Embracing the Storm

by Marie, Carly

  Caleb: Wait, pick me up! I got sent home early because of the storm coming.

  Me: You don't have to come here! There's going to be a snowstorm starting this evening.

  Logan: Yes, this evening. Right now it's not even noon and you need friends to remind you that Spence is head over heels in love with you.

  Caleb: For once, I totally agree with Logan. Spencer loves you, and it's definitely not too good to be true. He's going to be the perfect Daddy. And you'll be the perfect little!

  Aiden: The perfect dragon. We're bringing lunch. See you soon!

  The texts stopped and I stared at my phone in shock. What the hell had just happened? If they were coming over, I needed to get the kids packed up to go to Dexter's later in the day. It only took a few minutes for me to gather the stuff the kids would need into their small suitcases. I placed their bags on the top step so they were ready to go when they arrived home from school, then took a moment to gather my thoughts.

  I needed to clean up some before they arrived. As a rule, I was fairly organized, but when I was writing, I had a tendency to lose focus on everything else. There were days that I wondered how I'd made such a mess. Looking around the living room, there was a pile of blankets that needed to be folded and the stuffed animals that I'd brought down from my office needed to be put away.

  Spencer bought me a new one every time he went on a business trip, and the pile had gotten so out of control that it now took over an entire corner of my office. But they were great to snuggle up on in the middle of the afternoon and take a nap, and I liked having a few around while I worked. Over the last few months, I'd found myself with a stuffed animal around more often than not and couldn't help but wonder if there was a connection there.

  Taking another look around the room, I sighed at my worry. Two littles and a puppy were coming over, and I was worried about hiding a pile of blankets and a few stuffed animals.

  Just for appearance's sake, I needed to get the blankets folded. While I worked on that, I allowed myself to think about what Spencer might have planned for the weekend. It wasn't like we had a lot here to play with. We were both new to the lifestyle, and we hadn't had a lot of time to explore together.

  I curled onto the couch and started to make a mental list of things little Gray would want. How would they be different if I was a dragon? I didn't know. Was there much difference between little and dragon? Logan didn't talk when he was a puppy, but could I see myself not talking? It would be strange to not answer Spencer.

  Logic said I was getting ahead of myself. Everything I'd read said that I didn't need a dragon outfit to be a dragon, but I didn't know how I could get outside of my head without it.

  Those things aside, what did I see myself enjoying? I liked coloring, and playing with blocks was fun. My stuffed animals all made me happy, so maybe I could play with those. Being in my grownup headspace made little headspace seem far out of reach. No matter how hard I thought about what I wanted when I was little, I couldn't figure it out.

  I'd become so lost in thought, I was still in the same place over thirty minutes later when the doorbell rang. Voices filtered through the entryway, even with the doors and windows shut. Logan, Aiden, and Caleb were about as subtle as a drumline. Then again, they weren't trying to be subtle—I was expecting them.

  I swung the door open to the three before they'd even made it all the way up the steps. "Hey!" They were all bundled up like this was Antarctica, not Nashville, and it made me smile. At least I wasn't the only one not used to the cold.

  "Hi!" Aiden bounded into the house and shrugged off his coat. "We brought lunch! Logan stopped at the burger place near home."

  Caleb turned bright red at the comment.

  "What's that all about?" I asked, nodding at Caleb's face as I ushered them toward the kitchen so we could eat. Runt and Squirrel had taken a great interest in what we were doing and had come to sit on either side of me, their snouts poking curiously toward the bags of food.

  Aiden shrugged dismissively. "He's embarrassed 'cause Logan ordered off the kids' menu."

  Logan shrugged as he set the bags of food on the table. "I don't know why it was such a big deal. I got you each two meals! Oh, I bought the dogs burgers. Is that okay?"

  Caleb groaned. "He seriously asked us if we wanted the burger meal, hot dog, or chicken strips while the drive-through person was talking to us."

  I couldn't help but giggle. Caleb was so shy about his little side, and Logan didn't seem to have a reserved bone in his body. Instead of encouraging either of them to continue, I changed the subject. "What did I get?"

  "Burger and chicken strips. Logan said one could have fries, but the other had to have fruit. You got an apple—hope that's okay," Aiden said as he sorted bags out.

  "Awesome. And yeah, the monsters can have burgers."

  Logan grinned widely. "Yes!" I wasn't sure who was more excited about the dogs getting burgers, them or Logan.

  As we settled into our meals, the house was mostly quiet. Well, quiet but for the dogs scarfing down the burgers Logan had brought them. He'd made two best friends with the gifts and seemed completely fine with that prospect.

  "Shit, I should have brought bibs for you guys," Logan muttered as we started to eat. At the comment, I was pretty sure my cheeks turned as red as Caleb's.

  "We'll be good," Aiden responded for us, then shot the two of us a look that said we'd better be good.

  I felt my head bob up and down, and Caleb groaned but managed a weak nod. Caleb took the awkward few seconds to change the subject. "What are your plans with Spencer this weekend? Dex and James have the kids, so you two must have plans."

  "I have no idea. He's been acting a bit weird, but he hasn't told me any plans. This is why I keep thinking maybe he doesn't want to be my Daddy. I just keep worrying that he's doing it to appease me."

  Logan's head shot up and blue eyes stared at me. "What? That makes no sense."

  "It's so new. And I threw it all on him at once—"

  Aiden interrupted me. "And you talked about it afterward."

  My skin heated with embarrassment. "I guess…"

  Caleb gave me a sad smile. "You're me… well, me when I met Travis."

  Logan's head nodded so fast I worried about his neck. "This guy that you know today is nothing like the man we met when the two first got together. Oh my god, I scared the poor guy half to death. He was so shy."

  Caleb shot Logan a pointed look and shook a fry at him. "We aren't going there." Then he focused his attention back on me. "But you seem to be a lot like I was when I first got together with Travis. From my spot, the main difference is I was meeting my Daddy for the first time and had an ingrained fear of being rejected. You're married to Spencer. I'm guessing there's an element of fear about how this could change your relationship."

  I huffed as I processed Caleb's words. "Yeah. There is."

  Logan squeezed my arm. "We all saw the way he looked at you at DASH. I don't think there's any way he would ever think less of you. Trent says that he and Travis have talked to Spencer a few times since the club. If he wasn't going to take it well, he wouldn't be talking to two Daddies."

  My burger had suddenly become very interesting as I turned the words over in my head. Could it be that easy? It might be time to admit that what I was most afraid of was that Spencer really wasn't as okay with it as he'd said he was. We'd only played a few times, but it was something I could see myself enjoying more of. Was it even considered playing together when really it had been me playing and Spencer watching? He'd hardly been involved at all.

  "Stop thinking so much—just go with it. You've been honest with him." Aiden laughed lightly at the comment. I'd been far from honest in the beginning, and we all knew that. "Okay, you've been more honest, and he's still here. Spencer has words too. If he wasn't okay with what you're doing, you have to trust he'd say something."

  I hadn't processed it through that lens before. We'd been informally involved in BDSM for most of our r
elationship, and formally involved in the community for at least five years. We had safewords, we both knew how to use them, and we talked everything through. There'd never been a moment—until recently—that we hadn’t talked things nearly to death, and we'd never worried about telling the other if it was too much or we weren't comfortable with it.

  Caleb grinned at me as he washed his last fry down with some of his drink. "Something Aiden said hit home. You don't look like you're going to puke anymore."

  The smile that graced my lips was genuine. "Yeah. I feel better."

  A brief silence filled the dining room as we finished our meals. Logan barely had the last bite swallowed when his eyes lit up. "I have an idea! We're going to play, just the four of us. No Daddies or handlers around."

  Caleb's eyes widened as much as mine did. "I don't have toys here." My voice had caught in my throat, and I'd nearly had to croak the words out as I looked around the downstairs.

  Logan wasn't to be deterred that easily. "There were stuffies on the couch and a bunch of blankets."

  He'd only briefly passed the living room on our way to the dining room and he'd still seen those things. "This is why you're a good deputy," I whispered, mostly to myself.

  Logan looked at me, brows pulled together in confusion. It was the same look I'd seen on him at DASH when we'd started talking about Spencer not really being my Daddy. "What?"

  I chuckled uncomfortably as I tried to formulate my thoughts. "You didn't even go into the living room. We barely spent five seconds walking by it and you saw my dragons and all the blankets. You notice a lot, which has to mean you make a good deputy."

  Logan beamed with pride and I could have sworn his chest puffed up. "Years in the service and now even more in the sheriff's department. I guess I do notice a lot. I don't mean to, if that matters at all. I just see things and they stick there." He tapped at the side of his head for emphasis. "But in this case, it works well because that's a lot of blankets…"

  Logan's voice trailed off just as Aiden's eyes lit up. "And you have a huge TV! Blanket fort!"

  Logan nodded enthusiastically, and even with his earlier shyness, Caleb's eyes had begun to sparkle. "And cartoons. There's that new dragon show I want to watch!"

  "Wait, we gotta clean up lunch first," Logan said, holding up a finger to stop us.

  Five minutes later, we'd pulled the chairs into the living room and moved some furniture around to set up the walls of the blanket fort. Logan had sent me on a hunt for clips, an easy find thanks to an art project I'd done with the kids a week before. There was an entire bucket of clothespins in the laundry room cabinet, so it only took a few seconds to find them. As I grabbed the clothespins, I could hear Logan taking charge in the living room.

  The more directions he gave to Aiden and Caleb, the more the adult world began to slip away. I was going to get to build a fort with my friends, and it sounded like fun. If I was lucky, we'd find the dragon cartoon Caleb had been talking about.

  The living room was already well on its way to being transformed into an epic blanket fort. Just from how certain Logan was about how to set it up, I was pretty sure that this was not the first blanket fort he and Aiden had constructed.

  Logan made grabby hands for the clothespins as I returned to the room. "Perfect!"

  I had no idea how long it took us, but once the last blanket was secured around the TV, we effectively had a gabled roof to our fort allowing us to watch TV from inside. "Do you have more pillows and stuffies?" Aiden asked as Logan carefully affixed the blanket to the wall with a few Command hooks.

  "There are more stuffies in my office."

  Caleb reached for my hand and tugged. "Lead the way. They'll finish this up. We'll be right back!" he called to Aiden and Logan as I led him up the steps and into my office. Caleb's hazel eyes widened in surprise when he saw the corner filled with stuffed animals. "You've been holding out on me! There are so many!" He looked between me and the pile a number of times before he grinned. "Which are your favorites?"

  "Oh, that one," I said, pointing to a big black dragon with a rainbow spear on its tail. "And, uh, that one." I pointed to a purple dragon with green and red wings.

  At least ten years dropped from Caleb as he scooped the two up. "I'm going to grab some more for the fort. What about pillows? Pillows, blankets, and stuffies. We're going to have the best blanket fort ever!"

  "There's a bunch of extra pillows in the spare room." I was gone before Caleb responded.

  Logan's voice filtered up the steps. "Oh! Cal, I think we found the cartoon!"

  "We nothing!" Aiden responded. "I found it!"

  "Hurry, it's about to start!" Logan yelled as I came out of the spare room.

  Caleb was standing in the hallway grinning at me. "Ready?"

  I nodded and followed as Caleb led the way down the steps with every stuffed animal he could possibly carry. Given that a few were falling out of his hands as we walked, I'd say maybe his eyes had been bigger than his arms. Aiden's big brown eyes rounded as we came into view. "So many stuffies and pillows!" He hurried over to us and grabbed some of the items out of our arms.

  He and Logan had designed the fort so well I wasn't entirely certain where the entrance was until Aiden dropped down on his knees and crawled between two blankets. "It's super warm in here, and Puppy went to get snacks."

  I could hear Logan clanking around in the kitchen and I briefly wondered what he'd found to make, but my friends were excited to get in the fort, so I left Logan to it.

  Caleb looked around and sighed. "I didn't bring my dodi."

  Before I could ask what a dodi was, Aiden spoke up. "I have an extra binkie in my bag in the car." He shivered at the mere thought of going outside.

  "I'll get it," Logan said from the other side of the blankets. "You probably want Hedge anyway."

  Aiden's eyes lit up and he nodded so fast his glasses slid down his nose. I didn't have anything I was that attached to, but I could see how important Hedge, whatever that might be, was to Aiden.

  "Is a dodi a binkie?" I asked the guys when I heard the front door shut.

  Caleb laughed so hard he fell over onto one of the pillows. "Dexter named it when he saw it the first time. I guess the Irish call pacifiers dodies and it just stuck. I wasn't about to insist otherwise when he was grilling me about how long I'd had a dodi on the way to a lecture hall in college. At least no one but me had been scandalized by his questioning."

  My laugh took me by such surprise, I snorted. "I could see him doing that."

  Caleb groaned good-naturedly. "You didn't grow up with him. He honestly doesn't understand why I wasn't throwing myself at Trav when we first met. He could not seem to process that I wasn't ready to call him Daddy before our first date."

  Aiden shook his head. "Daddy is special. It's not something you call a stranger."

  I forced myself to not roll my eyes at myself. "In my case, I'm struggling to call a man I've been with for fifteen years Daddy."

  Caleb's little smile was comforting. "I think your situation may be even harder. You two are so established in your current relationship that changing it is hard. Travis had a pretty good idea that I was a little well before we started dating. I take that back—your soon-to-be brother-in-law told him to take care of me and told him I was special… all before our first technical date. I wanted to crawl in a hole and die."

  "And Trent found out I'm a little as soon as we met." Then Aiden giggled. "The hardest part for us was that Trent swore he wasn't a Daddy."

  I felt my eyes widen. At least Spencer hadn't said that. Spencer had been trying to tell me he was happy to be my Daddy. "Oh. Oh yeah, that would be awkward."

  Aiden grinned. "About the same amount of awkward as trying to talk to your husband about discovering your little side?"

  Dammit, he had a point. Before I could say anything else, the front door opened, then shut, and I heard Logan groan and shake himself off from the cold. He sounded exactly like Runt and Squirrel when they came into
the house after being outside in the cold. Puppy fit Logan well.

  A few seconds later, Logan's head popped between the blankets. "Hedge and binkie." He handed both items to Aiden, then looked at Caleb. "I'm gonna go wash one of the extras." Then he looked over at me. "Do you want one too?"

  My eyes widened, but Logan decided the question had been rhetorical as he shook his head back and forth. "Silly question. How would you know? I'm guessing you don't even have one. Oh well, I'll wash an extra. Aiden has a ton of extras 'cause he loses them all the time."

  Aiden's cheeks pinked at the comment, though Logan didn't notice because he was already gone. "Is he always like this?" I asked the other two in a whisper.

  They both giggled and nodded. "Always," they answered in unison.

  Aiden changed the subject, pointing to the TV where a show had been paused. "Is this the cartoon you were talking about?"

  Caleb glanced up and grinned. "Yup! It's funny."

  The blankets at the entrance parted and Logan crawled in, followed by Runt and Squirrel. Four men and two dogs big enough to be men were about as much as the space could handle. Logan handed Caleb and me the binkies he'd just washed then pulled Aiden toward him. "Showtime." He grabbed the remote and hit the play button before anyone could say anything else.

  Caleb popped the binkie in his mouth without thought and curled up with a pillow. Squirrel shimmied—as well as a dog nearly one hundred fifty pounds could shimmy—over to where Logan and Aiden were and curled up behind them to let them use him as a pillow. Runt did the same with me, though at nearly two hundred pounds he took up far more space, and Caleb finally gave up his pillow for Runt's stomach.

  I lay back and examined the item in my hand, trying to decide how it would feel in my mouth. Would it feel anything like my thumb? Would it be better? It wasn't that I was trying to decide if I was going to use it or not because somewhere along the line I'd already decided I wanted to. I was simply curious as to how it would feel and had gotten lost thinking about it.

  Caleb took the question out of my hands when he plucked the binkie from my grasp and pressed it into my mouth. "Show," he said around his own binkie, then pointed to the TV.