FREEDOM IS TAKEN...

Five years afterward I was still stuck at home. People thought I was the only child of my father - the highly acclaimed business magnate, Albert Sheriff of Albert farms and Allied Services – a conglomerate of multi-billion dollar businesses that had sat atop the food chain of the continent's economy for many decades, because the other two had gained independence, and migrated. Gained independence? No, that didn't fairly capture the ordeal of the duo. It was not until Lyon and Martha resorted to blackmail, having exhausted all options that they succeeded in twisting our parent's arms and took their freedom. When that happened, they fled to the city proper, where, according to them, the pace of events matched the energy they exuded. Chiefly, they wanted life simple; devoid of all the tiring schedules where even the breath we took was first enlisted on the menu, analyzed, and meticulously reckoned such that when exhaled, must yield a predetermined outcome or the doctors would be called-in. It didn't matter if an alteration we attempted was such as should be expected, slight or even harmless. It was forbidden. The protocol was elaborate, archaic, and annoyingly formal. The stewards attended to us with the same unflinching exactness as when we were kids. Martha told me nothing has been removed or added. Till these-adult days, they still prodded us to bed, waited to cast the beddings over our shoulders, waltzed around to turn off the appliances and dinked us good night ma'am or sire, with exaggerated smirk coating their faces as they bowed out. They still woke us to warm baths, pulled the chairs for us at the dinning, dishing out our rations and opened or closed the car doors. Looking smart in their colorful scrub shirts and mobcaps, you will see them at every corners of the home ready to take orders, and that would be if they were by some chance, not following some already. They were dutiful in a way that I hated to see and thought servilely. Although I couldn't clearly say I had an understanding of how that should work, It could me simply trusting a healthy conscience and somehow felt they worked rather too hard. Therefore, I began hatching a plan to advocate more time for them when our father returned from a business trip. The security did not not do worse. I used to think them uptight and unnecessarily cautious, because their rigidity especially in public places was embarrassing. They restricted us from mixing with 'normal people' at the community events and at the outdoor games of the townspeople, where we supposed that the voice of the one who paid their checks shouldn't be loud as to override our minor momentary adjustments to the environment. In fact, the obsessive organization of the entire home system forbade spontaneity. Nothing was without an accompanying-standby replacement. No surprises and no needs. If for any reason a need was created, it would be contracted out to the best vendors at the snap of the fingers and consequently, the steward whose laxity to duty created the sudden need for a supply would kiss his or her job a goodbye. They were that fastidious. I have not live long enough to have seen more than just one steward fired though. On that day, the head of operations decried the driver's inability to keep pace with the convoy by some minutes when they picked me up at the airfield on my way back from a long stay in Switzerland. I was hoping to tell you in future, how, following my father increasing fear, (however, born out of genuine concern for my sustained inability to recall faces), I was flown to the Hanson's after the passage of many years had not helped me know who might not be a friend. That would go on to become one of my father's greatest gestures and it altered my life for good. Efficiently, the HOP, as the stewards reverently called Jean, mopped it just as he did with other events not fit to make the news around the home. And that was long before the pressmen came snooping for a hint of it to embellish. This minute incident should otherwise not have a news value if it were with other people, but with my home, the press would beg to differ. However, like the many other times, this time, they were brutally denied; many thanks to Scott's unconcealed disgust for them. They hated each other alike with the mutual hatred of the mongoose to the black-mamba actually, and honestly, that would be what I share in common with the gaffer. Frankly, his open hatred for the pressmen remained the only positive avenue I could focus if I was to view him from a fairer spectrum other than the sadist I knew he was - a tag I donned him with since the last day he foiled one of my many chances of a kiss with some sweet-faced would-be-lovers that I met in public games couple of years back. Scott continued to deny the press access to important places in the home - potential hot spots for scooping juicy information. He knew that whatever would be 'juicy' to the press, as they tagged it, would be a humongous scandal to our home. Even a classified business strategy could be divulged which would be equally bad. Scott understood this, his job, and most times, annoyingly-too-well. Thoroughly, he mopped the details of the sack such that it was never known to anyone who wasn't family. Conversely, my sister seemed to have some words of praise for him - for his professionalism. I remember her saying that, "he reacted adroitly well in taking a-twelve man combat team on a retributive trip and permanently exterminated the onslaught of the aggressors." This was while she narrated the role Scott played in saving and retrieving me in the ugly event where death tabled a price for my life. Exterminated? Again, that didn't fairly capture the event and the ordeal Scott and his team went through, but I will just let the actors tell you the tale themselves, soon. The stewards were proactive. Their uncommon sense of duty generally made it impossible for us to live like anyone else. There was never a reason to drive to the store down town. Actually, our longest drives stopped at one end of the home from the other end. They however, were never without the company of a few shredded bodied ex-soldier guards strapping dangerous weapons inside of shimmering black suits. It was nauseating indeed, and did frustrate Lyon and Martha for a long time until they found a way to break away. Speaking from the standpoint of my oblivious past, outside the obvious reason of our safety for which these stewards were obligated to stick strictly to the instructions of our parent, their stubbornness often looked vengeful and personal to me and I hated them. For being their head, Scott earned a double. His busybody predisposition was costing us some heavy losses in experience. It felt worse that imprisonment around the home. It wasn't better outside the home. It was not uncommon scene seeing him and his boys breezing us tactically into waiting vehicles in a commando fashion the first minute an event was announced over. Such made us look like some chronically endangered species; at least, in my eyes. The pain that it evoked was akin to hitting one's little toe, given the rarity of such outings where one could meet and mix almost freely and feel normal. "Admittedly, whatever made them act this way would have been serious, but also in the far past" I gritted one day. Martha simply gave a snort and a shrug which had a 'speak-for-yourself' undertone. She acted that way that whenever I toed the path of a conversation capable of scavenging incidents cremated in my past. She literally experienced shock whenever conversations slipped towards there. Furthermore, there were quite a few times in the past when we attended an 'all-normal humans' public events, oblivious that we had been followed by security guards, we attempted to abscond with a potential lovers to momentarily appreciate some of the mischievous tendencies of the young people, stealing a kiss, touching and snuggling, or just taking a walk fingers-interlocked. Although we were not entirely starved of flavors of great social treats as such events that gathered a noble assembly of the children of the rich like ourselves were almost a diurnal event. But it was too monotonous. It was the only sort of outing we had known coming from childhood, for my siblings, and for me, since I woke. And that was not what our taste buds thirsted after. Each new event was always another big bland ball in another super rich home intentioned to give the press something to write about. The same kinds of expensive foods and drinks ostentatiously lavished to outdo the previous hosts to score heap points, and with the same set of grouchily spoiled kids who saddled heavy baggage of dirty secrets. Honestly, only very few among us in the 'children of the rich' caste were clean of hard drugs use. Cocaine, Cannabis all manner of hallucinogens were served freely in our parties whenever careless parents hosted. Or when, if the security head operational in the homes were morally bankrupt or long throats. They would take some bribed and look away. Strangely, my twin feelings of, especially hatred and, much later, love for Scott formed off thickly from here. He stayed put in the ballroom, and stayed disciplined. Martha never stopped talking about the first time she saw real people have sex and it was in a ball, in a rich home. She narrated how the scenes from that party impregnated her with a world of fantasies that she hadn't had the luxury of trying out. "It started as an innocuous kiss between a birthday celebrant and his girlfriend, she started. Soon, what started off as a cameo of lips brushing grew intermittently and broadened into a salacious scene where a suckling at the breast would later become the most decent thing they pulled off their sleeves. While the rest of the spectators cheered them spiritedly on, the lady got erratically emboldened and yanked off her mate's belt, made for the zipper, undid it, and unearthed his already congealed cock restricted in the captivity only by the underpants, then, slotted it into her mouth full length. In an inexplicable theatric moment of frenzy lunacy, almost half the people in the party hall subscribed, and in sympathy, each person picked a partner next to them and propagated the acts of the couple. It was so easy that it looked as though it was pre-arranged. In a moment, the entire place was blown into a full orgy show as the security looked either on in pleasure or away in complicity." I have heard her paint pictures of this vile scene more times than I can count. Each time, she did, I felt the wave of well-nourished sexual drive escaping and taxiing around my entire body, sending triggers that engorged my breasts to full size and flooded my mind with lewd fantasies. I could tell that she didn't have it differently because, usually after each of those times she retraced the events of that day, she would step out of her underpants and donned a new pair. A few other times, she subsumed her entire denuded body into the tub and soaked for a moment. Even though she wished, no yearned for the experience, it would never happen in our home. Scott's boys were rigid. Not in other people's homes either; her moral sieve won't pass them unchecked. However, I could tell that her body counts continued to pile up, in her mind.