Pets 2: Pani's Story (18 page)

“Wash,” he said, pointing to the wall.

Dirt, as it turned out, was rather difficult to clean out of all those little hills and valleys in the paint, but Pani scrubbed and sniffled and scrubbed some more. And every now and then, when Papa (who had returned to his desk) wasn’t looking, she spit lingering soap suds into the bowl.

Eventually the wall was returned to its customary state of pristine whiteness and Papa got up to take the bowl and cloth from her. He washed her feet first, and although he didn’t order her back into the corner before he left the room, that’s where Pani seated herself anyway. The face of the white timer was black. Sometime during her mouth-washing, the countdown had concluded. She was probably free to leave the chair.

Reaching up, Pani restarted the timer. Then she sat back down again, folded her hands in her lap and sighed. In the mood she was in, she was probably going to be sent right back here in short order anyway.

When Papa returned, he went back to his desk and sat down. From the lack of typing sounds, she knew he was probably watching her more than he was working. Finally, he got up again.

Spreading a blanket out on the floor, he pulled out her toys and called her over. “Come here.”

Pani got up and went, but she wasn’t smiling and she really didn’t want to spend the rest of the day pretending to be interested in multicolored blocks. Unless, of course, she somehow magically stumbled on a way to get him to tell her what was on them. Blinking at the wide array of toys, she hesitantly reached for one and, even more hesitantly, held it out to him.

“Yes, block,” he said.

Holy cow, that worked!

“Block?” she echoed, seizing on her success. She quickly began to sort through the smattering of baby toys, finding all the blocks and repeating the name as she held them up for him.

In a mood for lazy patience, Papa leaned back against the couch, taking each one as she 80

handed it to him and nodding. “Yes.”

She dropped the blocks and handed him a small yellow bowl. It was the smallest of a stackable set. “Block?”

“Cup,” he replied.

Eureka!

An ecstatic shriek escaped her before she could stop herself. It startled him, but she was too busy grabbing all the blocks and cups on the blanket. She quickly sorted them into piles. There were nine cups and thirteen blocks, four books and of course her doll.

“Bad girl Pani doll,” she told him when he tried to hand it to her and promptly set it aside.

“Okay, okay.” She flexed her fingers and picked up a block. “Block.” She dropped it and picked up the next item. “Cup.” He watched closely while she dropped it and grabbed the next one. “Book. Pani.” She pointed her finger at herself first, and then him. “Papa.” Then she patted at a cushion of the sofa he leaned against, and she waited.

His gaze followed her hand, and then slid back to her. “Couch.”

“Woo hoo!” she screamed, jumping to her feet and clapping. In her excitement, she grabbed his shoulders and kissed him square on the mouth. He startled, but not as much as he did when she ran to the table, patting at it with both hands. “Couch?”

“Table,” he corrected.

She ran to her corner. “Couch?”

“Chair.”

“Bad girl Pani chair.”

“Pani’s chair,” he corrected, reaching out an arm to catch her as she darted around the blanket on her way to the kitchen. She veered, neatly evading his grasping finger.

“Pani…”

“Chair?” she asked, patting the one he customarily occupied when they shared their meals.

“Yes.”

“Pani chair?” She tapped her own.

“Pani’s highchair. Tray,” he added when she pointed specifically to that and then to the open straps used to buckle her down. “Harness.” He beckoned with one finger. “Come here, Pani.” She ducked into the kitchen instead, disappearing out of his sight, taking up her position at the sink and waiting silently while he called her twice and then got up to pursue her. The instant he appeared around the threshold, she patted at the cool metal. “Cup?” He didn’t answer, but held up his hand instead. He was holding the hairbrush he’d bought the night of the infamous tea party. “Hairbrush,” he said, enunciating pointedly. “Pani’s spanking hairbrush.” He pointed back the way he’d come. “Blanket.” Tucking her hands behind her, half expecting him to slap at her bottom with the hairbrush as she slipped past him, Pani went meekly back to the living room and knelt down on the blanket.

She wasn’t smiling any more, but then neither was he. Instead, they stared at one another, Papa silent and contemplating, his eyes narrowing as he studied her, now and then rubbing at his chin until he finally seemed to reconcile himself to some sort of conclusion.

He pointed at the blanket, snapping his fingers once to show he was serious. “Stay.” Pani resisted the urge to bark like a dog as he slipped the handle of that hairbrush into his 81

back pant’s pocket and went upstairs. When he returned, it was with her bedroom toy box in his arms. He sat down cross-legged on the blanket across from her, gave her another long, assessing look, and then dumped the toy box out between them.

“Maze,” he said, picking up the first, and one by one they went through each individual item. He set them down in rows, making neat lines of her toys until he had named them all.

Then he gave her another long look. Picking up the maze, he finally asked, “What’s this?” For the next hour, Pani became a dutiful parrot. She repeated the names of every toy he held up to her. She learned them quickly and after going through the entire line once, needed very little correction, but that didn’t stop him from starting all over again, this time mixing it up a little by picking items randomly from the assemblage. By the third run through, she was heartily bored and ready to go onto something beyond toys. Something that mattered!

It came to a head when he picked up that cussed doll of hers—the one with long hair dyed red to match hers—and pranced it on the blanket in front of her.

“What’s this?” he asked gamely.

She glared at the doll. Very much more of this and she was going to save them both some time and argument and put herself to bed for the night.

“Pani.” He tapped her on the knee to regain her attention and danced the doll again. “What’s this?”

“Bad girl Pani doll,” she said flatly. Her mouth twisted in a grimace as she studied its painted cloth face, recognizing more alien than human features and hearing again Sassa’s pearl of great wisdom: You should always do what they like.

Papa frowned, his dark brows beetling together as he studied her. “No,” he gently corrected.

“This is Pani’s doll.”

That he’d dropped the ‘bad girl’ wasn’t lost on her. She grudgingly conceded, but only because he was bigger than she was. Bigger and stronger and relentlessly ‘The Boss.’ She held her tongue, but apparently should have worked harder at maintaining a more neutral expression.

Ducking his head to peer more closely at her face, Papa’s frown deepened over what he saw.

“Hm,” he said, and Pani very quickly cleared the sulkiness from her face when he picked up the ever-present hairbrush. “What’s this?”

Her bottom began to tingle, a deeply dreadful sensation that crawled just beneath the spankable surface of her skin. She cleared her throat and made an effort at contrition. She even made an attempt to add that funny gargling sound onto the end of her name, the way he’d been doing all morning, in the hopes that it might make him happy. “Bad girl Pani’s hairbrush.” And with any luck it would not be used on her.

She fidgeted, tapping her fingertips nervously together as she stole quick glances from the brush to him and back again.

The hairbrush dropped a scant inch in the air as he cocked his head at her. “What’s this?”

“B-bad girl Pani’s hairbrush?” Pani tapped her steepled fingertips again, unable to help but notice that he hadn’t lowered the brush all the way to the floor, putting it safely out of the realm of imminent danger. It was a fight to keep from putting her hands behind her, to rub and comfort a bottom that was doing its best to convince her brain that it could already feel the increasingly familiar sting of that implement. “Sp—” her breath caught in her throat, and Pani hesitantly tried 82

again, doing her best to cobble together a coherent sentence. “Sp-spanking P-Pani’s bottom, um…hairbrush?”

Slowly, Papa’s mouth widened into a sunny grin, but she didn’t relax until he’d discarded the brush. He fondly ruffled the top of her hair instead. “Pani’s hairbrush,” he echoed, putting an emphasis on that gargling syllable. “Good girl!” Heck, she’d gargle all day long if it had the power to get her out of a spanking. She squirmed on her bottom, trying to dispel that lingering tingling sensation, and Papa turned blithely back to toys.

“What’s this?” he asked, holding up a bright red block.

Looking from the hairbrush to the block, Pani wasn’t completely successful at biting back an exasperated huff. If she didn’t do something soon, she’d be a raving lunatic before he got tired of this game. “Block,” she answered and then, when he dropped his attention to select the next item, quickly pointed to the only thing she had on hand that was not a toy. That it happened to be her own nose didn’t matter; he was distracted from his ‘game’, watching her with that slightly tense ‘oh lord, not again’ stare.

“What’s this?” she asked hopefully, tapping the tip of her nose with one finger.

Papa’s mild frown faded into that unreadable mask that he always adopted whenever she did something that threatened to dispel the child-like illusion he so obviously preferred. He made a growling sound in the back of his throat as he cleared it, and might have gone back to blocks and stackable rings or cups if only she hadn’t crawled her way through them on her knees, pushing them aside as she lay her free hand cajolingly upon his chest.

“Papa,” she wheedled. “What’s this?”

He relented, but reluctantly. “Your nose.”

It was probably the physical closeness that did it; he always seemed much more amenable to what she wanted when she got close to him. Pani thrilled at the minute power of it. “Your nose,” she said, her fingers caressing along the length of her freckled bridge.

Papa drew a deeper breath, holding it for the span of a single heartbeat before, with a vague grimace tugging at the corners of his mouth, he corrected her possessive pronouns. “Your nose,” he emphasized, gently stroking the tip of his finger down the slope of it, and then tapping the side of his own. “My nose.”

“My nose,” Pani whispered. Holding all the power she needed to coax him into compliance, she edged closer. He made no objections; not when she crawled up into his lap, easing her leg over his thigh to straddle him, and certainly not when she cuddled deliberately close. Her stomach pressed to his. Her soft breasts pillowed against the breadth of his muscular chest, and the inner slope of her sensitive thigh absorbed the heat of his groin. In spite of herself, a flare of warm awareness sparked low down in her belly, turning molten with no more encouragement needed than the touch of his hand as it came to rest upon her hip, steadying her.

If he were experiencing these same tenuous threads of arousal, then he masked it well. She could see no smoky glimmer stirring in the depths of his unwavering gaze and there was no quickening of his breaths like there was with hers. But as she made herself coyly comfortable against him, she could have sworn she felt a dangerous stirring of the flesh pressed against the inside of her thigh. She was playing with fire and she knew it, but this too was power and of a 83

flavor that left her more hungry to savor than to abandon it.

She let her fingers walk up his chest, indulging in a single timid caress of the hard angles of his strong face before very softly stroking the outlines of his unsmiling lips with the barest tips of her fingers. “What’s this?”

Against her waist, his thumb mimicked that single sweeping caress along her side. It was the only movement he made as he answered, “My mouth.” Her fingers slipped down along the law of his jaw. “This?” She didn’t mean for it to, but her breath caught, turning her inquiry into the barest of whispers.

“Chin.”

The molten heat in her belly was moving through her now, flowing down from her womb with languid ease as she touched him. The way men and women were supposed to touch. She let her hands skim over his shirt-clad shoulder and down his right arm—his spanking arm. He allowed her to lift his wrist, obligingly holding up his hand, his relaxed fingers extending to their full length when she pressed her palm to his, comparing the size.

That was thrilling too, this reaffirmation of how much larger he was than herself, her small hand positively dwarfed by his on all sides. Her stomach tickled and for the barest half second she could have sworn she felt that hand pressing against to her bottom the way it did when he spanked her, or better yet when he didn’t, choosing instead to covet and caress.

“Fingers,” he said, his voice dipping into those lower octaves the way it sometimes did when he touched her in much more intimate places. Just the sound of it made her thighs convulse, squeezing him between her legs before she could catch herself. Her face flushed; she had to remind herself to breathe again.

Papa didn’t seem anywhere near as affected as she was. He still reclined against the couch, seeming so utterly at ease and yet with an alertness that glittered in the inky depths of his eyes that suggested he was taking careful note of her discomfit even while she boldly stroked his fingers, echoing him as he counted them off for her: his alien hand with only four digits as opposed to her five. A hand which she had the most absurd urge to bring to her mouth and kiss.

Taste maybe, while she let the tip of her tongue flick up the salty length of his forefinger before taking it into her mouth and sucking. Equally absurd was the even stronger urge to let her hand wander down far enough to clasp the half-mast erection she could feel pressing up against her buttocks from below and see if he named that for her as well.