‘She needs the toilet,’ Conor said. ‘It’s obvious. Why don’t you head off, Tam-Tam?’
‘Don’t wanna.’ Her face was fixed in a rictus smile. Finn remembered this expression — she pulled it whenever she was too embarrassed to do something.
‘It’s OK, little one,’ Finn said, making his voice as soft as he could. ‘We’re not going anywhere. You can take a minute for the bathroom.’
‘No, I mean, I don’t want to. I’m… scared of the toilets in this place.’
‘In the bar?’ Finn was shocked.
‘In Liberty. They’re like… not good.’
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘Nothing, it’s just… there was a bug in my toilet. And then I ran to another house, and the toilet was all… dry.’
‘No water?’ Conor asked.
‘No. It was just a random house next to mine. It was scary in there.’
‘So where have you been going?’
‘Ummm,’ she said. ‘Just a place.’
‘You know, if we were your Daddies,’ Finn said, ‘using the bathroom would be one of our rules. We’d make sure your bathroom was safe, and then we’d insist you use it, the moment you needed to.’
‘Would that be the only rule?’ she asked, still looking uncomfortable.
Finn looked at Tammy for a while. She was acting so different right now to the way she’d been at the surgery, in her role as Dr. Southey. But that was a good sign. Slipping into Little Space around him and Conor meant that she was comfortable around them. She could be herself.
‘Come with me,’ Finn said. He used a sterner tone of voice, because he somehowknewthat Tammy needed it. She needed to know that disobeying him wasn’t an option.
The toilets in The Den were spotless, of course. It’s crucial for Littles to feel safe and secure in the bathroom.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘if there’s any problems with your place, I’d like to hear about them. We don’t want you to ever feel unsafe or uncomfortable.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, quietly.
‘Now, go ahead and use the bathroom, and we’ll be waiting for you back in the pub.’
‘Um,’ she said, quietly, ‘could you wait outside the door for me?’
‘Course I can,’ he said. He felt a warm glow in his body — the happiness of being needed. It was the one thing a Daddy wanted more than anything else.
CHAPTER 7
Why was this happening?
Tammy had been sitting on the toilet for ten minutes. Her bladder was completely full. So full it was starting to hurt her. She shifted from buttock to buttock, urging her body to do what she wanted it to do.
Tammy’s long history with bathroom trouble started shortly after the brothers left Connecticut. She remembered the first time she encountered a problem.
Her dad had just dropped her off at her college dorm-room. She’d been excited — happy, even — to see the back of him. It had been a long trip, and she’d been bursting for a pee.
But when she got into the public bathroom, locked herself in a private cubicle, and sat on the cold rim of that toilet, it just hadn’t happened. In the end, she’d had to wait a full hour before she’d finally managed to go.
For a while, she’d worried that she had a medical condition. She asked her father about it — which had been embarrassing, to say the least — but lots of tests and incorrect water infection diagnoses had led to nothing.
Just stress.