Chapter 14
I takea deep breath in and let it out slowly. “Ten!” I shout.
I pull off the blindfold—a makeshift one instead of the pink satin one Daddy uses when we play—and look around the circle in the corn field. A cold breeze rustles across the tassels of the towering corn surrounding me. I’m glad Daddy bundled me up in a knee-length coat, wooly scarf, beret, and mittens for our outing.
A giggle drifts through the corn stalks from my left. There are three entrances to the corn maze from where I’m standing. Daddy showed me an aerial picture of the maze before we set off this morning so I wouldn’t feel lost. There are lots of twists and turns in the maze, which make a cool sunflower and bee pattern from the air but all paths lead to a single exit on the far side of the maze with no dead ends, so as long as I keep walking forward, I can always get out.
Sneakily, tip-toeing in my soft boots, I creep toward the entrance to my left. Another giggle and a voice that’s clearly Sammi’s saying “shhh.”
I love my little friends but they’re not very good at hiding.
I run down the path and turn a sharp right with the maze. Practically on the other side of the corner, Yummy and Sammi are standing a foot back in the corn with their arms around each other. Yummy’s batting at a fat, sleepy bumblebee circling the horns of her green dragon onesie.
“Tag,” I say.
Sammi pushes Yummy, not very hard, and she steps out of the corn.
“I told you she could hear you,” Sammi says. “You’re it.”
“You’re both it,” I tell them, taking Yummy’s hand. She swings mine as we skip through the maze, finding littles around practically every corner.
Notvery good at hiding.
When we’ve found all eighteen littles and submissives who came with us to this farm in Yorktown Heights, we troop to the exit to find our caregivers. Daddy’s standing with Max near a long, trestle table where a lot of the caregivers are sitting, eating cheese and apples that the farm sells and drinking the homemade cider. Livvy’s strapped to Daddy’s chest in her carrier, kicking her bootied feet and gumming Daddy’s little finger.
As soon as we emerge from among the corn rows, Faolan, the new daddy that Master Javier introduced, comes toward us. I’m holding his copper-haired little’s hand. Matty’s a geoarcheologist and the discoverer of a huge horde of Nazi gold, which is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard. She also came to playgroup wearing kitty ears and a huge, floppy, blue bow, which made us twinsies. She’s only just back from a trip to Russia; she’s looking for her father who disappeared while looking for the Nazi loot she found. She missed Halloween, so we’re planning a costume party for her birthday in December. I’ve been telling her about Laurel and being dragon friends.
“We’re going to be a flight!” Matty announces, rushing to her daddy and hugging him. He’s a tall, rawboned man with thick, wavy brown hair and a full beard dusted with gray. He reminds me of a hungry bear except that his eyes are pale, pale blue and they follow Matty wherever she goes.
“A flight? Like a tasting flight?” He catches her up against his barrel chest and twirls her around. Matty’s corkscrew curls catch the sunlight in a blaze of red as she spins. “Beer? Vodka? Either sounds good to me.”
“Like a flight of dragons,” Matty says.
Faolan lets Matty drop to her own feet and stoops to rub his nose against hers. “Dragons, you say?”
She nods. “I’m an amethyst dragon.”
“You’re my little amethyst, that’s for sure,” Faolan says, kissing her cheek. Matty beams.
Daddy waves me over and tucks me under his arm. I take the opportunity to wriggle out of my coat, since skipping through the maze made me roasty-toasty. Once I’m coatless, Daddy offers me a cup of cider, which I drink down too fast because my throat is dry.
And then I get hiccups.
Livvy goggles at the noise, then grins around Logan’s finger. I tickle her bootied tootsies. “Are my hiccups funny, Livvy-bit?”
“Could just be gas,” Max observes.
I shake my head at him. “Babies aren’t really that gassy, if they’re being burped properly after they feed.”
Max shifts his eyes right and left. “Yeah. We had some issues with that.”
“Stop trying to break Daddy’s baby, Max,” I tell him.
He chuckles, then he grunts and bends at the waist. A pair of furry black arms come around his neck and Cynnie’s face, surrounded by the bobbing antennae and black fuzz of her bumblebee hoodie, pops over his shoulder. Max straightens, looping his arms around his little’s calves, and bounces her once to get her into a good position on his back.
“Hi, Oppa.” She cranes her head around his to smack a kiss on his cheek.
“Hey, bumble baby. Did you win hide and seek?”
“I was the third from last to be found, so almost,” she responds.
“You had an unfair advantage,” I say. “That outfit blends too well.”
Cynnie holds out one arm, examining her yellow-and-black-striped hoodie. “Corn is green.”
She has a point but I’m not going to concede it. “But you’re a bee and there are a lot of bees in the corn.”
Okay, there was one bee in the corn that I saw but still.
“Sure,” Cynnie says, evidently too high on hide and seek, apple-picking, and cider to argue. “Matty’s birthday is next month, Oppa. We’re going to be a flight of dragons for her party. I’m going to be a queen bee dragon.”
“Uh, is that a thing?” Max asks.
“It is now. We need at least fifty sleepovers at Emmy and Logan’s to make costumes.”
Max laughs. “I know what you’re angling for. You can play with the baby any time.”
“Now?”
“Sure.” Max squats to set her down. Cynnie wriggles off his back and approaches Logan, who slowly unstraps Livvy and passes her to Cynnie.
As soon as people see that Cynnie’s holding the baby, a cluster of littles and caregivers gather around. Daddy sighs, not very loudly but I feel it and look up at him.
“All okay, Daddy?”
He nods. “I liked having her on my chest.”
I know that feeling. I band my arms around his chest and squeeze. “It’s just the novelty, Daddy. It’ll wear off and then people won’t be as eager to hold her. We’ll have lots of time with her.”
He tips his head down and brushes a kiss across the tip of my nose. “You’re right, sweetheart. Are you okay with your friends descending for sleepovers?”
I nod. “As long as it doesn’t mess up your schedule.”
“I’ll work a few in. I know you want to be the best little babysitter ever to Livvy but I don’t want caring for her to crimp your social life.”
I wriggle around until I can stand in the circle of his arms and look up at him. “Do you remember when we met?”
“Of course, baby doll. It wasn’t that long ago and Daddy didn’t lose that many brain cells to being whacked over the head.”
I reach up, run my fingertips tenderly over the scar on his forehead, and swallow against the lump that swells in my throat. “In less than six months, you’ve changed everything for me. I had friends in Syracuse. Good friends. But nothing like now. Gracie tried to understand my littleness but I didn’t feel safe enough to tell any of my other friends about it. I was always hiding. Now I can live my truth every day. I can have blanket-fort sleepovers. I can have dragon-costume-making parties. I have a real social life because of you. A social life where I can finally be myself.”
Logan blinks rapidly, then scoops me up against his chest and kisses me breathless.
When Daddy finally lets me breathe, I turn my head to check on Livvy. She’s made her way around the group to Max, who is blowing raspberries on her knuckles to elicit her gummy grin.
“I think Max will make a good daddy to more than Cynnie,” I whisper to my daddy.
Logan nods. “I should have realized it when he took that kid who lives in his building under his wing. Maxie’s a natural.”
I squeeze him tightly. “You’re a natural, too. Listening to you sing to Livvy when you were giving her a bath made me tear up.”
Logan grins. “Was my voice really that bad?”
I squeeze him harder. “You know that’s not why.”
“I used to sing to Lizbeth when she had nightmares. I’d forgotten all about that until I was bathing Livvy.” His Adam’s apple works as he swallows hard. “It brought back some memories. Good and bad.”
I know Daddy still feels conflicted about the feelings he had for his sister when he was an adolescent. I’m fine with them. They were the feelings that led him to being an amazing Dom. He focused on his sister because she was naturally submissive to her big brother but he hasn’t carried the sexual feelings he had for her over into adulthood. Only the shame, poor Daddy.
Having talked about adolescent kink experiences with other Doms and littles in playgroup, I’m glad it was his sister. He loved her so much he never would have hurt her, no matter how strong his feelings became. If anything, having those feelings taught Logan how to control his worst impulses and to compartmentalize. A lot of other people weren’t as lucky and their initial DD/lg experiences were bad enough to give me nightmares.
“When we’re alone, if you’d like to tell me about those memories, I’d like to listen,” I offer.
“Thank you, sweetie. I will.”
A whimper from Livvy has Max trotting her back to Daddy double-time, which makes me giggle. Everyone wants to hold the baby until she starts crying. I check the time. It’s thirty minutes until her scheduled feed but she’s probably thirsty.
After she’s had half of the bottle, I sit and rock her car seat on the table. She dozes while I talk with Aggie, Matty, Yummy, Amy, and a very excited Sammi, who has lots of questions about the gold Matty found. Mostly about where it is now and whether she got to keep any of it. He looks utterly crestfallen when Matty tells him it all got turned over to the British and Norwegian governments with the finder’s fee going to the company who financed her dig.
“You didn’t even keep one piece?” Sammi moans.
“They’re historical artifacts, Sammi,” Matty explains. “They need to be studied and taken care of in museums.”
“One leeetle piece?” Sammi asks.
Matty shakes her head, grinning.
Faolan puts his hands on Matty’s shoulders and kisses the top of her curly head. “She got to keep the clue her father left, which is the most important thing, isn’t it, imp?”
Matty tips her head back and smiles at her daddy. “Well, the box of gold bars would have been nice.”
Sammi’s jaw nearly hits the picnic table. “The box of gold bars?”
Matty nods. “Uh-huh. Big box.”
“The big box of gold bars,” Sammi whimpers.
“Tell us more about the Ark,” I say.
“The Ark.” Sammi’s eyes go round. “The Ark of the Covenant?”
Matty laughs. “It wasn’t the Ark. It was a gold altar. Well, a gold-plated altar. The Nazi scientists and occultists who used Miller’s Island were conducting some very strange pseudo-scientific rituals designed to create an ultimate weapon. Fortunately, they were not successful.”
“Just like Indiana Jones,” Sammi breathes.
“Nothing like Indiana Jones,” Matty responds, grinning.
Faolan squeezes her shoulders. “Except your pup stuffie named Indy.”
Matty swats him. “Daddy. You gave me Indy. And you named him.”
“Did I? Oh, right, I did.”
The daddies and mommies chuckle. Daddy humor. I trade sneaky eye rolls with Aggie.
Daddy leans over and whispers in my ear. “Saw that, little girl. You’re busted.”
I grind my teeth. I literally can’t get away with a single thing with Daddy around. “I claim an exemption.”
Daddy crouches by the picnic table, his eyebrows up. “An exemption?”
“I can’t be in trouble for reacting to bad dad jokes told by other daddies. I only get in trouble for eye-rolls to your bad jokes.”
“I don’t make bad jokes and I don’t think that’s the rule.”
“It’s an exemption to the rule.”
“That would be an exception to the rule and I didn’t agree to it beforehand, so you’re still busted. I’ll discuss your chastisement with Warrin.”
Because Warrin has daddy-hearing, too, he pops up behind Aggie. “Did someone say punishment?”
“Not us!” Aggie and I chorus.
“Do we have two little girls who have strayed off the path of righteousness?” Warrin asks Daddy.
“We do,” Daddy says. “Gross disrespect for fine, daddy humor.”
Warrin chuckles. “I’m aware this is a fault my little girl suffers from. Egregious. What example can we make of these miscreants?”
Daddy rubs his chin. Oh, no, I know that evil glint. “I decree a round robin of knock-knock jokes from all the mommies and daddies. Failure to laugh appropriately to any joke results in one minute of tickling.”
“Nooo!” Aggie and I squeal.
“This is an excellent idea,” Matty’s daddy says as he rubs her shoulders. Great, another sadist. “I’ll begin. Knock-knock?”
“Who’s there?” The littles around the table groan together.
“Major,” Faolan says.
“Major who?” We chorus.
“Made-jer day with this joke, didn’t I?”
I can’t even muster a chuckle that one’s so bad, although I control an eye-roll. Only Sammi manages a half-hearted laugh.
Warrin and Daddy each hold up a finger. Bravo joins them.
Aggie, Yummy, and I groan.