Chapter 21
twenty-one
He wears me down, the rat-fuck.
Hour by hour. On his surprisingly utilitarian plane which takes far too long to cross the Atlantic.
Through the jetlag that absolutely levels me the first day we’re in the fucking swamp that is England.
Why didn’t Logan ever mention how mossy and damp his home country is?
It’s September. It should be dry. It should be hot.
I end up wearing De Leon’s expensive hoodie not to protect me from a bullet or a knife but because it’s fucking freezing in this tiny, rainy country.
The second day we both spend on the toilet.
Or, as De Leon—who has rediscovered his British accent—calls it, “the bog.” He gets us Indian takeout the first night, while I’m still groggily staring at the bedside clock in the small bed and breakfast he’s parked us in and wondering why it’s still light outside at nearly eight at night.
It tastes fine going down: spicy and thick and satisfyingly warm in the chilly room.
It tastes much less fine coming up at four in the morning.
“Bad Balti,” De Leon says, apologetically, as he passes me on the way into “the bog.”
Groaning and farting and expelling what’s surely five years of food from our guts creates some kind of bond and by the time we’re back on our feet and headed into the even greener, wetter, less urban county that produced the woman Emily calls “the Mir-Witch,” I’ve explained the basics of littleness to De Leon.
To give him credit, he’s not an asshole about it.
He asks questions in his slow way, spacing them out over hours so I never feel the extent of his interrogation.
He takes time to process what I’ve told him and in the quiet of yet another bed and breakfast somewhere in deepest, darkest East Devon, while I schedule interviews, he Googles.
“How’s age play different from age regression?” he asks after I finish a phone call.
“You’d be better asking Logan about that. I’ve only done age play so far.”
“What’d you think?”
“About age play? I really liked it. The littles are very enthusiastic. We had a lot of fun and I forgot about everything else while we were playing. More relaxing than an hour of yoga.”
“More orgasms, too.”
“Age play isn’t necessarily about sex. I’ve done mostly platonic age play so far.”
“Interesting,” De Leon grunts and goes back to Googling while I make the next call.
He leaves it for hours, while I have a video call with Logan to go through interview questions, and a second call with Manny to catch up.
I finish my homework for Lindy’s class and submit it by email.
I have a little sext exchange with Cynnie, which leaves me grinning like an idiot.
De Leon waits until we’re eating dinner at a dark, tiny pub called the Dotty Duck—no more Baltis for either of us—before he starts the interrogation again.
“What kind of scenes have you done?”
I nearly spit my lamb and mint pie all over him. “What?”
“What kinda scenes? I was reading about them on a kink site. They got worksheets. I wondered which ones you’ve tried?”
There are worksheets? Why didn’t I know that?
“I, uh, haven’t done any of the ones online. Logan told me to start with Cynnie’s fantasies. We’ve played out a couple. And we did a punishment scene.”
“A punishment scene?”
“Yeah, I mean, it was a punishment, but Cynnie could have stopped it at any time just by getting up and walking out of the closet. So, I guess it was a scene because we were in our roles.”
“Huh.” De Leon slices up his gammon, smears some apple chutney on it, and downs it with relish. Salty pig leg. Jesus, Brits eat some strange shit.
Over beer that smells like sweaty socks but tastes like nirvana, sitting in front of the pub’s fire—yes, a real fire, in September—De Leon asks, “Do you consider yourself a sadist?”
“What? No, of course not.”
“But you got pleasure out of hurting your girlfriend, right? Out of punishing her? Pretty sure that’s the definition of a sadist.”
“I—this stuff is really hard to explain.”
De Leon shrugs like it doesn’t matter. But he circles back to it when he brings our second round. I notice his is a soda.
“What do you get out of a punishment if not pleasure?”
I scratch the back of my head. I’ve only had one beer, so it’s not the booze that’s loosened my tongue. His persistent questioning is hard to evade.
“Logan said it was a correction of our power exchange. What she did screwed things up between us. It took control away from me. Punishment fixed that. And, to tell you the truth, it made me feel better, even if I didn’t like doing it.
It was cathartic. I wasn’t angry at her afterwards.
I was free to be her daddy again without anything between us. ”
“Clean slate.”
“Yes, clean slate.”
“Huh.”
“Are you just curious or is this going somewhere?”
De Leon scratches his chin. “I like learning new things.”
“I’m not a science experiment, okay? Don’t poke and prod me for your amusement. This is my life.”
De Leon nods. His hair is down tonight, brushing his shoulders. His face is relaxed. He could pass for human, except there’s still absolutely no expression in his eyes, which he keeps trained on the fire.
“Why is it your life, Max?”
I toss back the rest of my beer for courage. “Because there was a hole inside me. A big, ugly, raw hole. And I didn’t even know it until I met Emily. And then I knew what I needed to fill that hole.”
De Leon lifts an eyebrow. “Logan’s girl. You got a thing for her?”
“I’ve got a thing for what she is.”
“Huh.”
I need something stronger than beer for this conversation.
“I’m getting a whisky. You want another soda?”
De Leon shakes his head. “I try to limit caffeine at night. And no whisky for you. Two beer limit’s probably a good idea as well. If we have to leave suddenly, you need to be sharp.”
I sigh and look down into my empty glass. “Then stop with the questions.”
“No problem,” De Leon says.
He gives me a reprieve that night but is back at it over the cholesterol fest he calls a “full English” breakfast. “Do you think littles are a subset of submissives or actually their own thing?”
I scratch under my chin with the back of my fork.
“Not something I’ve given any thought to.
Logan’s probably the best man to ask. He only became a daddy when he met Emily.
But he’s been a dominant for a long time.
I’m coming to it from the other direction.
I’m only really interested in being a daddy. ”
“Only? But you need the control, too, right?”
“Yes,” I admit. “I need that.”
“I’d need that,” De Leon says, wolfing down more of the revolting thing that he calls “black pudding.” Looks like a horse turd.
“So, this is more than academic interest?” I ask, finally understanding the interrogation.
“Uh-huh. When we get back, I’m gonna ask Logan to let me come to that playgroup.”
“No,” I say firmly.
He finally looks up and meets my eyes. “No?”
“No. Go get about fifty years of therapy and then ask.”
He puts his utensils down on the edge of his plate. “What’re you saying, Max?”
“I’m saying that you shouldn’t be around littles. You’re one bad day away from killing lots of people. Littles can be extremely vulnerable. Be honest with yourself. Should you be around someone extremely vulnerable?”
His eyes ice. “You don’t know me, Max. You got no idea about me. Don’t presume you do.”
“I’m not presuming anything. I’m telling you, straight out.”
“That’s fucking cold.”
“You were the one who started picking at my private life. You told me to be professional and then crossed the line as soon as you had a chance. Don’t think you can stick your nose into my life and expect me not to have an opinion. That’s my opinion.”
He holds my eyes for a long moment that sends pricks of fear up my spine. There’s just nothing there in his eyes. Nothing at all.
He looks back down at his plate and picks up his utensils. “Noted.”
And he calls me cold.
Mortally offending De Leon, mercifully, stops the questions. Without his constant needling, I can focus on the interviews. The family neighbor, Patricia Paceman, or “Trish” as she asks me to call her is more than happy to tell me everything she knows.
I interview her over the course of two days, taking a leaf out of De Leon’s playbook and spacing out the tough questions, looping back to them several times until I have such a clear picture of Miranda’s family I could be the one who lived next door all my life.
With Trish’s introduction, I speak to several other neighbors as well. The first two don’t have Trish’s level of certainty about what happened to Miranda’s baby brother, although they’re happy to relate the same rumors.
With the third one, I hit pay dirt.
Matilda “Tilly” Mitchell invites me into her “three up, three down” townhouse on the end of a small, brick row in Tiverton, the town closest to where Miranda’s family lived.
She’s a middle-aged woman wearing a tweed skirt-suit.
I didn’t think they made those anymore. There’s a plastic cover on the couch where she offers me a seat, and she serves me tea in a tall-sided china cup painted with roses.
I put it on the coffee table after taking an obligatory sip.
I’ve discovered during this trip that, along with the weather and driving on the wrong side of the road, I don’t like British tea.
More importantly, the possibility of accidentally cracking or chipping her china sends my anxiety skyrocketing. Give me a coffee mug any day.
I’m honest with Tilly, as I have been with everyone I’ve spoken to, about why I’m here and what I’m doing. Logan told me not to hide anything. To be able to use the interviews in the custody proceedings, I’ve been video-recording them, so there’s no point in being duplicitous.