Bailey, the Family Pet

He slipped in next to her.

Cozying next to him, she ran her fingers through the body hair on his stomach. She wrapped her fist around his cock, put her knee over his thigh.

This is how they spent the night.

Warren the master.

Bailey the pet.

EPILOGUE

Ten years later, Warren died in his sleep. He left this world peacefully.

He never learned what happened in those first few nights after Bailey returned home from her night of terror, but those nights were the ones that changed everything for her. She'd made a decision during the long car ride home, but knew she couldn't follow through on it alone. So she wrote a note. Three words. She folded her note and slipped it to Evelyn.

"You wrote this?" Evelyn asked.

Bailey looked at the floor. It wasn't always easy to predict what Evelyn would do. Meeting Evelyn's eyes, Bailey nodded.

Evelyn put the note in her purse and snapped it shut. Later that afternoon, she came for Bailey and put her in the car. Front seat. Evelyn snapped Bailey's seatbelt into place. They drove to a secluded beach. Evelyn took Bailey's note from her purse. She read it out loud.

NO MORE HORMONES.

Evelyn had brought with her a blank notebook and a pack of Pall Malls. She smoked and Bailey wrote.

Bailey took a deep breath. She liked walking nude. She liked being bathed, primped and feted. She enjoyed shitting in the park and peeing wherever she felt inspired to go. The kibble, she wrote, was excellent.

On the other hand, the hormones prevented her from feeling all her feelings. The absence of guilt had seemed like a blessing in the aftermath of her mother's accident. But she could see now, she wrote, that it wasn't a viable long term solution.

Bailey had tears in her eyes.

She intended to take her father's advice. She wanted to let it go. But to do it, she needed access to a full range of emotion. Evelyn blew smoke into the air. "Warren will be crushed," she said.

Bailey's eyes went wide. Scribbling furiously on the pad, she shoved it into Evelyn's hands.

BAILEY WILLIAMS FAMILY PET!

Evelyn grinned.

It was a little perverse. Bailey wanted to continue as the Williams' pet, but stop taking the pet hormone. Or maybe it wasn't as much perverse as it was practical. She wanted to let go of the guilt, but hold on to the love.

Evelyn warned that returning to the human side of the equation required more of a commitment than becoming a pet. It was untested. It involved a course of steroids that had to be taken a particular way.

Bailey narrowed her eyes.

The steroid only existed as a suppository.

Bailey rolled her eyes. Sometimes Evelyn was so fucking predictable.

Evelyn held up her hands, palm out, an innocent expression on her face. She pulled the first dose from her purse. It was the size and shape of a dog treat. She grinned perversely, twirling her finger in the air. Bailey twisted around in the seat, raising her ass.

Her face felt hot.

The cold grease on her asshole made her grit her teeth. Soon Evelyn had the grease warmed up and Bailey's ass well-oiled. Both women worked together to get the medicine where it needed to go. Bailey made soft grunts. Evelyn cooed encouragements and praise. It took the better part of twenty minutes. The ride home was arduous for poor Bailey with her treatment shoved up her ass, but she knew in her heart she was doing the right thing.

Her speech ability didn't return for almost six months.

By the time she possessed the faculty of language, she was three months pregnant with Warren's child. It seemed better to Bailey that her transition back to human was kept a secret from everyone, including Warren. Evelyn wholeheartedly agreed. Warren could be so old fashioned, so stodgy. Bailey refrained from speaking, except to occasionally frighten bullies or fresh constructions workers. And even then she only said a word or two. It never failed to terrify those who weren't expecting it.

Warren gave Bailey three children, all girls.

Dot, Pepper, and Blondie.

They raised the girls nude, allowing them to pee in the backyard and eat kibble and milk from big silver bowls. When the children grew old enough to wonder why they were naked, Evelyn (Aunt Evie) told them they were hippies.

Uncle Brian said they were wood nymphs.

The girls shrieked and howled and raced around the grounds in an indomitable pack. Their teachers came to the house, and all the girls did good in school, but occasionally they made little cigars in the pool. Warren scooped those out with a long pole net.

It was many years before any of those girls would feel any shame, and they were each raised to believe they could be whatever they wanted, whether hippie, or wood nymph, or something that required more clothes.

And Warren?

Bailey grew to love him, in her own way.

He could be a strict disciplinarian, but he had a kind heart. He was loyal and true. Bailey liked how he never forgot to bring a few little black plastic bags stuffed in his pockets for their walks. He would stoop to collect her waste, his back ramrod stiff like an Olympic athlete. He would hold the edges of the bag taut in his fingers and then swing it around to make a seal. If Bailey were in a perverse mood, she would drag him about the park, avoiding all the trash receptacles, trying to see how long she could get him to tote her poop in his hand.

Never once did Warren hide a full bag of Bailey's trash somewhere in the bushes, or over near the playground equipment.

For Warren's funeral, Bailey wore a plain silk wrap, flats, and dark sun glasses. No one recognized her with clothes on. Her story was that she was a distant relative who'd just come in from the wild. From that point forward, she wore clothes outside and slept in a bed at night. Her meals were served to her on china.

Warren left Bailey his entire fortune, which was a remarkable amount, but not nearly as impressive as the amount Evelyn had set aside for herself, with her long and storied career in biotech.

And Evelyn?

Six months after Warren passed away, Evelyn was diagnosed with early onset of Alzheimer's. She took the news with great aplomb. Bailey remained at the Williams' house to care for Evelyn. The disease moved quickly and soon she required in-patient care.

Bailey had an intuition that Evelyn had been shamed a lot as a child and Bailey determined she would not allow Evelyn to be shamed for the remainder of her life. Bailey retained her keen sense of smell and used it to evaluate Evelyn's care givers, finding a facility where most of the staff members smelt like Anna. These were good people who took great pride in their ability to serve, to provide for another's needs. In Evelyn's last days at the house, Bailey washed and groomed Evelyn, prepared her meals and fed her.

Bailey doted on Evelyn like a daughter.

And Brian?

In the early days during her transition back to human, but before she could speak, and when it was still far from certain she would be capable of shrugging off the hormones, Bailey knew she was on the right track because of Brian. He would whistle her into his room in the still of the morning, and Bailey would feel some nagging thing deep in her chest and she allowed that nagging thing to hold her back.

It wasn't easy.

Bailey liked Brian. He was wild and unpredictable and those were the very qualities she found so irresistible in Morris. Instead of answering Brian's call, she listened to her heart, padding away to the other side of the house, sometimes even using her thumbs to open the back door, hurling her naked body into the cold water of the pool.

If she didn't want to answer his call, Bailey did want connection with him.

She liked to sit with him in the great room by the fire, craftily putting her head under his hand so that he would stroke her. She loved it when he tickled her under her chin or between her breasts, or when he wanted to throw Frisbees in the backyard or race her the length of the pool.

Brian drank. A lot.

He regularly got picked up by the local authorities for driving intoxicated. Just when it looked as if he would spin out of control, pitching himself over a vast dark cliff, he fell in love with an Israeli woman he found living on an olive farm in Spain. Bailey was suspicious of this loud, obnoxious woman at first, but Brian moved onto her farm and started a family. He occasionally visited Bailey, bringing his whole earthy, raucous family with him.

Bailey whistled her girls up from the backyard, but the girls didn't like their cousins much either. Brian seemed happy, though. The cacophony and tremor of his family seemed to have forced him to take a steadier approach to life. He kept his hands more firmly on the wheel. He named his oldest daughter Anvil and taught her jujitsu and hand-to-hand combat.

She gave Dot more than one bloody nose.

And as for Morris . . .

Bailey came across some work papers as she sorted through Evelyn's things. Humans given rodent hormones showed extraordinarily long life spans and were notoriously difficult to destroy. After the night of terror, Morris ended up on a farm somewhere in Iowa, where he spent the next ten years involved with various research projects doing ground breaking work for battered women and sexually abused children. His role was to take lots of nasty chemical injections, wander through byzantine mazes, and eat lots and lots of feces. After Evelyn moved off the project, the documentation became spotty.

And Bailey?

She remained at the Williams' house where she had many adventures with Dot, Pepper and Blondie. She made regular visits to Evelyn and kept careful eye on her caregivers. Anna moved all of her family into the big house, and Bailey was surrounded by the wonderful scents of Anna's clan as well as the scent of all their good cooking, and the vegetable and fruit gardens they had installed throughout the grounds.

On moonlit summer nights, Bailey occasionally treated herself to long walks in the nearby park without any clothes. Reticent for the rest of her life, Bailey used words to say things that were thoughtful and deliberate.