The Bet
By Karen Singer
Chapter 60 (Tuesday – week 9 Part 1 of 6)
It was almost one
in the morning by the time Mel found the section she was looking for. Once again she separated the pages out and
brought them around for Sissy to work on.
And once again he mapped it out with his geometric shapes – covering
several yellow legal pad pages with his work.
He didn’t say anything, but Mel herself noticed the one spot where that
passage was most likely going to wind up getting put with the rest of what they
had found.
It took Sissy
over half an hour just to map out that one section. But in order for it to fit with the rest,
they would have to find the linking passages first. She took Sissy’s latest work and studied it
carefully. It was the one passage that
she knew was going to wind up in the mix somewhere, the one passage that made
everything they were doing so important.
It was the one passage in the whole contract that removed control of
Green Growers Corporation from the current directors who were trying to hold
onto it, and transferred all that power directly to Sunshine Corporation. Mel had known that passage would be there
somewhere. She had known it! Now she just had to find all the missing
links. Without them, all this work was useless!
She handed off
Sissy’s latest efforts to Andrea to work her magic on, then she gathered up all
the pages that Andrea had recreated so far.
She removed several of the pictures from her wall and grabbed a roll of
scotch tape. Then she began taping the
pages onto her wall. Carefully, she
lined up all the arrows from each of the pages so they each matched up with
where they needed to go. It was a rather
convoluted tree, with many false branches leading off to things that she wasn’t
the least bit interested in. But one
path held her complete interest.
Andrea looked up
from her computer as she was working on Sissy’s latest pages and noticed him
going back across the hallway to change himself again. He stopped in the middle of the hallway and
motioned toward the other room and then his diaper. She nodded and made a note on the paper where
she was keeping track of his times. When
he moved again, she noticed that he was walking funny… kind of the way he did
when he had messed himself earlier… was that today, or yesterday? She noticed that it seemed to take him a
while to change again. Maybe he had
messed his diaper again. Was that possible? She decided she didn’t really want to
know.
She finished what
she was doing and brought the papers back to Mel so she could study them. She was glad to see how pleased Mel was. It made her decision to stay the night all
that much more worthwhile. She watched
with pride as Mel taped her work up on the wall with the other pages, but this
one she positioned far to the right and down towards the bottom of the
wall. She also noticed the big gap Mel
had left between these pages and her previous ones… obviously for something
else that had to go in-between.
Mel studied the
wall carefully. Her eyes particularly
kept tracing the diagonal line that stretched from the top page at the left,
zigzagging down across her wall toward the bottom right where she had taped
what she was guessing would be the final pages – the passages that removed the
current directors from Green Growers.
There were gaps unfortunately.
But now that she had some idea of what she was looking for, she went
back to work. She would find those
gaps! And now she knew how to search!
Chad had been back to work for
another thirty minutes when he stumbled across one of those missing gaps. Mel took his work gladly and held it up. Yes, the arrows matched perfectly with
several pages already on her wall and definitely filled in one of the missing
pieces. She handed it off to Andrea and
she and Sissy got back to work again.
It was almost
forty-five minutes later when she found another of the sections she suspected
would fill in one of the blank spots. She brought it around for Sissy to work
on and fifteen minutes later she was comparing what Sissy had created with the
rest of it. It was another puzzle piece for sure. She stared at her wall. Just one more to go! She suspected that Andrea was happier now
that she had more work to do.
But there was
still that one more missing link in the mix that they had to find, and without
it, none of it added up. Without it, she
didn’t have the proof that she needed.
She glanced back down at Sissy.
He looked so tired he could hardly hold his eyes open, but he was still
trying to read through all that garbage.
Taking her cue from him, she dug back into the manuscript one more
time.
The time dragged
on forever… or seemed to. While Mel and
Sissy worked, Andrea slept on the couch.
Chad’s
eyes hurt so badly from trying to read and make sense of everything that he
could hardly see let alone think straight.
So he was somewhat shaken when he suddenly heard Mel proclaim, “Got
it!” A moment later he was taking the
offered pages out of her hands and was trying to find the mental power to once
again flowchart what was in front of him.
He was so tired he almost missed it, but one quick look back and he
realized where he had almost made the mistake and he corrected it.
“That’s it!” Mel
proclaimed, reaching for the pages he was still creating.
“Give me a
chance to finish this,” Chad
begged. “We want to make sure there’s no
mistake.”
Mel knew he was
right and waited – impatiently. And then
she finally saw Sissy put down his pen.
“That’s it,” he
said, still looking at the papers.
“That’s got to be the last one.”
Mel grabbed his
work quickly and studied it. Almost as
quickly she carried it over to her wall to temporarily put it in place. Yes!
Perfect! That was it. The missing link! They had solved the impossible puzzle!
Andrea came up
behind her. “Do you want me to do that
one now?”
Mel handed over
the final section, and noticed Sissy as she did so. He was slumped over on the floor amid his
mass of petticoats – totally exhausted.
She knew she herself should feel the same, but somehow she felt nothing
but exhilarated!
Chad just laid on the floor with
his eyes closed. Oddly, his massive
petticoats formed something of a soft cushion for him to lay on. But moments after Andrea walked past to work
on the last of what he had created, he realized… and remembered something
else. He was leaking again – and had
been since about the time that Mel had found that last section. He hadn’t had time to change!
Wearily, he
dragged himself to a crawling position and tried to crawl a few feet toward the
door since it was easier than trying to stand up… or he would have crawled,
except he kept getting stuck on his skirts.
He forced himself to his feet and headed across the hall to the other
office where his diaper bag was. He
pulled out another diaper to change himself… the last diaper in the bag. He hoped Mel would take him home soon so he
could just get very well diapered for the night and go to sleep – like for
about a year!
Once his fresh diaper
was in place, he knew he was supposed to tell Andrea that he had changed, but
the leather couch looked so much more comfortable. It wouldn’t hurt to just lay on it for a
minute. So he did just that, but only
for a minute.
While Sissy was
gone, Mel again studied the pages on the wall.
Over and over, her eyes traced the irregular path that went from the top
left page all the way down the bottom right page that held the passage about
turning all control over to Sunshine.
When seen like this it was easy to see the logic of it… logic that
“flowed” perfectly. Logic that only
Sissy’s strange flowchart could accurately expose. It had been so well hidden by Slatter that she
was amazed it had been found at all. But
then she remembered, it had been found before – by the lawyer that she was
replacing. The one who had suddenly
quit. And she suspected that she now
knew why he had quit. He must have found
the links, and then called Slatter about it.
Somehow, Slatter had bought him off.
She briefly wondered how much that must have cost Slatter… or Sunshine.
But she wasn’t
going to be bought off. She was still
angry at Slatter. And now it was time to
do something about it!
She didn’t have
Harry Feinbaum’s home phone number, but she did have his son Dick’s
number. Heck, Dick was marginally in
charge of this affair anyway. She dialed
his home number, knowing full well that it was only four in the morning.
It was a few
minutes before anyone answered, and then she recognized Dick’s voice. “Hello?”
“Dick! It’s Mel!
We’ve got to stop this merger!
Richard Slatter has screwed us… royally!”
“What? Mel?
Is that you? What the heck are
you talking about? We can’t stop this
now!”
“We’ve got
to. Green Growers is going to lose
everything!”
“I didn’t see
that in the contract.”
“You didn’t see
it because of the way Slatter hid it.
The guy’s a genius! It’s almost
impossible to find.”
“You’re sure
about this?”
“Absolutely!”
“Only my father
can stop this thing now,” Dick replied.
“He’s in charge.”
“Give me his
number. I’ll call him!”
“No, if it’s
this important I better call him myself.
Stand by though, he’s probably going to call you personally.”
“Good! I’m still at the office.”
“Okay. I understand.
Stand by.”
It was a long few
minutes for her to wait. She was
exhausted, but at the same time, she felt totally exhilarated. It seemed like an eternity before her phone
finally rang.
“Mel? This is Harry? Do you know what time it is? What the hell is going on?”
“Stop the deal,
Mr. Feinbaum! Stop the deal!”
“What the heck
are you talking about? We’re ready to
sign today!”
“Richard Slatter
is a genius! A genius! But we’re being screwed with! It was about sixteen layers deep and buried
under enough caca that a bulldozer shouldn’t have been able to dig it out! But I found it! Green Growers will lose everything, I’m not
sure how long it will take, probably about a year, but I’m sure it’s going to
happen! Oh, and one other thing, I’ve
now got a pretty good suspicion about why your last lawyer left so suddenly!”
Harry Feinbaum
didn’t get to where he was in life by being slow. “You’ve got proof?”
“All mapped out
– literally! I just need time to add
some page references to everything.”
“Do you think
you can get it to our offices by six?”
Mel groaned. “I’ve been up all night.” She looked up as Andrea walked back in with
the papers she had redone. Andrea looked
a mess! She didn’t see Sissy at
all. “My whole staff has about had it,”
she told him. “And I’m a mess.”
“I don’t care
how you look. I need to see that
information! Six o’clock! Don’t be late! I’m calling everyone else in now! Oh, and Mel… I don’t have to tell you that
your reputation is at stake here if you’re wrong!”
“I know, Mr.
Feinbaum. I know. Call them in because I’m very sure!”
“What can I do?”
Andrea asked.
Mel looked at the
pages on her wall again. “Grab a red
marker and retrace that route. I need to
look up the page references for every one of these so everyone else can find
them.” Only then did she realize that
Sissy was still missing. “Where’s
Sissy?”
“I saw him
sleeping in the other room when I went past.”
“Leave him.
He’s earned the rest.”
It didn’t take
Andrea long to retrace the linking arrows with her red marker. When she was finished, Mel had only added one
of the page references to the papers… and she had many more to go. It was a task Andrea couldn’t do anything to
help with so she laid back down on the couch to wait.
Mel worked
intently. Her concentration was
total. But it still took time. When she finished, she was shocked to see
that she had only forty five minutes to get everything to Feinbaum’s
office. She looked over at Andrea
sleeping on her couch. She was about to
ask for her help, but Andrea appeared to be sleeping so soundly she decided not
to wake her. Very carefully, Mel removed
the pages from her wall and stacked them in the order she would need them
later. By the time she finished, she was
really running late. As she gathered her
things, she tried to decide if she should wake Andrea or not. She finally decided to just leave her and let
her sleep. She had earned the rest as
well.
With her arms
loaded with papers and the contract, Mel stopped briefly to look in on
Sissy. He was very sound asleep. She knew she should have woken him and taken
him home, but she no longer had time to get him there. Softly stepping further
into the room, she looked around. So
many memories… so many emotions hit her.
This was her father’s office.
“Help me Daddy, please,” she whispered.
Leaving everyone
to their slumber, she went out to her car and headed straight for the early six
o’clock meeting. She knew she looked a
mess. Hopefully she would get a minute
to at least fix her face before the meeting started. But she had to get this information there
first. That was the one most important
thing in her life just then.
There was very little traffic at that hour
of the morning and she made it to Feinbaum’s office with only minutes to
spare. She gathered everything up and
literally ran for the door. But someone
was waiting for her and watching for her arrival, and they opened the door
ahead of her to let her in. She was very
grateful! Five minutes later, she was
directing two of Feinbaum’s staff members how to tape the pages up to the wall
in the meeting room.
All the other
lawyers had already arrived by the time she got there so they all watched
closely as the pages went up. Mel never
got a chance to freshen her makeup or even go to the bathroom before the
questions were being fired at her. And
as the pages continued to get taped to Feinbaum’s wall, more and more of the
legal experts in the room stood right there next to her, their own eyes tracing
the impossible zigzagging line as it gradually grew down the wall.
The questions
stopped coming about halfway through putting the papers up. Instead she was hearing mutterings of angry
comments… about Slatter. Twice she heard
someone mention that one of the conditions involved was in the process of
happening. And she heard someone else
mention that another one was looking very likely as well. By the time the last of it was up, she had
sat down in a chair at the table just to rest for a bit while the others looked
the wall over carefully. It was then
that the exhaustion started to hit her.
It was then that Harry Feinbaum came over and stood in front of her.
“Damn him!”
Feinbaum said. “It was split up and
obviously hidden so well that none of us would have noticed it since we had
divided the document up between us to study the sections individually in
depth.”
Mel nodded. “When I got the first version of the
contract, it was all out of order. I’m
pretty sure your previous lawyer found it… or part of it anyway, and surmised
what was going on.”
Feinbaum
nodded. “That would explain his hurried
departure. You want to go over this
formally for us now? We’re going to have
to dissect this before we meet with everyone else later.”
Mel nodded. She was weary, but she could do it. “Can I take a minute to freshen up first?”
Harry
nodded. “Of course.”
Ten minutes
later, with her face finally fixed, Mel stood in front of everyone and traced
the route on the wall. Questions were
asked, but only a few of them were questions that she needed to answer. Most of the discussion revolved around
strategy and she had no part in it.
Their best guess was that Sunshine was already in position to make every
one of the conditions happen so they would eventually take over full control
and the current board of directors for Green Growers would be forced out. Best estimates were that Sunshine could do it
in six to ten months. Easily. Two hours later, the meeting broke up. Feinbaum’s staff began removing the pages
from the wall. Everyone else, including
Mel, had to get ready for the big meeting.
As Mel climbed
wearily back into her car, she briefly thought about Sissy and Andrea still
sleeping at her office, at least she thought they would be sleeping… they
deserved it. She was still pressed for
time though and decided to just let them stay there. She went home to shower and change.
The shower helped to refresh her, but she
still felt the weariness deep inside.
She ignored it. There was no
question about what she would be wearing today – the dark grey suit. But as she reached for the shoes she planned
on wearing with it, she stopped herself and chose a different pair instead –
her very high black patent stilettos. At
the least, they would make her feel taller.
As she dressed,
she continually thought about the contract and what she still had to do. And just as much, her thoughts kept
remembering her father. She wasn’t going
to wear it, but at the last minute she went back to find it. She pulled it out of the drawer where she had
hidden it and just stared at it for a few moments. It was certainly beautiful. A bit ostentatious perhaps, but
beautiful. The diamond crusted hairclip
her father had given her was without a doubt something that anyone would look
at and realize she came from wealth. “Please
help me Daddy?” she prayed again. Then
quickly, she pulled her hair back and held it in place behind her head with the
clip. She grabbed her purse, and headed
out the door. She had no more time to
waste.
As she drove,
surprisingly she wasn’t thinking so much about what lay ahead, as she thought
more about Sissy, who was still sleeping in her office. She felt a bit guilty leaving him there, but
she knew he would be just fine till she got back. Besides, Andrea was there with him.
She thought again
about how it had been Sissy who had really found most of the links. His strange method of flowcharting the
document had been the only way of truly mapping it out. For someone with such strange inclinations,
he was one smart guy… sissy. That kind
of brainpower… and he was wasting it on…
No! He wasn’t wasting it… not really. He wanted to keep his job. That was where much of his self-respect
laid. That was the balancing part of his
life! His life as a sissy… and his life
as a normal person – if she could really consider him to be normal. She supposed he tried anyway… hiding his true
nature as best he could. If it hadn’t
been for her accidentally discovering his inner self two months ago, he would
still be very much hidden. What had she
done to him?
3 comments:
I love Mel's question- "What had she done to him?" I have no idea how Karen will end this story but for what it is worth, I have an answer to that question. Mel has given Sissy the opportunity he desperately needed to be his real self- a simpering, girly, submissive sissy who craves submission and humiliation- who needs the misery of being chained by his ears to a wall on display on his perch while his Mistress makes love to a real man. Yes Sissy may be miserable when he is abused and humiliated in public-but he would be so much more miserable if denied that humiliation.
Carla
Well other than fulfilling his wildest dreams and then some, she's given him friends who know who he really is inside and are largely OK with it... After his flowcharting helps save the contract day he'll get more self-respect and cred from his new sissy-aware friends :)
what a tale! i'm riveted!
daisy
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