Daddy Issues

  “Hey!” I frowned at my part­ner but he just gave me his best blank look as if to say, You know it’s true. After a minute, I dropped my eyes.

  “I see,” the pro­fessor said. “Well, on to your second ques­tion, then. Little-space is the head­space or mind set an Age Player gets into when they re­gress. It’s al­most an altered state of con­scious­ness when they go into it deeply enough.”

  “So—like some kind of drug?” I asked, frown­ing.

  He nod­ded. “It can be, in a way. It changes your per­cep­tion and your judg­ment. For Littles, or the play­ers who be­come ‘younger,’ it’s of­ten a more open, simple place for them to be in. Again, many find it sooth­ing to be­come a child again and not have to think about adult prob­lems.”

  “This sounds like a load of bull­shit to me,” I said, frown­ing. “But what about the other ones—the ones who play the adults? What do they get out of it, if it’s not sexual?”

  “The ‘Bigs’ or ‘Dad­dies’ as they are some­times called, get the sat­is­fac­tion of teach­ing, caring for, and com­fort­ing their ‘younger’ part­ner.” Pro­fessor Stevens smiled. “Over­all, Age Play re­la­tion­ships are very warm and ful­filling for all parties in­volved.”

  “Ooookay,” I said, not both­er­ing to try and hide my skep­ti­cism. “So the In­sti­tute is full of people who like to do this? This Age Play?”

  “Ex­actly. And make no mis­take about it, De­tect­ive, Age Play is a form of BDSM.” Stevens raised a fin­ger. “In fact, it closely mir­rors the mas­ter/slave re­la­tion­ship of more tra­di­tional prac­tices. But there are subtle dif­fer­ences in the Daddy/Baby­girl re­la­tion­ship…”

  “Okay, be­fore we get into all that…” I looked at Cap­tain Dou­glass again. “You ser­i­ously want us to do this? You want me to dress up like a little girl and Salt will be my Daddy? Be­cause I’m as­sum­ing it couldn’t go the other way around.”

  “No,” Pro­fessor Stevens said, an­swer­ing for him. “No, there are other scenes where a male ‘Little girl’ or ‘Baby­girl’ would be wel­comed but not at the In­sti­tute. They are very tra­di­tional there.”

  “You sound like you know the place,” I said, rais­ing an eye­brow at him.

  Stevens cleared his throat, a bit un­com­fort­ably I thought.

  “I am act­ive in the Tampa scene. I have been to one of their very rare open houses but it was some time ago.”

  “Okay, whatever,” I said, turn­ing back to the Cap­tain. “The point is, you want Salt and me to go in un­der­cover to what is prob­ably the weird­est, kinki­est place I’ve ever heard of. Why us?”

  He frowned. “You’ve done sting op­er­a­tions be­fore, Sug­ar­baker. Weren’t you un­der­cover as a pro once?”

  “Yeah, but at least I was still act­ing as an adult, even if I was pre­tend­ing to be a pros­ti­tute,” I poin­ted out.

  Salt looked sur­prised. “You went un­der­cover as a pros­ti­tute?”

  “It was be­fore your time—when I was in Vice for a while,” I as­sured him. “Don’t worry—nobody touched me.”

  He frowned pro­tect­ively. “They had bet­ter not.”

  “And speak­ing of Vice,” I said to the Cap­tain. “Why aren’t they in on this? It’s def­in­itely more their wheel­house than ours. Why not pick two of them to do this crazy thing?”

  “Be­cause none of the other de­tect­ives in your po­lice de­part­ment fit the very ex­act­ing cri­teria set by the In­sti­tute,” Pro­fessor Stevens said quietly. “I told you, they are very tra­di­tional—they only ad­mit male Bigs and fe­male Littles. And they prefer it when the Little in ques­tion is ex­tremely petite—it makes her seem more child­like.”

  “Ugh…” I shivered. “So Salt and I are get­ting this honor be­cause I’m height chal­lenged? Gotta tell you Cap­tain, that hardly seems fair.”

  “Sug­ar­baker…” He sighed and looked at me dir­ectly. “Have you seen what Please does to its users? Do you know how it got its name?”

  I shrugged. “Sure, I heard about that viral video.”

  “But have you watched it? Look…” The Cap­tain turned his large, flat com­puter mon­itor around and nod­ded at the pro­fessor. “Could you hit the lights? These over­head fluor­es­cents make it hard to see.”

  The of­fice was plunged into semi-gloom and then the Cap­tain punched a but­ton. The mon­itor flickered to life, show­ing a blonde girl who looked to be in her early to mid twen­ties. She was down on the floor, on her hands and knees, crawl­ing to­wards a man wear­ing a dark gray suit and ex­pens­ive look­ing shoes. I didn’t know what his face looked like be­cause the shot didn’t go that high.

  “See that?” the Cap­tain asked. “We be­lieve that man is the ori­ginal cre­ator of Please. If we could catch him, we could shut down a hell of a lot of pro­duc­tion.”

  “Who is he?” Salt asked but the Cap­tain shook his head.

  “Nobody knows. As you can see, they’re very care­ful not to show his face. But even if they did, I don’t think most people would be look­ing at it. She’s the in­ter­est­ing one.”

  He nod­ded at the girl on the screen who was look­ing more and more dis­tressed.

  “Please, Daddy,” she moaned, rub­bing against the man’s legs. “Please, I feel so empty in­side—it hurts—it hurts. Please fill me up with your big, hard cock!”

  I glanced at Salt to see how he was tak­ing this. I didn’t know if he watched Amer­ican porn or, in­deed, if Rus­sian porn was any dif­fer­ent. His face was im­pass­ive, how­ever—it’s im­possible to read him some­times.

  “Daddy, please!” The girl in the video flipped up her skirt, show­ing pink and white Hello Kitty panties. Her blonde hair was done in two curly pig­tails and she was wear­ing lacy white ankle socks and Mary Jane saddle shoes. I wondered un­eas­ily if her out­fit was an Age Play thing. Was I go­ing to have to dress like this and beg Salt to…

  But I pushed the thought away. Pro­fessor Stevens had said that it didn’t have to be sexual. So it wouldn’t be—and that was that. Not that I didn’t find Salt at­tract­ive—I’d have to be blind not to. But sleep­ing with your part­ner was bad news—a one way ticket to com­plic­a­tions and messy emo­tions. I pre­ferred to keep my work life and my sex life sep­ar­ate.

  Right, your nonex­ist­ent sex life, whispered a little voice in my head. I hadn’t really dated any­one ser­i­ously since Salt and I had been partnered up. I didn’t really know why that was—prob­ably it was in­tim­id­at­ing for pro­spect­ive dates to meet my part­ner, which they some­how, al­ways in­vari­ably did. Pos­sibly Salt was giv­ing them a ‘don’t hurt my part­ner’ speech or maybe they were just scared of him.

  For whatever reason, no guy I tried ever las­ted more than a couple of dates. And for the past few years, I had sort of stopped try­ing. Maybe I was get­ting too com­fort­able just be­ing on my own, or maybe I felt like I already had all the male com­pan­ion­ship I needed. After all, I spent some­thing like sev­enty-five per­cent of my time with Salt…

  “Daddy…Daddy, I’m go­ing to die if you don’t fuck me!” the blonde girl in the video brayed. I had sort of tuned it out for a minute but now I real­ized she was pulling down the Hello Kitty panties to show her bare ass. She star­ted rub­bing her­self between her legs frantic­ally, cry­ing and pant­ing and moan­ing. Her pu­pils were dilated so wide I couldn’t even tell what color her eyes were and her breath­ing was ragged.

  For the first time, the man on the screen spoke.

  “Fuck or die, Baby­girl,” he said, his voice com­ing out in a lust­ful growl. I still couldn’t see his face, clearly he was tak­ing pains to keep his iden­tity secret. “You told me you’d rather die than let me fuck you be­fore. Is that still how you feel?”

  “No, Daddy, no—I swear!” the blonde girl sobbed. “I’ll be your good little girl! So good—just give it to me, please.”

  Fi
­nally, mer­ci­fully, the Cap­tain stopped the video.

  “I think you can see why we need to get a handle on this,” he said quietly. “Please is not only dan­ger­ous, it’s shap­ing up to be the most ef­fect­ive date rape drug ever cre­ated. Can you ima­gine how dam­aging a video like this is to the vic­tim when it gets out? The girl is lit­er­ally beg­ging for it. And even though she’s un­der the in­flu­ence of the drug, a lot of people are go­ing to blame her be­cause…well, be­cause people are as­sholes. We all know that.”

  “Isn’t there any way to get someone down once they take the Please other than to have sex?” I asked.

  The cap­tain frowned. “There was one case where a girl was given a hit of Please at a party and her older brother took her home be­fore she could fall into the wrong hands. It wasn’t un­til after he got her back to the house that the symp­toms hit.”

  “Oh no…” I put a hand to my mouth. “Please tell me he didn’t—”

  “No, he didn’t have sex with his own sis­ter, Sug­ar­baker,” the Cap­tain said. “But people who take Please are in des­per­ate need of in­tense phys­ical sen­sa­tion. So in­stead of hav­ing sex with her, he beat the hell out of her.”

  “He what?” I asked, rais­ing my eye­brows at him.

  “You heard me—he beat her black and blue.” The Cap­tain shrugged. “It worked. She didn’t die but when she came down off the Please high she was a mess.”

  “Did she press charges?” I asked.

  The Cap­tain shook his head. “No. She gave a state­ment to the ef­fect that she’d rather have a few bruises than have been raped by some stranger. She was grate­ful to her brother, if you can be­lieve that.”

  “Well, he did save her from be­ing date raped,” I said, shrug­ging. “And then he gave her what her body needed, even if it prob­ably wasn’t ex­actly what she wanted at the time.”

  “This must be stopped.”

  I was sur­prised to hear the vehe­mence in Salt’s voice. Turn­ing, I saw that there was a grim ex­pres­sion on his nor­mally blank face, a mur­der­ous an­ger I rarely saw.

  “So you’re up for this?” I asked him. “You want to go in un­der­cover as my “Daddy” so we can bust these guys?”

  He looked at me ser­i­ously. “I know this will be hard for you, Andi. Much harder for you than for me. For that, I am sorry. But yes—I think we must stop this at any cost.”

  Well, that was some­thing to con­sider. I’d been pre­pared to put up more of a fight on this one but Salt seemed to feel really strongly about it.

  “All right,” I said, nod­ding at last. “I still don’t like it but we’ll do it.”

  “Great.” Cap­tain Douglas looked very re­lieved. Clearly, he’d ex­pec­ted more of an ar­gu­ment from me. “We’ll make the ar­range­ments and in the mean­time, I’d like Pro­fessor Stevens here to coach the two of you on what to ex­pect and how to act.”

  I looked at my watch. “Sounds good but it’s al­most quit­ting time, Cap­tain. Can we pick this back up to­mor­row?”

  “Ac­tu­ally, we were hop­ing to get you into the In­sti­tute sooner rather than later,” the Cap­tain said.

  “Okay.” I sighed. “Maybe the three of us can all go out to din­ner to­gether? Talk some more now?”

  Stevens shif­ted un­com­fort­ably. “We do need to talk but I think it’s bet­ter we do it in private.”

  “Plus you’ll need to try on your cos­tumes,” the Cap­tain put in. “I don’t think you’ll want to be seen out in pub­lic wear­ing those. Sorry, Sug­ar­baker.”

  I frowned. “Okay, and what is Salt go­ing to wear?”

  “Just wear a suit,” the Cap­tain said to Salt. “The more ex­pens­ive, the bet­ter. You’re go­ing to be a wealthy Rus­sian in­vestor who’s new to the whole Daddy-Dom ex­per­i­ence. You’re go­ing to the in­sti­tute with your Little, hop­ing to get tips to train her bet­ter.”

  “Wait—why does Salt have to ‘train’ me?” I de­man­ded.

  “Everything is al­ways a fight with you, isn’t it, Sug­ar­baker?” the Cap­tain growled. “Dr. Stevens and I thought it would be bet­ter for the two of you to present yourselves as new to the Age Play scene to ex­plain any mis­takes you might make.”

  “All right,” I said re­luct­antly. “I just don’t like the idea of fetch­ing a stick or beg­ging for treats.”

  “No, no, my dear.” Stevens laughed. “That would be puppy play. The In­sti­tute isn’t about that at all.”

  “I was just kid­ding about that,” I said. “But you’re ser­i­ous—that’s a thing? Puppy play?”

  “There are all kinds of kinks,” the pro­fessor said. “But as of now, you need only be con­cerned about one. So maybe the two of you would like to come to my house for sup­per and I can ex­plain your roles in more de­tail?”

  “No.” Salt spoke up, sur­pris­ing me. “No, we will meet at my house,” he said, look­ing at Stevens. “Less trouble this way.”

  “Well, okay, sure.” I shrugged. “Pro­fessor Stevens?”

  “Just tell me the ad­dress,” he said nod­ding. “I’ll be there with bells on.”

  Know­ing that he was deep in the fet­ish com­munity made me won­der if he meant that lit­er­ally. I had a feel­ing Salt and I were go­ing to find out.

  Chapter Two

  I hummed as I moved around Salt’s kit­chen, set­ting out a plate of sand­wiches and stir­ring the soup on the stove. Liv­ing in Flor­ida, I had never been much for soup be­fore I met my part­ner. It’s al­most never cold enough to crave winter com­fort foods, which was how I al­ways thought of it. But I had gradu­ally learned that Salt didn’t see a meal as com­plete without it, so I had ad­ded a num­ber of new soup re­cipes to my cook­ing rep­er­toire. The kind we were hav­ing to­night was ac­tu­ally a nice ve­get­able soup I had made for him a few weeks be­fore. He had frozen the rest so all I had to do was re­heat it—con­veni­ent.

  As I worked in the kit­chen, Salt set the table. He was also hum­ming to him­self in a low, tune­ful bari­tone. I stopped my own hum­ming to listen to him. I hadn’t thought of it much be­fore but it oc­curred to me how much I liked my part­ner’s voice. It’s very deep and mas­cu­line and com­mand­ing. It’s funny—he doesn’t talk much and when he does, he keeps his tone quiet for the most part. But still, when he talks, people listen and things get done. I liked that about him.

  “What are you hum­ming?” I asked, stir­ring the soup again. “It’s nice.”

  “Is a song my grand­mother used to sing to me at night some­times.” For a mo­ment, he stopped hum­ming and sang in­stead, his deep voice wash­ing over me as the rich, gut­tural Rus­sian lan­guage filled his warm kit­chen. It sent a shiver through me for some reason, though I didn’t know why.

  “What does it mean?” I asked when he fin­ished. “Trans­late for me.”

  “It is what you call a lul­laby I think. It goes…My little fox, my little kit­ten, sleep, oh sleep—the day is through. Heavy eyes and tired feet. Sleep my little mouse, sleep my little…” He paused for a mo­ment. “I think the last would trans­late into ‘my little nug­get of gold.’”

  “What?” I burst out laugh­ing. “My little gold nug­get? Is that a nick­name in Rus­sia?”

  “Da—of course.” He gave me one of his rare smiles. “What is more pre­cious than gold? You could also call someone dear to you pchelka—my little bee.”

  “Little bee?” I frowned. “But bees sting people.”

  “Bees also give honey,” he poin­ted out. “Which is an Eng­lish term of en­dear­ment.”

  “I guess so,” I ac­know­ledged. “It does sound weird when you think about it. Though no stranger than a man call­ing a grown wo­man ‘Little girl’ or a wo­man call­ing a man ‘Daddy,’ I guess.” I shivered. “Ugh—I’m really not look­ing for­ward to that.”

  Salt frowned. “This both­ers you greatly—the terms we are meant to use for ea
ch other?”

  “Come on, Salt…” I put a hand on my hips. “You meant to tell me it doesn’t bother you?”

  He shrugged, his broad shoulders rolling.

  “Is just an­other term of en­dear­ment, I sup­pose. Would you prefer we use other names for each other dur­ing this as­sign­ment?”

  “Can we?” I asked. “I never thought about that.”

  “Why not? I am from Rus­sia—I think it would be nat­ural to use terms of af­fec­tion in my own lan­guage.” He frowned thought­fully. “I will call you mishka—my little mouse.”

  “Why mouse?” I bristled at once. “Mice are timid and scared—I’m neither one of those things.”

  “You’re little though,” he poin­ted out. “And you have soft brown fur.”

  I laughed and put a hand to my hair. “Okay. If you say so.”

  “You also have big brown eyes,” Salt said quietly. He put the plates down and came over to tip my chin up so that our gazes met. “I see your soul in your eyes when I look at you, Andi. Tih kra-sah-vee-tsa.”

  “What does that mean? Is it Rus­sian?” I asked un­cer­tainly.

  “It is,” he ac­know­ledged softly. “It means, ‘you are beau­ti­ful.’”

  “Oh…” I didn’t know what to say. Salt was usu­ally all busi­ness but every once in a while he would come out with a state­ment like this that left me flounder­ing. I told my­self he was just act­ing as he had been raised—it was prob­ably just ‘the Rus­sian way’ to com­pli­ment a wo­man, even a coworker, on her looks. But still, some­times…

  “But the ques­tion is,” Salt con­tin­ued after a mo­ment, fi­nally let­ting me go. “What should you call me? You do not wish to call me ‘Daddy’ I take it?”

  “No, that’s what I called my own father. Well, be­fore he left.” I looked down at the soup again, which was sim­mer­ing nicely. Bet­ter not to think about that too much. “It just…creeps me out,” I said. “I mean, call­ing an­other man by that name.”

  “Why not call me Papa?” Salt asked. “Would that bother you?”