Page 100 of The Daddy P.I. Casefiles: The Second Collection
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 timewe’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.”
