Being Their Baby (12 page)

She frowned. “They could have hidden the evidence a little better,” she grumbled.

“They weren’t trying to hide it,” Josh shrugged, and walked over to sit on the bed. “That’s how things work in this house. Liz is a non-exclusive lady. You need to comprehend that. She’ll never be satisfied with just you, or just with Charlie, or just with me. There’s nothing any of us can do about it; that’s the way things are.”

Sophie nodded, although unhappily. She knew this about Liz, and she wasn’t heart-torn over not being Liz’s one-and-only. Really, in a lot of ways, it let her off the hook. She didn’t have to be the only person who was around to make Liz happy. Liz was a complicated woman; not to mention that Sophie wasn’t skilled enough at bed sport to even get Liz to orgasm yet.

But that didn’t make her afraid that Liz was going to choose to go monogamous any second, and not choose her. In fact, it seemed like it could head in that horrible direction at any second. “They were talking about…” she admitted, grabbing her stockings and looking distractedly at them, “… marriage. I think.”

Josh suddenly chuckled. “Probably. Charlie’s been trying to seal that deal since he was
four
.” He added, “Hell,
I’ve
been trying to marry Liz since I was
born
. But hey—even if one of us get her to let us have our way for once, it doesn’t mean the dynamic we have with her would change. It wouldn’t change how she feels about you.”

She looked at him, seriously doubting that.

“I’m serious!” he said. “Once Liz picks out a little, she’s a one-woman lady. She won’t want another unless
you
leave
her
.”

She sighed and sat down next to him on the bed to pull her white stockings over her feet and legs. “I’m not her little. I mean, I call her mommy, but other than that… I don’t do anything that regular littles do. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a bad girlfriend, because I don’t know how to… you know…”

He raised his eyebrows. “I do?”

“You know…” She swirled her hand around in the air. “That thing.”

“You mean orgasm?” he asked, looking far too amused.

“Well, no.” She stopped and stammered an explanation. “I mean, she’s done me—I’ve totally, like, done that. But I mean, I can’t do it to
her
.”

He smiled and shook his head before putting an arm around her shoulders and giving her a squeeze. “Then stick with me, grasshopper; learn from the
master
. I know that woman’s body better than I know my own. It’s all in the nipples. She’s huge on nipples; but she’s also got to be ready up here.” He dug his finger into his own temple. “She has to get into the right mindset, then she goes crazy. Other than that, it’s all the normal stuff.”

“Normal stuff?”

“You know, like the clit.”

“Right.” Sophie was going to have to get a book or something.
Oh, who am I fooling
? she thought.
I can’t even get
myself
off
.

“Other than that—being a little is no problem. Just let yourself
go
. Relax. Be silly. Make mistakes. As I said, you have nothing to worry about because Liz will never leave
you
. Other than that, you do enough just by acting naturally because you’re just a cute, bouncy person.
Except
…”

She leaned toward him, listening.

“You need to start sucking up to Charlie,” he told her. When she was disappointed by the advice, even sneered at it, he suddenly looked stern. “Look,” he said. “Liz is going to be miserable if you two don’t get along. Charlie’s a good guy, and he’s hell-bent on looking out for you, but he’s sensitive and he can get his feelings hurt. I think he’s already working himself in a fix because he wants to be your daddy, and you openly hate his guts.”

The idea of anyone wanting to play “daddy” with her made her blush. “You don’t know what it’s like to be… you know… A
little
.”

“No, maybe not,” Josh granted, “but you haven’t seen the D&S Liz and I dabble in. You don’t know what
that’s
like. I used to really freak out over some of the stuff she had me doing for her; but I couldn’t be dominant with her, because I knew
Charlie
was, and I wanted to provide something for her that Charlie couldn’t.

“So I relaxed and pretended to be way cooler with bottoming and subbing than I was. Before I realized it, I was actually
enjoying
it. Hell, I look forward to her topping the living shit out of me now—excuse my French.”

He shrugged and added, “Fake it till you make it. I have a feeling, now that I know you a little better, that if you just relax and let them—that means Charlie, too—treat you like a ‘little’, you’ll fall right into it. And then you’re gonna wake up one day and wonder how you lived outside of that dynamic. I know that’s what happened to
me
.”

He reached over and patted the inside of her thigh. Unexpectedly, he left it there for a long time. “By the way,” he added mischievously, “watching you put on your stockings gave me total wood right now.” Before she could react to that, he kissed her cheek and patted her inner thigh again.

She bit her lip and looked him over. “Hey… Josh?” she asked timidly before he made it to the door. He spun around to her and she continued, “I was thinking… If you wanted to…” She swallowed. “Can you give me lessons on how to… You know… with Liz?”

“Uh…” He looked panicked by the request for a second, and then he looked back and forth, as if searching for a camera, then at the door, before responding, “Right now?”

“Well…” She was probably purple by now, she was blushing so hard. She gave up on eye contact and pinched at her bedspread. “No, but… You know.”

He eyed her seductively for a second, and then nodded. “Only if you keep call me Uncle Josh,” he added with a wink. “I
love
that.”

She giggled slightly. “Okay, Uncle Josh.”

“And not right now,” Josh clarified, putting his hand on the doorknob. “You should probably go down and face the music.”

She blinked. “Face the music?”

“Yeah.” He opened the door and waved his hand to usher her through it. “If you think Liz was kidding about you needing to tell her if you need anything, you should think again. Liz doesn’t
kid
; particularly about health stuff. If I were you, I’d keep my head down and my mouth shut. Make Liz think that her disappointment is really the worst punishment of all.”

She got up from the bed, crying, “But… but I didn’t do anything bad or anything! I just thought it was a bruise!” She grabbed her shoes and tugged them on. “It’s no big deal.”

Josh frowned and shook his head. “It’s not
me
you have to convince,” he said, which was a bad sign, because not even Josh looked at all convinced. In fact, he began to repeat his advice, “Head down, admit you were wrong…”

“But I wasn’t!”

“… and definitely don’t say you weren’t wrong and thus imply that
she’s
wrong!” He ushered her out one more time and she sighed and complied. He trailed closely behind her. “Head down,” he reminded when they were at the bottom of the stairs, “and just let her lecture you.”

She pursed her lips, took a deep breath, and strode to the kitchen with her head high.

Josh rubbed his hand over his eyes and then murmured to himself something that sounded like, “Well, she has to learn
sometime
…”

* * *

“Where’s Josh?” Elizabeth asked when she came into the kitchen, simultaneously trying to hook her earrings on her lobes now that she’d applied her makeup.

“I think he went to go see Sophie,” Charlie replied. He’d seen Josh enter her room when he was coming in from outside the front door, where he had rescued the newspaper from the snowy front step. “Was your shower as cold as mine was?” he added tersely.

She sighed and admitted that it was. “I think it was a little bit of payback,” she admitted. “She’s not used to this. She’s used to what she sees—one man and one woman getting together and being exclusive. This arrangement is a lot to swallow,” she defended patiently, then she eyed the ceiling. “What’s Josh doing up there?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie replied, getting more frustrated with every second he couldn’t find the sports section in the rolled-up paper that was wet around the edges.

“Well, how long has he been up there?” she asked, sounding worried now.

“I don’t…” Suddenly he looked up, giving her a chiding expression. “Honey, you can’t start worrying about Josh. Despite what he says, he’s not actually the type of guy who would charge into an emotionally confused teenager’s panties. Besides,” he added with a shrug, “he told me he got tons of play last night. He’s not hard-up this morning. Aha!” The sports section was finally found. He pulled it out, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat down in his breakfast nook.

“What should I do about Sophie?” Liz asked him. “Should I have her stay home today? She’s gotta be hurting from the root canal, right?”

He rolled his eyes. “If you saw what I saw, you’d know, like I do, that there is no way she’s not feeling way better than she was yesterday morning. It looked painful—and it
was
; that’s why she’s been avoiding all cold, hot, and hard foods for the last two weeks and has been living on smoothies, mashed potatoes, and tubs of frosting.” He shook his head. “The diet of champions.”

Liz shook her head at herself. “I should have paid better attention,” she sighed. “I was just so tied up in work, and
thinking
about work, and that big account. My head wasn’t where it should be.”

“Well, she was also doing a good job hiding it and not talking about it,” Charlie reminded off-handedly. “If she was mine, she’d be sitting on a red tail already and I’d have her looking forward to a baby-time weekend. She’d hate it, but it would fit the crime. She can’t neglect her own health like that. It’s unacceptable! Besides, she can’t eat solid foods for a couple of days, anyway. Makes it as good a time to make her take to the bottle as any.”

Liz shook her head. “I have a lot of work to do this weekend,” she admitted. “Although I agree with you, Charlie, it’s too time-consuming. Not to mention it might be a little too early to put her through that. She’s still settling in, and she hadn’t even
heard
of age-play before she came here. A baby weekend would be too much of a shock.”

“That’s why it would make such a good impression on her,” he grumbled.

She smirked and shook her head at him before walking over to get herself some coffee. “I don’t like being the disciplinarian,” she said, even though Charlie knew that Liz did it too well and too often for that to be entirely true. “I prefer
being the one who spoils and coddles. There’s more to being a dominant than being a disciplinarian. If I’m in a sadistic mood or just want to punish something, I just take Josh out back.”

Charlie cringed. “Ugh,” he groaned. “What you do with my brother is between you and him. I know too much already.”

They listened to Josh and Sophie emerging from the bedroom upstairs, whispering to each other. When they came down, Sophie entered the room first, head held up like she was a proud puppy, assumingly for wasting all their hot water, and looked like she was going to say something snarky.

She didn’t get the chance, though, because Liz scooped Sophie into her arms like she was a doll and tucked her around her waist like she was, indeed, a pampered child. Sophie was startled, wide-eyed, and did actually look doll-like next to Liz. Never before had Charlie fully realized how much taller Liz was than Sophie, especially with her high heels on.

He sighed at the horrible display of coddling and read a couple of paragraphs of his newspaper while ignoring Elizabeth’s coos of, “Are you still hurting? Can you eat anything? Did you sleep well? Let me see…
Poor baby
!”

Josh had time during the display to walk around the two, cap off his coffee, take a muffin off of a little glass stand where the housekeeper insisted on displaying them, sit down next to Charlie, and ask Charlie if he was going to be selfish with the sports section like he “always was.”

Charlie grumbled, made a quick search through his paper, found the first article he saw that pertained to hockey, and passed it over to Josh, who was actually interested in that ridiculous sport more so than football, which was something Charlie never quite understood about him.

“It’s weird. Liz has gotten more brutal with me in the pool house and all marshmallowy toward her little. I still have a crop mark on my thigh from two days ago that hasn’t even
thought
about going away yet,” Josh mumbled to him, sounding slightly jealous, although because Josh spoke about everything like he was joking, it was hard to detect jealousy on him except by people who’d known him for the last twenty-nine years.

Charlie grimaced at the imagery. “Way,
way
too much information, Josh.”

Sophie, at this point, looked quite chipper, like someone who thought the coast was clear and it was now time to stop worrying about spankings and lectures that would never occur. “So,” she said when Elizabeth gave her room enough to speak between the fussing, “how’d your meeting go yesterday?”

And then Liz’s temper changed from one resembling a worried mother, to one more like a mother who had a naughty child that she didn’t know what to do with. Charlie hadn’t noticed the look until Josh nudged his elbow with his own, trying to bring attention to it so they could watch the interaction over their newspapers.

“Hold on just a second, young lady,” Liz said firmly, setting the smaller girl’s bottom up on the counter. “Before you start changing the subject, there are things we need to discuss.”

When Charlie had dated Lacey, this would be about the time when Lacey would dole out crocodile tears to keep him from even lecturing her. Except for a wide streak of incurable narcissism, Lacey was a good girl, but her spending was out of control and she was extremely lazy and temperamental. It was hard to spank her for discipline. He was in charge of her, but at the same time, Lacey was the master of manipulators and thus she was arguably the one holding his strings.