Prologue
All my young life, I had daydreamed about being in a strong, handsome, and successful man’s gilded cage. Owned, possessed, and tightly controlled. I can’t explain why, but it excited me, and nothing else would do. Living the life of owned chattel, as many women had centuries before. I didn’t want to be emancipated. I wanted to be his.
My family didn’t understand this, and it was futile to explain my motivations. At that tender age, and in my inexperience, I could barely dissect them myself. However, when he came into my life, things just fell into place, at least for a while. I had at last obtained that rarest of fantasies. Full-time 24/7 slavery, and dare I say it, it consumed me at least to begin with, even if it pushed every boundary I had.
With time, I realized that though I had achieved the dream, the dream had become broken and tainted. He was the wrong choice, a narcissistic, psychopathic man, and he intended to take me to hell with him.
However, his elder brother had recused me, and I will be ever grateful. He, too, practiced the life I sought, so I transferred my allegiance to him. It was difficult and traumatic at first; vivid memories of another still walked the corridors of my mind. It was hard to give, but with time, I found I could again be all I could be, and more, under this man’s stern but patient rule.
I realized, though, as the years went by, that this life I had longed for all my youth stifled me. I didn’t know how to extract myself. Becoming a caged and kept woman had severed any bonds I had with society, and how it operated. Slavery had freed me to just be me, yet like the plant that grew in the smallest container, it had stifled my growth.
This is the story of how I grew beyond the bounds of my mistake to become the complete me.
I don’t know how it is for others, this mythical beast ‘marriage.’ Mine, at least in the western world, is far from routine. I never first laid eyes on my future husband and said I must know that man. I didn’t feel all tingly inside, excited, or lightheaded when I beheld him. No, it was not like that at all.
Many speak to me about love, being carried away by it. I guess I’ve never been in that position. I had a friend once who had an arranged marriage. She was a hairdresser, and she had this cool little salon where I would get my hair trimmed. I remember listening to her, fascinated by her arranged marriage story. Yes, I know many Americans will all gasp in horror and shout.”THIS can’t HAPPEN IN OUR COUNTRY! IT’S ILLEGAL!” Well, it did, and you know what, she accepted it.
She was promised to him as a baby; he was not so much older than her, a couple of years or so. She said on the day she got married, it felt like a happy party full of all her best friends, relatives, and his, too, with her mother crying at the ceremony, and her dad beaming proudly as he gave her away. Then after....... There she was, standing alone, expected to care for this man. She said it was odd. That morning, she had been a little girl with brothers and sisters, and a mother and father to care for her. That night, she was in the house that her family had gifted them as a wedding gift. She was a woman, and supposed to make him dinner, and do other things she was both afraid and unsure of.
But by far the most important element about her story was that four children later, and half a lifetime, she told me she grew to love that man.
I have revisited Vanessa’s story many times now in my mind. It was different for me, very different. By the time I met my future husband, I knew what men wanted, I knew what they liked and didn’t like, and how to cook and clean very well.
I was still, though, very naive. I thought it would be so exciting to finally meet the rest of Master Frej’s family. His brother and mother, especially. I was kind of uncertain and nervous about that, for being Master Frej’s slave didn’t seem to sit all too well with meeting other family members. I was in a real quandary that evening when Master Frej said his elder brother would be visiting us. I was unsure how I should act, how to present myself. I knew the man had made a long drive, so I wanted to have a nice dinner made, and the house to be inviting and at least passably tidy. Not so easy in the decrepit home we inhabited at the time. I also knew he had recently lost his wife, and by Master Frej’s accounts had taken her loss pretty badly.
When he first walked in the doorway, I must confess only recalling two things: his sense of morose sadness that covered him like a blanket, and seemed to infect all those about him; the second was his eyes. The way he looked at me was unabashed, predatory.
That was the first sight I had of my future husband. If someone had said he was going to be that man, I would have said right then.”No, how, surely not.”
Later that night, after I had been so brutally shamed, my cover exposed, and my inclinations known, I had been given to lie in his arms. I knew that night in the dark he had wanted me then, not in the way Master Frej did, but in some other capacity not yet fathomed by me. I feel his love, the hugeness of it, the nobleness, and yet it is not in me....…
So do others speak to me of this love. I have felt love, like the love I had for Nita, my kittens, my horse, or my best friend. However, I suspect it’s not the same.......
