Variation on a Theme, Book 6
Copyright© 2024 by Grey Wolf
Chapter 89: Future-Proofing
Saturday, February 1, 1986
We did, in fact, let Darla sleep uninterrupted, but the Wolf had his way with her before we got out of bed. Condoms certainly sucked a bit — we all agreed — but they did make for easier cleanup, overall.
Breakfast was fine. Darla got teased, but she gave as good as she took, and the others were pretty much resigned to the idea that Jas and I would sometimes do things that were normal for us but wildly atypical for most people. Sharing Darla was right up there, especially for Cammie and Mel, but they understood it about as well as anyone who wasn’t in a relationship like ours could.
And Darla wasn’t really ‘shared.’ Even after last night, no one was under the illusion that Darla was really bisexual. She was bisexual enough, but she really ‘belonged’ to Mister Wolf. Ms. Wolf had a claim on her only through me. The feeling of Jas having a claim on her, though, was very hot, partly because it was also embarrassing.
I was pretty sure Darla would eat Jas out, and would enjoy doing so, if things went that way. But she would probably enjoy it mostly because it would please me. And because she liked Jas, quite well. It wouldn’t be because the act itself was a turn-on for her, though, almost certainly.
Jas and I both knew we were playing with fire to some extent. Parting with Darla was going to hurt, and it was going to hurt all three of us. But her finding her wolf would feel very good, and that would outweigh the hurt. She wasn’t ours, and we knew it.
On the other hand, we could look at this and think: ‘What if?’ What if we had a girl something like Darla, but who didn’t want the conventional life? A girl whose parents could be fine with her being ‘ours,’ who wanted that for herself, and who would either fit into the inner circle or be fine with being adjacent to it but no more. Would we want that?
It felt like, yes, we really might. Not today, and not soon, but it was an option going forward.
Something we’d said long ago bounced around in my head: what if we both seduced the babysitter? Oh, she would have to be beyond the age of consent — we had a lot to lose if we crossed that line — but that left a wide range of options.
If dating Darla opened up possibilities like that, it would be an astonishing success. It already was, really. I’d found the big bad wolf inside of me, and that mattered. Perhaps it mattered a great deal. Big bad wolves are, after all, fairly good at seducing babysitters and other parties, if they are open to being seduced.
No one could know where things were going, but I thought Darla had changed us, and perhaps nearly as much as we had changed her.
Jas and I took Darla back to her dorm about an hour after breakfast, with Darla sitting between us in the front seat. Darla was just slightly embarrassed about that, because Jas was essentially acting like the ‘date’ had been all three of us. Her blush got worse, not better, when Jas asked if it was better if she’d gone to bed with her after one date or after not dating at all. Darla had no answer for that except a blush and some stuttering non-answer.
A kiss seemed to settle her down quite a bit, though. Always a good answer!
We walked her up to her room. There was no one in the hall, so Jas gave her a goodbye kiss before I did.
“We’ll talk soon,” I said.
“Looking forward to it!” Darla said.
“Us, too,” Jas said, grinning.
“We ... do that, don’t we?” Darla said, grinning a bit in return. The blush from before seemed to be forgotten.
“We would melt Steve’s brain if he heard us,” Jas said, giggling.
“Can’t have that! He needs his brain!”
“He does!”
I just chuckled. What else was there to say? Jas was probably right. Girl talk was likely dangerous to mere males.
Jas almost immediately second-guessed herself in the car. I wasn’t surprised, because I was, too, if only a little.
“That was wonderful!” she said. “But ... we need to be careful.”
“Really careful.”
“I could ... it’s just been the one night, and I’ll miss her when we go to just being friends. More than Katy. Maybe more than Monique. Which is weird, but...”
“But you put work into really seducing Darla, and have been cheering on my seduction longer. And, also, Darla is really more than just a fling.”
“All of that,” she said. “Darla is ... we can’t keep her. Part of me wants to, but it’s not fair to her, and that makes it not fair to us as well. I couldn’t keep the others, either, but I didn’t want to. But ... she means something. Years of history for me, and — in a way, at least — even more history for you.”
“That’s where I am, with all of it. There’s all that high school history, and ... well. I don’t have my thoughts together on much of that ‘even more’ history. It wasn’t a great subject to think about for a while. I think ... well. I’ll ponder it.”
She giggled and nodded.
“No rush! None at all.”
“On the other hand, I have started to think about something we teased about, long ago, though.”
“What’s that?”
“What if we both seduced the babysitter?” I said.
Jas giggled.
“Oh! I like it! If she was a bit of a Little Red Riding Hood type and we could both be a bit ... lupine ... um, yeah. Maybe we could keep someone like that.”
“She would have to have no real desire for a relationship of her own, or we would still have to let her go. And we’d have to have someone old enough for a babysitter.”
Jas waved her hand a bit.
“So, the first part, yes. Some girls would love that, though. On the second part, I’m ahead of you. We’re never hiring anyone underage for anything real. We’re going to have too much to lose if anyone even accuses us of anything improper. That’s going to get tricky when the kids have friends in the right — or wrong — age range, but ... we can manage something. I just ... I can see some kid saying, ‘Mister Marshall got me alone and did unspeakable things to me! I need a few million dollars or I’m going to the papers!’ Or ... whatever. Not only can’t we play even slightly fast and loose with age of consent laws, we also can’t put ourselves at risk.”
“You’re ahead of me, but it makes total sense.”
“You’re not used to being a target,” she said. “I’m not, either, except ... girls are always targets, in one sense. I have a bit more of a radar for thinking about where threats might come from. We can protect ourselves against a lot of threats with a solid house design and security, but a teenager is their own walking threat. I can think of three or four who might have been conniving enough to make a demand like that, back in the day.”
“Sucks,” I said.
“No more sucking from anyone underage for you!” she said, giggling. “Or me, either.”
“Which is fine.”
“Yeah.”
“And, yes, we have to be careful about Darla,” I said.
“Probably ... well, definitely not no sleepovers. But they have to be less frequent than dates. She’s gotten closer to my heart in one date than Katy ever did. That probably means the opposite is true. And we need her to find her Wolf.”
“We do. I’ll talk to her about it on Monday. I’m pretty sure she’s on the same page. We talked about limiting sleepovers to an occasional thing a while back.”
“I should be clear,” she said. “This is a Darla thing. Monique’s not getting sucked into our lives. Amy might be, but Amy currently has no need to not be sucked in that anyone’s found.”
“Amy is her own check on that,” I said. “She’s made it clear she has career goals. If she started to compromise them, that’s an ‘it may not be good for me to be involved with her’ thing.”
“That makes sense,” Jas said, nodding. “We want — we need — to respect people that way.”
“Which brings us back around,” I said. “It might be legal, but ‘rich couple seduce naive nineteen-year-old nanny into their depraved sex cult’ is a bad headline, and might entail big payoffs.”
“She can sign a non-disclosure agreement and avow that it was all consensual,” Jas said. “You really think billionaires don’t have mistresses?”
I chuckled and said, “Oh, they probably do, but I imagine someone might be getting paid. Normally, that sends billionaire’s wives off to divorce court and gets prenups invalidated, or big payoffs to avoid the fight.”
She giggled.
“We are doing none of that! But ... yeah. No, I agree. Our rules say it has to be good for them. If we get to where what’s keeping us from being awful is just the law, or fearing bad publicity, we’ve already failed.”
“Though the law matters. No matter how good it might be for a sixteen-year-old...”
“It’s a hard pass,” she said, nodding.
“If we’re somewhere with a lower age of consent...?” I said, mostly to be a debater.
“Um. We ... we carefully consider our options. It’s ... yeah. Probably illegal to even take them there. If they’re already there...”
“I wasn’t serious. Or, I think I wasn’t. I ... oh, hell, who knows? There was a famous case decades in the future about a rich guy who apparently routinely did awful things to underage girls on his island. I think it didn’t have a lower age of consent, but ... anyway.”
“So ... the age of consent in France is 15,” she said. “We’re there, and a cute French girl attaches herself to you. What do you do?”
“Have a very long talk with you, our attorney, our PR guy...”
She giggled.
“Okay, fine! Just ... I don’t know what I think about that. But we should be on the same page.”
“I don’t know, either,” I said. “I’m ... probably somewhat against it. But only somewhat. I feel certain that I knew a young French girl who was perfectly capable of giving informed consent at 15.”
She giggled a bit more, and said, “And went to bed with someone fifty-six or something like that!”
“Eh. Fifty-six. Fifteen. Who could tell?”
She snorted, then said, “They look so similar!”
“Uncannily so. Good genes!”
“Very, very lucky genes! Which we are passing along to our kids!” she said, grinning.
We talked a bit more, but decided the problem was intractable. We simply wouldn’t know until we got there. Eighteen was far safer and felt much more morally defensible to me, and we would probably just stick to that, but ... when in France, do as the French do? Maybe? It wasn’t impossible, but it would take a lot of thought at the very least.
The big problem was that ‘morality’ was in the eye of the beholder. I hadn’t been kidding: fifteen-year-old Jasmine Nguyen had been fully capable of giving consent, whether the guy was fourteen, nineteen, or ninety. Saying she wasn’t would be slighting her significantly.
But should I consent? That was entirely different, and I had no good answer for that at all. It’s easy to say ‘never,’ but who knew what the circumstances could be?
‘Legal’ was an easy answer. It just stopped being as easy when laws varied.
We’d been planning for our meeting with Paula Patterson, but some more discussion happened over lunch, just making sure we were all on the same page. Paula would, almost certainly, be underestimating just how complicated the estate planning and marital-contract needs of six nineteen-year-olds could be.
Jas brought up pre-nups, and Paige joined her immediately. It was hardly for the first time, but it had been a while. They had obviously talked, because they were on the same page, and their proposal seemed entirely reasonable.
The gist of it was that each of us would have, as sole and separate property, the value of the assets we brought into the marriage. If it dissolved with more than the sum of those assets, each person got their original assets first, plus the interest and earnings from those assets, and then everything else was divided.
When figuring this out, the profit interest in the Dell stock and house counted as ‘assets brought into the marriage.’ The difference between those values at the time of the marriage and when they were sold was immaterial — the full proceeds were sole and separate property.
Anything earned during the marriage, including appreciation on common assets, interest, salaries, and everything else was community property.
The major deviation from Texas law was the careful delineation of what each of us started with along with the difference in how interest and earnings were treated for separate assets. We actually thought it was a lot simpler. Under the law, if someone brought in $1 million in a separate account and slowly spent $100,000 while earning $400,000 in interest, that interest was community property. They would probably wind up with $900,000, and each person would get $200,000, but it would take a forensic accountant to actually make that happen. In our case, it was $1,300,000 and that was that. No fuss, no muss.
Perhaps the biggest advantage was that it would take very little work to set up. None of us expected to even refer to the pre-nups again. They almost didn’t matter at all, because I’d taken great pains to make sure that we all entered the marriages relatively equal, instead of me being rich, Angie being moderately wealthy, and Jas and Paige being ‘college-student poor.’ Pre-nups mostly matter when people enter with wildly different means.
Cammie and Mel were different, but also substantially equal.
Having pre-nups mattered to Jas and Paige in particular, though, and that was enough for all of us.
We arrived at Paula Patterson’s office a bit before two. Her secretary, a pleasant woman in her late 30s or 40s named Helen (one more of those, but we probably wouldn’t interact with this one all that often), had us wait a few minutes.
After a bit, a middle-aged man came out, talking to a woman who looked to be in her mid-30s. I had already noted the law degree on the wall. Paula’s was from 1976, so I’d already guessed she was in her mid-30s.
We rose as he left. Paula turned to us and said, “You must be Steve,” offering her hand.
I shook hands, smiling and nodding.
“And you must be Jasmine,” she said.
Jasmine giggled, shook hands, and said, “The last name is probably a hint.”
She looked at Angie and Paige and said, “I cheated here, because otherwise I never would have figured it out. A pleasure to meet you, Paige,” she said, shaking hands, then greeting Angie and shaking hands with her.
“Cheated?” Paige said.
“Newspaper search. Your picture was there. Both of you, I mean, and several of Angie.”
Angie chuckled and said, “Sometimes I almost forget that we’re already famous!”
She turned to Cammie and Mel.
“In your case ... no guesses.”
Cammie laughed and extended her hand.
“Cammie Clarke,” she said, shaking hands.
“And I’m Mel — Melissa, but I really never use that — Riley,” Mel said, also shaking hands.