Page 24 of Daddy's Little Librarian
“I don’t know,” she said, looking at the laundry. “That doesn’t tend to turn out well for me.”
“I can handle pink underwear long enough to earn a paycheck and buy some more.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Pink underwear, Gopher. I make a mess out of everything I touch.”
She looked genuinely unhappy, too. Not unhappy as some Littles did when they wanted hugs or cuddles, and so picked at themselves because they didn’t know how else to get it. Kurt was very familiar with that kind of behavior. Krissy’s mother had been one of those, and before he went to prison, he used to cuddle the hell out of her whenever she got like this. He’d cuddled her even when he knew it was an act meant to manipulate a compliment or forgiveness out of him for some slight misbehavior.
That ‘act’ had been like a default setting for her. Hell, she’d even done it the one time she’d come to visit him after he’d been sent to prison. Because of Krissy.
“Please don’t ask me to take you out of here by putting my baby in,” she’d said, with those giant crocodile tears building in her eyes. And god help him, but if it hadn’t been for that thick pane of glass separating them, he’d have reached through and tried to comfort her still.
Standing here in Scotti’s house, looking at her as she looked dejectedly at her basket of semi-pink clothes, most of which should have been white, Kurt would have sworn there were worlds of difference between Dana and Scotti. But, he also knew he couldn’t trust himself to see this clearly. The Daddy half of him was a cuddler and a forgiver. Always had been; always would be.
“It’s just clothes,” he told her. “Two months from now, no one is going to care that a red got in with the whites and the color ran. The ghosts of Gopher might linger longer, but I’m going to get rid of him and two years from now, if you can even remember his name, you’re going to shake your head and wonder at whatever decisions led you to making him part of your life. But that’s life,” Kurt said. “Nobody goes through it perfectly or without mistakes. Which means, you don’t get to beat yourself up for the mistakes you do make.”
She looked up at him, shoulders hunched. “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have a Gopher in your life.”
He snorted, shaking his head. “No, I do not.”
When she bowed her head back to her laundry, he blew out another sigh, shook his head at himself again, and came back to the table to sit down beside her. He set his last sandwich on the table. Taking the laundry away from her, he set it on the floor and physically turned her chair around so she had no choice but to look straight at him.
“No,” he told her again, “I do not have a Gopher.” Smothering another sigh, hardly able to believe he was doing this, he grudgingly confessed, “I have a Dana.”
She blinked. “Who?”
“I dated her for about four years. She was my girlfriend and my Little. I met her at a party, not unlike the one you say you met your Gopher at. We became play partners at the dungeon we both attended. Then we became more than that, and eventually we moved in together. Her daughter, Krissy, was the reason I went to prison. She was a… troubled girl. She never really warmed up to me, but I didn’t know how badly she hated having me in her mother’s life until one day at work, they were running training exercises for the K9s in the parking lot and one hit on my car. Where Krissy got the drugs, I have no idea, but she planted enough to get me convicted for felony possession with intent to distribute. Both she and her mother testified against me in open court, and I lost everything. My badge, my life… my Little, everything. I also did two years in general population with a lot of angry convicts, every one of whom knew I was a cop.”
“That’s awful,” Scotti softly said. As genuinely sad as she had been only a moment before, she now looked every bit that sympathetic. “I’m so sorry.”
Kurt shrugged. “Mistakes were made.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, “but not by you. That never should have happened.”
“And what Rodent is doing to you should?” he countered.
“No,” she scoffed, a corner of her mouth twisting, but her brow furrowing as if in confusion. “But that’s different.”
“How?” he challenged. “Why? Because you’re a submissive, so you ought to just take it?”
She rubbed her hands and her eyebrows drew even closer together, but she didn’t argue.
“That’s the kind of argument battered women use to defend their abusers. Tell me you’re not doing that.” Slowly, deliberately, he took hold of the arms of her chair and pulled her close, parting his legs to draw her as near as their two chairs would allow. Her knees brushed the inside of his thighs, but he only stopped pulling when he ran out of space between them. Even more slowly, much more deliberately, he leaned toward her. Close enough to smell the subtle coconut scent of her shampoo and the linen fresh scent of the dryer cloth residue on her hands. “Do you know what I think you deserve to take?” he asked her, his voice dropping low in spite of himself, and every rapid-firing synapse in his brain screaming for him to stop.
To get back.
To put as much distance in between him and this woman as he possibly could before it became—
She raised her eyes to his, womanly reluctance at war with Little innocence in the depths of baby blue eyes so alluring that a man could fall face-first into the pool of her and happily drown.
—too late.
“What?” she whispered.
“Kisses,” he replied, every inch of him an idiot because he couldn’t seem to make himself stop.
She tried to smile, but it was breathy, a shaky echo of the kind of smiles she’d flashed him last night when for a few short seconds at a time she’d been comfortable enough in his presence to forget she was supposed to be scared.
It was like being trapped in the library men’s room all over again.
