"Hello, Mrs. Blanc."
"Hello, Mrs. Riviera."
"What's up, Cate."
"I have a favor to ask and if you don't want to do it, you're the only one I trust to suggest someone else."
"What do you need?"
"I need an actress in a role play scenario. There wouldn't be much acting really, it just needs to be... extremely discreet. And it's kind of... kinky. And there's a lot at stake."
"Well Cate, how can I possibly not want to know more after a line like that?"
It really didn't take much convincing to get her on board for the ceremony that Barbie Malibu and I had cooked up for my husband.
I had previously identified that the sisterhood's re-nups can trigger abusive relationships, but I had missed the signs in my own marriage. Without realizing how trapped he felt, I had unintentionally opened a floodgate of angst with the Earn an Orgasm game and the Courage Jars and Freaky Friday. Dan was perfectly comfortable with having secret urges that he had no intention of acting on, and maybe I should have respected that, but we both gained by exploring our dark sides. I really don't think he regrets anything that happened in them. But the combination of stresses I had inflicted were harder on him than I realized. And now it's too late. He wants me to have an exit strategy to free us, meaning him, from what he perceives as the sisterhood's thumb on us, meaning him. I had to tell him that leaving was unacceptable to me. The sisterhood had given me an irreplaceable purpose.
When I was recruited into the sisterhood, I learned that Dan was a wealth hider. Kyra's team discovered that we were living well below our means and Dan was hiding our true net worth from me. Of course, both Kyra and I jumped to the conclusion that he was preparing to exit the marriage with more than his fair share. It happens all the time. Men sense divorce on the horizon and even though it's difficult to do, they try to hide assets that they would be forced to include in the settlement.
Unfortunately for me, Dan's explanation was much less sinister. I had never really shown interest in the process of amassing a nest egg. Dan felt he was under pressure to secure our future and one way to do that was to instill frugality into our family culture. In my opinion, he went overboard, but that doesn't imply nefarious intent.
Perhaps if I had known that we could afford some domestic help, I might have had more time to devote to him and to keeping our marriage secure. But maybe that's just me trying to blame him again. It is useless hindsight. Perhaps I would have just spent more on status symbols and made his anxiety worse. I'm not immune to the allure of bling.
My alliance with the sisterhood transferred the control of our assets to me, where they were managed with the advice of Kyra and Claire, and goosed by the insider trading nature of the sisterhood. Through the combined effects of numerous seemingly unrelated small trades, appropriately timed, the sisterhood benefits both the individual members and our cause. Our net worth is now much more than Dan was aware of. I thought I was doing that for my protection, and to secure the future financial security of our children. But I was really no better than him when my hand was on the financial steering wheel. We were richer, but I was hiding that from him.
By dabbling in his secret fantasies, pushing his buttons to discover where his boundaries were, and where they could be shifted to, I was scaring him with the potential risks to our careers and our financial security. We are both on track to become the CEOs of our respective companies, but that would certainly be jeopardized by the inadvertent discovery of our kinky games.
There was another aspect to his anxiety that I take full blame for. I was unknowingly giving him the impression that the sisterhood was a cuckolding and emotional castration program and that I was crawling my way up the organization's power ladder at his expense. He thought that what we were doing was something that many in the sisterhood routinely do to their re-nupped husbands, that this was more than just my attempts to keep our marriage together and to resolve the emotional conflicts of my bad experience with the Fuscias.
I could think of no other way to allay his fears than to take the advice of an old hippy era poster that one of the girls in our college dorm had thought was extremely profound. 'If you love someone, set them free. If they come back...'
To set him emotionally free without losing him, I would have to divulge more about the sisterhood than I felt authorized to divulge, to make him more of an ally. We are naturally suspicious of men because we fear our tendency to take the easy road by letting them run our lives. The sisterhood excludes men wherever they can, but I'm sure we all let our men have hints about our activities. I had done that with Gabe, to the point where he had taken our oath, and the results had been very mutually satisfying.
I wanted to show Dan that I wasn't trusting all of our nest egg to some sinister coven of witches that could wipe us out when it was convenient for them. But I knew that, even though I felt that I could trust him, it was too big of a decision to make on my own. I thought about consulting Kyra, but sometimes it's just clear that a particular person, even though she's my best friend, isn't really the best source of certain kinds of advice.
I knew that I could not consult with my shrink on how to proceed. Barbie had cautioned me not to involve her in 'our business'. She had read my stories and she was aware of our organization, but she's not a sworn member, just an associate bound by a non-disclosure agreement and doctor-patient privilege. On top of that, I was winding up my relationship with her. After Dan's retaliation, my disturbing urges toward my male coworkers disappeared. Every time that I even tried to think about pegging or caning one of them, my thoughts turned to the recording that I had watched and had insisted that Dan must encrypt and keep in a very private place. It was of me in bondage, bent over a large foam cushion, with a vibrating wand turning me into a whimpering pile of sated lust.
These thoughts didn't make me run to the ladies room to masturbate. They made me look forward to sex with Dan. I was satisfied that I no longer needed the shrink, the courage jars, or the Freaky Fridays. I could simply tell Dan what I was in the mood for or ask him what would please him. Unfortunately, I made the trust problem worse by suggesting that we end the Freaky Fridays.
"I won't be bought off, Cathy. For one thing, I really do like the good sex we're having. I want to keep that. I liked planning what I would do with you for a whole week before doing it. I think we should draw the cards early and give the one person days to prepare while giving the other days to wonder about what will happen. But I don't want to keep risking our futures."
Because this problem with Dan involved both the sisterhood and our marriage, Barbie Malibu, the marriage counselor of Liz's Red Council, and the first woman to become a gift to Dan, and the woman who had consoled me and helped me to find the counseling that I needed, was the natural choice to consult. She had some ideas. She had been impressed with how I had handled Gabe and William, integrating them into the sisterhood's plans by giving them just enough insight into our true nature. She thought that we could do the same with Dan, but that I should offer a him a walk-away choice first.
The goal was to convince him that he would always have financial security, even if his career somehow became compromised by me or the sisterhood. If he wasn't interested in taking the opportunity to escape our grip, she wanted a chance to 'counsel' him into the sisterhood. So she authorized me to divulge the high level money picture of our organization without completely lifting our skirts for him. She left it very vague, trusting that I could see what he needed and present it with minimal risk to us. She's not exactly savvy with money, so I'm sure she just didn't know what to authorize me to tell him. So I made my own plan.
Step one was to give him control of a big chunk of our assets. "If the tax man ever finds out what we're doing, Dan, he probably won't be nice enough to give us adjoining cells, but if you log into this website with this username and password, you'll find your own offshore nest egg and instructions on how to move it to where I can't touch it. You'll have to leave the country and assume an alias to actually make it spendable, but then you'll be able to live the rest of your life in luxury."
"That's not what I want, Cathy."
"I know that, Dan. You and I want the same thing, a bright future for our children, but it's good to have a financial security blanket, and that's yours. If you ever have to get out of Dodge, you don't have to take the money and run. Just grab your passport and go. I'm doing this so you know that you can do as you please, and if it pleases you to stay with me, I'll know it's because you want to, not because you feel trapped by the financial hold we have on you. And now that you understand us better, maybe we won't seem so sinister."
"But I don't really understand you better. You're organized. You do these things and you don't get caught. I'm not a financial idiot, Cathy. You don't move huge mountains of cash from place to place in trucks. You use the networks. You get around tax and banking laws somehow. That seems kind of sinister."
I show him my blank red credit card. "I don't dig below the surface, Dan. Breaking the law and doing something wrong can be two different things. I don't have a need to know. I assume there's a bank of some sort behind it, just not one that pays much attention to laws. This card gets accepted with a high degree of welcome."
"Are these teeth marks in it?"
"Um, yup. Just one of those times when I didn't have enough hands free to hold everything that needed holding." Actually, when I added those teeth marks to the card, I had one hand rubbin' my nubbin while the other was tied up over my head as I lay naked and spread with vibrating plugs in my cunt and ass while I was surrounded by a sinister coven of sisters engaged in a lust ritual. I guess I bit down pretty hard when I came. But I didn't think that story would help me to allay his fears. Instead, I showed him all the steps I had taken to secure our children's futures.
I also showed him the two other nest eggs that I'm keeping control of. One is what our government would find if they audited us, and we should be safe from prosecution with that one. The other is my offshore nest egg, and it's roughly the same size as his. He doesn't have a need to know about the NQA money in my sisterhood account. That's more than the other three nest eggs combined, and each of those is sufficient to make for a very comfy retirement.
"So, don't worry your pretty little head about our financial security, dear."
"I guess I deserved that. I'm okay with the offshore security blankets, Cathy. Hopefully we'll never need them. But I want to keep abreast of our legitimate investments. I'm not asking for control. I can't hope to beat the success you're having. But I would appreciate ongoing awareness. Maybe I can learn something, and maybe I can make worthwhile suggestions that can help your... our cause."
I knew when he said 'our cause' that his attitude toward the sisterhood had improved. Our cause is not some kumbaya, pie-in-the-sky, peace-on-earth fantasy. It's a lot of hard work to demolish the obstacles and impediments to peace and prosperity, one family at a time. Dan is a hard worker. It was an easy concession for me to make. I could let Dan see and suggest.
Then he blew my mind when he said, "But I still feel like I have to protect you from harm and I failed at that. You were badly hurt somehow, and I want to keep you safe. If you won't get out, then I want to get in so I can do that. I want a card of my own and I want to be trusted in my role as your partner."
That really threw me. He wanted inclusion in the sisterhood's business at a level I still couldn't allow. I would need his oath and Liz's concurrence and I should have seen that coming. Gabe didn't care about the money, so we never gave him a card. But he took the oath to get the bargain with us. Maybe I should have learned from that. I didn't want to be the sister who too easily trusted her husband and allowed him to harm our cause, but allowing him to take the oath and feel part of the system might not be a bad idea.
"What would you do with a card?"
"I would take you out to dinner at Pierre's."
"The cards are like debit cards. How would you earn money to put on one?"
"I'm sure you can think of some other way I can contribute, aside from my job related role."
So I told him that if he really wanted in, he would have to present his case to someone else who could help me sell it to 'the powers that be'. I pulled out my secret cell phone and called Barbie. She was expecting my call. It wasn't the first time he had seen the phone and he knew that I only ever used it in private. After explaining that he wanted more than I felt I could give him, I let him speak directly with her. I left the room, so that I wouldn't be tempted to interrupt based on his half of the conversation. The call took over an hour. At the end of it, he brought the phone to me and left the room so Barbie could tell me the details of their agreement.
Dan had agreed to earn our trust by taking an oath and participating in a trust earning ritual. Apparently, due to my success with Gabe and Mr. F, Liz had tasked Barbie with creating a structure for integrating 'little brothers' into our organization. Barbie had already received Liz's concurrence to integrate Dan and now I had a need to know, because she wanted access to Dan. I got the feeling that some other promises and agreements were made, but she did not reveal them.
"So what do you have in mind for an induction ceremony for him?"
"Barb, I should be asking you about that. Didn't you tell him what would be involved?"
"No, I left it open ended. I trust your instincts, Cate. You know what motivates him. Fraternity and sorority initiations are trials by ordeal. Kyra and Claire put you through one of those and it made for a great story. It sounds like you've already put each other through Hell Week, so just a simple exchange of promises and some symbolic acts should do. Be creative."
And so I had. Dan had recognized Barbie's voice and been surprised when she had described herself as the sisterhood's primary marriage counselor for the Midwestern region. That was a strategic leak of information to show that we intended to be more forthcoming. So I scripted her as the Mistress of Ceremonies for a CFNM ordeal that I knew Dan would find humiliating and enjoyable. I would play the role of sponsor and mentor.
Barbie and I both thought that an anonymous witness who would be known only as 'Esteemed Guest', and who ultimately gave her blessing to his admission would really sell the authenticity of the ceremony, after which, Dan would be presented with a new blank credit card for men only, a copper colored card. Bethany agreed to participate as Esteemed Guest.
The scene would be set in an old building that Claire and I had bought through a dummy holding company. It was a former martial arts dojo that we planned on using for a variety of sisterhood functions. It was convenient for this purpose because it is windowless and has a good security system. It was undergoing renovations as I wrote the script and they were almost complete on the night I scheduled for the ceremony.
I let us into the building and lock the door behind us. Barbie has her own key since she will be a frequent user of the place. I take Dan into the men's locker room and order him to strip completely and to prepare for anal penetration with the supplies that I've brought.
"Pegging?"
He seems almost hopeful, and then disappointed, when I say, "No dear, your ass is mine. I'm not sharing that with anyone, but I did have to agree to a slight infraction of that."
I had tried to prepare him emotionally for the event and I had given him a brief rundown of his role for the evening, which was to basically follow the orders of any woman who gave any, and to show respect for all of us, especially the 'Big Cheese' he would meet. But I had left a lot of the specifics out, hoping that would make it seem more exciting to him.
I give him sandals to keep his feet clean of the construction dust from the renovations. I also give him a black floor length robe, and I make sure that he pees and cleans and dries the chastity cage as best he can afterwards. And then we wait. I can tell that he is nervous. Who wouldn't be? I had designed the ceremony to be humiliating and I know how he will react physically to that, but I don't truly know whether he will make the commitments that Barbie wants him to make.
We both jump when we hear a sudden knock at the locker room door. I open it to find Barbie standing there. She is wearing her mask and it is truly beautiful. She is also wearing an elegant evening dress.
"The Esteemed Guest is ready. Are we all?"
I turned to Dan for his answer. "Yes, Ma'am."
"Follow me. Ladies first." She walks in front and I lead Dan by a leash connected to his chastity cage.
We approach a throne set on a dais made from a nine inch high stage platform.