Mommy Opened the Wrong Box

I do payroll for a chain of garden centers, eleven stores across two counties, and I do it from a desk by the front window of my apartment, which sits on the second floor over a hair salon. It's quiet work. Twice a month it's not quiet at all, when forty seasonal staff all discover at once that they've been paid for the wrong number of hours, but the rest of the time it's me and a spreadsheet and the smell of hair dye drifting up through the floorboards. I'm thirty-six. I like numbers that come out even. I like knowing where everything is.

The salon belongs to Della. She also owns the building, and she lives in the other apartment on my floor, across a landing just wide enough for two doormats and a potted fern that she waters and I'm not allowed to touch. She's a tall, solid woman with silver hair cut sharp at her jaw and reading glasses she keeps pushed up on her head, and she always smells faintly of the almond oil she uses on her customers. She told me she was fifty-two on the day I signed my lease, when she caught me looking at her hair, and she said it like a challenge. She calls everyone sweetheart, including the man who reads the gas meter. She once came over at eleven at night because she'd heard me coughing through the wall and brought me a jar of honey and lemon and stood over me until I drank some.

The first winter I lived there, my hair got so long it curled over my collar, and she stopped me on the landing one evening and looked at it like it had personally offended her.

"Downstairs," she said. "Sunday morning. I'm closed, so nobody will see you cry."

I laughed. Then I went, because you don't say no to Della.

The salon on a Sunday was dim and still, with all the chairs turned the same way and the big mirrors full of gray light from the street. She sat me at the sink first and tipped my head back into the cool curve of the basin and washed my hair. I couldn't remember the last time somebody had washed my hair. Her fingers were strong and slow on my scalp, the water was exactly warm enough, and she hummed something under her breath while she worked. I closed my eyes, and something in my chest came loose that I hadn't known was tied.

When she sat me up and wrapped a towel around my shoulders, she looked at my face in the mirror for a second longer than she needed to.

"There," she said quietly. "That's better, isn't it?"

It was. I didn't know how to say so. She cut my hair short and neat, wouldn't take my money, and told me to come back in six weeks. I've gone back every six weeks since, and I'd started looking forward to it in a way I was careful not to think about too hard.

I liked her. I was a little afraid of her. Both of those things turned out to matter.

The packages came on Tuesdays. Mine and hers. She ordered her color and her foils from a supply company that shipped in plain brown boxes about the size of a microwave, and I ordered something else from a different company that also shipped in plain brown boxes about the size of a microwave. For two years, the delivery driver put each one on the right doormat. I never thought about it. That's the thing about luck; you don't notice it until it runs out.

On the second Tuesday in March, I heard her door open, then close, then open again. Then she knocked on mine.

She was standing on the landing with one of the plain brown boxes in her arms. It was open. The flaps were folded back, and I could see straight down into it from where I stood, and I could see the soft white plastic packaging inside, and the printed panel on the side of the top pack, with a picture of a thick white diaper covered in tiny blue stars.

"Owen," she said. "I opened your package."

I didn't say anything. I think I'd stopped breathing.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart. I truly am. I thought it was my foils. I had the tape cut before I read the label." She looked down into the box and back up at me, over the top of her glasses. Her face was very calm. "I've apologized. Now you're going to take this box, and tomorrow at ten you're going to come over and have coffee with me, so you stop looking at me like I've caught you robbing a bank."

I took the box. I closed the door. I sat on the floor of my kitchen with it in my lap for half an hour.

Here's what she'd caught me doing, for the record. When I was thirty, my girlfriend of five years moved out, and the apartment got very big and very quiet, and I started wearing diapers at night. It had been a private fantasy since my twenties, the kind you have and never touch, and that empty winter I finally touched it. I can't explain why it worked. It felt like being looked after when there was no one to look after me. I'd put one on and get into bed and press my hand against the front, and the thickness of it and the crinkle and the warmth made the world go small and soft and safe, and then, every time, without fail, I got hard. Six years later, I wore them every night and most weekends. Nobody knew. That was the whole point.

Now Della knew.

I went over at ten the next morning because I didn't have the courage not to.

Her apartment was the mirror image of mine and nothing like it, full of plants and books and a big soft sofa covered in a knitted blanket. She poured coffee into two heavy mugs and handed me one and sat in the armchair across from me with her legs crossed, and she let me sweat for a while. Then she said, "So. Tell me."

I don't know what I expected. Mockery, maybe, or worse, pity. What I got was a woman who listened to the whole thing, the girlfriend and the winter and the six years, with her chin on her hand, and didn't interrupt once. When I ran out of words, she asked one more question.

"Does it make you feel looked after? Or is there more to it than that?"

I stared into my coffee. "Both," I said. "It makes me feel safe. And it turns me on. That's the part I'd rather die than say out loud."

"You just said it out loud," she said. "And look. Nobody died."

I laughed, a short, startled laugh, and some of the tightness went out of my shoulders. She nodded slowly.

"You want to know what I thought, when I opened that box?" she said.

I didn't, at all, and I nodded anyway.

"I thought, that poor man. Doing that all by himself in the dark for who knows how long." She set her mug down. "I have always liked taking care of people, Owen. It's half of why I do hair. People sit in my chair and let me wash their hair and they tell me things they don't tell anyone. Men especially. The ones who need it the most never ask for it. They just come in and sit very still and let me touch their heads and look like they might cry." She tilted her head. "You look like that right now."

I put my mug down because my hands weren't steady.

"I'm not going to tell you what to do," she said. "I'm going to tell you that my door is right across the landing. If one night you'd like somebody else to put one on you, instead of doing it alone, you can knock. Nobody will ever hear about it from me. And if you never knock, that's all right too, and we'll keep watering the fern and saying good morning."

I didn't knock for three nights. I lay in bed in my diaper and stared at the ceiling and thought about the knitted blanket and the almond oil and the words somebody else to put one on you, and I got so hard thinking about it that I couldn't sleep.

On the fourth night, at nine o'clock, I put on a diaper with the blue stars, pulled a pair of gray sweatpants over it, and walked across the landing before I could talk myself out of it. I stood there with my fist raised for a long time. Then I knocked.

She opened the door in a long cotton robe, with her glasses on her head, and looked at me. She looked down at the front of my sweatpants, where the shape of the diaper was perfectly obvious, and back up at my face. And her expression went soft in a way I'd never seen.

"Oh, sweetheart," she said. "Come here."

She took my hand and led me through her apartment to her bedroom, which was all creamy white and smelled like her, and sat me down on the edge of the big bed. She stood in front of me and put her hands on either side of my face, the way I imagined she held her customers' heads at the sink.

"What would you like to call me?" she asked.

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

"How about Mommy?" she said, very gently. "Say it once and see how it feels. If it's wrong, we'll find something else."

It took me a moment. "Mommy," I said, and my voice cracked in half on it, and something huge and warm turned over in my chest.

"There," she said, and she kissed my forehead. "That's my good boy. Lie back."

I lay back on her bed. She tugged my sweatpants down and off and folded them over a chair, and then she stood looking down at me in my starred diaper and my T-shirt, and I had never been so exposed in my life. She sat beside me on the bed and laid her palm on the front of the diaper, and pressed, and found my cock straining hard against the padding, and she smiled.

"My, my," she said. "Mommy's been gone two minutes and look at you."

She rubbed me through the diaper, slow, firm strokes with the flat of her hand, and the crinkle filled the quiet room. I groaned. My hips pushed up into her palm on their own.

"Are you dry?"

"Yes, Mommy."

"Well, we can't have that." She leaned over and opened the drawer of her nightstand and took out a wand vibrator, a big one with a cord, and plugged it into the wall behind the bed. It hummed to life in her hand. She looked at me over the top of it. "I bought this for myself years ago, sweetheart. I never imagined it would come in so handy."

She pressed it to the front of my diaper, right over the head of my cock, and the buzz went through the padding and through me like a current. I shouted. She held it there and watched my face, steady as a surgeon.

"You're going to wet for Mommy," she said. "And you're not going to come. Not until I say."

I tried. God, I tried. The wand hummed and my cock throbbed against the padding and my whole body clenched, and I was right at the edge of coming and she lifted it away, just in time, and said, "No." Then she pressed it back. I was gasping. She did it again. And somewhere in the middle of the third time, with my body wound so tight I was shaking, everything let go at once, and I wet.

It flooded out of me, hot and fast, filling the diaper and spreading warm under my ass and up around my cock, and she kept the wand pressed there through it. The heat and the buzzing together were so much I was half crying. She watched the padding swell and turn heavy in her hand, and she made a soft, approving sound.

"Good boy," she said. "Good, good boy. Look at you. Look how much you needed that."

She switched the wand off and set it aside. She opened the drawer again and took out a pack of wipes, which meant she'd bought them, which meant she'd been planning for the night I knocked, and that thought almost undid me. She tore the tapes of my diaper open one by one. She peeled the soaked front down. My cock sprang up out of the wet padding, red and slick and so hard it hurt, and she looked at it like it was hers.

She cleaned me with slow, thorough strokes, the cool wipes over my belly and my balls and up the length of my cock, and I jerked under every pass. She slid the wet diaper out from under me and folded it away. And then she stood up and untied her robe.

She was naked underneath. Full, heavy breasts with dark nipples, a soft belly, wide hips, a neat triangle of silver hair between her thighs. She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen and I told her so, and she laughed, low and pleased.

"Sweet talker," she said. "Mommy has one more present for you."

She took something small and silver out of the drawer. It was a pair of nipple clamps on a fine chain. She pushed my T-shirt up under my arms, rolled my left nipple between her finger and thumb until it was hard, and closed the first clamp on it. I arched at the bite of it. She did the right one. Then she hooked one finger through the chain and tugged, just a little, and a sharp sweet line of feeling ran from my chest straight down to my cock.

"Now," she said, climbing onto the bed. "Mommy takes care of you. And you're going to take care of Mommy."

She straddled my face. She lowered herself onto my mouth, slow, her thighs on either side of my head, and she was already wet, and she tasted like salt and almond oil and her. I licked her the way I'd fantasized about for six years, flat and slow and then circling her clit, and she sighed and rocked against my tongue and held the chain of the clamps in one hand like a set of reins. Every time I did something she liked, she tugged. Every time she tugged, I moaned into her pussy, and she rode my mouth harder.

"That's it, sweetheart. Right there. Don't you stop."

I didn't stop. I sucked her clit between my lips and she grabbed the headboard and came on my face with a long, deep groan, grinding down, her thighs shaking around my ears.

Then she slid down my body, slow, and reached between us, and took hold of my cock.

"You've been very good," she said, looking down at me. "So Mommy's going to let you inside. But you don't come until Mommy says. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Mommy."

She sank down onto me. She was so wet and so hot, and she took me all the way inside her in one long slide and then sat there, fully seated, with her hands spread on my chest and my cock buried in her, and looked at me.

Then she rode me.

She took her time, the way she did everything. Slow, deep rolls of her hips. Every so often she'd tug the chain, and my whole body would jolt, and she'd smile and squeeze around me. I held her hips. I watched her breasts sway. I begged, over and over, please, Mommy, please, because I was so close, and she just shook her head and kept going.

"Not yet. You can hold it for Mommy."

She reached down and rubbed her own clit while she rode me, fast little circles, and her breath started coming short, and I felt her start to tighten around me. She came again, gasping, clamping down on my cock so hard I saw stars, and in the middle of it she reached up and released both of the nipple clamps at once.

The blood rushing back stung like fire. I shouted.

"Now," she said. "Come for Mommy. Now."

I came so hard my back left the bed. I pumped up into her, again and again, and she held me down with her hands on my chest and rode me through every pulse of it, murmuring good boy, good boy, that's it, give it all to Mommy, until I was empty and trembling and couldn't feel my own legs.

She stayed there a while, with me softening inside her, stroking my sore nipples with the tips of her fingers.

Then she took care of me. She cleaned me up with warm wipes. She brought a fresh diaper out of her own closet, one with the blue stars, which meant she'd ordered a pack of my brand, and I didn't even have it in me to be embarrassed anymore. She slid it under my hips and taped it on snug and smoothed her palm over the front. She lay down next to me, still naked, and pulled my head onto her breast, and pulled the soft white duvet over both of us.

For a long time neither of us said anything. Her heartbeat was slow and steady under my ear, and her fingers moved through my hair the way they did at the sink downstairs, and the new diaper crinkled softly whenever I shifted, and I felt like I'd been carrying something heavy up a long flight of stairs for six years and had finally been allowed to put it down.

"You're very quiet," she said.

"I'm happy," I said, and was surprised to find out it was true.

"Good." She kissed the top of my head. "That's the whole idea, sweetheart."

"Della," I said, after a while.

"Mommy," she corrected me, mildly.

"Mommy. What do I do about the deliveries?"

She laughed into my hair. I felt it more than heard it.

"Next Tuesday," she said, "you change your shipping address to my door. And you leave it that way."