Page 21 of Tizzy's Little Thanksgiving

Tizzy blinked hard. “At everything!” she exclaimed. “At being your Little girl, at taking a punishment well, at not making a fool of myself, at not crying and getting snot all over your clothes…” She trailed off, knowing there were a lot more things that should be on that list.

Eddie’s slow blink mirrored her earlier one as he stared at her blankly. He cocked his head to one side and then the other, gnawed on his bottom lip and then slowly nodded. “Oh, I see what’s happening here. You did your Tizzy thing, didn’t you?”

“What?” Teresa shrieked, offended and confused by his succinct summary. “No! that’s not what ha—”

“Isn’t it?” Eddie stood and took a step forward, rapidly closing the space between them until the air in the room seemed to evaporate.

Teresa took a deep breath. Had Eddie always been so imposing or had that happened naturally the second she started calling him Daddy?

“If that’s not what happened,” Eddie continued, his tone haughty and challenging, “why don’t you tell me what did happen?”

Teresa nodded. She could do that. She’d just explain what she’d been thinking and then Eddie would have to admit he was wrong… right?

“Well, see, you were spanking me and it really, really hurt, like a lot more than I thought it would, and then you started lecturing and you kept saying long hard bare-bottom spanking, but I still had my panties on, and I thought, I won’t be able to handle it if he takes them off, and then I thought, but what if he doesn’t? What if he decides not to because he hadn’t realized what a giant wuss I was gonna be? And then I thought that if you didn’t, I probably wouldn’t respect you afterward because you promised this was more than sex and a couple ass smacks, but if you said something like that and then didn’t follow through, then you’d be just like all the fake daddies in my past, but then you did, and I was relieved for a minute, but then I was worried I wouldn’t be able to take it, and what if I cried and—” She broke off suddenly and looked at him horrified. “Oh god, I was doing it again, wasn’t I?”

As Eddie nodded, she could tell he was trying not to smirk.

Tizzy buried her face in her hands and groaned, mortified. “God, what is wrong with me? Why am I like this?”

Eddie walked closer, grabbing her hands and peeling them away from her face, holding them in his.

Before he could say a word, she wailed, “And I used my safeword like a ninny! God, what an idiot I am!”

“Stop,” Eddie commanded sharply. “Look at me.”

She forced herself to meet his gaze and hold it, staring deep into eyes the color of bluebonnets. To her astonishment, she saw no judgment there, just a patient understanding, a twinkle of amusement and what she thought might be pride. But how could that possibly be? How could anyone be proud when she’d not managed to get through their very first exchange as Little and Daddy?

“You absolutely should have used your safeword,” Eddie stated. “You did exactly the right thing.”

“I did?”

“Yes, little one.” Eddie held her hands tightly. “You wouldn’t have gotten anything out of it the way your brain was spinning and then what’s the point?”

“I’ll never be able to stop spinning! It’s who I am! It’s what I do!” Tizzy shook her head. “I guess I’m not really a Little after all. Whoever heard of a Little who can’t take a spanking? See, I was right: Ididfail! Iama failure.”

“Stop.” Still holding her hands, Eddie gave them a little shake. “First of all, even I know there’s no one right way to be a Little, and second of all young lady, we don’t use that word.”

“What word?” Tizzy cried, confused, racking her brain.

“The F word.”

“What!” Tizzy was indignant. She was enough of a screw-up as it was, she didn’t need Eddie adding things she hadn’t even done to the list of ways she was failing. She pulled her hands free to press her fists against her hips and stomped her foot. “I didn’t curse!”

“Failure,” Eddie clarified. “We do not usethatF word.”

“Oh.” Tizzy could actually feel the defiance seeping from her, like air leaking from a tire, deflating her ire. “Umm…” she began, only to stop and swallow hard. She used that F-word a lot. With a sigh, she looked up at him again. “That might be a problem,” she admitted.

Eddie grinned and nodded. “I thought that might be the case.” Recapturing her hands, he gave them a squeeze. “Is there any time you don’t feel like that? Any time your brain isn’t catapulting toward disaster at a million miles a minute?”

“At work,” Tizzy answered without hesitation. “In the ER, and especially the OR.”

Chapter 8

Eddie

She wasthe least stressed in the most high-stress situations, Eddie thought to himself, closing his eyes. Somehow it just made sense and, in truth, it was a dichotomy that was so typically Tizzy.

Luckily, he was a surgeon himself, so he could work with that.

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