Pets 2: Pani's Story (21 page)

“Papa!” she wailed, tears streaming from her face, her words so garbled that she could hardly understand herself.

Her worst fear, that he would simply discard the broken implement and resume spanking her with his iron-hard hand—or worse, that he would grab another spatula—never came to be. He lay his hand upon her aching flesh, feeling the heat, squeezing to make it flare hotter, uncaring if his touch made her writhe and sob. Then he grunted, satisfied, and pulled her stiffly upright.

The instant Pani became even semi-vertical, she scrambled for closeness. Rather than risk being abandoned to the floor, she climbed up him, reaching for his chest, throwing her arms around his shoulders and clinging as close as she could get without crawling into his skin with him. “Papa! Papa!”

Although still obviously irritated, the hand he had so severely punished her with only seconds ago now became a tool of comfort, patting her back and stroking her unbrushed hair as he carried her out into the living room. She would cheerfully have held onto him longer, weeping—never for the life of her would she ever get out of bed without his permission again!—

and hoping to placate his temper further with gentle strokes and pats of her small hands against his neck and chest. But he took her unerringly to her corner and piteously deposited her bottom-down on her Bad Girl’s chair.

Pani leapt to her feet with a howl, stomping and bouncing fretfully as she alternately held and rubbed her scalded nether cheeks.

“Stay!” Papa told her, frowning ferociously.

Stay, she did. Head bowed, she faced the corner and didn’t dare move from it, not until her tears had faded into the most remorseful of hiccupy gasps and sniffles. Not until Papa said she could come out, and then it was only to be marched back upstairs to their bedroom.

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Scowling and shaking his head, Papa picked up her sleepsack, his ire seeming to deepen as he looked from it to her, and then he threw it down in disgust.

Wilting under his disapproving eye, Pani tried to crawl back into his bed, but he stopped her before she could disappear under the blankets and made her get up again.

Their morning routine was tense and uncomfortable. There was no shower, no gentle touches, no erotic caresses; he simply washed her face at the sink, helping her to blow her nose and applying a cool cloth to her red-rimmed and swollen eyes. For the first time in a long time, he made her wear a diaper. The elastic scraped the backs of her sore legs and the soft interior felt like sandpaper against her raw skin, but she didn’t complain. She didn’t dare. Although Papa’s mood had begun to mellow back into some semblance of normalcy by the time he got around to brushing and braiding her hair, she didn’t want to ruin that.

He chose a frilly white baby-doll dress from her closet. Used to not being able to dress herself, Pani raised her arms and waited for him to tug it gently down over her head. The hem only just touched her thighs, leaving the lowest point of her diaper visible, both front and back, and a good portion of her well-spanked thighs on full display. He made her sit down while he put on her shoes and socks, and there was no position that she could find—and she squirmed desperately in constant search of one—that did not hurt.

Papa remained completely unsympathetic. While bracing her arms against the chair, a doomed effort to hold her weight up off her burning bottom, he only frowned at her and muttered what was likely the alien equivalent of ‘serves you right.’ When her squirming accidentally pulled her foot from his hand, he put an abrupt end to her search for comfort with a sharp flick to the tip of her nose. She clapped both hands over it and then just sat there, tears welling up in her eyes, the burning, pulsing ache intensifying beneath her while he finished buckling her into her shoes.

“Hush,” he said, and marched her downstairs by one braid. He did put a small pillow on her highchair seat, though she still groaned expressively when he picked her up and placed her upon it. There went that look and that scoldingly muttered, ‘Serves you right’ with ‘bad, bad Pani’

thrown in at the end. But he softened the reprimand by brushing his hand over her head, both patting and then stroking her hair before he vanished into the kitchen to fix breakfast.

She ate everything he put on her plate without so much as a grimace. It was worth it to see him smile at her and to hear that much appreciated, “Good girl” once he’d washed her face and hands afterward.

“Go get your leash,” he said, lifting her from the highchair and setting her on her feet.

Pani went, rubbing her bottom and trying to adjust where the diaper gripped her legs all the way to his desk. She put her collar on herself and was just clipping the leash to the end when Papa came into the living room, wiping his hands on a dish towel. He fetched his keys and wallet, then snapped his fingers and she immediately went. When he reached for the end of the leash, she shyly offered him her hand instead.

He took it, gently pulling her into the light of a nearby window long enough to search her palm and fingers, both front and back, as if for splinters. Finding none, he then took the leash and led her out to the car.

Pani sighed, but didn’t protest. When he opened the door, she crawled up onto the seat, 94

wincing as she eased herself gingerly into a sitting position. She shifted from one buttock to the other, then tried to bring her feet up under her. Papa stood patiently by, waiting for her to settle down so he could buckle her in. Already he was shaking his head when she tried to turn on the seat, crawling up onto her knees and hugging the backrest.

“No, Pani,” he drawled, drawing lazy turn-around circles in the air with one finger.

Already the diaper felt as if it were rubbing her raw. Just the thought of having to actually sit, even on this softly padded seat, during the roller-coaster ride into town, was enough to make her want to burst out into tears all over again. Sniffling, she leaned out through the open car door just far enough to cast him a pleading look.

For the longest moment, neither of them moved. Then Papa’s frown gradually eased into a look that suggested Pani deserved an Oscar for her exceptional acting. Still, he gave in first.

Shutting the door, he allowed her to kneel in the car all the way to town, where they descended into the parking lot of a huge mall-like building. The car let down its wheels and rolled to a gentle stop beneath a shady row of red-leafed trees.

“Stay,” Papa told her, cracking both his and her window before he got out of the car. Still kneeling on her seat, Pani waited as he came around to her side of the car. He held up his hand, stopping her from getting out the instant he opened her door. “No. Stay.”

“Stay,” Pani echoed, rising up on her knees when he patted her bottom.

He checked the back of her diaper, then ran his fingers lightly up and down the scarlet and tender skin of her thighs. Satisfied that no long-lasting damage had been done her, he started to withdraw. Again, she tried to climb down out of the car to accompany him, but no sooner did her feet touch the concrete, than did he pick her up and put her back in the car. “Stay, Pani.” A thrill of absolute panic snaked through her as she realized he was about to leave her in the car. He’d never done that before. Was it because he was still that angry?

“Good girl Pani,” she whined, instantly disgusted with herself because that’s exactly what it was: whining.

“Good girl Pani,” he agreed. But he still took the end of her leash and laced it through the seat between the padded back and the adjustable headrest. Taking each of her wrists in turn, he tied them together behind the chair, leaving her hugging the seat and unable to climb out of the car on her own. “Stay,” he said again, patting her on the head in an effort to take some of the sting out of the abandonment.

“No stay,” she whined again, but he blindfolded her eyes and left her kneeling on the seat, unable to see where he went or to follow him while he went shopping. The whole car rocked when he shut the door. “Bad Papa!” she shouted after him, but if he heard her, he didn’t come back to the car. Wilting against the seat, Pani tried first to rub the blindfold off and, when that didn’t work, plopped down on her knees to wait. “Ow.” That hurt.

Shifting in an effort to placate her aching bottom, she rested her head on her arm and growled under her breath in frustration. The slow whine of a decelerating vehicle passed the car, buffeting it with a gust of displaced air. Pani raised her head when she heard the tread of feet approach a short time later. Tipping back her head, she tried to see who it was under the bottom hem of the blindfold, but then a woman spoke and she realized it wasn’t Papa. She deflated, 95

sagging back onto her knees and dropping her head back onto her arm to wait.

She hated waiting.

The whole car jerked under the sudden impact of being struck, and Pani screamed as the window beside her shattered. Glass sprayed all over her, and for a moment she was sure she’d just been hit by another car. Except that Papa’s car didn’t go flying and, aside from her involuntary flinch to evade the flying glass, she was still upright and hugging the seat she was tied to.

A hand suddenly stroked the side of her face, and Pani flinched again, holding her breath, not at all sure she knew what was happening. “P-papa?” she whispered, shying from the coolness of those unfamiliar fingers again, but the woman only laughed softly and pet her hair instead.

Rubbing her face furiously against both her arm and the upper curve of the seat she was tied to, Pani again struggled to move the blindfold and this time succeeded in halfway uncovering one eye. Tipping her head way back, she caught a glimpse of a familiar face. It was the woman from the pet store, the one who owned the dark-eyed, brooding male, although she couldn’t see him anywhere around them right now.

She’s going to buy you for me, he’d said.

Pani cringed back as far as her leash would allow, but the women simply leaned in through the broken window, and with a knife in her hand, cut through it. Pani barely got her hands free before a fist closed around one of her braids and she was yanked head-first, kicking and shouting wildly, right out of Papa’s car.

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Pani tried to run the instant the woman pulled her from Papa’s the car and her feet ever so briefly touched the ground. But then she was hefted back up again, tucked beneath the woman’s arm and balanced against her hip for the length of time it took to cross two parking lot aisles, open the driver’s side door to her own car and drop Pani onto the passenger seat. She kept a firm hold on the back of Pani’s dress, however, which put an abrupt halt on her immediate attempt to wrench her own door open and dive right back out of the car.

Well, that and the pet-proof car locks that put a premature halt to her frantic escape attempt and hurt her when, half panicked, she rammed the door with her shoulder.

“Bad girl,” the woman said mildly, buckling her into her seatbelt. Catching Pani’s slapping hands, she slipped a pair of leather cuffs with sewn-in finger-restraining mittens onto her wrists, binding them helplessly before her. Tapping the tip of her finger to the of Pani’s nose, she said a quiet, smiling, “Be good,” before starting the car.

The last time Pani had felt this panicked was the day she’d awakened naked on the floor of Papa’s living room only to find herself living with a giant. Now, pressed herself to the passenger-side window, she frantically searched the faces of the people trickling out of the store but nowhere could she see Papa’s imposing height and strong, familiar features.

“Papa!” she shouted as the car began to move, pulling up its wheels as it glided out onto the road and rapidly accelerated towards the upwards curving onramp of the sky-high railway.

“Hush!” The woman lightly boxed Pani’s ears with the backs of her fingers, but Pani was beyond listening. From the start of the terrifying trip, all the way until they dropped down from the sky, pulling slowly off onto a country road and eventually from there onto a long and winding driveway that took them back behind a thick shade of trees to a small country-style house, the woman continued to touch Pani. She stroked her braids, combing her fingers through Pani’s bangs, not being particularly careful of her long claws and so occasionally scratched her forehead. Pani flinched back until she was pressed as close as she could get to the door, but she couldn’t shield herself from the other woman’s unpleasant touch and she couldn’t get away. Not until the car pulled to a stop, not in front of the house but past it, down into a slight gully behind where a massive and long, single-story barn stood waiting for them with wide open doors.

Pani recoiled from the smell—the overpowering stench of unwashed bodies and accumulating feces and urine—the minute the woman opened the car door. She grabbed at everything from the steering wheel and seats to the frame of the driver’s door, but the woman was infinitely stronger and dragged her out of the car by one arm and her hair anyway. Pani braced her legs, her heels digging furrows in the grass as she was quite literally dragged into the barn.

“Stop!” the woman snapped, her patience wearing thin, and shook Pani roughly once. “Be good!”

“No!” Unable to wrench out of the woman’s grip, Pani did the next best thing. Yank her arm up to her mouth, she aggressively sank her teeth into the woman’s thumb. She bit hard enough to taste blood, and with a raw shout, the woman quickly shifted her grip to Pani’s hair, 97

shaking her by her braids until her teeth were dislodged.

Staring first at her wounded hand, the woman then turned ice-cold eyes onto Pani. She laughed, but the sound was far from amused.

Pani expected to be hit for that; she braced for it, but the woman only tightened her grip in Pani’s hair and marched her into the barn, dragging the twin doors shut behind her. They banged closed with such a sound of finality; Pani shuddered.

There were two lights inside, bare bulbs that hung suspended from cobweb-coated ceiling rafters and which only just cast a dim glow of illumination over the dominating shadows within.