Chapter Three

Reid

Things with the house had been going better than I'd anticipated they would. Everyone in the neighborhood had been really nice and gave me great hints on who to call for which tasks. It was still pretty overwhelming, but it no longer felt insurmountable, and that was huge.

The majority of the work I'd done so far was basically cleaning. But the house no longer smelled stale, and I was no longer worried about attracting rodents or bugs. The last thing I needed was to deal with mice on top of all of this.

I made a list of everything I accomplished as I finished it instead of making a to-do list. It helped more than I thought it would, gave me a sense moving forward instead of waiting for everything to topple on me. I considered that progress.

So far, my list included: getting rid of all the food that was left behind, taking care of the backyard that hadn't been mowed or raked at all since my uncle passed, calling a repair person for the washer that had been left full of wet clothes the entire time and needed to be cleaned out better than I was able to do with the stuff I found at the grocery store, scrubbing the bathroom, and washing floors. Basically, anything and everything that held no memories. I was working my way up to those.

Despite promising myself I'd move in here to do the work, I was still staying at the hotel. I kept going back and forth on whether to use my uncle's room or the guest room that he'd been using as an office. Both would take a different kind of work. The office would mean building a bed and moving a lot of furniture. His bedroom? That would mean going through his belongings.

I leaned heavily toward the office. I could turn that into a small bedroom and possibly keep the memories from getting to be too much. But every morning, I woke up thinking today would be the day and, as I got to the house, I realized I wasn't sure I was quite ready yet. Soon though.

Tomorrow, I planned to go through all of his clothing. It was pretty much all going to be donated. He wasn't my size, and I didn't know anyone who could use them. If I didn't need to make sure all the pockets were empty, and that there was anything that looked personal that maybe he wouldn't have wanted sold, I'd have done it already. It wasn't as easy as just dumping out the dressers, unfortunately.

As well as things were going, I was on edge. I could never fully get into my little space in the hotel. You never knew when some asshole was gonna pull the fire alarm, which had already happened once, or if somebody was going to "accidentally" key into your room thinking that you were out and they wanted to clean—another thing that had already happened. Basically, it wasn't as private as I needed to feel safe in that headspace.

It wasn't only that though. I needed to be around people. I'd been alone, and normally I didn't mind that, but I was alone alone, not alone around other people, and that was different. Being surrounded by like-minded people sounded perfect.

I called my local club and asked them if their sister club in town, Chained, would take my membership, and was quite pleased to find out that they not only would, but it was very minimal paperwork. I only had to sign a release and show my ID. Done.

Maybe it was time to just go and find a daddy for the night, do a scene, and let my little side out. It would for sure make tomorrow better.

I went back to the hotel and took a shower and dug out my best little clothes. I only brought a teddy bear suit onesie, some knee-highs, and a pair of pajamas that I'd already tossed in the laundry. Onesie and knee-highs it was.

My backpack wasn't my favorite one, looking very much a commuter bag and not a going-out one, but it, too, would have to do. Into it the clothes, my bottle, just in case I was feeling it, a binkie, and my stuffie went.

On my way out, I grabbed my hat, not caring about hat hair. Having a piece of my childhood with me was grounding in a way I hadn't realized I needed.

The club parking was fuller than I expected it to be, and I nearly turned around.

"You won't find a daddy if you go on a night with no daddies," I spoke into my car's vanity mirror. "You can do this. It will help."

A few deep breaths later, I was walking into the club and checking in. I didn't opt to get a private changing room, mistake number one. Changing with other littles and pups and corset hotness had me staying big. They were nice and all, but I was so busy making sure I didn't miss someone talking to me or space out and have another guy think I was staring at him when in actuality I was a million miles away.

Once I was dressed, I shoved everything into a locker and walked out before I chickened out. I'd gone to the club alone. Heck, I'd done it weekly for a while. I wasn't a shy little wall flower. But, today? Today was different.

This wasn't my club. I didn't know what was around each corner, or any even. Did they follow the rules and keep their members as safe as my home club? I wasn't foolish enough to think that all clubs had the same personality. But today? Today, I wished they had.

I kept my head down as I passed a group of leather-clad bears. I wasn't even sure why. They were hot and obviously not there for me. But suddenly I was embarrassed by being daddy-less. This was so not like me.

The person up front gave me directions to the little room, and I decided that was my best bet. I could play and make some friends and find a daddy. Easy peasy.

Only it wasn't easy peasy. I reached the door, looked inside, and nearly ran the other way. A Ms. Lily gave me a tour and asked me if I wanted to play or maybe have a snack. And what did I do? I lied.

"I need to use the bathroom. I'll be back in a minute."

A minute turned into an hour of hiding in the bathroom. But I was going to do this. This time, when I got there, the place was packed. Some littles played together, but mostly it was daddies and mommies with their littles and, of course, the one who caught my eye didn't have one little. Nope. He had a group.

Would he want another to join them? Did they all belong to him? Was he even really there with all of them, or had littles congregated around him? There were so many questions and it would be so easy to get answers to each and every one of them. All I needed to do was to walk up and ask to play. Easy peasy.

But something stopped me. Maybe I needed to ease my way into this place. Whatever the case was, this was not my night for being little. It was supposed to be a safe time, a time to let the world slip away and instead, I was letting it cause me added stress. It was time to go home.

I hightailed it to the locker room, threw my jeans and shirt over my little clothes, and nearly forgot to grab my phone on the way out. Other than a stop at a drive-through for a kid's meal, I turned toward the hotel, deciding last second I needed to be at the house. It might still be difficult to be there, but it felt more like home than anyplace I'd lived in the past few years.

I set my kid's meal on the coffee table, took off my big clothes, and settled on the couch, turning on the first cartoon I could find. It wasn't perfect, but it would do.

It wasn't until the next morning that I realized that somewhere during my near meltdown, I lost my hat.

Fuck.