✅ The Last New Start [NaNoWriMo2021]

110. The Big Day

There was a bench down the side of the house, where it would be possible to sit and watch either kids playing in the back garden – except for one part where the view was cut off by the house in between – and anybody coming into the driveway at the front. Tess had never seen Gabby sitting there through the winter, and the white paint on the little piece of furniture. With the hedges curling tentative tendrils of growth around it as well, it almost disappeared into the shrubbery. But Tess had asked Ffrances if she could try cutting the greenery back a little so there would be somewhere comfortable to sit when spring arrived; and she'd learned that this was an annual chore that Gabby always put off for several weeks because of the amount of work involved.

Now Tess was sitting in a clear area in the middle of the bench, idly uncoiling the young shoots where they had looped around the planks of the bench. She did her best to release them and put them back into the hedge behind her, rather than breaking them off when the plants would still be feeling fragile. But most of her attention today was on the street. There was a nervous knot in her stomach as she waited, and she was smart enough to recognise that the continuation of this choire was just displacement activity; something to occupy her hands so that she didn't have to think so hard about what she had gotten herself into.

Talking to Spike had been surprisingly easy after that conversation with Mindy. He seemed to sense that there was something Tess wanted to say, and had asked her to walk with him back to Pine Ridge. After much dithering and stuttering, she'd been able to ask him if he wanted to be her daddy. Just for an afternoon, to see if the regression fantasies in his mind were close to how it could work in reality, and if it was really something to do. And he'd said yes. She'd also mentioned using hypnosis to help get into the right headspace, although she'd been too nervous to go into any of the details. She'd managed to explain little bits and pieces over the following week, and she thought that he had an approximate idea of the kind of things that he would be able to do to her now, although she still hadn't managed to go into any of the specifics.

It was just one afternoon, she told herself. It was just to test it out, to see if the presence of someone she really loved would be enough of a positive influence to overcome the embarrassment of being a little kid again. If it was him, she told herself, she would do whatever it took to make him happy. But she still couldn't be sure. If she found out that she didn't like it, would he lose interest in her? She couldn't believe it; but there was still that nagging voice at the back of her mind, telling her that she could be sacrificing the friendship that mattered the most to her. But she knew that wasn't true; if he wanted it that badly, then refusing to try would drive him away even faster. And she'd known him for a few years now, she was sure that Spike was a good person. She couldn't let Gabby's cynicism get to her.

They'd had a long conversation that morning. Gabby knew that Spike was coming round for dinner; presumably Ffrances had told her. She had gone on and on about how boys only want sex, and how certain she was that Spike would make some contrived excuse to get Tess out of her clothes. Tess had wanted to yell, to tell her that she was going to be too young to even consider something like that today. But letting her cousin know that she would consider regressing for someone else was the last thing she wanted. Gabby still kept talking as if Tess wanted to be treated like a little kid, or it was something that would be good for her. No matter how many times Tess told her that it was only for Gabby's sake, she kept on acting the same way. And knowing that it had happened with someone else could only make her more certain. No, this was something Gabby could never know about.

Tess looked down at her clothes again. She was wearing a white shirt with unicorns on, a print that looked like it was made of glitter. And her jeans today were slightly scruffy, but with embroidered butterflies along her legs, detailed using an extension of the two lines of stitches along the seams. They were really discreet, and some of them had sequin eyes, but it was amazing how much cuteness could be conveyed with a couple of simple lines. There had been some really good things in the closet in Gabby's nursery after all.