Torn

Chapter 3
Friday

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Chapter Description: Partyin' partyin'.

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Rick awoke disoriented. With the loud and metronomic click of an analog wall clock did the elements of his new reality fall into place.

He was bleary-eyed and the light streaming into the bay windows assaulted him. The arid swampland that was his mouth tasted of stale hops and morning breath. His headache was slight but nothing that would prevent him from going to—

—Shit!

The time on his watch read 8:38. If Rick wanted to make it in to work on time – something he felt was pretty pivotal if he was going to justify being recognized on Monday for his ten years of service and solid performance, the most recent being his best – he could only afford to run a comb through his hair and brush/gargle the hangover out of his mouth.

Richard Nolan made it to work on time and, except for the five o’clock shadow that had become more of a patchy 24-hour stubble, he was presentable to the world. But he felt scuzzy, that generalized sense of discombobulation that comes with skipping a shower, and he had a sneaking suspicion that the previous evening’s lapse in personal privacy would, at some point, come around to bite him in the unwashed ass.

He didn’t have to wait long.

-=--=-

“How’s your dad, Marie?” asked Rick, taking a swig of a double-strong coffee whose caffeine molecules, he hoped in his tenuous understanding of human physiology, would bind to the toxins of last night’s beers and wash the headache and Sahara-desert feeling right out of him. He was glad to see his secretary on the clock; her presence suggested an absence of tragedy in her life.

“Really well, thanks,” Miss Darling smiled. “It was touch-and-go for a while there, but they stabilized him, and they don’t think he’s lost any higher brain function. Just a little bit of mobility.”

“That’s great to hear.” Rick’s smile was genuine. “If ever you need to take time off to attend to him, you know you shouldn’t hestitate to ask.”

“I really appreciate that.” Marie’s smile decayed into the slightest of a frown, one that tends to appear on the face of a person who regrets having remembered the necessity of an unpleasant conversation. “May we speak in your office for a moment?”

“Sure.” Rick offered Marie a cup of coffee from the pot; she declined, and he led her past the cubicles to his office, whose door he closed behind them. He sat at his desk and she took a comfortable seat in front of it.

“Richard, when I came to pick up Emily last night after I had gotten back from the hospital, you were already asleep.”

“I’m so sorry about that,” said Rick. “I was exhausted. I didn’t even make it into bed.”

Marie shook her head. “That’s not the problem. Emily’s seventeen—I’m sure she wasn’t waiting for you to pass out just so she could crawl through the house finding outlets to stab and cleaners to drink.”

Rick chuckled. “Still, I’m sorry it happened. It won’t happen again.”

“No, it won’t,” said Marie. She appeared almost sullen.

“What is it, Marie?”

“I need you to come to my house after work,” Miss Darling replied. “I have something to discuss with you that isn’t apropos to the work environment. It involves… some things Emily found on your computer.”

Now Rick was capable of conjuring up a little fury. Did a secret hold no sanctity to that girl?

“What things were she supposed to have found?”

“I’d rather talk at home, Rick,” said the secretary. “It involves the company.”

So it doesn’t involve diapers.

Rick was worse off than he’d thought. Emily knowing about the age regression was embarrassing. Marie knowing about the salami-slicing was… dangerous.

“Sure,” said Rick, his voice dry and shaky. “Sure. I’ll meet you there after work.”

Marie rose and smiled. “Let’s just try to have a good day until then. We’re very close, Richard. You know that, as a friend, I would never do anything to harm you. We just need to discuss the added… responsibilities I’m about to take on.”

Like “accessory after the fact?” Rick thought grimly.

Rick stood and led his secretary out of his office. As he closed the door between them and let out a slow, ragged sigh of mental exhaustion, all he could think about was the coming afternoon.

What he didn’t think about, for there was no way of knowing, was how ill-prepared for it he truly was.

-=--=-

“I’m not going to debate the ethics of it with you, Richard.” Marie took a sip of her gin martini (Rick’s was vodka) and shook her head as she set it upon the coffee table in her common room. “I’m more pragmatic than I am philosophical and it is, as far as I’m concerned, your business. …At least, it was, until I found it on Emily’s flash drive, put it together, and – suddenly – my silence makes me indictable.”

Rick crooked an eyebrow. “Emily’s flash drive?”

“She confessed to me that she copied the stuff on your lanyard last night when you were asleep. Don’t worry—I’ve already punished her seven ways from Sunday for her sheer rudeness.”

“I can’t believe how quickly my life has… unraveled. At the goddamned hands of people I trust!” His mind wandered to the stultifying memory of a Tommy Wiseau picture.

Marie took Rick’s hand in hers. “Nothing has unraveled. Nothing has changed. You’re still the same person you were yesterday, and so am I. Your friend. And I can keep a secret better than my daughter, I’ll have you know.”

“So… we can just… let this go?”

Marie clicked her teeth. “I wish I could. I mean, normally, I would. But it just so happens that, in my explorations of the drive I’d confiscated from Emily, I found out the… other stuff about you.”

Rick’s stomach shriveled up. His day was getting worse with each passing moment.

“What does that have to do with anything?” His usually stoic and firm green irises appeared now childlike and pleading.

Marie moved her hand over to Rick’s and took it in hers.

“I happen to find it…”

Weird? Sick? Stay-away-from-my-daughter-grade, call-SVU-level, perverted fucking—

“—sexy.”

Rick nearly choked on his martini. He set it back down at the table and looked at his smiling secretary. The white-bread, pedestrian, “yes-sir pardon-me-sir right-away-sir” secretary next door (literally).

“Sexy.” He placed the word on the table so that it sat there without garnish.

“Oh, come on, Ricky…” – she had never called him Ricky before, and now she did it with a half-buzzed slur as she silently moved a pair of fingertips up and down his hairy forearm – “…there’s always been an unspoken something between us.”

“It’s called friendship.”

“No—friendship is the thing under which we’ve buried the other thing.”

Rick turned to Marie. “I like you, Marie. I like you a lot. But… but I just don’t think I could share that side of myself with you. With anyone.”

“I’m fascinated by it,” she declared, as though she hadn’t heard a word. “I’ve been thinking about it all day. The sheer schoolgirl joy of the feelings those images evoke in me—”

“Marie,” said Rick, perhaps a touch more sternly than he had intended. “This isn’t for us.”

“It is for me.”

Rick swallowed, but he had no spit. He knew what was coming next.

“You’re in a position to do what I want,” said Marie. “Now, Emily’s away for the evening at her aunt’s. Let’s not taint the fun we’re going to have with something as unbecoming as blackmail.”

The next drink Rick took drained his martini.

“Do we need to pick up anything?”

Marie beamed. “Got it all on my lunch break.”

Rick turned to look at her, breathing through an open mouth, his expression one of fear and excitement and wonder.

“I didn’t take a shower today.”

Miss Darling stood and again claimed Richard’s hand.

“Then we’ll start there.”

-=--=-

Richard shivered in spite of the bubbly water’s warmth. He hadn’t been bathed like a child since he was exactly that. And the gentle caresses that simultaneously humiliated and excited him felt borne from an intimacy he could not recall at any point having shared with his wife.

“Feeling nice, Ricky?”

The man shuddered. “Uhh…yeah. Please don’t call me that.”

“I want to call you that,” Marie said matter-of-factly; and Rick, being one to choose his battles, didn’t feel like going toe-to-toe with her on that point. “It seems more appropriate at this stage.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Rick was seated in a warm tub of bubble bath, his feet at the front of the tub, capping legs that were bent upwards into an inverted V. He had his arms wrapped around his knees, as though protecting his genitals at altitude from the inevitable. As Marie ran the soapy, sudsy washcloth all along Rick’s body, he noticed that his hair was swept away with every loving dash of the terry—depilatory soap, he figured, though there didn’t seem to be any liberated strands of hair floating freely amidst the brine.

“You seem distant,” Marie observed. Though having her boss in this position had been titillating in theory, she had been hoping for a certain level of cooperation from her charge. As much as it troubled her to do so, in the same way it might bother a strict-rules golfer to use spring-loaded clubs, she realized she might have to start… encouraging Ricky’s regression.

“I was thinking of one of your daughter’s cheers last night.”

“Cheers?”

Rick cracked a smile despite himself. “She didn’t tell you? Yeah, she let me know in no uncertain terms that I was welcome to keep my dignity – that maybe the near future had some surprises in store for me – and she did it using the art of the cheer.”

Marie smiled back. “And have there been surprises?”

“More than I could have hoped for.” He meant it, though he wasn’t sure how.

“So which of her cheers has taken you away from me this moment?”

“The last one she did,” Rick said as Marie wrung out the washcloth above the tub’s water line. All the hair above his waist, except for that on top of his head, was gone. “I think it was about witches or witchcraft.”

“You think it was about witches?”

“God’s honest truth, I was not long for the world by that point. I was pretty sure she had me sucking my thumb.”

Marie sat back on her haunches and sighed in envy. “That sounds just adorable.”

“So…”

“So what?”

“So are you… witches? Whatever that entails these days?”

“I suppose you could call us that,” Marie nodded. “The actual term for what we are is unpronounceable by the human tongue and can’t be written on two-dimensional paper.”

Rick chuckled. He had completely lost track of what was worth believing and what comprised Marie’s sense of humor.

“You have powers?”

Marie nodded. “Notice how I’ve stripped you of all your hair? There’s none in the water or on the rag.”

“That’s you?”

Another nod. “That’s me. Kid’s stuff, really. Want to see another example?”

“Sure, Mommy.”

Marie grinned.

Rick blushed a deep crimson. “I mean… Mommy. Mommy! Mommy?”

The man’s brain was signaling his mouth to say “Marie.” The latter simply wasn’t doing its job.

“No silly verbal spells or unwieldy grimoires for me,” Marie chuckled. “I just bend reality to my will, and there it is.”

“Can Emily do that too, Mommy?” Rick asked. He wanted to punch himself in the face for sounding so juvenile.

“A little. When she turns eighteen, we’ll have ourselves a ritual and that sort of high-level existence manipulation will be taught to her in full, should she demonstrate the level of maturity necessary to wield such power responsibly.”

“Absowoot powuh cowwupts absowootwy,” said Rick. He turned his head to face Marie and shot daggers into her eyes.

“Too much too soon?”

“Too much too soon.” Richard coughed. “Thanks.”

Marie added more soap to the washcloth and tapped her boss on the shoulder. “Get on your hands and knees, Ricky, so Mommy can get to your bottom and tinker.”

The request sounded ridiculous to his ears… but damned if he wasn’t doing it. Forty-five-year-old Richard Nolan, all 190 broad-shouldered pounds of him, moved to a position on all fours in the bathtub so his secretary could remove the hair from his legs and give the same loving treatment to his most private parts.

“You make me feel… really little, Mommy,” Ricky cooed, as though he was voluntarily sharing an intimate secret of his own accord—though this one was laced with subtle hints of gratitude.

“I’m so happy to hear that, Ricky.” She slid the washcloth up the crack of the man’s ass, rendering it peachy and smooth, with a little pink rosebud at its center; then did the same for Ricky’s testicles, as well as the seven inches of meaty iron that dangled, stiff as a rod, between his thighs. In no time at all Richard Nolan was as bare and as clean as he’d been on the night he was brought home from the hospital.

“Bathtime’s over, little man,” smiled Miss Darling. “Let’s go get you dressed.”

-=--=-

He had felt scuzzy all day. Betrayed all afternoon. Awkward during bathtime. And, at all moments, vulnerable.

Now, Richard Nolan feels none of those things, save for vulnerability. And it is a blessed vulnerability.

He is confident it is neither the witch’s magic nor the alcohol’s liberating spirit. It is merely the circumstances of existence, aligned in a certain favorable array, conspired into concert, a symphony brought to life.

At this moment, stretched out atop a bath towel on Marie Darling’s queen-sized bed, denuded of both clothing and body hair, Rick Nolan feels alive. At this moment, his legs splayed outward, his hands at his sides, his erection straining into the air as a monument to sexual actualization, Ricky Nolan feels free.

She turns from the dresser and approaches him. In her left hand is a plastic bottle, labeled with the image of a cherub, imprinted with text denoting “lavender.” In her right hand is Ricky’s destiny.

“Mommy,” the man coos—and, at once, he balls his left hand into a fist and pushes its thumb into his mouth.

She sets down the powder and unfolds the diaper. It is a disposable, purest white, triple-thick, four tapes. A waistband of nappy-clad teddy bears playing with plastic balls and baby blocks differentiates the garment from common medical incontinence briefs.

This is not that. It is a Diaper, meant for Baby, given by Mommy.

Ricky sucks his thumb. It doesn’t take long for him to hit upon a long-forgotten rhythm. His cheeks inflate and deflate with every suckle. The roof of his mouth is pleasured by the gentle force of a depressed thumb. A thin rivulet of drool works its way free of the corner of Ricky’s mouth and idly traces a line down to the bedspread.

“Lift up,” Mommy coos, and Ricky does, bearing weight down on his feet to elevate his hips high into the air. She slides the diaper beneath the canopy of his body, crinkly plastic sliding against the damp terry of the bath towel, an invitingly soft inside awaiting the weight of Ricky’s smooth posterior.

“And down.” Ricky does. He feels immense pleasure course up his spine the moment his sensitive rear end sets upon the pillowlike fluffiness of the diaper. His eyes roll back into his head. His cock twitches, and leaks.

Mommy chuckles lovingly and begins puffing powder all over Ricky’s butter-smooth groin, the lowest echelons of his belly, onto his barely-parted thighs, into the perfect whiteness of the diaper beneath.

Her hands – warm, angelic, without flaw – descend upon his private areas; with great love and tenderness do they massage the sweet-scented powder into Ricky’s aching crotch, the talc’s soporific properties both olfactory and tactile.

“Mommy—”

Large, spherical baubles of pre-ejaculate form at Ricky’s slit and dribble down his straining shaft, mixing in with the powder to create a creamy, lotionlike paste. With an expert grip does Mommy massage this lotion into Ricky’s needful spire.

Ricky squirms. He moans. His toes curl. His anus contracts.

“…Mommy!...”

With one hand she palms Ricky’s boiling testicles and inserts her middle finger into his rectum, the sphincter having yielded for but an instant before contracting around the digit and holding it in place. With her other hand does Mommy stroke upwards, her thumb running over the swollen plum of Ricky’s head, the ducts in his penis stiffening with content as his balls rush to deliver their payload to Baby’s world.

There is a moment of great, ear-splitting intensity. Then, silence.

Silence all across the universe.

Amidst this silence, in a corner of all existence, on a blue dust mote drowned in endless blackness, in the suburban house shared by a young witch and her teenage daughter, a bedroom exists in which the entirety of reason and thought and life and breath is focused; it is all for one man, one man who has surrendered, one man whose worldview has shifted so profoundly over the course of the previous 24 hours that the release he experiences transcends the definition of catharsis and blazes a trail through forests uncharted—

—cutting through the air like a scythe, white heat, a potent potion, thick with sperm, its arrival announced by a guttural, unchecked moan from below—

—“—uuuuunnnnnnnnnnhhhhh—”—

—a line lands on his cheek, a line lands on his chest, then another, great gouts of it; like a javelin does the fourth shot impale his chin; the fifth, sixth, and seventh lines, shorter than their predecessors, leave his chest and his stomach to glisten in the waning daylight; then droplets, oozing into his navel, sap from a tapped tree—

—relief.

--to be continued--

 

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