All Chapters of Daddy's Forbidden Little Pet: Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

352 Chapters

Part 2: My Ex’s Father

Thursday arrived with the heavy, humid air that always preceded a storm.I spent most of the day telling myself the dinner was only dinner — a civil gesture from a man who had once been something like family and was now simply being decent.By the time I stood in front of my closet the argument had thinned to almost nothing. I chose a dress the color of dark wine, soft fabric, clean lines. Nothing that could be called trying. Everything that could be called deliberate.Victor opened the door at seven exactly. He had changed into a charcoal shirt with the sleeves rolled once. The house smelled of garlic, rosemary, and red wine already opened.“You came,” he said.“I said I would.”He stepped aside. I walked in. The door closed with the same soft finality I remembered from the first visit. This time we did not stop in the kitchen.He led me through to the dining room, where the table had been set for two with the kind of care that made the absence of other people feel intentional.“Sit,

Part 3: My Ex’s Father

The second kiss was slower only because Victor made it so.He pulled back just far enough to look at me, eyes dark in the low light, rain still hammering the windows behind him.Whatever internal vote he had taken during dinner had finished. The careful distance he had maintained for years was no longer present in his hands or his mouth.“Bedroom,” he said quietly. “Not the sofa. Not the first time.”I nodded once.He stood and offered his hand. I took it. The house felt larger as we moved through it — the hallway, the stairs, the closed doors that had once belonged to a family structure I was no longer part of.Victor’s room was at the end of the upper corridor. He pushed the door open and let me walk in first.It was exactly as composed as the rest of the house: dark wood, white bedding, a single lamp already lit on the far table. No photographs of Julian visible.I registered the absence without comment. Victor closed the door. The soft click of the latch sounded louder than the ra

Part 4: My Ex’s Father

He called two days later, mid-afternoon, while I was standing in my mother’s kitchen staring at a grocery list I had no intention of following.“Are you free this evening?”No greeting. No unnecessary softness. Just the question and the low, measured voice that still made the air in the room feel tighter.“Yes.”“Come at seven. Use the side gate. The front of the house is more visible from the street.”He hung up without waiting for confirmation. I stood with the phone still against my ear for a moment longer than necessary, then set it down and went to change.The side gate opened soundlessly. The path along the side of the house was narrow and shaded by the same trees that had always made the backyard feel private. Victor was waiting at the kitchen door.He stepped aside to let me in, closed it, and locked it with a deliberateness that made the ordinary gesture feel like the drawing of a curtain.We did not speak at first. He walked me backward until my hips met the edge of the coun

Part 5: My Ex’s Father

The three weeks compressed into a series of locked doors and deleted messages.We met when we could — late afternoons when the street was empty, one long evening when Victor’s oldest colleague took him to dinner and he left the side gate unlatched for me instead. Each time felt more deliberate than the last.The knowledge of Julian’s approaching visit sat between us like a third presence in the bed. We did not speak about it often.When we did, the conversation was practical, almost cold: which nights the house would be full, which hours might still be usable, how little noise the old floorboards would forgive.On the Thursday before Julian was due to arrive, Victor texted a single line.'Come now. He lands tomorrow night.' I cut through the side gate at 4:10. The house was quiet and dim. Victor met me in the kitchen, took the bag from my shoulder, and walked me upstairs without speaking. In his bedroom the light was already turning the color of old whiskey.He undressed me slowly, a

Part 1:The Night Shift Doctor

The hospital at 6:40 a.m. had a particular kind of quiet.Not silence — machines still beeped, the elevator still groaned, someone at the far end of the corridor still coughed into a blanket — but a thinning of noise, as if the building itself exhaled once the night’s worst possibilities had been deferred until daylight.I stood at the nurses’ station finishing the last of my charts, shoulders tight from twelve hours on my feet, when Dr. Elias Voss set a paper coffee cup down beside my keyboard without comment.Black, no sugar. The way I took it when anyone bothered to notice.“You stayed late again,” he said.His voice matched the hour: low, even, stripped of the sharper edges he used during codes and teaching rounds. Forty-one. Tall enough that I had to look up. Dark hair going silver at the temples in a way that made the rest of the staff call him “distinguished” when he wasn’t in earshot.He had been attending on nights for the past six weeks while Dr. Patel was on medical leave.

Part 2: The Night Shift Doctor

The following night began with a crash alert and ended with the kind of quiet that felt earned rather than given.I had three admissions before midnight, a rapid response at 2:14, and a family conference that left the daughter of the man in 11 crying in the hallway while Elias explained, with devastating calm, why the numbers no longer supported optimism.He did not soften the truth. He also did not leave her standing alone with it. I watched him from the station as he waited until the social worker arrived, one hand briefly resting on the woman’s shoulder, before he returned to the unit and asked for the next set of labs as if the human cost of the previous hour had been filed in a drawer only he could open.At 5:50 a.m. the board was finally stable. I stayed to finish the last of the charting. Elias appeared at the station with two coffees and set one beside my keyboard without comment. Black, no sugar.The ritual had become reliable enough that its absence would have been louder th

Part 3: The Night Shift Doctor

He arrived at 8:40 p.m. carrying nothing but the same controlled silence he wore on the unit.I opened the door of the walk-up before he could knock. Elias stood on the narrow landing in a dark sweater instead of scrubs, the silver at his temples more pronounced under the hallway’s single bare bulb.Without the white coat he looked slightly less like the attending who ran night codes and slightly more like a man who had spent the afternoon deciding whether to cross a line he himself had drawn.“You texted,” he said.“You came.”He stepped inside. I closed the door. The click of the lock sounded louder in the small apartment than it ever did in the break room. For a moment we only looked at each other across the short distance of the entryway.The hospital hierarchy was still present — it lived in the way I had to tilt my head to meet his eyes, in the residual instinct to straighten when he was silent — but it no longer had walls and fluorescent lighting to enforce it.“I almost didn’t

Part 4: The Night Shift Doctor

The unit did not notice.That was the most unsettling part. We returned to the fluorescent lights and the clipped handoffs and the second coffee set down beside my keyboard without commentary, and the machinery of the night shift absorbed us as if nothing had changed six blocks away.Elias still ran codes with the same exacting calm. I still charted with the same focus. When our eyes met across a patient’s bed the contact lasted exactly as long as clinical necessity required and not a second longer.The only difference lived in the hours after sign-out.Three nights after the first visit to my apartment he texted a single line at 7:22 a.m., once both of us were off the clock.'Your place. One hour.'I barely had time to shower the hospital off my skin before the knock came. Elias stood on the landing in the same dark sweater, jaw set with the residual tension of a night that had included two rapid responses and a family meeting that ended in tears. He stepped inside, locked the door,

Part 5: The Night Shift Doctor

The last night of Elias’s attending rotation arrived with the same fluorescent indifference as every other night.Patel’s name was already written in the board’s margin for the following evening. The unit treated the transition as ordinary paperwork. I treated it as the quiet dismantling of the only structure that had given us permission to keep the door half-closed.We worked the shift with the same exacting professionalism as always — codes, labs, the clipped exchange of numbers that never once slipped into anything personal. When Elias set the second coffee beside my keyboard at 5:50 a.m. it carried the full weight of finality.“Sign-out in twenty,” he said. “Your place after. If you still want it.”“I still want it.”He nodded once and walked toward 14 without further comment. I finished the last of the charts with hands that remained steady only through long practice.He arrived at my apartment forty minutes after we both cleared the building. No sweater this time — just the dark

Part 1: The Tenant

The first package arrived on a Tuesday, addressed to J. Voss in handwriting I didn’t recognize.I signed for it without thinking, then stood in the driveway looking at the brown paper-wrapped rectangle and the quiet converted garage at the end of the path.Julian had been living above my garage for eleven days. In that time I had seen him twice: once when he signed the lease in my kitchen, polite and contained, and once when he carried a single box of books up the exterior stairs while I pretended to water plants that did not need watering.He worked from home. He kept unusual hours. The light in the apartment often stayed on until two or three in the morning.I carried the package to the foot of the stairs and hesitated. Knocking felt like crossing a line I had drawn myself in the lease agreement — 'Landlord will provide reasonable notice before entering the rental unit' . A package was not an emergency. It was also not nothing.I climbed the stairs and knocked once.Julian opened th

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