by Maren Smith
Bottles and sippy cups, and toys, and coloring books, and clothes. My head was spinning, and the more I thought about what Malcolm had just said, the more I wanted my pacifier, but it was across the room. Instead, I found myself rubbing Malcolm’s pants between my thumb and forefinger. If this would make Malcolm happy, I didn’t see a problem. I already had a pacifier; how much different would a bottle or sippy cup be? But could I see myself coloring at the table or in the living room while Daddy made dinner or watched TV?
I’d spent most of the previous evening sitting on the couch next to Malcolm playing a coloring app on my phone. Sure, it was an intricate, geometric, rendering of a sugar skull, but it had held my attention for nearly two hours between finishing dinner and Malcolm insisting we head up to bed. How would coloring in a coloring book be any different?
How would I feel to look up and see Malcolm—Daddy?—sitting near me? The warm fuzzy feeling in my stomach told me I wouldn’t mind. My pacifier, a coloring book, a sippy cup. “Oh! Could I have chocolate milk?”
Malcolm’s laughter filled the room. “Now?”
“No, in my sippy cup. Well, I guess I’d take it now too if you’re offering.” Then I realized I’d basically said sippy cups were okay. Even if my conscious brain was telling me to apply the brakes, my subconscious was letting Malcolm’s words wrap around me like a blanket.
Lips pressed against my temple. “I think if my boy’s eaten well and behaved nicely, chocolate milk would be a great reward.”
I found myself smiling at the idea. “You… you won’t think differently of me either way? I mean, if I like the little stuff or not?”
His answer came without hesitation. “Of course not. It’s something we can explore together. I don’t even know how I see the age play stuff working for us. From everything I’ve read, the beauty of this type of role play is that there’s no right way for you to be little or for me to be your Daddy. It doesn’t matter how little you want to be or what clothes you want to wear. What feels right to us is what matters.
There was a chance I wouldn’t like it no matter what and we could stop. There was a pesky voice in the back of my head telling me the chances of not liking what Malcolm was suggesting were minimal. I liked him taking care of me, and this just seemed like a different level of care.
When I yawned—the game, the drinking, the late hour all catching up to me—Malcolm decided we’d talked enough. “Okay, sleepy head, it’s time to brush your teeth.” Yeah, he’d thrive as a Daddy, and despite my sleepiness, my cock was taking notice. Come to think of it, my body tended to react to him telling me what to do; go to bed, brush my teeth, eat my vegetables. Seriously, how did he make telling me to eat my vegetables sexy? Large hands pushed at my back. “Now, Ry. Go get ready for bed.”
Chapter Seven
Malcolm
I woke up early on Friday—earlier than Ryder and earlier than I should have given our late night. Ryder was dead to the world, buried under the blankets, his brown hair sticking up at odd angles, and the pacifier still between his lips. In all the reading I’d done, most of the littles and their Daddies and Mommies complained that pacifiers got lost at night. Ryder didn’t have that problem because his pacifier went in and stayed in.
It was hard to leave the bed, but we were off for the day—thank fuck because there were going to be some players nursing terrible hangovers—and I planned to make the best of the day. I showered quickly, scrawled a note to Ryder that I’d be home in a few hours, grabbed a coffee and a breakfast smoothie, then headed out the door.
I’d spent so much time the last few weeks trying to figure out what I thought Ryder as a little would like, I already had a good idea of what I wanted to get him. Some of the things I couldn’t buy at the store—like the cute play clothes and special undies—but everything else I could easily find at a local big box store. Thankfully, we lived close enough to Nashville that getting to a Target only took ten minutes. The biggest problem was navigating the store.
We didn’t have kids, and aside from a few baby shower gifts here and there, I hadn’t spent time searching the kids’ sections. Ryder loved things that moved, but he especially loved cars. He made me go to the auto show every year and we had a garage full of weird cars we rarely drove. I knew I wanted to find him cars to play with and one of those rugs with a road on them. Coach River had one in his office for when his kids came to the arena, and Ryder had mentioned a few times that he thought it was cool. He needed a sippy cup and bottle, and I wanted to find him some cute plates like I’d seen some of the boys online using.
As it turned out, cars and blocks were easy to find. I’d started by grabbing a number of Matchbox cars, then found a set of wooden cars, and some chunkier cars meant for younger kids. I had no idea what Ryder would prefer, so I put some of each of them in the cart. When I’d found the wooden cars, I’d also found colorful wooden blocks and thought maybe Ryder would enjoy building with them. Before long, my cart was overflowing with goodies.
A helpful employee helped me find the car mat in a nearby section, and as I turned to put the rug in my cart, I found a soft blanket printed with cars and two car stuffies. One of the cars was a yellow Bug that adult Ryder wouldn’t be caught dead in, but maybe little Ryder would like it. The other was a red sports car which I knew Ryder would love—big or little. Then I was on my way to find cups and plates. As it turned out, there was a cartoon movie with cars and planes that was popular enough that it had cups, plates, and silverware. With that choice made, I turned my attention to finding Ryder a bottle. The choices were so varied it took me longer than it should have to pick something out. Actually, I didn’t make a decision until a woman with a toddler came down the aisle, took one look at my cart and where I was looking and started to laugh.
“I swear, I thought breaking the bottle habit would be easier than this! They can’t seem to give them up, huh?” Then she turned her attention to the boy sitting in the cart and sighed. “Last time I’m buying these, buster. If you break it or bite through the nipple, I’m not buying a new one.” She grabbed a chunky bottle off the shelf and a nipple hanging above the bottle.
The chunky bottle looked like it would fit in my hand better and I thought the wider nipple would probably be more comfortable in Ryder’s mouth. Looking up to where she’d pulled the nipple off the shelf, I noticed it was marked “fast flow.” I chuckled to myself as I dropped it into the cart.
On my way to the front of the store to check out, I took a rather wandering path through the clothing section. The men’s clothing section was filled with cartoon printed shirts and brightly colored pajama pants. I found a cobalt blue shirt with Speed Racer on it, and a red one with POP! Superheroes on it. The draw string pajama shorts weren’t quite as cute as the ones I’d seen online, but they definitely weren’t the athletic shorts Ryder tended to traipse around the house in and would hopefully put him in the headspace to let me take care of him.
I detoured through the food section and found snacks, little yogurt pouches, and fun dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. On a whim, I grabbed some apple juice and a container of chocolate syrup in case we didn’t have any at the house. Shay would have a heart attack if she saw my cart at the moment. The toys and clothes wouldn’t bother her, but the junk food would have her going insane.
But, what Shay didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her… or me.
Thankfully getting to the store early meant I got through the checkout and back home quickly. So quickly, Ryder hadn’t even woken up. I checked on him and he’d hardly moved, so I went downstairs to unpack the items I’d found at the store. The clothes went into the washing machine, and I hand washed the feeding stuff I’d bought, then unboxed the toys and laid his rug out in the living room. Once Ryder woke up, we’d have an entire day to start exploring what we liked.
Ryder must have needed more sleep than I had realized because he still hadn’t made it downstairs by the time his clothes were out of the dryer. I took them upstairs and found him sitting in
bed, his pacifier still in his mouth, staring at his phone. “Hey, baby,” I said quietly so I didn’t scare him.
He looked up in surprise and pink rose in his cheeks. I couldn’t help but wonder what he was looking at. “H-hi.” His halting sentence had me even more suspicious.
“What are you looking at over there?”
He opened his mouth to speak and his pacifier tumbled out. The arm he threw over his eyes as he groaned had me laughing.
“It must be good.”
Ryder shook his head, and I climbed into bed next to him. “Show me, baby.”
He twisted the phone so I could see what he was looking at. A Twitter post with a guy in a diaper greeted me. I recognized the little from some of the research I’d done. He was younger than Ryder, fit, but nowhere near as muscular. He looked happy with his Daddy, but even after all the searching and research I’d done, I had never been able to picture Ryder in diapers. If he wanted to regress that far, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, but I couldn’t see him enjoying it. Finding him looking at that particular profile made me wonder if I’d been wrong.
“Is this how you see me as a little?” His eyebrows had crinkled downward as he thought.
“Honestly? No. But if it’s something you’d want, then that would be fine with me.”
Ryder shook his head, bedhead flopping wildly about. “No! I mean, no, that’s not how I see myself.” His body sagged in relief when he finished speaking. “I was reading today, trying to figure out how you saw… this. I know you said each couple is different, but this makes me nervous.”
I pulled him over so I could wrap an arm around him. “That’s not the goal. I don’t want you to be nervous or worried. This all boils down to a way to let you relax and not worry about everything else going on in our lives. It helps me relax a lot too.”
Ryder twisted around so he could look at me. “It really does help you relax.” He hadn’t asked a question. Whatever he’d seen on my face told him I was telling the truth.
I didn’t want him to question what he saw, so I nodded. “Absolutely. When I’m making you dinner or when you curl up with me and play a game on your phone, I feel more relaxed than when I do anything else I can think of.”
Ryder’s posture changed, and he responded with confidence. “Okay.”
“Okay?” What did that mean? He’d said it with finality, like he’d decided something, but he hadn’t filled me in on what.
“I want to try, Daddy.” I couldn’t see his face, but I felt his skin heat against my chest, even through my T-shirt.
My chest got tight with emotion, and my eyes stung. I squeezed him closer to me, planting a kiss on the side of his head. “Okay, Ry. Let’s get you dressed, then you can come down for a very late breakfast.”
As we began to maneuver out of bed, I saw Ryder smirk. “Is it breakfast or lunch?”
I pointed at my chest. “I’m Daddy. It’s whatever I say it is.”
The laughter that bubbled from Ryder told me he’d relaxed enough I could get him dressed. I headed directly to his dresser to grab his underwear. My husband walked around naked, but my boy wasn’t about to go downstairs without being fully dressed. Somewhere in the back of his drawer was a pair of briefs one of the guys had given him before our wedding. I’d always been under the impression wedding underwear should be sexy, but Darrell had decided it was supposed to be fun. The briefs were covered in puppy dog faces. We’d all had a good laugh, then Ryder had shoved them into his drawer and forgotten about them.
I’d forgotten about them myself, until the first week of training camp when we’d both been too tired to do laundry and he’d come out of the bedroom wearing them one morning when the rest of his underwear was dirty. Now that I remembered they were there, and I knew I hadn’t seen them in the laundry room that morning, I was going to make sure he felt properly little for the day.
As expected, I found them shoved in the back of the drawer and pulled them out. Tucked inside the new clothes I’d brought with me, Ryder didn’t see what I had in my hands until I set everything down on the bed.
“What’s that?” he asked, looking at the stack of neatly folded clothes.
“Clothes for today.” I pulled the undies from the center of the stack and shook them out.
Ryder took one look at them and started laughing hard enough it took him a few seconds to be able to speak. “Of course you found those.”
I shrugged casually as I fed his legs into them. “If today goes well, we’ll find you new ones. These will work for now. My boy needs undies on to go play with his toys.”
The sentence drew Ryder up short. “Toys?”
He hadn’t had toys when he’d gone to bed, but now there were new toys and coloring books in the living room where I could keep an eye on him as I made breakfast. I had a feeling Ryder was going to love that I’d be able to see him. “After you get dressed you can explore, but first, do you need to go potty?”
The question caused Ryder to turn red as he shook his head. “I-I, uh, went when I got up.”
“That’s fine. Try to keep your big boy undies dry today.” Ryder groaned, but the embarrassed duck of his head told me it had the desired effect on my boy. The more he saw himself as my boy, the easier I thought it would be for him to sink into the headspace I knew he’d need.
Ryder stood automatically so I could pull the underwear up his legs, then work them over his butt and adjust his dick inside the front pouch. While he was standing, I unfolded the shorts. Ryder lifted his leg then seemed to process what I was putting on him. “Where’d those come from?”
“The store,” I responded casually, pulling them up and securing the drawstring.
“The same place the toys came from?” He was already raising his arms for me to slip the superhero shirt over his head. As I pulled it down, Ryder examined the bright characters and a small smile tugged at his lips. “I really do look like a little kid.”
Ryder managed to pull off sexy and sweet in a way no professional athlete should have been able to. His powerful thighs were hidden behind loose cotton, and his muscular shoulders and abs were just as well hidden under his playful T-shirt. Standing in front of me, he looked like he’d fit right in on a playground, not an NFL field.
He tugged at the shirt. The hem was so slightly too short because I’d bought it a size too small. “What else did you buy?”
I grabbed his pacifier and placed it in his pocket. “You’ll see when we get downstairs.” Holding out my hand, I was surprised at Ryder’s lack of hesitation as he laced his fingers in mine.
“Lead the way, Daddy.” He managed not to blush, but that time he’d hesitated slightly as though he was really trying it on for size.
Personally, I liked it.
Chapter Eight
Ryder
I didn’t know if I wanted to let go of Malcolm’s hand as we reached the kitchen. He gestured toward the living room and gave me a little push. “Go play, and I’ll get breakfast ready for you.”
The living room loomed in front of me. I was almost scared to turn the corner, though I knew I shouldn’t be nervous. I was interested to see what he’d found at the store. I’d spent a lot of time that morning scouring every site I could find about littles. They all seemed to have toys they liked—special stuffed animals, blankets, dinosaurs, blocks. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d played with any sort of toy apart from video games. What had Malcolm thought I’d like?
“Should I come with you?”
I shook my head. I needed to take this step alone, even though I was certain I’d read something earlier about how Daddies were there to help their boys tackle fears and uncertainties. I knew Malcolm had given me everything he could, and I also knew I needed to give this a shot. If this whole thing wasn’t for me, I didn’t want my face to give it away. I wanted to have time to put my thoughts together before we talked it out. Malcolm wanted to be my Daddy, but I couldn’t shake the fear that I just wasn’t cut out to be a boy.
; Malcolm squeezed my hand reassuringly before he let go. “I’m right here if you need me.”
I nodded, more to myself than to him, and took my first step toward the living room. I made it to the back of the couch before I saw that the coffee table had been pushed to the side and a rug had been put in its place. A rug with little roads, almost identical to the one Coach had in his office. Cars of every sort were set up along one edge, a pile of various blocks sat nearby, and some crayons and coloring books were on the coffee table. As my eyes scanned the room again, I noticed a blanket folded on the floor and two, huge stuffed cars sitting on top of it. They looked nearly big enough to be pillows. They were certainly big enough to cuddle.
A smile tugged at my lips. This didn’t seem scary or impossible. Actually, it seemed kind of inviting. Malcolm had done a lot of thinking about what I’d like, and he’d bought things I could see myself playing with.
Sinking to my knees on the rug, I picked up the first car in the row, a blue one that looked a lot like one of the cars in our garage. I pushed it around for a few minutes, tracing each path a few times, before I picked up the next car.
The sounds of Malcolm clanking around in the kitchen slowly faded as I focused more on the cars. I’d driven three cars around the rug when I noticed there were no buildings lining the roads. Even a scenic drive had houses and the occasional gas station. I didn’t have houses or buildings, but I had blocks. Before long, there were apartment buildings and little cottages along the roads. I’d even made a grocery store and a gas station. The further I got in my play, the more toys I began to use.
It wasn’t until I’d been rolling one of the chunky cars and a wooden car around the roads for a number of minutes that I realized I liked them more. They didn’t have a set thing to be. One minute they were a fire truck, the next a minivan. A bright blue sports car couldn’t be anything but a bright blue sports car.
