7. Kristoff Contemplates Chaucer
7
Kristoff Contemplates Chaucer
I can’t sleep, but this isn’t unusual for me. I’ve never been a good sleeper. I think it’s all the moving around I did, and the lack of a permanent home. This condo is the closest thing to a permanent home that I’ve ever had. I should feel comfortable and safe here. I should be able to sleep, but insomnia is too ingrained in me, I suppose. My body never learned to sleep and doesn’t feel the need to learn now at this late date. I’m often unable to turn off my thoughts and tonight the show du jour is all about my stepdemon.
Over the past few weeks of working with Peter, I often find myself forgetting how young he is. He hides it very well under a shell of self-confidence and bravado. It reminds me of the shell I crafted around myself for protection at every school I was ever sent to. The shell proclaimed to everyone that I didn’t care what anyone thought because I was above it all. I shunned any overtures of friendship well before I could be disappointed that none existed. I rejected well in advance of being rejected myself, and inside my shell it was safe, if lonely.
Peter is a little like that, I think, although I could be wrong. He could be the same as every bully who ever tried to make my life miserable. There were glimpses of him tonight, though, that paint me a different picture—one of a man well out of his depth and absolutely determined no one finds out.
I wonder if my father did this to him. It’s a stupid question. It’s clear my father is at least partially, if not fully, responsible. He raised Peter like he didn’t raise me, and I think it’s clear that with or without his absence, he’s a shitty parent. Peter and I have that in common, at the very least.
It occurs to me It's bordering on cruel to have thrust Peter into the COO position. He’s far too young for it and every single person at the company knows it. They’re afraid of my father, so they’re afraid of Peter by proxy, but I don’t think any of the employees truly respect him.
Granted, I’m not convinced they respect me, either, but at least I started at Minola as an intern and worked my way up. Everyone knows where I was bound to end up, but I didn’t cut corners to get there. I’m not riding on my grandfather’s or my father’s coattails.
I wonder how Peter will do tomorrow in the meeting. Theoretically it would be good for me if he crashed and burned, but I’m trying to take a more long-term view. All I have to do is outwait my father and Peter while at the same time keeping the company running like it should. It’s a huge task, but it’s also, in a way, what my grandfather raised me to do. He taught me that the company’s success is always the number one goal of a CEO, and that means more than just making stock price projections. The entire company needs to be functional and healthy. It needs space to breathe and workers who want to do their jobs well. There are a lot of moving pieces that you need to keep moving and not colliding into each other.
One of those pieces is now Peter in the COO position and another piece is me demoted to his assistant. It’s meant to humiliate me and put me at a disadvantage, and so far that’s exactly what my demotion and the stepdemon’s promotion has caused. I’m sure my father intends on keeping me banging my head against a figurative wall until I give up and cede the business to him. I will give up Minola over my dead body, though, so I either need to get better at banging my head or pivot and do something else. Something that gives me an edge.
A million ideas filter through my head, some of them completely ridiculous, just to amuse me, like breaking into the Shedd aquarium at night and kidnapping all the penguins then training them to be my minions. I’d have them wear little black bowties, like debonair avian secret agents, and have them infiltrate the Minola building to do… I have no idea. But it’s still a fun thought.
While running through various scenarios in my head, even ones including kidnapped and radicalized penguins, an insidious idea worms its way inside my head. It’s a crazy Idea. One that very well might blow up in my face. But if it works… my entire body flushes and I break out in goose bumps all over. It’s the same shivery feeling I get when I’m on the edge of coming.
What if, instead of fighting Peter tooth and nail, I give in?
I don’t mean admitting defeat and quitting, letting my father win. What I’m thinking of is a sort of malicious compliance mixed with taking one for the team, that team being Minola Corp. as a whole. I examine the idea from various angles, coming up with pros, cons, and potential responses to my ploy. If I choose this avenue, how will Peter respond?
I know this is a path I shouldn’t tread. There is far more risk than reward. Probably. But I’ve also seen a glint in Peter’s eyes a few times that makes me think my idea isn’t that outlandish. While I stand by what I said to Peter earlier—he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing—I don’t think he’s all that far from figuring it out. As much as I’d like to think Peter is stupid and lazy, I don’t think he’s either. If I’m going to make this work, I have a very small window of opportunity to make it happen. But I think, if I pick the right moment, I can regain the upper hand without Peter realizing what’s happened.
If I can nudge Peter in the proper direction. If Peter is the type of man I think he is, or might become. If I’m lucky. If a million things manage to go my way. If Father doesn’t figure out what I’m up to
There are a lot of ifs to worry about, I know, but the reward is so very tempting. I can potentially put Father into a checkmate while at the same time getting something I’ve wanted for an exceedingly long time. Something far more elusive than winning Minola Corp. Something equally dangerous and alluring.
Submission.
It’s not what most people think. Or, rather, when done correctly it’s not what most people think. A common association with submission is abuse, and while the idea isn’t completely wrong, it’s far from being completely right.
Willing submission is all about having power. Far more power than any Dom ever could. Granted, this is all theoretical. I have no first-hand experience. I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to find a Dom, let alone one that I could trust. That’s just not me. But maybe, if I’m both lucky and smart, I can create one.
I shouldn’t be even considering molding my stepbrother into my own personal kink toy. It’s wrong. And immoral. And it would also be extremely satisfying to thwart my father while indulging in my secret desires. That wrongness curves around and becomes right, much in the same way submission wraps around and becomes power.
I don’t know why I’m like this. Therapy, so far, hasn’t given me a ton of insight, other than this theory: I’ve always felt powerless and the idea of being in control of my powerlessness flips my dick to the ON position. It’s possible, I suppose, but personally, I think the person really to blame is Chaucer. That, and Dr. Oswald for assigning an already sexually confused teenager several of The Canterbury Tales in a literature class. They were all very eye opening, but especially, and probably not at all in the way Dr. Oswald intended, The Clerk’s Tale .
“I could be the stepdemon’s Griselda,” I murmur out loud, much to the annoyance of either Laertes or Polonius. In the dark, I can’t tell which is which, but one of them lets out an annoyed mew then bats my mouth to shut it up.
Message received, my little tyrants, I think, slipping into a familiar fantasy. I’ll be quiet.
In my mind I wander down a well-worn path, putting myself into the story and embellishing as I go. When I get hard, as I always do at some point during the fantasy, I don’t do anything to ease the ache. That, after all, is the entire point.
The Clerk’s Tale isn’t one of the more famous of Chaucer’s stories, like The Miller’s Tale or The Wife of Bath, but it is one of the more contentious. At face value it’s the story of a poor but pious and devoted woman, Griselda, the daughter of a serf, who marries a nobleman. She promises absolute loyalty and devotion, and she delivers it—hard. Her husband, wanting to test her seemingly endless virtue, puts her through some insane trials to see if she’ll turn against him. She does not, even after he pretends to kill their infant children then takes another wife, whom Griselda will now serve. Our heroine sucks up all the abuse and keeps on smiling. And when her noble husband starts to see that his people revere her more for her piety than him for his nobility, he’s like “Just kidding, folks,” and shows that he never killed their kids or divorced her in order to marry someone younger. Everyone lives happily ever after, blah blah.
The obvious take from this little parable is that it’s demonstrating how women should behave, but if you dig down, you’ll see what really happened in the story. Griselda won and gained power over her noble husband, and she did it through malicious compliance. And if, like me as an over-horny and under-sexed teenager, you dig down even further, you get what for me was my very first glimpse of how hot that kind of submission could be. It made me feel achy and shivery and needy for something I didn’t have a name for.
The school I was attending at the time had completely archaic rules involving cell phones and the Internet. Internet use was strictly monitored and firewalled to hell and back. Cell phones were forbidden under all circumstances. But while kids who were connected managed to get their hands onto unmonitored Internet via contraband burner smartphones, I was not so lucky or popular. I found a work-around, however: books. That school, bless them, didn’t give a crap about what kind of books we ordered from Amazon. Reading, after all, was encouraged. Especially the kind that involved a physical product.
That’s how I first found T he Story of O, and it was a slippery slope from there. I learned porn was readily available to me as long as it was contained within the written word, and I read everything from absolute filth to scholarly books written by doctors. I learned about the Kinsey scale and a mind-blowing array of kinks and BDSM. I discovered I was definitely gay, probably a bottom, and very much on the subby side of things. I learned about safe words and contracts and consent. Most importantly, I learned I wasn’t alone or some sort of deviant freak. I was bent, but that was okay. Most people are bent in one way or another. As long as you kept things safe, sane, and consensual, then everything would be okay.
And always, in the background of my thoughts, was Griselda. Biding her time and taking what was dished out to her and still coming out as the winner. Without once meeting a Dom, I learned that there is great power in submission.
Theoretically, of course. It was all theoretical. It still is. I was born and raised to be the nobleman in the story, to give orders and be obeyed. I was never, ever supposed to be Griselda.
Until now, if I can play my cards right and nudge my stepdemon in just the right way. It can be my secret; a bit of harmless role play on my end to make the time go by. Peter doesn’t need to know how much I get off on him punishing me. He never has to know that I’m actually the one in charge. I’ll be aware and that’s the only thing that matters.
The only pang I feel is knowing it can’t last forever and it could never, ever, be real.