Prescribed Advice [Tier 2 and 3 Exclusive] (Patreon)

She’s got a cup of coffee in her hands, but she’s not drinking it. She hasn’t taken a single sip out of it yet. I’m tempted to be frustrated about it. It’s hot coffee. I paid for it. And now it’s just sitting in her hands, slowly losing heat.

She’s doing this on purpose, I think. Or, maybe, I should’ve listened to her when she said she didn’t want coffee. I mean, yes, obviously. But you don’t spend 5 years with someone and not learn a thing or two. If I hadn’t bought her a coffee, I ran the risk of her later complaining about not having any.

Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe this is a good example of how I’m a “poor communicator.” I’m so close to an epiphany - the sort of nugget of self-realization that Deborah Marshall, LMHC, would be absolutely giddy to hear.

I stop myself from further exploration. I’ll save that for later. I’ll save that for when we’re in Ms. Marshall’s office again.

Despite this - despite having thought all of this - I still find myself saying: “Your coffee is getting cold.”

Amber turns to me with an icy stare that would make Medusa jealous. “It’s keeping my hands warm,” she said. “And if my hands weren’t on this cup, I’d be tempted to put them around your neck instead.”

“Tough crowd,” I joke. Terrible, horrible excuse for a joke. Bad timing. Poor execution.

This is, more or less, what the drive is usually like when we leave Ms. Marshall’s office. I made the mistake of calling her a doctor once. Ms. Marshall was quick to correct me - baring her teeth a little for the first and only time that I had ever seen. I had struck a nerve, I guess. I have a bad habit of doing that.

“Well?” asks Amber, perhaps seeing that the conversation dam has been broken anyways. “What did you think of that?”

I knew this question - or some form of it - was coming. If not now, later for sure. Now certainly seemed to be ahead of schedule.

“I...well… We certainly got some things to think about, right? Food - er, coffee - for thought, you know?”

I glance at her face, finding that her eyes have a lot more to say than her words ever would. Was that supposed to be a joke too?

“You threw me under the bus,” she says. “You made me sound like the villain here. Like a tyrant or some sort of monster.”

“That’s not true,” I say. “I didn’t even mention your ability to level small buildings with your eye-lasers.”

She sighs. One of those sighs that sounds like the very last of her patience is being expelled from her body so that she can fully commit to just being angry. My efforts to lighten the mood have failed - as I should’ve known. I need to tread carefully.

“I wasn’t trying to, uh, ‘throw you under the bus,’” I say. “I was just speaking openly. As Ms. Marshall said we should.”

“You used most of our hour-long session to give one giant monologue about how you felt like I was oppressing you because I didn’t want you waddling around the house in your…”

“I never once used the word ‘oppressed,’” I say.

“Oh, my bad,” she hisses. “I must’ve gotten confused with when you said that I was far too harsh with my judgment of you.”

“I didn’t mean for that to sound like…” I didn’t bother finishing the sentence. She was already staring out the passenger side window. If she’s not completely disconnected yet, she will be soon.

We drive for a few more minutes in complete silence. I’m tempted to poke at it again. It’s ill-advised, I know, but it also feels like a conversation better had in a car than at home. At home, she can go places. She can go upstairs. She can get in her own car.

Again, I feel like I’m so close to seeing a fundamental flaw in myself. Oh well.

“So what are we going to do?” I ask. “Are we going to follow her advice? Or are we going to ignore it, and then go back to her office in a week or two and tell her that we didn’t do anything that she asked - all while asking why we’re not making any progress?”

I can’t see her face, but I know that she’s rolling her eyes.

“We agreed that we’d give couples counselling a try and stick with it until we felt like it had either helped us, or we realized that it couldn’t help us. And after today? I’m tempted to say that I know that it won’t help us.”

“What?” I ask. “I think you’re totally wrong about that. Why would you say that?”

“Because you hijacked today’s session,” she spat. “Here I am, hoping that we’re going to talk about communication issues or something, but nope. We get an epic speech from the guy who thinks that he’s being oppressed by his wife because he feels like he can’t wear diapers - of all fucking things.”

“That’s not exactly what I said…”

“You played the therapist like a fiddle.”

“She’s the professional,” I say. “Not me. If she felt that what I said had merit then I don’t know what to tell you.”

“She got half of the context, because you took up all the time.”

“I mean - I don’t know - it just sounds like you’re kind of bitter because she didn’t say what you wanted her to say.”

“Fine,” she says, throwing her hands up in the air. “Fine fine fine. Go ahead and have a ball. Do what she suggested. If you want to wear diapers around the house, go for it. Go act like an oversized infant all day.”

“That was only part of what she asked for us to try,” I say. I feel like an asshole - I feel like an overly smug kid who knows the rules to my favorite board game way too well. Well, act-u-ally…

“I’ll play by her rules,” she says. “You go on and toddle about the house for a week. And I’ll keep all my judgment to myself. I won’t say a thing. I won’t make you feel...oppressed.”

“I never said that word,” I remind her.

“Then, next week?” she continues, as if I hadn’t interrupted her. “I’ll tell Ms. Marshall exactly how I feel about it.”

Day One

Small steps. Uh, baby steps?

There are no instructions to follow, and no process to guide us. Ms. Marshall had just made a general suggestion, based on observation.

“It sounds like you’re both working under the cloud of assumption. Each of you assumes the other would resort to their worst instincts. Regis, you think that Amber would judge you too harshly. Amber, you think that Regis would let this kink of his rule his life and become all-encompassing. But the truth is that neither of you actually know. Maybe it’d help if we...actually knew how this played out? Just for a week. Stop worrying about what the other would do and just...be yourselves. Otherwise, we’ll all just be in here speculating indefinitely.”

I diaper myself - the first time in a very long time that I’m doing it while Amber is in the house - and pull my jeans up over it. I look at myself in the mirror. I can’t tell if it's obvious or not. I doubt anyone would be able to look at it and guess. But I also imagine myself being in a police line-up, and being the one immediately pointed out if the witness was asked to point out the man wearing a diaper.

Amber watches me walk into the kitchen. She’s analyzing me; pulling up mental images of what my pants normally look like and comparing it to what it looks like now. She probably assumed that I’d waste no time in putting a diaper on.

“Morning,” I say. I’m waiting for her to say something about the diapers. Underhanded. Subtle. She’s probably already working on something snarky.

“Morning,” she repeats back, her gaze returning to her bowl of yogurt and granola.

I’m both disappointed and thankful.

“Going to be a busy day today?” I ask, in the spirit of not letting the conversation end there.

She sighs a little. Resignation, perhaps, that she should probably participate in this chit-chat too. “I don’t think so. I’m caught up, so I’ll probably just keep an eye on email all day in case something pops up.” Then, as if only through obligation: “You?”

“Yeah, probably. I’ll be stuck at my desk all day, I think. Got some projects to work through and stuff.”

She opens her mouth to say something, but seems to think better of it.

“What?” I ask. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing,” she says.

“Oh come on, Amber. I know you were going to say something. Maybe this is, uh, the sorts of interactions we need to have? Where we actually say what’s on our minds?”

“I was just going to say that it’s good you’re wearing one of your diapers. You know, if you were going to be stuck at your desk all day.”

“I can’t tell - are you being sarcastic?”

She just shrugs. I let it go.

Nothing else is said about the diapers. No other comments - sarcastic or not. No follow-up questions later that day, either. I’m expecting some query about whether or not I ended up using my diaper, but it never comes.

I wet myself twice, for what it's worth.

Day Two

“Diapers again?” she asks as I enter the kitchen. I’m surprised she initiates a conversation at all, let alone calling out the scorn of our relationship by name.

“Uh, yeah,” I say, shrugging.

“So you took her words to heart, huh? You figured you’d just wear them everyday - all day - for the next week?”

“I’m just...trying something.”

“Oh? Is this an experiment?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t this...what we were supposed to do?”

She sighs. Thirty seconds into our first conversation of the day and I feel like she’s shutting down. I know better than to push forward. Once again, I allow myself to walk away from the conversation - a decision that she seems equally satisfied with.

The day plays out mostly like the one before it. I wet myself while sitting at the desk of my home office. I’m tempted to keep it on and see if I can get another wetting out of it. But this one already feels substantially saturated. Amber might be keeping her distance, but I can’t imagine she’d be able to bite her tongue if she saw that my pants were soaked from a leaky diaper.

Our paths cross in the living room as I make my way to the stairs so I can get a fresh diaper. There’s an awkward moment as we both seem to be stuck deciding whether or not we want to be friendly.

“I’m, uh, just going upstairs,” I say. The answer to a question that nobody asked.

“Diaper change?” she asks. In a vacuum, maybe I’d be unsure if this was intended to be mocking. I know her well enough to be sure that she was not genuinely curious.

I give her an honest answer anyways: “Yes, actually.”

“Really? It’s only been, what, three hours?”

“Do you think a diaper can hold more than that?”

She shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”

I start walking past her, confident that this conversation has nowhere else to go.

“Wait,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“Show me.”

“What? Seriously?”

“I don’t know. I’m curious. Show me what you’re working with here. What does an at-capacity diaper even look like?”

“You...want me to, what, pull down my pants and show you my diaper?”

“Yes,” she says. Unblinking. No sign of her being either genuinely curious or genuinely spiteful.

It feels kind of like a trap, but the permission to show my wet diaper off to her overrides any practical part of my brain. I’m compliant - enthusiastically so. With the smallest number of movements possible, I’ve unbuttoned my pants and have slid them down mid-thigh so that she can investigate.

“And what is this?” she asks, pointing to my diaper.

“I mean, it’s a, uh…”

“I mean, I know it’s a diaper,” she says. “But, I don’t know, is it...a good diaper?”

“Good? I mean, it’s pretty well-behaved, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Come on,” she says, her tone suggesting that she’s less interested in my jokes than usual.

“I mean, yeah, they’re a better brand. I ordered them online. They hold a bit, you know? They’re popular with, uh, other...people.”

She shakes her head. I initially read it as astonishment. She’s in awe of what is before her. But it is far more likely to be the opposite. Disappointment. Maybe regret.

“I...I should get going,” I say. “Gotta get cleaned up and then back to work.”

“Hurry,” she says. “Don’t get a rash.”

Day Three

“No diaper today?” she asks as I arrive in the kitchen for my morning coffee.

Her question surprises me in multiple ways - but mostly because I didn’t think she’d have noticed.

“Was it that obvious when I was wearing them?”

“I guess I know what to look for now,” she says. “And when to look for it.”

There’s not much I want to say in response. I doubt she actually wants to have a conversation about it. If she was looking to ruffle my feathers, mission accomplished. I’ll just get coffee and move on with my day.

“But seriously,” she says. “Why no diapers today?”

I don’t have an especially good reason to give her. The basic answer was that when I was faced with the prospect of putting another diaper on this morning - another diaper quietly being judged and mocked by Amber - I had lost my ambition for it. Besides - testing the ability to wear diapers when I wanted didn’t mean that I had to wear them all the time.

With no desire to explain that to her, I simply say: “I just didn’t feel like it.”

“Well that’s not acceptable,” she says.

“I’m sorry?”

“I thought I was getting a week of you strolling about in your diapers. I mean, this is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Well sure. But, that doesn’t mean that I can’t, like, take a day off if I feel like it.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head.

“No?”

“We’re doing this. All week. Every day. We’re going back to Ms. Marshall’s office with a solid week’s worth of experiences to talk about.”

“So...you’re asking me to…”

“Turn around, go back upstairs, put a diaper on, and then come down here and start your day over again.”

Another trap, maybe. It felt like she was playing a game that I wasn’t privy to the rules of. She was taunting me - baiting me - into exploring this side of me in her company. When we had our next session with Ms. Marshall, I wondered what the conversation would look like. Was Amber planning on ambushing me with a list of all the things she hated about the diapers?

I still went upstairs and put one on.

I was expecting this to be the end of the day’s discussion about diapers. She had proven the last two days that she had a pretty small threshold for when diaper-talk had overstayed its welcome.

But only three hours later, there is a knock on my office door.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” she responds. It’s surreal having her visit me here. I can’t even remember the last time she had dropped by while I was working.

“Did you, uh, need something?” I feel bad sounding so suspicious, but she’s probably just as aware of how uncommon an occurrence this is.

“I just came to check up on you,” she says.

“Check up? I’m...fine.”

She rolls her eyes. “I mean, like, your diaper.”

“Oh. Wait, seriously?”

“Stand up,” she says. “Pull your pants down. Let me see.”

I could say no. I could ask her why she wants to see this and what it means to her. We both know that I won’t.

I’m standing, and I’m pulling my pants down again.

She steps closer, squatting a little to get a better look at the diaper. Wet, but not too wet. Wet enough that it’s got a little bit of a sag to it. Probably a decent yellow hue to the bottom to boot.

“Wet,” she announces. “You were wetter yesterday.”

“I wasn’t planning on changing this one soon,” I say with a shrug. I can’t decide if I should be defensive or not.

“In a perfect world,” she asks, “what does this look like for you?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Let’s say I wasn’t home this week. Are you wearing diapers 24/7?”

“Honestly? Probably.”

“Just wetting? Or do you…”

I feel my cheeks warming as I let out a nervous burst of laughter. “Do you really want to know the answer to that?”

She mulled it over for half a second, no doubt asking herself - one more time - if she wanted that answer or not. “Yeah.”

“Well, then. Yeah. Yeah I do.”

“And so you’d do that too? If left to your own devices?”

“Probably, yes.” It’s as honest as I can be, and no amount of confidence or justification with myself helps to inspire a less-shamed tone.

“Then I see no reason as to why you should restrict yourself on my account.”

I shake my head. “Are you suggesting that I…”

“Poop your pants? Well, only if it’s something you’d want to do anyways.”

“Is this a game to you?” It sounds more aggressive than I mean for it to.

“I just think that we’re wasting our time if you’re not going to go all the way with this.”

“How so?”

“You made it overwhelmingly clear to Ms. Marshall, in your little speech the other day, that you felt that you couldn’t be yourself without the fear of being judged. And, seeing as how you’re so eager to jump on her recommendation that you just be yourself for the next week, I see no reason to cut yourself short. Why not do it all?”

I sigh - a long slow release of air from my nostrils as I stand before her in just my mildly wet diaper. I get what she’s saying - but I can also hear how she’s saying it. “Go on. Humiliate yourself. This is what you want, isn’t it?”

“Are you sure?” I ask.

She shrugs. “You don’t need my permission. I’m just reminding you that if this is what you want, you might as well go all the way. For the sake of argument. For science.”

“I’ll think about it.”

She checks in one more time that afternoon. The diaper is wetter. Heavier. Sagging more. But there’s nothing else in there. I’m unsure if she’s pleased or upset about this.

Day Four

“If I wasn’t here,” she asks, as I stroll into the kitchen, “would you be wearing pants over your diaper?”

“No,” I say. “Probably not.”

She shrugs. It’s a statement in itself. A silent: “Well, I’m just saying…”

“Are you asking me to take my pants off?”

“I don’t think it’s a bad idea,” she says. “You could argue that by hiding your diaper in your pants, you’re hiding this part of yourself from me. And wasn’t that part of your point? That you were sick of feeling like you had to hide all of this from me?”

“That’s not exactly what I meant.”

Another coy shrug.

She’s right. I think so, at least. My pants come off right there in the kitchen. I’m left in just a diaper and t-shirt. I’ve been here before - in this state of attire - but never before with an audience. It makes me feel incredibly small. Toddler-sized.

She comes to me again, later that morning. She doesn’t knock, she just enters the office with a: “I thought I’d check in on the baby.”

‘The baby.’ It’s simultaneously exciting and humiliating. Without any real clue of what her current personal stance is on my kink, I’m unsure what reaction she had intended for me to have.

I stand to show her my diaper. It’s quite wet. Wet beyond the point where I would normally go and change myself. I could ask myself why I haven’t yet - but the answer would be obvious. I knew that she’d check in on me. I wanted her to see.

“Very full,” she observes. She touches my diaper for the first time, her hand lightly tapping the sagging bottom of it, testing its weight.

“I was thinking I’d go change it.”

“Were you? When did you think you’d get around to that. This one seems like it’s been rather ripe for a while.”

“Now?”

She tilts her chin up, a smug smile resting on her face.

Her silence drives me to try answering that again: “I...I would’ve gotten to it eventually.”

“And if you were home alone?”

“I’d probably wait a bit longer.”

“How much longer?”

“Until I…”

“Yes?”

“Until I...used the diaper, uh...fully?”

“Until you messed your diaper?”

“Yeah…” I cringed a little, hearing the words said aloud - by her - twists my stomach.

“I think you should get to work on that, then,” she said.

“Do you really think I should do that?”

“How am I ever going to learn about how much of a baby you are - a full picture of just how much I’ve oppressed you - if I don’t see every single part of it?”

She was mocking me and what I had said to Ms. Marshall. More or less - there was still a word I took umbrage with.

“Alright, fine. I will.”

It both was and wasn’t a game. She wanted to make a point. But we both wanted to call each other’s bluff.

Ten minutes after she leaves the office, I step away from my desk. In the middle of the room, and with little fanfare, I squat and push on my bowels. My body had been aching for release for longer than I’d have cared to admit, and it all comes rather easily. A slow and constant mass fills the bottom of my diaper. I keep waiting for the moment where either the diaper is at capacity or I’ve simply run out of things to fill it with, but neither comes quickly. I’m stuck in that position for what feels like minutes. One wave finishes, and I can feel another already in queue. With each push, I’m expecting it to be the end. At some point, the diaper shouldn’t be able to hold any more.

It’s done, and I’m empty. For a single blissful moment, I feel completely satisfied. The pressure in my body is gone. My diaper is pleasantly plump. I’m living my best baby life.

But Amber is standing in the doorway, watching me.

“When did you… How long have you been standing there?”

“Long enough,” she says.

For a moment, I feel violated. The feeling dissipates quickly. This - this - is what I’ve wanted to experience for a very long time.

“So you watched me…”

“Poop your pants? Fill your diaper like a baby? Make a little stinky? Yeah, I guess I did.” She took an exaggerated sniff or two of the air. “Pew. Certainly not a little stinky.”

My face erupts into flames as I slowly straighten my body out, my bloated diaper sagging as far as it possibly could without simply just falling off of my body.

“Do you like it?” she asks. As if she needs to remind me, she adds: “Be honest.”

“I do.”

“What do you like about it?”

“Are you a reporter now? Is this the cover story for tomorrow’s issue of The Household Times?”

“Worse,” she says. “I’m the paparazzi, representing The Household Sun. You will be on the cover, but you’ll somehow look even more pathetic than you do right now.”

It’s a joke. It’s embarrassing, but it’s a welcome change of pace.

“The...taboo of it, perhaps?” I say, returning to her question. “I’m not supposed to be, uh…”

“You can say it, you know?” she says. “I mean - if you can do it, you can say it.”

I start over: “I’m not supposed to be pooping my diaper like a baby. Because I’m an adult. So I do and, then, I’m not supposed to like having done that, you know? But...I do.”

“And then what?” she asks.

It might be the hardest question she’s ever asked me before. I know the answers - and she can certainly guess them. Just as, I’m sure, she could guess everything that she’s seen so far.

“And then...I get changed.”

“Yeah? That’s it?”

“I mean...I’m sure you can imagine if there’s anything else.”

“No,” she says. “I don’t think I can.”

“I would touch myself.”

“Is that what you’d do now?” she asks.

“I...I’m not sure.” It’s not a lie. I hadn’t thought this far ahead.

“If I wasn’t here. And if you had loaded your diaper up good and full. And knowing that you’re still on the clock…” She motioned to my computer, still lit up with new emails and messages that weren’t getting answered. “...what do you think you’d do?”

“You know what I’d do.”

“Then do it.”

“Now? With...you here?”

She nodded.

Day Five

No pants. Diaper exposed. I’m already wet by the time I’m in the kitchen.

“Pathetic,” she mutters, looking over the top of her tablet as she reads the morning’s news.

I don’t say anything. I’m unsure of what we’re doing anymore. She watched me pleasure myself to completion the day before - in a diaper that could be described as something of a biohazard. I feel like we’re playing a game, but we forgot what the rules were.

“At this rate you’re going to need a change in the next hour or two.”

“I guess. We’ll see how things go once I have some coffee.”

She laughs. “You don’t think that’s going to help, do you?”

I shrug. “I guess not, no.”

“Don’t change your diaper without talking to me first.”

“So, what, am I supposed to come find you?”

“Exactly,” she says. “Come show me your dirty diaper. I’ll tell you if it’s worthy of a change or not.”

Is she just offering her opinion? Or is she now the gatekeeper of my next diaper change?

Two hours, and two cups of coffee, later and I’m waddling towards her with a saturated diaper. She’s sitting in the living room, working from her laptop, per usual, as talking heads on YouTube discuss true-crime.

“Have something to show me, do you?”

“I’m sure you can see that already.”

“Come closer. I’d like to really inspect this.”

I do so, and she runs her fingers across the diaper, carefully lifting the sagging bulge while feeling it’s warm heft.

“I think there’s room in there,” she says.

“No...I don’t think so.”

“You’re the expert,” she says. “But in my opinion? You’ve got some room in there.”

I don’t fight her on this and I return to my office.

An hour later I return, figurative tail tucked between my literal legs. My waddle feels far more pronounced than it had the first time I sought her out. My movement is limited to half my normal speed. She’s in the same spot as she was the first time. She’s not even looking at her laptop - it’s as if she had been watching the hallway, waiting for me to come back.

“Well, look who it is again,” she says.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say that you were starting to like this. Or...some part of this, I don’t know.”

She offers an exaggerated shrug. “Come here. Let me see the damage.”

I take two steps further and she holds up a hand to stop me.

“I can smell you from here,” she says.

“But I didn’t…”

“You smell like piss,” she says. “There’s, like, a pissy cloud hanging over you or something.”

“Okay, so… I pissed myself a few times. But only because you wanted to…”

“Oh, come on. You can’t blame me. This is what you wanted.”

We’re far past the point of her making whatever point she had wanted to make. Message received, loud and clear. She’s sticking my nose in my pee - almost literally. I’m just waiting for the rolled up newspaper to start smacking me.

I stand before her, and her hands squeeze and caress my diaper. She’s thoroughly inspecting it, seemingly amused with its squishy heft.

“Does this qualify for a diaper change?” I ask.

“You tell me,” she says. “I never said you couldn’t change your diaper. I just said that I wanted to see your diaper before you changed it.”

Something has changed, and suddenly she’s...involved. She asserted herself into my kink. And whether she actually likes it or just wants to fuck with me, she’s already influencing how I see these things.

“Well, I’m asking your opinion now,” I say. “Since I’m here anyways.”

“Yeah, maybe it’d be best if you did,” she says.

I come close to asking her something, but I stop myself. I turn and go upstairs to change into a new diaper instead.

Day Six

I enter the kitchen, guns blazing. Diaper and a t-shirt. Diaper is wet already. Before she can even make a snarky comment in between sips of her morning coffee, I’m on my soapbox.

“Look. I’m glad you’ve taken an interest in what I’m doing,” I say. “But I feel like you’re playing some sort of mind game with me.”

“Okay?” she says, eyes narrowing inquisitively. “I mean, I might not be.”

“I need to know what’s going on here. Are you just taking in every humiliating thing you can so that you can relay it to Ms. Marshall at our appointment tomorrow and bury me with it?”

“Is that what you think is happening?”

“Well, I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

“What would I do to convince you that that isn’t the case?” she asks.

It’s a great question, and one that throws me off guard for a moment. I quickly think about it, trying to see if there’s an answer I can give her.

“Participate,” I say.

“Oh?”

“You want to see me piss and shit my diaper? You want to get close and make fun of me for it? Then you can...play along. Feed me a bottle. Talk to me like a baby. Change my diaper.”

“Yeah?” she says. “Is that what you want? For Mommy to change your diaper?”

My vision blurs a little and the sound in the room gets a little fuzzy. I could’ve sworn she just asked if I wanted to have my diaper changed.

“Yes?”

“You can give me a more confident answer than that.”

“Yes.”

I’m half-expecting another hurdle to form in front of me. My diaper needs to be wetter. Heavier. Smellier. She’s going to need more from me before she’ll take another step herself.

I’m happy to be wrong. She stands, leaving her precious coffee behind. She marches past me, grasping my arm at the last moment. I’m towed up the stairs, awkwardly bouncing on each step behind her as I try to match her brisk pace. I’m dragged all the way to the bedroom where she points to the bed.

“There. Get up on that.”

I do as she asks.

“Where are your diapers?”

I’m thankful, but surprised, that she doesn’t already know. I’ve never thought my hiding spot - in a drawer of my dresser that had long ago been relegated to pants I would never wear again - was all that subtle, but it had apparently served me well.

“What else do you have?”

“What else do you need?”

“I don’t know. Powder? Baby wipes?”

“I don’t know what’s in there,” I say. A lie, and one that she can likely see through too.

I lie down on my back. It almost feels presumptuous to take on any sort of position, but I let it happen anyways. Part of me can’t even help myself.

I hear the drawer open and I hear her digging through it.

“Diapers,” she says. “And wipes. Baby powder. Baby...lotion. Pacifiers. Bibs?”

“I...may have things I don’t actually need. Or use.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that. We could find a use for all these things.”

We. That felt good. That felt better than whatever 100 diaper changes could do. Though I was, obviously, looking forward to that too.

Day Seven

“And so what are you going to say today?” I ask.

We stopped and got coffee on the way to the appointment this week. She holds the coffee in both hands in front of her, but my peripheral vision catches her bringing it up to her lips a few times as I drive.

“Should I tell her the truth?” she asks.

“I guess that depends on what the truth is.”

“I could tell her that she was right. She said that you needed the space to explore that side of yourself without judgment, and that when you had the chance to…”

“Hold up,” I say. “That’s not exactly the truth. I felt like you judged me an awful lot. Maybe more than usual.”

“So I stick to the tangible things, maybe? I tell her that you pranced around in your diaper. I tell her that I saw a place for myself in that space. Then I… Well, should I tell her everything?”

“How do you think she’d react to you admitting that you changed my diaper?”

“How do you think she’d react to me sitting on your face for twenty minutes so that you could earn that diaper change?”

We both laugh.

If I’m being honest: maybe it’s progress, maybe it’s not. We’re not going to counseling because I have a diaper fetish - it’s just one of those gray areas that we haven’t been great at navigating in the past. A diaper change or three doesn’t mean our relationship is saved, but it suggests to me that maybe there’s hope. If we can work through this gray area, maybe the rest are easier than we thought.

She takes a warm hand off of her coffee cup and puts it in my lap as we drive. I look to her and smile, but she’s not paying attention - she’s looking out her own window.

Her hand creeps between my legs, lightly squeezing the diaper between my legs.

“Do you hate couples counseling as much as I do?” she asks.

“Yeah, probably.”

“I’m not saying it’s worthless. It’s just...not fun.”

“I don’t disagree.”

“I’ll make a deal with you,” she says.

“Okay?”

“Maybe not today. Maybe not next week. Just...whenever. It’s an open offer, okay?”

“Okay?”

“Poop your pants,” she says. I’m not sure if it's a command or a stream-of-conscious thought.

“What?”

“Poop yourself. Mess your diaper. Absolutely fill it. Right there in Deborah Marshall’s office.”

I laugh. “Deborah Marshall, LMHC.”

“Not a doctor.”

“Okay. Say I did that. Then what?”

“I take you by the hand and advise the good therapist that we need to be excused so that I can change my baby. And I lead you back to the car. You’ll have to sit in the backseat, of course - where dirty-pants babies sit.”

“Obviously.”

“Then we get home and I change your stinky bottom. Before or after you fuck me. I haven’t decided on the timing yet.”

“So, say we do something like that, right? I mean, obviously we aren’t going back to her for any appointments after.”

“Right,” she says. “Exactly. That’s our, uh, swan song. That’s your signal - to me - that you’re ready for this to be done. That you’re ready and able to help work through the rest of our issues with me.”

“Because I poop my pants in front of our therapist?”

“Right.”

“A licensed mental health counselor would probably not see that as a sign of...mental health.”

“But we’d be okay with it.”

I laugh - it’s a pretty hilarious mental image. The more seconds that pass since the end of the conversation, the more it feels like a joke. I’m pretty confident in just calling it a joke.

But I take an internal survey anyway. How are my bowels doing? Any pressure in there? If there was going to be a day where that happened, would it be today?

It’s not looking good, but I’ll see what I can do about that. And if not this week...well, there are ways of making sure it happens the next week.

“I never said that I was oppressed,” I say, apropos of nothing.

“Seriously? I didn’t even bring that up today.”

“I just want it on the record.”

We’re there soon after, ready to lay out our week for the judgment of Ms. Marshall herself.