Snuggle Ch. 04

Yarnell set his pen down and leaned back, crossing his arms and frowning. "Kendra," he said gently, "the contract is written within the guidelines of ALL laws. It isn't necessary to list each one individually."

She seemed suddenly unsure of herself. "Can't we add it anyway," she asked him plaintively. "It might not help anything, but it doesn't hurt, does it?"

He canted his head slightly as a sort of shrug. "Alright ... but call it the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998." He paused. "... or is it 99? Just leave off the date. We know what you're talking about. What's next?"

"Wait a minute!" Toddworth groused. "What the hell is she talking about?"

He looked around at all our blank faces. "I THINK that she's trying to reiterate that whatever this is that's being sold here is an intellectual property. I don't know what it is myself, but I, too, assume that it will be treated like one. An intellectual property can have its rights sold away, but the property itself will always belong to the person who created it." We were still giving him dumb stares. "Look," he continued. "Let's say this thing you're selling is song. You sell Mr. Toddworth here the exclusive rights to that song. You are then prohibited from selling or giving it to anyone else. BUT ... the song is always yours. You can go on the road and sing it yourself, anytime you want. Make sense?"

"We can use the process ourselves," I said, never having considered that.

"Exactly. You just can't sell or give it to one of Mr. Toddworth's competitors. Now, anything else?"

"Pending approval of counsel," Kendra said. "That's all." She closed the contract and sat back, grinning at the men across from her as if she'd just beaten them at their own game.

"Name of counsel?" Yarnell asked, his pen poised.

Kendra was smiling, obviously feeling smug with herself. But when I didn't answer immediately, the smile quickly faded, and she looked questioningly up into my eyes. I gave her a helpless little shrug, and her mouth fell open. "Randy! I can understand you trying to negotiate a contract yourself, but you don't have a lawyer?" She faced forward and tried to come to grips with that. Then she nodded solemnly to herself, looked up at Yarnell and said: "Bow, Barrow and Bow, Third Avenue, New York."

It was Yarnell's turn to hesitate. After a moment's thought, he said: "Very well ... a couple small changes of our own. Please strike all of paragraphs seven and eight. That's all then. I'll show you where to sign."

"Damn it, Ephraim! What's the meaning of this?" Toddworth boomed.

"They'd never let it get by, Rankin. A firm like BB&B would tie you up in so many knots over something like that, you'd NEVER get to use your ... process or whatever it is. We tried. It didn't work. Call it luck." He rose and came around to our side of the table. Kendra was still puzzling over the two paragraphs, but seemingly couldn't figure them out. He lined through them, initialed them, checked the other pages and pointed to where Frank and I were to sign. Then, he walked the things around to let Toddworth sign. The old man clearly wasn't happy.

"Now," he said. "that concludes my business here. And it concludes my services to Rankin Toddworth. I resign forthwith."

Toddworth barked a laugh. "Don't be absurd, Ephraim. We have a contract."

The lawyer only smiled. "Rankin, I've been writing loopholes in your contracts for thirty years. You don't think I wrote a few into my own?" His face was set in a mask of total disgust. "What you've evidently done to theses women is inexcusable. I always knew you had a mean streak ... but this is the last straw. I don't want anything to do with you or your company!" Then he turned toward us. "I'm driving into the city. Can I give you a lift?"

He had a Lincoln Town Car, and we all fit very nicely, with me up front and Janie holding hands with each of the other two in the back. Frank's and my suitcases and computer bags were in the trunk, but the girls had no qualms about leaving whatever they had brought. They just wanted all of us to get away from the mansion as soon as possible. Yarnell only had one bit of advice, he told us. "Young lady," he said over his shoulder to Kendra, "I know you meant well by mentioning the first law firm you could think of ... but Bow, Barrow and Bow is going to charge you a FORTUNE for reviewing that contract!"

She smiled wanly. "I was hoping they could do it pro bono," she said.

He laughed aloud. "Let me tell you something, Ms. ... um .... I'm sorry, I never caught your last name."

"Barrow," she told him, quietly.

He laughed so hard I started worrying we might have an accident. When he finally had himself under control, he shook his head in wonder. "I just have to say, this: I'm guessing that Rankin Toddworth spent a considerable amount to close this deal. Chances are that your process is worth FAR more than you think it is. But he also grossly underestimated one thing."

"What's that?" I asked.

But it was Janie, in the back seat, who answered. "He underestimated the value of the property," she said. And she squeezed Kendra's hand hard and shook it for emphasis. They both had tears in their eyes.

I won't go into the old "meeting the girlfriend's parents" routine, except to say that I liked them both very much. The next day, we rented a car and drove to Ithaca, where we helped them pack and we sent off all their stuff in a moving van, headed west. Then we drove to Syracuse, where we caught a flight that connected through Chicago to Denver. The girls shared a bedroom in Ithaca, and so our apartment was the first time we'd had a chance for a little privacy since our stay in the mansion. I wasn't sure at all how Janie and Frank would do in the cohabitation department ... definitely a Type-A versus Type-B thing there ... but amazingly, he had no qualms at all about her "tidying up" the place. I can't tell you how often in the past he'd accused me of violating his "space" because I'd picked up a crushed soda can.

I told Kendra I'd take her out for a romantic dinner, but we never made it. She said she was hungrier for me than for food. Our lovemaking was very slow, very tender and particularly gratifying. I marveled at just about every part of her; and most of all, I marveled at her patience. I mean, a girl has GOT to get tired of a guy playing with her breasts, but (at least for now) she not only tolerated it, she seemed to be enjoying it. When I entered her the first time that evening, I took her with long, slow, powerful strokes, and once again, she came twice before I reached my peak and spent inside her. I found it hard to envision such bliss in life. After the first time, we debated doing it again or going out for dinner, and we decided to order a pizza instead. She decided there was enough time for a blow job while we waited, but believe it or not, there wasn't; and when the doorbell rang, we had to scramble to throw on something, since she had to go to the door with me to get it. Finally, she had one of my long sleeved shirts on (with at least a couple buttons done), while I sported an old pair of jeans.

I guess it was pretty obvious what we'd been doing when we answered the door, but we lived through the embarrassment, somehow. I paid the guy, even though it wasn't the amount they'd told me it would be. Then I peeked at the pizza ... and it wasn't the right order. Come to think of it ... it wasn't even the right pizza company. That's because it was Frank and Janie's. Ours arrived just as they finally emerged from THEIR love den, she sporting a lovely ensemble featuring a pair of Frank's gym shorts and a tee shirt, and he in his ratty old robe. There was nothing else to do except break out the beer and have a party.

But things tend to happen after three or four beers; and the girls decided to use this evening to "take a stand" in our relationships. I should have seen a big deal coming when Kendra started crying, just trying to verbalize the thing. The whole train of thought evidently went something like this: Their love for us had more or less been conditioned into them through hypnotic mind control. We were aware of this. We were nice guys ... but we were just guys, all the same. ERGO, at some point in our relationships, we were going to do something incredibly stupid, like trying to "undo" their love for us. Anyway, that was the gist of it. I swore to them that we would not. Kendra wailed that she couldn't be sure. I told her that we'd sign another contract, by golly! But when we tried to write on a piece of paper with a ballpoint pen, it kept skipping on spots that had pizza grease on it. So, I grabbed her, threw her over my knees, pulled up her shirt tail, and signed her bare ass while she squealed and laughed.

I had a ton of things to do the next day. I talked to a local corporate lawyer, and began setting up the framework for a privately-held business; and I started arranging things that were best for the money, tax-wise, when it arrived. I also visited a private investigator ... a local guy, but one who was part of a national franchise. I won't go into detail, except to say that after a LONG time and a LOT of money, his firm was primarily responsible for the arrest of Dr. Gustaf Weinerberger, who was later indicted by the state of Connecticut for performing unlicensed medical procedures on young women. Maybe you've read about it. It was really big in the supermarket tabloids for awhile; forced, surgically-oriented mind control to make women more pliable and suggestible through "controlled panic attacks." Right up the tabloid's alley. Weinerberger fled the country while on bail, but not before the state had frozen all his financial assets, which were listed in the millions. The investigator believes he now resides in Brazil. They're still working on it.

And as for the REAL monster in this melodrama, the good "Doctor Arnold" is apparently going to escape any type of legal scrutiny whatsoever. We DO know that is not his real name ... but that's about all we know. Toddworth certainly isn't talking, for obvious reasons; and there is no paperwork trail leading back to him at all. What is really confounding is that the girls don't seem to care. Near the end of their captivity, the "doctor" evidently had them so bamboozled, that they (to this day) feel a great empathy for the man. I think, deep down, that each one credits him with finding the one true love in her life and making that love possible. Complete and total brainwashing was a small price to pay. That's what I THINK they think, anyway. As a man who made his living through "mind control," he obviously knew his profession very, very well.

When I got home that day, I found that Frank had bought five new sketch pads ... the precursor to a major project in the "Frank Universe." The girls were working by themselves, with a stack of yellow legal pads and pencils, outlining some idea. And ... if you haven't guessed by now ... THAT was the beginning. The result would eventually become "Blood on the Streets of Barcelona," last year's number-one grossing adventure video game, produced by F&R Software. Before that project was all over, we would have 22 full-time employees (and contract certain services from 19 others), rent a whole building in Aurora (which we're now in the process of buying) and we'd be featured in tech magazine articles around the world.

We settled on Aurora because that's where we found the house ... a huge duplex that we modified by tearing out some walls and building "common rooms," both upstairs and down: a living room on the first floor and a massive office area on the second. That's where most of the preliminary work on the game was done.

If you haven't heard of it, it was a pretty neat idea. The girls wrote fifteen different mysteries, and the solution from one unlocks and leads the player to the beginning of the next. Those "beginnings," however, are generated at random. As a result, it is virtually impossible for two players to work through the thing in the same order (actually the odds of an exact repeat are 1 in 1,307,674,368,000). The game was rated MA17+ (mature audiences only), mostly for sex. There are two main characters, pretty female detectives, one black and one white. They are very intelligent, but both have a habit of getting themselves into compromising sexual situations. Each has sex three times in the course of the game, always being seduced by a suspect (not counting one episode where they have sex with each other). They each wind up in a bondage situation twice. Frank did the nude sketches from modeling sessions with Janie and Kendra, along with literally thousands of digital photos used for creating animated graphics done by the art staff in the office.

While we were still beta-testing, we chose the best console that would support it, then we hired a team of four to take it cross-platform from PC/MAC. When we presented it to their corporate president, it was already in his format. He couldn't turn it down. But after viewing it, he wanted a lot more than the game ... he wanted exclusive game console platform rights for all our future products. That little deal was worth twenty mil. That launched us. And sequels were also guaranteed because the original graphical code was secured by our process. The game sold for $49.99, and they literally couldn't keep them on the shelves ... ALL the major retailers sold out within weeks, and we've just ordered a seventh production run.

There are those of you that wouldn't like our lifestyle, and would openly condemn it. Most people want their space. The very concept of "constant physical closeness" would be abhorrent to them. There are tens of millions of people out there with physical, mental or emotional handicaps; but when imperfections are filtered through the eyes of a lover, they can be rendered inconsequential. She needs me, and so I am there. She needs my touch, and so I touch her. She needs my love, and oh, God, I love her! For the rest of my life, I know that when I sleep, I will snuggle. Trust me; I can think of a lot worse prospects in life.

We've worked hard with the hypnosis thing. We do it almost every day. Kendra, and Janie, too, have gotten to the point where they can be separated by up to a couple feet; but they have to KNOW that all they need to do is reach out to reclaim contact. We're still working on it. For now, we claim success in terms of one more inch. There are a few strange aspects about the hypnosis that are still with us. Every time they go under, they cum. And, the multiple orgasms during sex are still a very real part of their lives. If those are being generated "mentally," they certainly can't differentiate. As far as they can tell, they are very, very real ... and very, very enjoyable. (Hypnosis was also the solution to the "potty problem." We simply put them under and tell them that we were still "with them" until they have finished. And, of course, the reverse is also true. If I want to get up in middle of the night, I just wake Kendra up, immediately "put her under," and suggest that I'm still with her in bed while I leave for her for awhile.)

The girls have always worked together in the big office at home, their desks 90-degrees from each other; so that all they have to do is reach out to touch. Kendra will do anything I ask ... anything ... with one exception. Every five or six days, she comes to me (or she calls me at the office) and asks if she can "take a nap." That's a code phrase, of course; what she's really doing is requesting my permission for them to spend the afternoon in bed together, making love. Janie makes the same requests to Frank. We've both told them over and over that they should just do it and stop asking. But they continue to do so, and it's apparent that they will always beg us for approval and acceptance of their love. Now ... I've always assumed that a little spirited afternoon delight would probably dampen a person's sexual ardor for the remainder of the day ... but just the opposite is true. On those evenings, Kendra is an insatiable wildcat in bed with me. Frank reports the same is true with Janie. Go figure.

Do bad guys win? Sure they do. All the time. And this time was no exception. Toddworth must have made a bundle off of us. I lie in bed some nights and dream of revenge ... think of ways to hurt him ... to make him suffer. It's especially tempting for someone who knows a little something about hacking and getting around computer security protocols. But, in the end, as I hold the woman I love, I can't help feeling sorry for the old fool. Not only did he lose his last remaining friend in the course of the deal, but it never even occurred to him that those two beautiful bodies on his operating table downstairs might be more than just a form of payment. They were, in fact, the "intellectual properties" with the greatest value.

The double-wedding last June was a relatively small affair, all things considered, with only a few friends, our immediate families and our employees in attendance. I thought it was a wonderful party, and I had a great time ... but then, half of the people there spoke my language.

I even did the chicken dance.

The End