by Maren Smith
“Oh my God! Just leave us alone!” Chloe was saying as Bradley reached the door. Tisha was there again.
“I’m not leaving until you sign this paper,” Tisha said.
“No.” Chloe shook her head.
“You know it’s what he would have wanted.” Tisha thrust the paper in her face. Before Bradley got between them, Chloe launched herself at Tisha, shouting and swearing like a hellcat.
“Isn’t it enough that you stole my father? Isn’t it enough that he liked you better than us? Why do you need to keep pouring salt in the wound? Leave! Me! Alone!”
“ENOUGH!” Bradley bellowed, then bodily lifted the two women by an upper arm belonging to each of them. They wriggled and tried to get at each other, but he stood between them.
“Tisha, you come here again I’m getting a restraining order. This is harassment. If Chloe doesn’t want to give you her inheritance, she doesn’t have to.” He stared down the entitled woman. She visibly shrank as she took a step back. “Chloe, you were told to take it easy today.”
“Kicking a ho doesn’t count,” Chloe said defiantly. He turned his dominant gaze on her and raised a single eyebrow. She closed her mouth.
“You ain’t heard the last of this!” Tisha yelled, flipping her bleach-blonde hair over her shoulder.
“Beat it!” Bradley yelled at Tisha, before he led Chloe back indoors.
On the couch, bundled up in a blanket, she deflated.
“I’m sorry I answered the door, daddy.” Her voice cracked and she chewed on her fingernails. Bradley took her fingers out of her mouth and rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb.
“Apology accepted. How do you feel?”
“Wibbly-wobbly. Like all my insides are jelly.”
Chloe stared at the air conditioning unit for a long time, and Bradley went to finish getting her bottle. When he returned, silent tears were running down her cheeks.
“Daddy? Why didn’t he want me?” She crumpled a little as she spoke, and Bradley’s heart broke for his little girl. He wrapped her in another big hug.
“I don’t know what your father’s problem was, little one, but you’re mine, now, and I want you more than anything else in the world.”
“What did me and my mom do to make him so mad that he used to shout and throw things and smash things all the time? And he never did that stuff to her! What’s Tisha got that I haven’t?” Chloe sobbed.
“There’s never any easy answers when it comes to this stuff. Sometimes people do mean things and it makes no sense. They hurt people and leave long-lasting scars. I don’t think many people get an apology, or closure, after an abusive childhood. All you can do is move on.”
“But the past keeps dragging me back! It keeps making me do stupid stuff! And it makes me feel like nothing! How can I move on?”
Bradley tried to be comforting. “It’ll take time, little bunny. Time, and love and affection from your daddy. Eggnog. Presents. Kisses and cuddles. Snowmen. All the things you couldn’t have.”
“Ugh, I just wish I could stop feeling like a dead weight when I get like this. And you’re so good at helping me feel better. What do you get out of this?”
He wished he could explain why he loved being a dominant, but they’d had similar conversations before and Chloe never quite understood why anyone enjoyed taking charge. “I get to see how happy you are when I make you do whatever I want you to.”
“That sounds silly.”
He sighed and kissed the top of her head. “If you understood, you’d be a daddy, not a little. Just go with it.”
Truth be told, he was a little disappointed in himself. He had only suggested this Christmas roleplaying thing because he wanted to help her reconnect with a season that he knew she would adore if she could only get over her deep-seated associations with traumatic events from her childhood. Now, he wished he’d kept tighter control of her. What kind of a daddy dom encouraged his little sub to be curious and to explore, then left her to wander the house unsupervised? He was so angry at himself that he hardly noticed when Chloe fell asleep in his arms.
The rest of the day was spent quietly helping Chloe to feel better about the stress of Tisha’s latest nonsense. Every time she was left alone for too long, she seemed to start thinking about it all again, then she would begin crying again. Bradley wished there was something he could do to instantly make this all better.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BABY’S EIGHTH CHRISTMAS:
Because Chloe had now lost another day of age-play, Bradley had agreed that she could be seven on Christmas Day, from the moment she woke up until they ate Christmas dinner, at which point she had to be a grown-up again. Today, however, she was going to be eight.
She awoke at half past seven and played with some toys in her room until Bradley came to get her. Holding his hand, she went downstairs and saw the living room bedecked in its now-familiar Christmas theme. She especially liked the fact that fresh presents awaited her under the tree.
The morning was spent in gentle playtime. They played Connect Four, Battleship, Checkers, and Happy Families. Chloe suspected that Bradley was letting her win, but she said nothing because she knew he was trying to protect her from stressing out about anything after the previous day’s dramas.
After a late lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Bradley pushed his plate away and turned to Chloe.
“It’s two p.m., now, so I think you’ve rested long enough after yesterday’s bump on the head,” he told her decisively.
Chloe grinned. “Phew!”
“Want to go outside for a walk?” Bradley suggested. “I bet you’re full of energy after having to take it easy for a whole day!”
Chloe nodded emphatically in agreement. She hated staying still.
Beyond their front door, the world was chilly, and a white outline of frost sat upon every surface. Chloe loved the cold weather. She was bundled up in a thick jacket with a faux-fur-lined hood, and had thick waterproof mittens on each hand. On her feet, she wore wellies with little rabbits printed on them. All in all, she was snug as a bug in a rug.
“Daddy, can we play hide and seek?” she asked as they got to the small wood beside the playpark.
“All right, little one. I’ll count to twenty, you go and hide.” He turned to a tree trunk and began counting aloud. Chloe ran away quickly, looking for somewhere to hide. She climbed up a tree, as high as she could go, and waited for her daddy to start looking.
Since there were no leaves on the trees, Chloe had thought it would be really obvious that she was sitting on a branch, eight feet in the air, but Bradley seemed to have lost her. As time went on, and she watched him become more frantic, she decided to get down and give herself up. When she moved to descend, however, one of the branches snapped beneath her feet and she had to go back up again. Well and truly, she was stuck. He was getting further away, so Chloe tried shouting to him.
“Here I am, Daddy! Up here!” she shouted, but he didn’t seem to hear her. Scared and stuck, she began to cry. It reminded her of the day her father had left her mother. All the loss and anguish exploded in her chest, as she relived that day. He had yelled at Chloe, telling her she was an ungrateful little monster, and he had hit her mother, telling her she was an ugly harpy with no soul, then he had stormed out.
A month later, Tisha had turned up in an expensive sports car, and demanded Chloe’s mother hand over all her father’s belongings. He hadn’t even wanted to see Chloe. Her mother was too passive to even bother getting a divorce until the man initiated proceedings so he could marry Tisha two years ago, so Chloe had never found out if her father would have tried to get custody of her, but she was almost certain he wouldn’t have made the effort. He never even sent her a card.
Chloe cried harder. She had been fourteen when her dad left, and since her mother didn’t really know how to do anything on her own, Chloe had ended up looking after her and the house. Chloe hadn’t known what she was doing, either, but she’d at least tried to sor
t everything out.
She hadn’t missed her father, but she had missed the ideal life that she’d never experienced; having parents that actually cared whether she lived or died, who weren’t too self-centered to notice her, and whose affection wasn’t handed out in $10 bills once every few months. Having a father she hadn’t been deathly afraid of whenever the warning signs began. At the time, she’d been too focused on day-to-day survival to realize she was missing anything. Now, that normal childhood was what she mourned.
This whole age-play week had been like repairing the cracks in her shattered soul. But it wasn’t enough, and one day she knew that Bradley would get fed up with her crap and then he would leave her. Who wanted to be around someone who cried whenever they saw mothers and daughters shopping together in Wal-Mart? And it was only one example amongst a plethora of other scenarios that set her tears falling.
...Like being stuck in a tree when a game of hide and seek went wrong and her daddy disappeared. She wanted to jump down, but her recent head injury reminded her that this was not a good idea. She cried harder and hated how useless she felt. Would she be trapped in this tree forever? One day, in years to come, would someone finally look up and find her long-forgotten skeleton up here, still waiting for her daddy to find her?
There was only one thing to do, and it terrified Chloe to even consider it. She startled when she heard people screaming, because it set her trauma off, but now, she knew she had to do it. She took a deep breath, opened her mouth wide, and was about to empty her lungs into the air when she saw her daddy heading this way. Instead of screaming, she called to him.
“DADDY! DADDY! I’M HERE!” she yelled frantically at the top of her voice. He looked up in surprise, then the mixture of surprise and joy on his face became obvious. He bounded toward her like a hound dog, then frowned when he reached the bottom of the tree.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” His voice was filled with concern and when Chloe realized just how much she had missed him, she began to cry again.
“Daddy, I missed you so much!” she sobbed. “I watched you looking for me and you never found me and I got scared. I tried calling to you but you were going away and then I couldn’t see you, so I tried to get down but I’m stuck!” she blurted out, as tears fell.
Bradley looked at the tree thoughtfully. “Can you shuffle toward the trunk?” he asked. Chloe tried, and found that she could.
“But I can’t put my feet on anything lower!” she pointed out. He nodded.
“Here,” he said, and wrapped his arms around her calves. She held onto the tree branch as he carefully brought her legs closer to the ground, then she was out of the tree, and he was suddenly so much taller than her. She buried her face in his chest and threw her arms around him. He stroked her hair and made reassuring shushing noises.
“Everything is all right, little one,” he told her. “You’re safe now. Daddy is here. I might go away sometimes, but I promise I will always come back to my baby girl.”
“Cross your heart?” she asked.
He nodded. “Cross my heart.”
His words filled her with a joy she’d never experienced before, and she happily snuggled into him. Her fear of abandonment couldn’t be washed away with a few words, but she liked hearing that he promised to stay with her, all the same.
“C’mon, little bunny, let’s go home and have some Christmas dinner.”
“Can’t we play out a little longer? Please?” she begged.
“All right. But no more hide and seek.”
“That’s fine. TAG! You’re it!” She tapped his arm, shrieked with laughter, and tried to run away, but Bradley caught up with her easily.
“Tag,” he said, then swatted her bottom. She giggled and went after him. Every time she tagged him, he caught up with her and spanked her ass. It was the most fun she’d ever had playing tag. Tired out from all the running, she wasn’t surprised when he barreled into her and she landed face down on the soft ground.
He straddled her body, and swatted her bottom, hard. The sting went straight to her clit, awakening her body and making her nipples harden.
“Tag,” he murmured. “You’re it.”
She wiggled her bottom slightly, touching against his semi-hard cock, and replied, “Tag, you’re it.”
He landed another fiery spank on her ass and her clit throbbed as it tingled with desire.
“Tag,” he said in a dominant, primal growl. She giggled as her pussy clenched.
She flexed one of her arms and managed to touch his foot.
He swatted her ass again, making her moan with need as her core was flooded with glowing sensations and her clit beat in time with her pulse. She tried to raise one of her legs to tag him, but she couldn’t quite reach.
“Do you give up, little girl?” he asked sweetly. She nodded, rubbing her hair in the fallen leaves leftover from autumn. He swatted her bottom again then got off her. He scooped her up in his strong arms, repositioning her so she was cradled by him, and she rested her arms around his strong shoulders.
“I need to take you home and show you what happens to little girls who like to play tag with Daddy’s cock,” he whispered, and she shuddered in anticipation as he carried her the short distance to their home. Never had she felt so protected, so loved, and so turned on, all at the same time. She loved her daddy so much.
CHAPTER NINE
BABY’S NINTH CHRISTMAS:
“Have you looked out of the window yet, Chloe?” Bradley asked.
Chloe shook her head.
“I think you should open the curtains, then,” he told her. She stepped toward the window and pulled the velvet curtains apart, then she stared outside for a moment.
It was several seconds before she registered that she wasn’t looking at a blank, fogged up window. She shrieked with joy.
“It’s snowing!” she cried. “Like, so much snow!”
“Do you want to play out in the snow after breakfast?” Bradley asked.
Chloe grinned. “Duh!” she exclaimed.
“Don’t be sarcastic,” he chided gently. “Eat all your breakfast and we can go out.”
Gobbling down her breakfast, Chloe only thought about all the neat stuff she was going to do in the snow. It hardly ever snowed here, especially around Christmastime, so the excitement was almost too much to bear.
Outside in her thick winterwear again, Chloe was far too interested in playing with snow to worry about anything else. She hardly ever saw snow and it always made her so happy. The first thing she did when they got to the empty playpark was climb up the chute and slide down it, landing in a big snowdrift at the bottom. She giggled so hard when snow flew everywhere and landed on Bradley’s thick wooly hat.
Deciding that she liked the idea of covering her daddy in snow, she scooped up a thick handful of cold white stuff and compressed it into a ball. She rolled it around in her hand then launched it at him with all her might. She shrieked with laughter when it hit him square in the chest. When he retaliated a moment later with a big handful of snow, she stopped laughing. He landed his missile straight on her shoulder and it exploded into icy particles that went in all directions.
“Do you want to build a snowman?” he asked, as she brushed snow off her jacket.
Her eyes lit up, and she remembered the line from one of her favorite Disney movies.
“Do you wanna build a snow-mannnnn?” she sang back to him. She loved that song. He laughed.
“You make the head and I’ll do the body,” he told her. She hesitated. What had she agreed to?
“I don’t know how,” she replied. No one had ever showed her how to do it, although she’d seen snowmen before on the TV.
“I’ll show you. Look, you scoop up some snow, like you’re making a snowball, then roll it, like this, watch.” He rolled his snow around in some more snow. To Chloe’s surprise, it all stuck together and made a bigger snowball, until he had a huge sphere of snow.
“Now you try,” he said. �
�I’m going to get more snow and turn this into the snowman’s body.”
Chloe smiled. She’d always wanted to make a snowman of her very own. She started with a snowball, like he had, and rolled it around in some snow, but it fell apart in her hands. She threw it and laid down in the snow, staring at the white sky. Making snowmen was so easy, a baby could do it, and yet the moment she tried it all went wrong. She felt the tears of frustration threatening her.
“What happened, little one?” Bradley asked.
“It broke apart. It’s stupid,” she said.
“Why do you always say that when something doesn’t work perfectly the first time you try to do it?”
“Because I mean that I’m stupid. I can’t do anything,” she replied as the tears fell.
“You’re not stupid and you know it. If you want a compliment, take the time to slowly and carefully learn how to do something and get it right.” Bradley’s harsh words shocked her, and Chloe began to cry harder.
“Don’t be mad at me!” she sobbed. “I can’t help being crap at everything!”
If his words had shocked her, being flipped onto her belly then getting her bottom peppered with a series of hard swats surprised her even more. She cried into the snow.
“You’re not allowed to say mean things about yourself and you know it. Now, your snowman didn’t work out, so are you going to lie here crying about it or are you going to do something to fix it? What are you going to do about it?” Bradley prompted. Chloe thought about it. He was right. She wasn’t making any effort to solve her own problem.
“I’m going to try again,” she replied. “And ask for help instead of giving up.”
“Good girl. I can’t help if you just give up at the first hurdle.” He helped her sit up, then hugged her to him.