Daddy's Little Diaper Bitches

The dare was Margot’s idea, and I hated her for it the second the door clicked shut behind us.

We came up the gravel drive laughing, the four of us, because that was the only thing to do with a thing this stupid. A long weekend at a stranger’s house in the hills. A man who answered an ad none of us would admit to writing. Margot drove. Priya rode shotgun with the address glowing on her phone. Daria and I sat in the back passing a flask we never opened, and I kept telling myself it was a joke we would tell for years.

He was waiting on the porch when we pulled up. Tall, gray at the temples, a flannel shirt rolled to the forearms. Calm in a way that made me sit up straighter without deciding to.

“You’re late,” he said. Not unkind. Just a fact he set down on the table between us.

Margot did the talking, because Margot always did. She tilted her chin and gave him the grin that got us free drinks for a decade. He waited until she ran out of words. Then he stepped aside and held the screen door open.

“Inside,” he said. “All four.”

We went. I want that on the record. Nobody pushed me. I walked through that door on my own two feet in my own good boots, twenty-nine years old with a mortgage and a job that mattered, and I crossed his threshold because I was curious and because the others were going and because some small ugly part of me had already gone quiet and wanting.

The front room was warm. Too warm. A fire he must have built hours ago, banked low and red. There were four chairs set in a half circle, plain wooden ones, the kind you sit in when someone is about to tell you the rules. He gestured at them. We sat. Even Margot sat.

“You answered an honest ad,” he said, walking the line of us, slow, hands behind his back. “So I’ll be honest. None of you are leaving this weekend the way you came in.”

Priya laughed. It came out thin.

He stopped in front of me.

I don’t know why me. I have turned that question over a thousand times since. Maybe it was the boots. Maybe it was that I had not said a single word since the car, and silence in a room like that reads like a held breath. He looked down at me the way you look at something you already own and are deciding when to use. My face went hot. I told myself it was the fire.

“You first,” he said.

Margot opened her mouth. He raised one finger without looking at her and she closed it. That was the moment the room changed temperature for all of us, I think. The grin none of us could find anymore.

“Stand up,” he told me.

Here is the part I have never said out loud. My body stood before I gave it leave to. Knees, then hips, then I was on my feet in front of him with my heart going like a fist on a door, and there was a heat low in my stomach that had no business being there. I crossed my arms over my chest because my nipples had gone hard under my shirt and I did not want him to see, and the second I did it his mouth moved, just barely, like I had answered a question he had not asked yet.

This is a joke, I thought. This is a story for the group chat. And under that thought, quieter, a second one I could not look at straight: I had worn my good underwear. I had picked it out this morning knowing exactly nothing and choosing it anyway.

“Hands at your sides,” he said.

My arms came down. Just like that. I felt the give in my own shoulders and hated it and wanted, underneath the hate, to give more.

He reached out and took my chin between his thumb and two fingers. Tipped my face up to the firelight. Turned it left, then right, like a man checking fruit. My friends were watching. I could feel all three of them watching, Daria’s breath gone shallow somewhere to my right, and the shame of being handled in front of them ran down through me and pooled exactly where I did not want it to.

“You’re the one who runs everything,” he said. Not a question. “Schedules. Lists. The one who books the table and splits the check.”

I did not answer. My throat had closed.

“That stops here.” He let go of my chin. “Here you don’t decide anything. Not when you eat. Not when you sleep. Not when you’re allowed to touch yourself.” His eyes moved down me and back up, unhurried. “We’re going to take all of it off your shoulders. Every choice. You’ll be surprised how fast you stop fighting it. Your body already has.”

My face burned so hard my eyes stung. Because he was right and he could see it, the flush crawling up my neck, the way I had not stepped back, the press of my own thighs together that I could not stop.

“Margot,” he said, still looking at me. “There’s a bag by the stairs. Bring it.”

“I’m not your errand girl,” Margot said, but her voice had lost its floor.

“You’ll bring it,” he said, “because you want to see what’s in it, and because some part of you is glad it isn’t your turn yet.” A pause. “Both of those are true. Bring the bag.”

She brought the bag.

He took it from her without thanks and set it on the low table and unzipped it slowly, the way you do when the slowness is the point, when making three grown women lean forward to look is half of what you are after. I did not lean. I made myself not lean. It cost me everything I had.

What he lifted out first was soft and white and folded thick, and my whole body understood before my brain would let it. Heat and humiliation hit me in the same breath, tangled so tight I could not have pulled one from the other with my hands.

No, I thought. Not that. I am a person who signs other people’s paychecks.

And right behind that, traitor-fast, a warmth between my legs so sudden and so wet that I had to lock my knees to stay standing.

“Look at me,” he said.

I looked at him.

“You’re going to learn to ask,” he said. “Out loud. In your own words. For every single thing. And the first thing you’re going to ask me for is to be put into this.” He held it up so the firelight caught the white of it. So the others could see. So I could see them seeing. “Say it.”

The room was so quiet I could hear the fire eat the log.

“I won’t,” I said. My voice came out wrecked, nothing like mine, and he smiled then for the first time, full and patient, like a man with all the time in the world and a thing he already knew the end of.

“You will,” he said. “But not because I make you.” He stepped close. Close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his eyes, close enough that the heat of him reached me through my shirt. His hand came to rest flat on my belly, low, just above the button of my jeans, and the weight of it there went straight through me like a struck bell. “You’ll ask because in about a minute you’re going to want it more than you’ve ever wanted anything, and you’ll be too far gone to lie about it. Even to them.”

His thumb moved. Just once. Just over the seam of my jeans, right where I was already aching, and my hips rolled forward into his hand before I could stop them, before I even knew they would, and a sound came out of me that I had never made in front of another living soul.

Behind me, Daria whispered my name like a warning, or a prayer, or both.

He did not look away from me. His hand stayed exactly where it was, that slow pressure building and building, and I stood in a stranger’s warm red room with my friends watching and my whole proud life folding up small in my chest, and I opened my mouth to tell him no one more time.

That is not what came out.