered a naked girl on the job.
She’d spent the last 10 months nude, visible to everyone she encountered, male and female, and she’d gotten used to it, not just her body bare but also her inner self, her sexuality. But here was something different, two men not inured to the presence of nude females, and responding with surprise as they took all of her in; indeed, drinking her in, eyes so direct and so focused she knew that their minds must be doing nothing else at the moment but absorbing, processing, recording, trying to understand.
Was Priscilla self-conscious, embarrassed, stricken with modesty? Oddly enough, she wasn’t sure. She sensed what the men were feeling as they eyed her, no doubt the same carnal interest that provoked erections when her male research partners were brought to her. But these men were not here to impale her to mutual climax. They were here to hook up water lines to sinks and toilets. And so maybe this was awkward. Priscilla was here to look at her future home, the men were here to plumb, but she was naked and that changed things.