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“Between what I know about you and what Mitch said, I think I put some pieces together. It sounds like he hurt you really badly.”
“Uh-huh.”
Cricket sniffed and the part of him that didn’t flood with empathy wanted to commandeer the plane, fly to Anchorage, hunt Mitch down and teach him a lesson or six. With his fists.
“Can you tell me what happened? I only got to hear his version so I can guess how it made you feel but I don’t know for sure.”
“Do I have to?”
Poor thing’s voice was small and unsteady. Yeah, Mitch had sure done a number on her.
“Oh, babygirl,” he crooned, and then gave her a squeeze and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I know it hurts. But it’s kind of like cleaning out a scrape. The cleaning can hurt, but not cleaning the cut and having it get infected is way worse. I promise we can do something special after. Anything you want.”
Chapter Forty-Two
As soon as Daddy had said Mitch’s name, Cricket knew. It had been a couple years and she’d had other people in her life since then but wow did that still smart. Maybe Daddy was right though. Maybe she hadn’t cleaned that wound and it was festering and infected and it would never heal if she didn’t address it. Plus, he was right here and she knew he’d ease her through it. Who better to help clean and bandage a wound than a doctor?
“We met at Covert, and had a pretty hot first scene together. I was coming off a break up and was feeling kind of…”
“Tender?” he offered.
“That’s a good word. Thank you, Daddy.”
“You’re welcome, Cricket. Anything to help my love bug.”
He kissed her forehead again. Even though it hurt to talk about Mitch, her Daddy really was doing everything he could to make it as painless as possible. He was the best.
“I wanted to take things kind of slow but Mitch was full steam ahead. He wanted me to call him Daddy right away and gave me rules and we saw each other a bunch in a short period of time. Always at the club or my place, but that didn’t bother me much at first.”
She thought back to those first couple of weeks with Mitch and how she’d felt like he’d made her promises. He was going to be her Daddy, and he was going to make all her DDlg dreams come true. And he had. Sort of. For a little while.
“I was still kind of gun shy, and he was definitely more into the sexy parts of being a Daddy Dom than the nurturing part, but I thought since he seemed to like me so much that he’d work on it. But he didn’t have much patience for parts of me being Little. He’d say stuff like ‘why can’t you just grow up?’ And tell me to get over things I was upset about.”
She could hear his voice in her head even now, and despite being cuddled up with her Daddy in her crib, it still hurt.
“I’m sorry, babygirl. No one should ever dismiss your feelings like that, even if they don’t understand why you’re upset or they’re uncomfortable with how you’re expressing yourself.”
She knew that now, and had even realized it at the time. But it was so hard to let go of the possibility of a fantasy coming true that she’d overlooked the red flags.
“The last time he came over, I’d had a bad day at work. Really busy and I’d had more meanies in my queue than usual. All I wanted to do was find Bandit, get my sippy, and have a cuddle while we watched a movie. He didn’t even offer to help me find Bandit. He just kept trying to initiate sex, and I—”
Just thinking about it made her throat get close and her sinuses burn. Sometimes when she was Little, sexy stuff was great. But sometimes…
“I got so frustrated. It felt like he didn’t care about what I needed at all, and like I was being the wrong kind of Little. I got really upset and had a tantrum. I yelled at him and cried and threw some stuff.”
It was so embarrassing to talk about. Daddy had seen her have tantrums before but she’d never thrown anything. Plus, Daddy didn’t like it when she had tantrums but that was because it wasn’t safe and he wanted her to find better ways to express her feelings. But he’d never seemed grossed out by them or like he was going to be driven away. He’d never yelled at her and told her to “act like an adult, for fuck’s sake.”
“He said it seemed like I needed some time to cool down and we’d talk later. And then he left.”
“Oh, babygirl. I’m so sorry.”
Even with Daddy holding her, all big and warm and strong, the memory of being abandoned felt as though someone was gutting her like a deer they’d just harvested. It was hard to explain how alone and empty she’d felt; even harder to figure out why she still felt that way.
“He didn’t even check on me. And the next few times I texted him, he was evasive and short and told me work was busy and he was getting ready for a trip. I should’ve realized he was blowing me off, but Daddies aren’t supposed to do that. They’re supposed to be mature and honest and better behaved than Littles, and he wasn’t. He wasn’t, Daddy! Instead of telling me we weren’t a good fit and that he didn’t want to see me anymore or communicating honestly at all, he just stopped talking to me.”
“I know, Cricket. I know. He behaved really badly and you deserved better.”
Cricket had been able to stay so calm and grown up while she told Daddy about Mitch, but reliving it had dragged her back into Littlespace. She didn’t want to waste any more tears on that poopyhead but she started to cry.
