✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

72. My Week's Highlights

Here's a bonus chapter for Bill. I already posted one of another story, because I didn't see the message on Patreon in time; so this is a bonus bonus. One extra :) I hope you enjoy it, and thank you again for your support.

Everything I tried was a failure. I had half a dozen ideas of who might be the mystery little I had introduced Ffrances to, but I couldn't figure it out. And Ffrances wouldn't help; her concern for someone else's privacy outweighed even her own comfort. I tried asking around discreetly, and searching for every hidden clue I could think of; but every possibility I considered turned out to be a dead end.

I knew there was time to investigate more, but it would be pretty tight. We were planning on having the party as soon as Tess got back after Christmas, which meant there was almost no time left to convince another little that we were serious, even once I knew who she was. I just had to keep on trying. And when we got a few minutes together, we were still refining some of the details of how this session was going to work. It was still about giving the little a Christmas gift, but a lot of other things were changing after Tess's demands. I still wanted to believe that we would find a way around forcing Ffrances to join in the scene, but the other things I would probably have to live with, and that meant I needed to understand how it was going to work so that I could find the best way to use it to further encourage her into her headspace.

The big problem this time was that I wouldn't be able to trigger Tess. I couldn't believe that when Ffrances told me, but now I was coming to understand. Tess still didn't quite trust me, and she wanted to take control out of my hands. She would feel safer regressing, perhaps, if she was the one making the choices. So now, she would have to kick off her regression by telling us how old she was. Once she said that, I was free to suggest how she should feel, and how she should act, but she would have to say the trigger phrase herself to make it happen.

"I'm that little," Ffrances had said with a giggle.

"You don't have to be. We can find –"

"No, I mean as the trigger phrase. You tell Tess how a kid of her current age would behave, and she says 'Yes, I'm that little!' to make it happen. If it's something that's completely appropriate for the age she chose, and something that she's excited or curious about experiencing, it will be natural to say it without feeling embarrassed. But it still won't affect her until she actually makes that choice. The power's always in her hands."

Inodded, and thought about it. I could already see how I could use that; I'd seen more than Ffrances had how easy it was for Tess to sink into a real little headspace. Like when I'd given her a pacifier the first time, she hadn't even thought to take it out. If she was feeling like that again, she could easily be talked into things she might not otherwise have considered. And because of the permissive nature of the suggestions, it would seem like her own idea. Making it easier to accept those things in future. I didn't know how well that would work, but I could think about it more as the week passed.

One thing that I was less enthusiastic about was the second change Ffrances made to that trigger. She was still talking as if she would be little alongside Tess, which I assumed meant she would play along as if she had the same trigger. But no; Ffrances said she would be recording a hypnotic induction for herself, and then listening to it in the car. So she didn't have any power over Tess that she might be tempted to abuse, and so that the little one could clearly see that everything was fair. I understood why that made sense, but it didn't mean I had to like it. Especially when she told me how she planned to make the triggers work: I could suggest things that a child might do or feel at a certain age, and that was good. But picking their ages in the first place, as well as deciding whether to turn those ideas into triggers, would be entirely in Tess's hands. For both of them. She would be able to agree that she was that little, or say that Ffrances was, or that they both were.