LifeMates Ch. 07 - Myrna's Choice

As children were the last thing on my mind at that point in time, I agreed to this last condition without demur.

In return, Amanda offered me generous support: The venture capital that I obtained from her with the initial loan would be augmented on request up to a specified ceiling which should be more than sufficient. These extensions would be made on the same terms as the initial borrowing -- as personal loans to me. Initially, I would have the use of KI legal, accounting and administrative services free of charge, until my new company started making money to pay for them. Finally, as she was planning to live henceforth at her chateau near Mont Tremblant and had been thinking to sell the Westmount house as soon as possible, she would instead offer its use to me for living, and for office and training space, provided only that we keep one suitable room for her as a pied-à-terre to crash with us as a guest when staying overnight in the city. At that time, we might also be asked to lodge and feed one of her slaves, usually the chauffeur. Such visits would not be more than a few times a year.

On these terms, LifeMates got its start. The first step was a three-way meeting with Bernice included, to invite her to assist me, organize our household and keep her dungeon going for the training and discipline of KI and LifeMates subs, and for whatever additional, commercial use. Bernice agreed.

A second step was to initiate the legal process of incorporation, and to take possession of the Westmount house, making the few small changes needed for our intended use. Bernice and I discussed what changes were required; and she, in her new role as household manager, arranged that they were done.

For a third step, Amanda offered me two new arrivals in her chateau household -- a girl named Petra Wilkes who had shown up on her doorstep one morning asking to be taken in and trained, and a young man named Guido Morelli who had done the same -- both hoping to be paired with Dominants eventually as 24/7 lifestyle submissives. Guido was a dilettante, gay in both senses of that word, who liked to read and watch documentary films. His only ambition was to be a househusband and bed pet with lots of leisure time. He would serve the prosperous Master who made this possible. Petra was an experienced secretary, hoping for a permanent Mistress who would keep her as a companion, secretary and playmate. She was exactly the kind of sub we hoped to attract. Amanda explained to both of them that I was better positioned to help them than she was, and they moved in with Bernice and me as our first trainees. I used Petra as my own executive secretary and pet -- both to test and extend her skills, and because I wanted someone in that role. We used Guido to do the housework and cooking under instruction and supervision from Bernice.

And for a fourth step, I wanted a male pet and sidekick of my own -- someone to assist and complement me, who would become the best living model that I could make him of the product I hoped to sell. Here I had a a real stroke of luck. At my request, Mistress Amanda asked the contract officers at Keyholders to be on the lookout for someone with the right temperament and credentials to be trained as the submissive I needed. Soon after, an application from one Richard Luria landed on Charles Thorncliffe's desk; and, remembering Amanda's memo describing what I was looking for, he directed that application to my attention. What happened after that you know from Richard's account. He had all the qualifications that I had asked for; and when he quoted that Donne poem to me, I knew that his idea of the ideal D/s relationship exactly matched my own.

The crucial idea is the complementarity between a 'fixed foot,' focused on the achievement or actualization of some goal, and a 'roaming foot' who goes and does what needs to be done. The Dominant holds fast to 'ends' which the submissive obeys and implements. Real life is more complex, of course, but the geometer's compass is a splendid metaphor for this division of roles in a lifemate couple.

Richard's main skills are with language. He tends to live in a world of abstractions, though his real-world skills are more than adequate. His thoughts tend to roam over possibilities; and what he has needed (first from Sylvie, and now from me) is an anchor for his actual life -- a source of specific motivation beyond the immediate needs of his body. LifeMates and I give him that, and he is happy. He helps me do what I want done, and derives much of his own satisfaction from pleasing and pleasuring me. So it should be with every lifemate couple.

In our case though, what happened was that Richard has became as much a centre for me as I am for him. What I learned from him and from Amanda is that I too sometimes need help to break the symmetry of diversely attractive goals to set myself moving in a specific direction. I too am sometimes submissive in that way.

Most of this next part of my story can be found in Richard's narrative. Though I was keen to get our business up and running, I found myself envying my sister and other wifely women, and thinking that there was more to life than Dominance and submission. I found myself feeling somewhat empty and unfulfilled by the life I had been leading. It seems that sex for us women continues into conception, pregnancy and lactation, while for men it mostly ends with ejaculation. They too can get involved in raising their children, but in a far less directly physiological way. Childcare is not a part of their sexuality, as it is for women. Where that instinct is present in the males of a species, it probably derives from something else.

I found myself yearning to have a baby: Richard's baby, for I was now in love with him. But there were two things preventing this. The first was that I had promised Amanda not to get pregnant until the loans from KI were paid off, which would still be at least four years in the future. The second obstacle was just time and biology. I was already 38 years old, If I got pregnant right then, I would be almost 60 by the time this child was 21. He or she would not be fully adult, ready to settle down and have a family, till I was in my late sixties or seventies.

The promise to Amanda, made so easily when I was excited by the idea for LifeMates now felt like a millstone around my neck. But, having made that promise, I now felt bound by it. Amanda was much more to me than someone who had loaned me money. She had been a teacher and mentor when I had needed one. In effect, she had given me my career. I felt bound to her too by the submissive's ethic of obedience and loyalty. This was not trivial for me. One of the things, as I now felt, that made me a trustworthy Domme was that in my time I had been a trustworthy submissive. In this way, it seemed to me that I would betray my own integrity as a Domme if I broke my promise to Amanda.

But, on the other hand, LifeMates was now up and running and my biological clock was ticking. There was no doubt that Amanda would get her money back, and have another viable company in her empire whether I had a baby or not. And even preoccupied with a newborn, I would still be accessible. Richard and Bernice, between them, with the organization now in place, could easily run our business. Asking for my total commitment at the beginning of the enterprise had felt justified and reasonable. Insisting on it now would not be. I felt within my rights as a woman to be allowed to have a baby while I still could.

In this divided state of mind, I broached the subject with Bernice. All she said was, "Richard and I can run LifeMates while you're nursing and changing the baby, but Amanda won't be happy!" This was less than helpful. I had gotten that far on my own.

That evening I asked Richard if he remembered our conversation about a promotion to boyfriend status?

He said, "I remember that I hurt you, and that I was sorry for doing so."

"Don't be sorry," I said. "You did hurt me a bit, but it was a good pain. You know what those are, right?"

He chuckled. "Yes, I know about good pain, but what was good about that one?"

"It told me something useful, and raised an important question for me," I answered. "First, it told me that you would consider the change from proxy to boyfriend and potential husband a promotion. I have to ask you now, do you still feel that way."

"More than ever," he replied. "I've felt married to you, for all practical purposes, since that night at Amanda's chateau when I saw how angry you were at the way they treated me. I saw that you loved me, and knew I felt the same about you."

"I should have stopped it," I said. "I've regretted ever since that I let them flog you that way."

"I'm glad you didn't try. First, its not clear that Amanda would have stopped it, just because you asked her to. She was testing you as much as me, but she really did want to see what I could take -- and how I took it. Also, LifeMates by then was now almost as much my baby as yours. Refusing her test would have risked a project that we both cared about. I knew I could take whatever her 'Mrs. Payne' could do to me. I remember thinking at the time that it was worth a few stripes that would heal in a week."

"Well then, consider yourself promoted -- not just to boyfriend but to husband. We can decide later whether and how we want to make that legal, but you should now kiss the bride."

He did, more thoroughly and satisfactorily than he had ever done. I kissed back, just as thoroughly.

"Now, that raises the second point," I said, when we had stopped, looked at each other for awhile, and caught our breath. "Do you recall what was said then about the central privilege of a husband."

"That a husband could start a conversation about making babies," he answered. "I guessed that was what hurt you, and I've remembered ever since."

"You guessed right," I told him, "but as I told you, it was a pain I needed. It started me thinking again about a question I had buried."

" Did you want a baby enough to break your promise, anger Amanda and risk LifeMates?" he completed my sentence. "I remember your telling me that you had promised her that you would not get pregnant, until you had paid off her investment."

"That's it. But I didn't just want a baby. At that point, I knew that I wanted your baby. And I still do, with all my heart. More than ever."

"But now, as my husband and business partner, it's your decision as much as mine. How do you feel about challenging Amanda by having a baby with me?"

"First, darling, I have an urgent question. As your new husband, I have to ask if you are still my beloved Mistress? Because, if you are, then I will go along with whatever you want."

"No dear. It can't work that way. You heard what happened with George and Amanda; and that mustn't happen to us. The baby will be yours as much as mine. It will call you 'Daddy' and you will have to respond in your own voice and from your own heart. In begetting a child, I cannot be the Mistress who anchors you and 'makes your circle just.' You will have to do that for yourself. In this matter, and perhaps others yet to come, you will be anchoring me. Can you handle that? Do you want to?"

"So in gaining a wife, I'm losing a Mistress. Is that what you're telling me?"

"Not quite, my love. I can still be your bossy wife most of the time and you can enjoy your status as my hen-pecked husband. You can mostly obey and serve to your heart's content. But in gaining a wife, you will find that she sometimes needs you to be her Master. Then we may have to fight like a normal married couple about who decides and who obeys -- though the fight, in that case, will be that we'd both prefer to obey. The best I can offer is to remain your Mistress by default most of the time, if you promise to take the Dom role when I need you to. Can you live with that?

"I believe so, Wife. I want to very much."

"Then we have a bargain, Husband; but now, for the first time, I have to call you on it: What are we going to do about our baby (Don't worry! I'm not pregnant yet!) and about my promise to Amanda? I need you to make that decision for me. I will live with what you decide."

He thought for a moment, and then said, "Let's make a baby, Amanda be damned!"

"Explain," I ordered.

"LifeMates is doing very well: We've got over 200 current clients at various stages of finding or training a proxy and settling in with him or her. Amanda is our majority shareholder, but to punish you, she can only do two things: Getting rid of you as CEO would be cutting her nose to spite her face. No one else could run it nearly as well, and she knows that. And selling her shares would be liberating for you. Even if she sold the business to someone who wanted to run LifeMates himself, we could open our own commercial dungeon, specialized in mentoring and training, and keep doing pretty much what we've been doing all along. And she could only sell her own shares in LifeMates. She couldn't sell yours. If you kept those shares, you'd still have leverage in the business; and you could also use them as collateral to get funding for your own dungeon."

"But I am Amanda's submissive and I did make a promise."

"Then she'd be giving you the choice between taking some punishment as a disobedient subbie or giving her the finger. You could tell her that "All decisions concerning my welfare are made by my husband (who is, when convenient, the head of my family).' In that case, it's I who would have the pleasure of giving her the finger. Or, if you felt that integrity as her sub required you to to take her punishment, you could get pregnant before telling her anything (it's always easier to get forgiveness than permission), and accept her punishment after your pregnancy -- after you'd recovered from the delivery. She couldn't do worse to you than what she did to me that evening, and honour would be satisfied. Do you want the baby enough to take that flogging?"

"You know I do. It can't be as painful as delivering a baby in the natural way."

"Then there's your answer, Wife. As your temporary Alpha, I ask you to get pregnant and have my child!"

"Yes, Master! I hear and obey. Can we start trying now?"