Page 37 of A Little Discovery

Lucky startles at the judge’s words and I watch life start to bleed back into his eyes. “You know Gramps, too?” His voice is barely audible, but the pain in it is clear as day.

Judge Roberts hums an affirmation before continuing, “I’ve known Joe for going on forty years now. For the last twenty, you are all he wants to talk about. I was hoping to meet you much sooner than this, maybe bring our families together, but I seem to have missed that chance.”

I choke on my drink. He what now?

“The only reason I wanted a closer inspection on that divorce of yours was the fact that I couldn’t reconcile the man on paper with the man I’d been hearing about for the last twenty years. Now that Spencer here has finished his investigation, everything should be set to rights soon.”

Lucky turns from the older gentleman to look up at me, clearly proud of me. I plan on getting that look from him as much as humanly possible from this point forward. The judge chuckles before saying his farewell and heading back to the woman I can only assume is his wife. When he sits, he whispers in her ear. She leans to look past him to wave at us, to which Lucky gives a shy wave in response.

“He seems much nicer than he did in the courtroom,” he mumbles. “I was so scared.”

CHAPTER 25

LUCKY

It takes a few seconds for me to realize what I just said. When it registers to my brain, I slap my hands over my mouth. I’m so stupid! I had a plan where I would get Spencer alone and I would explain and ask him to be my Daddy. When he says yes, we would play… or get one of the private rooms Eli told me about and he can take my virginity. Since I know for certain now that Sabrina never touched me, I want Spencer to have that special part of me... even if I am asexual, I can still do it for someone I love, right?

Spencer looks taken aback by my actions. Did he not hear me? Is he going to take me home? I don’t want to leave yet. I have plans…

“Relax, little one,” he tells me, pulling my hands down and holding them in his own. “Let’s go get a room where we can have some privacy and we can have a talk before our tour.”

I nod and shuffle along behind him as he leads me off into another hallway from the ones where the others disappeared. This one has rooms up and down each side. Painted on the door to each room is a picture or graphic depicting the theme of that room. We pass one having to do with doctors, a canopy bed, a bathtub, and a toilet before Spencer takes us into a room with a desk on the door. When he locks the door, I notice a light goes off out in the hallway.

“If the light above the door if off, it means the room is occupied. If it is on, it means free to enter,” he explains while I’m still staring at the door from our side. “After an hour or so of the light being off, the front desk will call to the room for a safety check. They have a master key and can open all of the doors in case of an emergency.”

“How do they know if it’s been over an hour?” I ask. “Do they watch cameras or something?”

Spencer chuckles as he leads me to the loveseat in the room. I notice the room we are in is decorated to look like an office. The placard on the desk says CEO, but I’ve been in my father’s office before. I can’t think of a place less sexy than that.

“Can we get a different room? My father isn’t sexy,” I blurt out before he has a chance to answer my previous question. I mumble an apology when he huffs at me.

“Don’t be sorry, Lucky-boy. I’m not mad,” he tells me. “To answer your first question, Theo or one of the other bouncers does a sweep of the entire club once an hour, so if the light is off when they do their first sweep and it’s still off on the next one, the room gets a call.

“Regarding the second question… We are in this room for privacy to talk. Not that I don’t find you ridiculously sexy, because I definitely do, but I don’t want to put pressure on you.”

“You aren’t putting pressure on me,” I tell him before he can speak again and I lose my nerve again. “I’ve been trying to figure out a way to ask you to be my Daddy for a while now, but I got scared. What if you really don’t like me? What if you are only nice to me out of guilt? Or even worse, you’re like this with all littles and I’m not special to you?”

I feel my panic rising as all the reasons why Spencer should turn me down start spewing from my mouth.

Arms wrap around me and tug me over into his lap. “Shh, little one,” he murmurs while I try to get my breathing back under control. “It’s alright. I’m here.”

“There is a reason I won’t be your Daddy yet, but it isn’t any of those,” he tells me, brushing his thumb across my cheeks to wipe away the tears. “Something happened the night you had your accident, and I can’t in good conscience agree to be your Daddy when you don’t trust me fully.”

I sit up and shake my head so hard I almost fall off his lap. When he pulls me close again, I don’t stop myself from telling him the truth this time.

“But Idotrust you. I remember everything,” I tell him and feel him still beneath me. I can’t bring myself to look at his face while I spill the whole story. I start with the night of the Theta party and how safe he made me feel. I tell him about the fact that I had finally gotten up the nerve to talk to him but was ambushed by Sabrina and my mother on the way to the Theta house that day.

I tell him about my father’s total abandonment of me with the exception of making sure Sabrina couldn’t kill me to get my money. I tell him about the rushed wedding and subsequent withdrawal from school at my mother’s insistence. My time at Carlisle Construction and the regular gaslighting makes him tense even more, but that is only part of it.

I recount how Sabrina treated me every day and how I found out about her and James, with them laughing about me being clueless. I was never clueless regarding their affair. I only thoughtbetter him than me. I didn’t want to have sex with my wife. I was already disgusted that I had already supposedly doneit once.

My explanation about how the motel excursions came about finally thaws him a bit and he huffs a single laugh, but I’ll take it. I was forced into a detour one day on the way home from work thanks to a water main break and saw the sign out front saying they offered the streaming channels for free. I was lured in by the cartoons, but ultimately ended up finding my freedom thanks to that random happenstance.

Spencer is still tense, but he still holds me while I tell him about the time I forgot, leading up to my fall in the woods. When I finish, I bury my face in his chest.

“I know I shouldn’t have run,” I mumble. “But I didn’t have a chance to really think about it and I didn’t know any of you. Then the article saying you were her friend… it was too much.”

He plants a kiss on the top of my head and holds me tighter.

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