Doing Business, Part 60 (Patreon)

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Sixty

My mother had no idea the part she was playing in this game.

Of course, she was playing her own game–the one she had been playing since I was an actual child–a slow-burning plot to prove that I still needed someone to take care of me.

She won that game. She didn’t know she had won, but she had. I did need someone to take care of me. It just wouldn’t be her.

Smack!

Mommy’s hand made impact with the skin of my bare ass, and the crisp sound echoed in the restaurant office. A meek yelp was forced from my lips: “Ooph!”

Smack! Smack! Smack!

With each blow, my cries sounded a little more pathetic and whining. Until finally, I felt the tears welling in my eyes. Before long, I was having an infantile breakdown, sobbing and gasping for air as tears streamed down my face.

Smack! Smack!

It was the sort of thing that I still didn’t believe I was actually capable of, despite having already experienced it in Seattle. I just never thought of myself as a crier. Not like this. Of course, it took a bit to get me to this point. A firm spanking over Mommy’s knees in the back of a restaurant, as I stared at the diaper that I would soon be put into, would do that.

Smack! Smack! Smack!

“N-no…please, Mommy! I…”

Smack! Smack!

“I…I promise I’ll…”

Smack! Smack!

“...never go out w-without…”

Smack! Smack! Smack!

“...diapers ever again!”

And, then, one final Smack!

“There,” Mommy said. “I think that should do it. Don’t you?”

“Puh-pleeease,” I begged, between pathetic whimpers. “No more…”

I could immediately feel the energy in her hand change as she began to gently rub and soothe my, no doubt, reddened rear.

“There, there, Baby. I know it stings. But you had a very important lesson to learn–Mommy keeps you in diapers for a reason.”

In my week of stressing about what today was actually going to look like, not once did I imagine a scenario where Mommy spanked my bottom–only feet away from where my mother stood.

I sniffled my last and tried to collect myself. Really, I only had one thing to say: “Thank you, Mommy.”

“You’re quite welcome. Now then, shall we put you back together again so we can send you back out to brunch.”

“P-probably…”

I was suddenly on my back on the couch and she was hovering above me with the opened diaper in her hand. I accepted my fate with a deep breath. If I didn’t like this outcome, I only had myself to blame.

“Are you going to come out and meet my mother?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I assume that’s preferable to you?”

“Yes. But…I feel bad for dragging you out here just to put a diaper on me.”

“And I spanked you,” she reminded me. “That was important too. But don’t worry about me. Paolo is going to feed me in a few minutes. And, as long as I’m in town, I figure I might as well get some shopping in.”

“You’re really good to me.”

She laughed. “But only because you are really good to me. We need each other, remember.”

I nodded. “Yes, Mommy.”

“I didn’t bring any wipes or baby powder with me,” she said. “I think you’ll be fine without. Just don’t let your mother sniff around your crotch too much–she may pick up the faintest whiff of pee on your skin.”

“I…I don’t think we have to worry about that.”

“Let’s hope so. Well, that should do it. Let’s get these pants and shoes back on you and send you out into the land of brunch once more.”

“Thank you.”

“Speaking of, how is brunch going so far? Well, besides the fact that you pissed yourself.”

“It’s…fine,” I said.

“Just fine?”

I nodded. “It could probably be a lot worse. She seems to like Lyndie.”

“Well that’s good.”

“Sort of,” I said. “I feel like, at some point, I either have to tell her the truth about Lyndie and I–or I just keep the con going until I one day have to say we, like, broke up or something.”

“Such webs we weave,” Mommy laughed. I was hoping she’d have a suggestion or some sort of advice for how to deal with this situation, but that was all she seemed to have to say about it.

She patted my bottom, and the telltale plastic rustling of the diaper emanated from my pants. I would much rather not have to return to my mother like this–though I couldn’t deny that I was at least feeling more comfortable with a diaper on.

“This is where we part ways,” she said. “I’ll be here a little longer if you should have another accident…”

“N-no,” I said, furiously shaking my head. “I won’t be having any other accidents today.”

“It’s cute that you believe that. But, barring some sort of blowout, I assume I’ll see you on Monday?”

The thought of having a blowout in my diaper at the restaurant–in front of my mother–made my cheeks turn crimson again. “Yes, Mommy. And, again, I can’t thank you enough for helping me today.”

“Of course. Isn’t that what mommies are for?”

I left the office and slunk through the edge of the kitchen, just in case my mother was still around. She wasn’t. Soon, I was back amongst the patrons and their food, making my way back to our table.

“Where’d you run off to?” my mother asked as I pulled my chair out from the table.

I was pleased to see that at some point, my soaking wet chair had been replaced with a clean and dry one. I wondered if I owed Lyndie had flagged someone down while my mother and I were both away from the table.

“See?” Lyndie said to me, jumping into the conversation. “I told you that you should’ve used the restroom before we came here.”

I swallowed nervously and shrugged. “You know how it is. Sometimes it just creeps up on you.” I turned to my mother: “So? How was the kitchen tour?”

“Oh, Clark, it was fantastic. Just a team of absolute professionals in there.”

I sighed with relief. What could have been the single worst moment of my life had been reduced to just…another embarrassing adventure that the world at large wasn’t privy to. My mother sat there with a smug smile on her face–meanwhile, I was sitting across the table from her in a diaper while my ass stung from the spanking I had just received not that far from where she had been standing.

“You know,” my mother continued, seeming to stray into a new topic. “Clark here was very hard to potty train.”

I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Mother. What does that have to do with anything?”

“No, no,” Lyndie said, laughing. She looked very happy to be hearing this. “I’d love to hear more about that.”

“He was just a stubborn little boy,” my mother said, shrugging. “I was terrified that I’d have to delay him from going to preschool for a year because he’d still be having accidents.”

Lyndie’s smile was downright smarmy. “But you did it? You successfully potty trained him?”

My mother laughed. “It took a while. And I won’t tell you how many pairs of underwear we lost in that battle. But, so far as I know, it eventually took. Is that right, Clark? I have to assume you’re not pooping your pants at work.”

I couldn’t even bring myself to look at Lyndie. “Mother, can we please not talk about me, uhm, having accidents? I’m a grown man.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Lyndie said. “He poops his pants almost every day at work.”

My mother belted out another laugh as she looked back towards me. “She’s funny.”

Her brain would’ve exploded on the spot if she knew that Lyndie was telling the truth and not just trying to poke fun at me. And there was a part of me that almost wanted to see that.

I could just picture it. “Actually, Mother? She’s right. And, here, I’ll show you right now…”

I quickly brushed away the daydreams, afraid of getting too caught up in them.

And so brunch rolled on. We continued to chat–mostly small talk about inconsequential things. It seemed like both my mother and I were intentionally avoiding topics that came even close to being ‘deep.’ At first, I thought I preferred it this way. I liked keeping the meal relatively simple and drama-free. But the longer it stayed like this, the less welcomed the mood felt. All this build-up and anticipation for brunch, and we were just going to sit there and act as if everything was fine? Like we had a good, if boring, relationship?

I suspected my mother felt the same way. I could see it in her gaze when her eyes lingered on me a little too long. I could hear it in her tone.

Sometimes I was thankful that Lyndie was there as someone to keep the peace, though I sometimes wished I hadn’t brought her along–afraid it was getting in the way of a much uglier conversation that my mother and I needed to have. Too, I was a little disappointed that Lyndie might walk away from this experience thinking that I had overreacted about my mother–she wouldn’t have seen the woman that I often feared.

“We should really do this more often,” my mother said to me, dabbing her cloth napkin to her lips upon taking her last bite of food. “Wasn’t this nice?”

I sighed. Was I going to just nod my head and agree?

I chose to bite my proverbial tongue. “Perhaps we should.”

“It seems silly that it took us so long to reconnect, Clark. And it’d be nice if I didn’t have to be the one to initiate that conversation.”

Through gritted teeth: “Yeah…I suppose I should just reach out next time.”

“It seems like you’re doing well, Clark,” my mother said. She seemed surprised.

As tempting as it was to call that out, I let it be.

“Thank you.”

From our spot on the balcony, I could see Mommy at a table below us. She was sitting with Paolo Ferdinand, a rather impressive spread of food between them. I couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. I wasn’t so stupid as to believe that Mommy was mine and mine alone, though it still didn’t feel all that great to see her smiling in the company of another man.

My mother was saying something, and Lyndie was responding–I was almost entirely tuned out of that conversation as my eyes kept glancing towards Mommy’s table. I wondered if she could see me up here and if she had any idea what I might be thinking.

Did she know Paolo well? How did they meet? How long have they known each other? How good of a friend do you have to be with someone before you can have them run interference while you pull someone into their office for a spanking?

“...and I thought that maybe I’d take some time off before grad school, though it’s definitely on the horizon,” Lyndie was saying, doing her best to keep the conversation going while my consciousness was absent from the table.

I had been chewing on this little thought since Seattle, though it seemed kind of formless until I was at Mommy’s house last night. It was about how Mommy seemed to have put so much of her life on hold for the sake of her job. And also, probably, her ‘babies.’ Maybe she didn’t want actual children of her own. But I knew her, and I was beginning to think I knew her pretty well at that. I was seeing some sort of longing in her eyes. She needed something more than just enthusiastic wimps in diapers that she could boss around and humiliate–she needed a partner who was on the same page as her. Someone that was her equal. Hell, maybe even someone that was capable of putting Mommy in her place once in a while.

Was Paolo that man? I knew nothing about him, but I hoped not. I didn’t really like his vibe–whatever that meant.

So then who? It felt like I was assigning myself homework: finding Mommy a partner.

Or are you finding yourself a Daddy? The thought was so absurd that I laughed out loud.

“There’s nothing funny about furthering your education, Clark,” my mother said, shaking her head. “Have you put any thought into what you’re doing after you’ve graduated?”

I really stepped into that one.

“Oh, I don’t know. I mean, I have a pretty good job right now so it’s hard to think that I’d want to leave that anytime soon.”

My mother’s tongue clucked and she shook her head. “But you’re someone’s assistant, right?”

“Is that a bad thing?” I asked.

“You’re just an assistant. What’s the next step in that career path?”

Her question annoyed me, but mostly because it wasn’t a terrible one. “I guess I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”

My mother shook her head with disapproval. “See, Clark? This is why I worry about you. I feel like you’re always stuck in the present. Really, it’s not all that different from your difficulties with potty training. At some point, you have to be ready to move on to something better than diapers.”

It was as if my mother knew about the diapers. I was certain that she didn’t–if only because she wouldn’t hesitate to talk about that too. But just the reference was enough to make me feel like I was melting into a puddle of humiliated liquid. It certainly didn’t help that Lyndie was giggling behind her hand–doing her best to stifle an even bigger outburst.

I turned my chair a little–just enough to make it harder for me to glance down at Mommy. I didn’t need this distraction anymore. Especially not while my mother was using the d-word at my table.

“But what if Clark likes diapers?” Lyndie said. I wanted to slap her silly for that.

My mother laughed. “Well, you did say that he dirtied his pants all day at work, right?”

Lyndie chuckled as she glanced in my direction for a moment–all but actually winking at me.

“You’re right,” I said. “At some point you have to move on from, uh, diapers.” I said it only to appease my mother, but as the words came out of my mouth, they felt truer than I expected them to.

My mother was right–I probably did have a penchant for staying in the now. I created a comfort zone and then I didn’t budge from it until I absolutely had to. Not once in the time I had known Mommy had I considered the tale of how stubborn I was when being potty trained as a toddler. I wasn’t sure if I had just never heard that story before, or if I had, but blocked it from my memory. It made complete sense though. I had been comfortable in diapers, once upon a time. And, when I found myself back in them again, I found that comfort once more.

“See,” my mother said. “Sometimes he just needs–”

“But here’s the thing, Mom. Sometimes it’s okay to just stop and enjoy a moment. I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, and I know that I can’t, like, wear diapers for all of it. So if I want to take some time to enjoy diapers now, then maybe I’m going to.”

Lyndie was still laughing–maybe harder than she had been before.

My mother had a very puzzled look on her face. “Clark, we are still talking about your complacency, right? I’m starting to think we’re actually talking about diapers.”

It probably wasn’t very smart to use my secret shame as a metaphor, I realized. “R-right. My, uhm, complacency.”

“Well,” she said, a begrudging tone in her voice, “whether I agree or disagree, you seem happy. At the end of the day, that’s all I really wanted for you.”

That felt like a victory.

No, my mother didn’t know the whole story. She didn’t know that somewhere in this very restaurant, there was a woman I called ‘Mommy’ who spanked me and treated me like an infant. She didn’t know that Lyndie wasn’t my girlfriend, though she was often my babysitter. She didn’t know that when I said I wanted to enjoy diapers a little longer–I meant it very literally. But I stood my ground and convinced my mother that I was an adult who was doing the things I wanted to do, and that was all I had to do.

“Well,” Lyndie said, standing up. “I think it’s my turn to step away from the table for a moment. Just off to the restroom, but I’ll be back in a moment.”

And that just left me and my mother, alone at the table with each other for the first time.

She wasted no time. “Clark, I told you that I wanted to come up to talk to you.”

“I’m sorry?”

“She’s a nice young woman, but don’t think that I didn’t see through this little tactic.”

“Tactic? Wh-what tactic?”

“I wanted to talk about our relationship, Clark. Or, you know, the lack thereof. And you knew that I wouldn’t bring up those things if you brought a guest with you.”

I hadn’t actually considered that–though if I had, I would’ve liked that plan too. My reason for bringing Lyndie was to attempt to prove that I was an independent adult who didn’t need my mother to take care of me anymore.

“And if I’m wrong about this, feel free to get all huffy and tell me so,” she continued, “but I don’t even think you and Lyndie are actually dating.”

I sighed. “What makes you think that?”

“A mother knows everything. I’ve been watching the two of you the whole time. You don’t touch each other. You barely look at each other half the time. I’ve seen couples on the verge of divorce that interact more than the two of you.”

I had no counterargument for that. I could say she was wrong, but she already made her mind up–and I couldn’t spin a lie that was going to change it.

I just shrugged. A noncommittal ‘Well fine, if you think that’s true–what do you think that means?’

“Do you know what would have actually impressed me today?” she asked.

Oof. “No.”

“If you just met me someplace–anyplace–as yourself. And we just talked. Like a mother and a son.”

I sighed and spun the remnants of my last mimosa around in my champagne flute. This had never been about me being scared of my mother. It had been about me being afraid to be myself. Afraid that I’d have let my mother down.

“Just tell me now,” she said, glancing off to her side for a moment. “Quickly, before Lyndie gets back. And honestly. Are you doing well?”

I laughed. There really wasn’t a ‘quick’ answer to a question like that. But I searched my gut and found the answer: “I am. I’m doing really well. Sometimes I feel like I’m in over my head…but the highs have never been higher.”

“That’s all that really matters to me,” she said. “No further questions…”

I sighed in relief.

“...until next time. When I’m in town next, it’s going to be just you and me. And I’ll probably have a few more questions for you.”

“Yeah…fair enough,” I said, watching Lyndie as she strolled back towards the table.

Brunch came to an end and we stepped out from the restaurant–our bellies full and our heads a little buzzed from the champagne in our mimosas. I had no clue what the protocol was here. Was I supposed to invite my mother back to my place? Suggest that we go and find another activity? Truthfully, I had my fill of my mother for one day, so I would’ve rather avoided spending more time with her if I could help it.

Thankfully, she nipped that conversation in the bud. “Well, it’s been a wonderful time this morning, but I should probably get going.”

This was the part where I had to feign interest in her staying longer. “What? Already? Are you sure you don’t want to stay longer? You drove all this way and…”

“It was good seeing you, Clark. I hope we get to see each other again soon.” I could never be entirely sure with her, but I felt i knew her enough to know what she actually meant: “Today was stressful for you, I can tell. Here, have some space.”

I nodded and wrapped my arms around here. I couldn’t see the look on her face, but I could feel her surprise–this might have been the first time in our life together that I had initiated a hug with her.

“You’ll take good care of him, young lady?” my mother asked Lyndie, hugging her next.

“I promise.”

There were a few more hugs and an awkward wet kiss planted on my cheek. Then, my mother did something that I had forgotten she used to do–a signature-mom move from our childhood: a firm-but-encouraging pat to the bottom. Of course, my bottom was well-padded, and her hand struck the concealed diaper with a hollow thunk. I could see the look on her face, and I could tell that she wasn’t sure what to make of that.

Maybe, one day, she’d ask me about that. Hopefully, she would forget.

Then, she expertly hailed a cab and was taken away. That was it–it was over.

“Well?” Lyndie asked, a big grin on her face. “You survived.”

“Just barely.”

“Yeah, pissy pants and everything.”

I took a deep breath and shook my head. “Jesus, what’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing at all, Clarky,” she said, putting her arm around my shoulders.

“My mom probably thinks I’m crazy.”

“Maybe,” Lyndie said, shrugging. “But who cares?”

“Easy for you to say,” I said as we began to walk down the street together, her arm wrapped around my shoulder as I looped mine around her waist. “She’s not your family.”

“Oh, please,” she quickly retorted. “My family is full of weirdos.”

I laughed. “Really?”

“Well, sure. I’ve got a little brother who still wears diapers. He can get real stinky too.”

I blushed and laughed again. “Y-you think I’m your family?”

“There’s the family you’re born with, and the family you create for yourself, Clarky. I’m proud to have you as part of mine.”

“I love you, Lyndie.”

“I love you too, Clark.”

We walked another block before she guided me into a quiet alley, leading me behind a building into an empty patch of concrete.

“Wh-what are we doing here?”

“I need to check your diaper.”

“What? Now? But…”

“Clark. Did you, or did you not just pee your pants.”

“Wait, but…how did you…?”

She laughed to herself as she shook her head. “Your waddle always gets a little more pronounced when you’re carrying around some extra weight in your pants.”

I did nothing to stop her as she pulled the waistband of my pants open and lowered a practiced hand into them to feel my diaper. She nodded upon her hand’s discovery of the wet and mushy padding between my legs.

“Didn’t Mommy just put you into this diaper? When did this happen?”

“Like…right after my mother got into her cab.”

Lyndie laughed and shook her head. “C’mon. Let’s go back to your place. I’ll change your diaper for you.”

“You sure?”

“Quite. So if you’ve got anything else to do in your diaper before we get back, you might as well do it now.”

“A-are you sure? You might not like it…”

“You might be surprised,” she said, smiling as she walked me back to the street again. “If I’m being honest…I’ve kind of grown attached to, uhm, more maternal things as of late.”

“You’d be a good mommy,” I said.

Later, reflecting on the surreal morning from my bed, I found myself feeling better about my relationship with my mother. Maybe the best I had felt in a long time. It was perfect, but I could see a path for things to get better.

I decided to text her: “Thank you for coming this morning. I do hope we get together soon.”

I then realized that I still had her name saved in my phone as ‘Annette Leiland-Ashburn.’ So formal. It was as if she was a business associate, not my mother. I decided to edit the contact information to just ‘Mom.’ A small gesture, and one that only I would ever know about, but it felt like a step in the right direction.

A baby step, of course. Because that’s all I was capable of.