I first encountered The Dark One on Usenet. Usenet was like a distributed version of reddit, and it copied messages around from system to system until everyone had everything. It could run over the Internet, but started as an older direct-dialup relay system.
I was too timid to run a newsreader on the
alt.sex.stories hierarchy of Usenet groups, because other
people on the Unix system could see. So instead I browsed around the
database directly, searching for the topics of my desires, and quickly
downloading the messages to my home computer for offline reading. And
that is how I found Hired Help.
Hired Help
Hired Help is about a young woman who takes a job as a rich man’s vinyl French maid. The tale begins to a familiar formula: a desperate young lady rushes into a contract she did not read carefully enough. But that would not be enough for such a long tale on its own.
We see everything through Jennifer’s eyes, and explore the mysterious Richard Hane’s personal and family history. We learn why he posted the position, and why he refuses the opportunities for sexual exploitation that he himself engineered.
As a young man developing his libido, I was drawn to the sweetness woven throughout this work. It builds a D/s love story that also brings families together in acceptance and playful eroticism. Not all of the specific elements spoke to my personal desires, but in the spirit of acceptance I was drawn into even those chapters.
Private Partner
I later encountered Knight of Sunlight (as he was then called) in a latex channel on IRC chat. He had updated his site at one point to add a disclaimer, saying that he once looked for 24/7 TPE, but found out it was not for him. I was sorry to hear this at the time, fearing it meant all our fantasies were doomed. Since then I have grown and accepted a lot of cold reality myself.
He never finished the sequel to Hired Help, and the draft he sent around contains editorial notes and placeholder text. The paragraphs were sometimes separated by extra whitespace to indicate a break in the text, but sometimes just seem to have been an artifact of the writing process. I have converted all of those into dividing lines.