Clinical Trial

SCENE opens on the interior of a medical exam room as the door opens – a doctor enters the room and closes the door behind him, then greets the young woman sitting waiting on the examination table as Dr. Greenwood. He thanks her for coming and for participating in the clinical trial – she just has to pass a quick screener and then they can begin. Holding up a clipboard and pen, he asks her some questions – her name (‘Jamie Lawson’), her age (‘I just turned 18 a couple of months ago’), is she pregnant (‘no’), does she have any history of health conditions – asthma, heart problems, osteoporosis, breast cancer (‘no, none’), and her level of daily physical activity (‘well I play lacrosse about twice a week, plus daily running and morning yoga’). He makes a quip that she must be quite flexible, to which she rolls her eyes and says sarcastically that she’s never heard that one before. Satisfied with the responses, the doctor tells her he’s going to be asking her to complete a series of exercises, while monitoring her to measure physical stimulation and stress. They have equipment set up in a room down the hall. On their way out the door of the exam room, Jamie jokes that she doesn’t stress easily, and Dr. Greenwood smirks in reply and says ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll find a way to get you to break a sweat!’

CUT TO TITLE PLATE
We cut back to the two already midway through setting up in another larger room, containing a hybrid of medical and exercise equipment. The doctor is mostly done applying medical electrodes to her temples and clavicles. The last thing he has to do before they begin is to take her blood pressure and resting heart rate, so he can compare these with after the trial. First he takes her blood pressure – as he moves to strap it around her arm his hand brushes against her breast, he chuckles a brief apology and continues as if nothing happened.

Jamie tries to make small talk with him as he pumps and holds the gauge in his other hand – ‘So, what is this trial for? Some sort of new performance drug or something?’ The doctor provides only the most evasive of replies – he can’t discuss the trial with the subjects beforehand or it could compromise the results. ‘You’re offering way more for this study than the last one of these I did,’ Jamie remarks. Oh, is that so? the doctor replies, still acting elusive. Does she sign up for clinical trials often? ‘Yeah, well not until recently but I really need the extra help right now,’ Jamie grumbles, ‘my dad hurt his knee and can’t work so I’m trying to support him whenever I can. It’s a drag, but I’m hoping it won’t be for much longer.’ The doctor smiles politely and says ‘Well, we have your contact information now so if more of these opportunities come along, we’ll be sure to contact you.’ He finishes taking her blood pressure, notes something on his clipboard, and then tells her he’ll take her heart rate now. ‘Do I have permission to touch your chest?’ Jamie looks taken aback – she supposes so, but don’t they usually check at the neck? ‘I prefer my own methods,’ the doctor insists, and reaches his hand towards her chest to feel her heart. Again, his hand brushes her breasts – this time he doesn’t apologize. Jamie looks a bit flustered and is about to speak up, but thinks better of it.

After a long awkward moment, the doctor releases his hand from her chest and notes something on the clipboard. He pats his legs, stands up, and says great – they’re ready to get started! He’d like her to start with some simple jumping jacks. He stands her up in the middle of the room, the wires leading from her body to a small handheld device he holds in one hand, his clipboard in the other. He asks her to begin. She does a few, but he stops her. ‘I’ll need you to remove your bra, actually.’ What? Why? she protests. It interferes with the test, he says vaguely, but he assures her it’s quite necessary to the results. He turns around so that she can take it off with some privacy – she lifts her shirt up to reveal the bra, and unclaspsit, exposing her breasts momentarily before pulling her tank-top back down to cover them. Beginning the exercise again, her breasts now bounce up and down tantalizingly beneath her shirt as she jumps – with the doctor and the camera both clearly narrowing in on this bouncing as their primary interest.After several jumps with no indication of stopping, Jamie gets a bit frazzled and asks the doctor how many of these she’s expected to do – this snaps him out of his reverie and he nonchalantly says ‘five more, and then we’ll move on to the next exercise’. Jamie exhales sharply, a bit frustrated, butacquiesces.

Next is an exercise bike – Dr. Greenwood asks her to mount it, and then begin cycling at a pace she’s comfortable with to start. He stands behind the bike – his focus clearly fixated on the crack of her ass peeking out of her yoga pants as she pedals – and he offers her some mild platitudes to keep herencouraged. After a minute, he heads to the front to increase the resistance of the pedals – ‘we need to see you break out a sweat, so let’s turn it up a bit, shall we?’, he says, and then instructs her to continue.

CUT to roughly fifteen minutes later – Jamie has been on the bike for a while now, as is obvious by the thick beads of sweat dripping down her face and chest, and soaking her workout clothes. She’s showing no signs of exhaustion yet, but it’s clear the workout is no walk in the park for her either. The doctor meanwhile is still just looking her over, with perverse appreciation. ‘That’s enough of that for now,’ he says finally, and Jamie lets out a sigh of relief and slows her pedaling down. She gets off the bike and takes a nearby towel to wipe off the seat. ‘That’s quite alright, you can leave it’ the doctor says. Jamie looks increasingly puzzled but shrugs and starts to pat her head with the towel. The doctor rips the towel out of her hand – ‘I didn’t say you could do that yet.’ Jamie starts to argue that she’s just wiping sweat off when the doctor cuts her off – ‘If you want to disagree with my methods, that’s fine, you can leave at any time and I’ll just move on to the next subject.’ Jamie realizes how bad she needs the compensation, and holds her tongue. ‘What’s next, then?’ she asks. He tells her to go grab the exercise mat a few feet away. As she turns around to fetch it, he runs his finger along the sweaty bike seat and then sniffs or licks his fingertip.

Once the mat’s in place in the floor center, the doctor proceeds to have Jamie remove her shoes and socks, and then do various flexibility tests – bend over and touch your toes, sit legs spread and reach forward, assume various yoga poses… he licks his lips as he watches each of these poses, which thanks to her sweat-drenched clothes and no bra are extremely revealing. Jamie can increasingly feel his eyes on her as she strikes each pose – finally, after the third or fourth yoga pose she snaps at him. ‘You’re not even writing anything down anymore, you’re just staring at me!’ The doctor seems unfazed by her sudden outburst. ‘We’ll move on to the next test, then…’ No, she exclaims. No more of these weird tests. What was it he even said these tests were for?

Dr. Greenwood reminds her that he’s monitoring her physical responses to stress and stimulus. He says that now that they’ve gotten the stress tests out of the way, it’s time for the stimulus tests. He goes to a small table nearby and procures a sleek black featureless vibrator. Calmly, he tells Jamie that she will have to pleasure herself while he monitors her physical reactions. Jamie snaps – there’s no way she’s doing that. This isn’t what she signed up for. The doctor sighs and shrugs – that’s fine, he understands. Of course, he can’t compensate her for incomplete participation – but if she stays, he’ll triple the amount that was offered in the ad. Jamie flat out refuses, it doesn’t matter what he offers her, she’s not doing that. Indifferent, the doctor says he supposes that she’ll just have to find some other way to support her dad. He muses that someone her age could probably make that amount in about two weeks of working full-time. A shame that she’ll throw away two whole weeks of her life instead of spending just one hourdoing something perfectly harmless… not just harmless, but enjoyable, even. Jamie is torn… but with some convincing, and some insistence that the doctor keeps his distance, only watches, and isn’t recording her, she agrees.

She hesitantly pulls her yoga pants to her ankles, sets herself down on the mat and takes the vibrator in hand, and reluctantly starts pleasuring herself. The doctor watches intently, at first taking a note or two but quickly abandoning the pretense, his hand moving to his crotch for some over-the-pants strokes. She tries to avoid meeting his eyes, but at times he insists she looks at him or gives her some other instruction to follow to humiliate her further. The conflict between her physical pleasure and her emotional discomfort is obvious. After some minutes of this, he crouches down to her level and says warmly ‘It’s time, Ms. Lawson.’ He begins to peel off the electrodes and wires hooked to her. She looks relieved – you mean the trial’s done? He shakes his head. ‘No, I mean it’s time for you to let me fuck you.’

Jamie protests weakly – he agreed he was just going to watch. He smiles coldly. ‘Come on Jamie, you knew where this was going. Did you honestly think I wasn’t going to ask for more? If you really weren’t up for the possibility, you would have left the second I asked you to touch yourself.’ Jamie insists that’s not true, she trusted him, but her words lack conviction. ‘You’re a little slut,’ he continues calmly. ‘You were fine with letting a complete stranger watch you strip and pleasure yourself. So stop lying to us both. We both know you’re going to let me fuck you, so just be a good little slut, say yes to it and spare us the drama.’ Jamie sputters, but she has no words. Eventually she bitterly says ‘Ok… just get it over with.’