Pets: Bach's Story (4 page)

“It’s a fascinating read,” he told her deadpan. “Supposedly chock-full of all sorts of useful information.” He lowered the book and went back to reading. “‘Pick the name by which your pet should address you. This is usually your pet’s first vocabulary word. Some examples can be: Master, Boss, Sir, or pander to the child-like qualities that make the human animal unique, and teach it to say Mommy or Daddy. Whatever your preference, your chosen word should be used consistently and often. Repetition is the key to teaching your pet to speak.’ Hm, okay.”

Bach closed the book and looked at Pani, who had leaned to one side in order to rotate her right arm in its cuff. She was slowly and painstakingly picking at the buckle with the tips of her fingernails in an attempt to loosen the strap.

Clever thing.

She froze when she saw him watching her.

“All right, let me think.” He tightened the buckle back down again. “What should you call me?”

Twisting her arm back around, she leaned back in the highchair and slumped sulkily. One leg began to jiggle rapidly up and down in its bonds.

“I don’t like Boss, Master, or Sir. You hardly strike me as a submissive pet. And my daughters called me Daddy, so that won’t do.”

He reached out to touch her mane, smoothing back all the wisps of red that had deftly escaped her braid. She flinched, but although she watched his hand very closely, she allowed the touch without twisting her head away.

Progress.

“How about Papa.” He tapped two fingers against his chest. “Papa,” he repeated. “Can you say Papa?”

She blinked twice, then leaned to one side, so she could twist her arm around in the strap again. She poked a finger back at herself, and gargled something guttural and hard to make out much less pronounce.

He gently tapped her chest. “Pani,” he said. “You are Pani. I am Papa.” He tapped his chest again. “Can you say, Papa?”

He stretched the syllables, repeating the word three times before she heaved a deep sigh and softly gargled out, “Pa-a-pa.”

He was inordinately pleased. He got her to say it twice more before taking her back to her room. He nailed both windows closed and diapered her again, despite her squeals and protests. A sleep sack kept her busy hands, arms and legs contained in a warm pouch that buckled, not too tightly, at the back of her neck. Then he placed her on her back in her crib, before pushing it over the floor to its proper place against the wall.

Pani lay in the center of the mattress glaring up at the ceiling as he bid her good night.

She tried to bite his hand twice when he reached down into the crib to caress her face, but a warning tap on the tip of her nose put a stop to that.

“No more bad behavior out of you, little miss,” he told her softly. “Tomorrow is a whole new day for us, and I intend to start your training off right.”

Like a landed fish, she rolled and flopped in the sleep sack from her back, to her side, and then to her stomach. She glared at the wall and sighed.

“Like it or not,” he said, as he gently rubbed her back. “You’re going to be hand-tamed.”

He gave her diapered bottom a pat, then covered her with a blanket and quit the room. He shut the light off, but left the door open so he could hear if she managed to wiggle out of the sleep sack to make another daring escape for freedom.

Well, he’d done it. He was now a pet owner.

Every so often as he got ready for bed, he walked back down the hall to peek in at her.

She was still awake and fidgeting to find a way out of her sack, moving around the perimeter of her crib like a frustrated inchworm.

He brought the book upstairs to read in bed for a while and made a list of things he would need to get tomorrow, the first and foremost being formula. He didn’t want her starving to death before she grew comfortable enough with him to start eating.

It was late when he finally turned out the light, rolling over onto his side to sleep. In the dark and quiet of his house, as he lay there with his eyes closed, Bach suddenly became aware of a soft snuffling and gasping coming from down the hall. His pet was having problems breathing.

He was up and down the hall in record time, whacking his foot on a short table and all but falling into the nursery room. He slapped the light switch on and, ignoring his throbbing toes, bent over the crib to check the neck of her sleep sack. No, she was getting plenty of air. It wasn’t until he rolled her over to check her coloring that he noticed her face was wet.

Though she tried to turn her face away, he touched her cheeks with gentle fingertips.

Tears, an intense emotional reaction to disciplinary situations. He’d read about them in his book.

“Pani,” he said gently. “You’re not being punished.”

It hadn’t even occurred to him that placing her in a room to sleep alone would be viewed like that. But it only made sense, he supposed, since on the distant planet of Earth, wild humans reputedly dwelt in large colonies called cities. Apparently it was a very rare occurrence indeed to find one completely by itself. Hence the high cost of purchasing a human pet. Not only was there the expense of transporting the beasts, but it took time and patience to tag a good, quality pet without spooking the entire colony.

Bach rubbed her back while she turned her head away from him. Who knew how many individuals had been in Pani’s city, and now she was being forced to sleep in a strange place all by herself. Small wonder she was crying.

Bach picked her up and, despite her instant shouts and squirms, carried her down the hall to his bedroom. Her resistence to being placed in his bed ended when he climbed in beside her.

She lay as stiff as a wood plank in her sleep sack as he covered her with a blanket, and snuggling down beside her. With his head cushioned on his arm, he draped his other around her waist and pulled her back against the confines of his hard chest.

He stroked her mane, caressed her tear-dampened cheeks, kissed her forehead, and went to sleep holding her so she wouldn’t feel alone.

Chapter Three

Bach woke up early the next morning with a comfortable weight snoring softly on top of him. He opened his eyes, inclining his head to look at Pani, still in her sleep sack. Sometime in the night, she’d curled up against him for warmth. Her head was cushioned on his shoulder, one hand within the canvas sack tucked up under her chin. He almost hated to move. He knew once he did, she’d wake up and then the struggle for freedom would begin.

Pani’s face scrunched into a disagreeable expression and she made soft, yet angry talking noises in her sleep. Someone in her dream was getting the sharp side of her tongue, and Bach smiled. It was probably him.

He caressed her soft cheek with the backs of two fingers, and her eyes fluttered, then opened. She blinked sleepily at his chest, then moved her hands as though to rub her eyes. The sleep sack confined them, and she looked down at it in confusion. Some of the sleepiness fled her, and she tipped her head back and looked at him. Her body went tense against him.

And so the day began.

She fought him getting up. She kicked and howled the whole way down to the bathroom, where he locked them both inside so she couldn’t run all over the house while he took care of business. He then discovered that he was going to have to install a different kind of lock on the doors, and higher up, because she figured out how to unlock the doorknob very quickly.

Leaving her in her sleep sack was the best thing he could have done. He managed to chase her down in the hallway with very little effort and carried her back to the bathroom. This time, he wedged a hamper in front of the door and finished his morning routine while she crouched in a corner and glared at him.

Not quite trusting her to stay where he’d left her, he spent the entire duration of what should have been a pleasurable morning shower trying to see through the distorted glass door to check up on her. Sure enough, about midway through washing his hair, he glanced up to see the blurred shape of the sleep sack tiptoeing towards the bathroom door.

Pani was just starting to try to wrestle the hamper out of her way when he opened the door. She froze, as if by not moving perhaps he wouldn’t see her. He gave her a stern look, snapping his fingers as he pointed back to her corner.

Her eyes narrowed and she abruptly let go of the hamper. Grabbing up the folds of the sleep sack to keep from tangling her confined feet, Pani stomp-waddled back to the other side of the bathroom, kicking out her feet every few steps to untangle them from the sack, and flung herself down in the corner in a thoroughly irritated heap. Cupping her chin in the palm of her confined hand, she scowled at him.

“All right,” he said, and got out of the shower. Her eyes widened and she sat upright when, dripping and naked, he started towards her. “Since I obviously can’t trust you to stay put, you can shower with me.”

She raised pure hell when he picked her up. By the time he wrestled her out of her sleep sack and dragged her over to the shower, he’d hit the end of his patience for temper tantrums.

Bracing his foot up on the edge of the tub, he tossed her over his knee and pinned her squirming body down with one arm thrown across her back. “Little miss,” he said as he captured her wrists in one hand and twisted her arms up behind her. “It’s about time you learned what all this bad behavior will get you.”

She was just a little thing with a little bottom. He wanted to give her only five or six good swats, just enough to deliver a bit of a sting and plant a firm and unnegotiable ‘No’ into her naughty way of thinking. He only struck hard enough to land some really crisp-sounding smacks and for the flesh of her bottom to turn a lovely shade of pink.

Pani’s struggles ended suddenly with the very first swat, and she lay over his knee gasping and grunting with each subsequent blow until the final one bounced off her rosy red bottom and his hand came to rest on her thighs.

Panting, she made no effort to get up on her own, so he helped her, rolling her over so that she could perch upright on his thigh. As he smoothed the unruly red mane of her hair back from her face, he realized he’d stopped way too soon. She stabbed him with the furious, slate-grey stare of her eyes, then with a roar, lashed out with both fists. He promptly toppled her face-down back over his knee. This time he gave her more than six.

His open palm whacked and smacked all over her bare bottom, darkening the rosy red to a deeper shade of scarlet while she kicked and howled as though she were being skinned alive. A proper good skelping, as his grandfather had once told him, rarely did a body any lasting harm and often did a lot of permanent good.

So that’s what Bach gave her. Though Pani hardly seemed appreciative. Her furious shrieks began to be displaced by pain-filled wails. Instead of kicking to hurt him, she was now kicking to get away and struggling to twist her hips from side to side in an futile effort to avoid his hand. When she tried to roll over, he promptly flipped her back into place and continued spanking until, in a move that smacked of self-preserving desperation, she began to cry out clear and audible ‘Papa, Papa’s’, then burst into tears.

Bach stopped, but he didn’t let her up right away. He rested his hand upon her bottom, the scarlet flesh seeming to sizzle beneath his touch. As she cried in loud and lusty sobs, he gently rubbed to soothe away the hurt.

“You need to learn what is and is not acceptable behavior,” he said. “So far, all I’ve seen from you is the unacceptable.”

As her wails dwindled to hiccups, he again helped her up to sit on his thigh. She reached back with both hands, alternately rubbing and cupping her bottom, the saddest look upon her face. He couldn’t help but hug her and was a little surprised when she allowed it. She didn’t even turn her face away when he dampened a washcloth and gently wiped the tears from her face.

She made no fuss when he brought her into the shower with him, other than to duck her head when the spray of the warm water struck her. He washed every part of her, but the only time she shied away was when the rasp of the wash cloth passed over her tender flanks. She had only one brief moment when she tried to get out of the shower all together, and that was when he dipped between her slender thighs to clean her more intimately.

He caught her arm before she could climb out and sternly told her, “No, Pani.”

She uttered a small and muffled sound of protest, then repeated, “No, Pani.”

Without another word, she stood frozen while the spray of the water struck her bowed head.

He tried to play with her as he was toweling her dry afterwards, but his attempts at peek-a-boo were very one-sided.

He picked through a packed away box of his daughters’ old clothes and finally selected a small green dress. There was quite a fad going these days for people who liked to dress their pets up like real people. He guessed he was going to be one of them. She looked cute in it. It was loose and uncinched at the waist, short sleeved, and only came down far enough to cover the bottommost swells of her blushing bottom. He’d sent his daughters to school in dresses like this.

With white knee socks, ruffled yellow panties, and buckle-down shoes on her feet, for a moment, he could almost forget Pani was a pet.

He took his time brushing out the chaotic remains that her braid had become and, when all the tangles were gone, rebraided her mane. Two braids this time, tied at the tops and bottoms with thin green ribbons that matched the color of her dress.

Breakfast was another battle, albeit a much more muted one.

Strapped into her highchair, sitting gingerly on a pillow that he’d provided, Pani just turned her face away when he offered her a bite of egg. He made two attempts, then set his fork and the omelette aside.

“All right,” he said, standing up. “We’ll do this the hard way.”

He took the plate into the kitchen and scraped it into the sink. He got a blender out of the cabinet and opened the refrigeration unit. He mixed up a protein shake, adding a dollop of honey at the end to sweeten what was, he knew from prior dieting experiences, an otherwise nasty flavor. In the attic, he found an assortment of bottles packed away in an old diaper bag and brought them all downstairs to wash them out in the kitchen sink.