Archive of Our Own

May 7, 1995

There's a girl dressed in all white. 

She has brown hair up in a sloppy bun and is wearing high waisted short shorts, a thick strapped bra looking top with a bow hanging down the center of it, and tennis shoes. 

White, white, white.

Like the last of what he snorted however long ago. It's why he stopped at one of these service plazas dotting the highway. He's not ready to quit driving yet and needs a large hot coffee to help him stay awake.

"Black," he whispers.

The girl has been pacing with her slim arms wrapped around herself for the entire time he's sat parked in the car. She's crying. 

No one but him, Cooper Howard, has paid her any mind longer than a second to glance in her direction before quickly averting their eyes, the people in their pressed office wear most likely assuming the worst of her. 

That she's just a strung out junkie. 

And if they're correct, if they live around here and stop by before work to fill up their gas tanks, or get coffee and a pastry to quickly eat, because it's currently around 8 o’clock in the morning, and they see her here doing this all the time? Well, she's a pretty one. 

He does one last swipe under his nose and steps out of his car. 

In the bustling store, Cooper swiftly walks through to the convenience area, walking past the coffee machine to pick up a couple things. Among the items are two large bottles of cold water, a sandwich, and a fruit cup. In line behind a woman and a young couple, he opens the pack of spearmint gum he also grabbed and chews a piece. 

Cooper shifts his weight, stretching and flattening the gum with his tongue over and over again. His high is wearing off. 

Instead of refusing the receipt as he usually does when the cashier offers it to him, he takes it, keeping it in hand as he strides through the parking lot towards her, spitting his gum out.

Her back is turned to him, fists clenched and head back as she breathes heavily and this close up, Cooper can see that she's a touch too thin, her ribs and spine showing slightly through her sunkissed skin. 

He clears his throat and she spins around in alarm and takes a few steps back even though there's already approximately a couple feet between them.

Cooper swallows. 

She has the biggest eyes he's ever seen. They look like she's plucked them out of Bambi’s head and sewn them into her own. She stopped crying sometime while he was inside, leaving those large eyes red rimmed with wet lashes. There's freckles on her small nose and cheeks. She clears her throat and puts an obviously practiced smile on her face. 

Practiced or not, it's a nice smile. He likes how pointed her canines are. 

“Hi, mister.” 

He likes her voice. 

Cooper reaches into the bag and pulls out one of the bottles, holding it towards her. “Take this.” She doesn't move to reach for it, her beatific smile faltering with suspicion.

Smart. 

He presents the receipt to her so she can see the time of purchase and the large watch face on his wrist. “Hasn’t been tampered with.”

“Thank you, mister." She murmurs, finally accepting the bottle and testing the tightness of the cap before opening it and taking a sip but she lifts it right back up and starts to chug, like she hasn't realized until then just how badly she needs the hydration. 

He looks at the hand squeezing the bottle and spots a dainty silver band on her right ring finger with an equally dainty stone. He doesn't know much about jewelry, but he knows enough to tell it's jade. 

His eyes move to her pink lips wrapped around the spout before a trickle of water catches his attention as it slips past the corner of her mouth to roll down her jaw and throat before disappearing in between her small tits, which are rising and falling as she breathes harshly through her nose. 

Blood rushes to his dick. She has to at least be 18. She has to be…Cooper's days of being good have been over for years now but he's still got some morals intact.

The 50 ounce water bottle is almost half finished by the time she pulls off it with a hearty sigh, looking up at him to give him a more genuine smile. “Thanks again…?” 

“Cooper." He says, the thought of using an alias not even crossing his mind.

“I'm Tracy,” The girl says after the slightest fraction of a second, her eyes darting away as she twists the cap back on. 

He's become a bloodhound when it comes to sniffing out lies.

He cocks his head to the side. “Now that's just not true. C’mon,” he purrs. “Let's have an honest exchange here…Hello, my name is Cooper. What's yours?”

She mirrors the tilt of his head as she purses her lips and flits her big cartoon eyes over his features. Whatever she sees has her conceding with a softly spoken, “Lucy.”

Little Lot Lizard Lucy, his mind supplies and his mouth ever so slightly curls with amusement before he snakes his tongue over it. “And how old are you, Lucy?” 

He likes her name, too. 

“I'm 21.”

Halle-fucking-lujah. 

“Would you like to sit with me?" He asks, jerking his head in the direction of an unoccupied picnic table under a dead tree. 

She bats her lashes. “Yes, I think I would.”

Lucy follows at his heels as he turns and walks to the sun bleached table, the dark green iron warmed under the sun. She slides in across from him. “Are you married,” she asks him point blank as he places the bag beside him and rifles through it, bypassing the box of condoms, to pull out the turkey sandwich and fruit cup. 

“No.”

He's never had the desire to marry. Not after witnessing the result of his own parents' shotgun marriage they rushed to have before his mother started showing, the abject misery from the both of them, too afraid of public ridicule to separate. The ways that his father's resentment manifested…

“How old are you,” Lucy asks next.

He places the food in the middle of the table, pushing them towards her. “45.”

Her hands grab the fruit cup and opens it, placing the lid under the container and choosing a grape to eat first. She chews, swallows. “What do you do for a living?” 

Cooper huffs, pausing in taking a drink from his own water bottle. “Why were you crying earlier?”

She winces in embarrassment, lowering her eyes to grab a piece of pineapple. “You saw that?”

“Yeah.”

“I feel so stupid..." Lucy sighs, her too small shoulders curling inward. “Um, okay so, I hitchhiked here…I let my guard down because it was an older woman. Women are usually safe. It took a couple hours and, feeling comfortable with her, I put my backpack in the backseat because it was too big to keep on my lap.

Well, actually, okay before that, literally the day before, I put my purse on the hook in a bathroom stall and left it there. Right in front of me and I forgot to grab it, just walked out! I was so tired, though,” she defends herself, her index finger picking at some peeling paint. There's flecks of blue polish on her nails. “It was only just a few minutes before I realized and ran back for it, but it was gone. Someone had already taken it.

And then that woman picked me up and she was so nice…She drove me here but,” her lip starts quivering, “she sped off before I could open the back door and get my stuff! I had money and my ID in my purse and that backpack had all my clothes and toiletries…”

Sniffling, Lucy rips open the sandwich container and picks up one of the triangle shaped halves to eat tiny bites of, her glistening eyes fixed on the tree. He grabs his pack of cigarettes and zippo. 

She finishes only half of the sandwich halves before putting it in the container and fixing the lid in place. She also closes the fruit cup. “What’s that?”

“Huh?” 

“Your lighter…What's on it?”

He holds the silver zippo out to her. “Scorpion.”

Careful not to touch his fingers, she accepts it, rubbing her thumb over the smoothly etched design before opening and spinning the flint wheel with a little smile on her face. “I've always thought these things looked cool…”

“Bought it last month.” He didn't walk in and purposely pick the thing out of several options available in a fit of fancy over his astrology sign though, no. Funnily enough, it was just the only one they had left.

She hums, snapping it shut before opening it and flicking the flame to life again. Cooper belatedly reaches again for his pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. “You smoke?”

“Oh, no way. It's bad for you. No offense...”

Snap. Open. Flick. Snap. Open. Flick. 

He taps ash onto the ground. 

Snap. Open. Flick. Snap. Open. Flick. 

His lips do that twitch again.

Snap. Open. Flick. Snap. Open. Flick. 

A baby wails in a woman's arms as she speed walks towards the entrance of the building, an expression on her worn face that only comes from smelling something atrocious. 

Snap. Open. Flick. Snap. Open. Flick.

He takes one last draw of smoke before snuffing the cigarette out under his boot. “You want to get out of here?” 

Lucy finally tears her eyes away from the zippo to glance at the water and food before looking up at him already rising to his feet. “What do you mean? Go where? Do what?”

She knows exactly what he means. He picks up the gray bag. 

“Get a room,” Cooper inexplicably says. “Saw a motel that's less than 10 miles away. Get out of this sun...Turn the A/C on."

Then fuck, he thinks.

She squints up at him while a rosiness blooms on her cheeks and nods jerkily. And isn't that cute? A girl he's sure is a whore blushing at him after getting propositioned. “Okay.” 

He waits for her to gather up the uneaten food and throw it away in a nearby trash can before leading her over to his black Camaro. “This is nice…You like a traveling salesman or something,” she asks once seated on the buttery leather. 

Buckling in, he twists the key in the ignition and turns up the radio a bit. “Or something. You can change the station if you want.” Pulling out of the lot, he takes right onto the highway as she settles on a station playing country music. “Really?” 

She shrugs, settling back with her small hands folded in her lap. “What? Were you expecting me to pick a top 40s station? I like all kinds of music.” After one song, she turns to him. “Can I take a shower when we get in there?”

“Sure.”

“Alone,” she clarifies. 

“Sure.” That's what he assumed she meant the first time. Besides, he took a shower around five in the morning at another rest stop. 

“And um,” she fidgets. “Do you have a spare, unopened toothbrush? And unopened toothpaste?” 

He quirks a brow. “People mess with those?”

“I've heard some things…” 

“Yes and yes. I don't know how good the toothpaste will be though. It's this travel sized one that came with a room’s amenities. Never even heard of the brand before.”

Cooper glances over to see her running her tongue over her teeth. “That's fine. I haven't brushed my teeth since yesterday morning,” she admits with a grimace. 

“Oh, the horror..." He drawls, even though he himself likes to brush his teeth daily.

“Well, I like to brush at least twice a day, so it really is kind of horrifying, yeah," Lucy replies.

Pulling up to the motel, he whistles lowly as he glances around the place. It’s definitely been a couple of rough years since the picture taken on the billboard but it'd do. He parks near the lobby and gets out, pausing in putting his keys in his pocket as he spots a balding man with hair more white than blonde peering over at them while clutching a brown paper bag, concealing a large bottle. 

“Something wrong?" She murmurs, scraping at the polish on her left thumb with her right one.

It's broad daylight but he still says, “Lock the doors after I leave.” 

“Okay, Mister Cooper…”

Another twitch of his mouth. “And don't snoop.”

“I won't,” she says. 

Nodding, he waits to hear the locks engaging before he enters the lobby and has to ring a silver bell before a man steps out and he's able to buy a room. Lucy is drinking some more water when he returns and starts the engine up. “Room 13,” he intones with mock graveness. 

She laugh quietly, her sharp looking canines briefly drawing his eyes as he drives a few seconds to park right in front of the room door. “Do you need the bathroom,” she politely asks after exiting the car. “I'm jumping in the shower immediately if you don't.”

“Don't need it. Here,” Cooper unlocks the door for her and she darts past him for the bathroom before he goes back to his car for his suitcase and toiletry bag, along with the gray plastic one from the plaza. 

The shower is already on as he sets the one carrying his hygienic supplies on the table and rifles through it for the things she asked for. He leaves them out on the counter by the sink and mirror right by the bathroom door. He brushes his own teeth and turns the A/C on before inspecting the bedding for any egregious stains or bugs skittering about.

Cooper doesn't have a habit of doing this. Of the vices he has, women has never been one of them. 

Humming from the shower has him looking at the closed door before he grabs the new, he used the last one in his possession a while ago, box of condoms and puts it in the nightstand. He then sits down on the bed, takes his boots off, scoots back and reclines on a pillow. At least these are nice. Firm but not too firm.

He debates grabbing the remote to watch some TV but he’s never been much of a television watcher. He instead just closes his eyes and pictures her under the spray of water, her hands roving over her slippery body as she washes up. 

Cooper occupies himself like this until the door swings open, bringing with it the scent of cheap motel soap and he lazily withdraws his hand from his groin. 

He can't see Lucy from here but he hears her chirp out an exclamation of gratitude before the sound of plastic being torn into hits his ears, and then five minutes later the sink turns on as she rinses her mouth, her spit splattering against the rusted porcelain. 

She lingers over there a minute afterwards and he clears his throat. “So what's your story? Why-”

Lucy rounds the bend and stands in front of him, skin shining with water droplets, her hair down and wet, the ends reaching just past her shoulders. Clad in a short towel wrapped around her chest, she grabs it. “You can stop. I’m alone in a room with you.”

Except he actually is interested in knowing why a sweet thing like her, and she is sweet that he can already tell plain as day, is prostituting herself.

She unwraps the towel and lets it fall to her feet and his mouth suddenly goes dry like he hasn't drunk any of the water he bought for them. He's already seen most of what she has to offer in her outfit but her small tits and the peek of pussy he can see through the thatch of hair between her thighs has him swallowing roughly. 

On her left, so sharp, she needs to eat more, hip bone is a reddish-brown scar. With the width and diameter of a cigarette. One of her Johns probably burned her with a cigarette. Something twists in his gut and he feels a phantom pain near his right elbow. His father…He forces that thought back down as she climbs onto the bed and crawls towards him. 

“You want to have sex with me, right?" She asks, sitting herself on his lap. 

“Is the tent in my pants not clear enough of a signal, baby?” She rocks against it and his eyes flutter, jaw tightening. 

“Do you want to be inside me? Or do you want a handjob? Oral? Oral and a handjob? What do you want, mister?" She murmurs, her own eyes becoming droopy as she grinds against his dark jeans. “If you want to fuck me, we'll need a condom.”

The swear sounds odd on her tongue. She clearly isn't much of a cusser. Sweet, indeed…He wordlessly pulls open the drawer.

She bites her lip, giggling. “Efficient. I like that.”

He slowly sits up and goes in for a kiss. He never kisses the women he's fucked through his years of traveling but that same thing that had him get a room with her is pushing him to slot his mouth over hers.

Only, she turns her head and reaches over to pluck out one of the aluminum foils. “No kissing. No slapping. No biting. No scratching. No marks of any kind…I'm not turning my back to you during sex either so doggy style is out of the question,” Lucy states. “Okay?”

“Yeah,” Cooper murmurs, watching her set it aside next to her calf before she begins to finger herself, lip between her teeth again as she mewls, her hips rolling down into her hand. 

His cock twitches as a slick noise then reaches his ears. He unzips his pants and pulls himself out, too impatient to dislodge her and undress more. He strokes himself, gazing at those fingers sinking into her.

“You ever have a John eat this little pussy before, baby?" He husks, tongue wetting his bottom lip.

“A few times." She tells him, throat working as she swallows. “Some have just had me sit on their face until they made me come, paid me, and left…” She inserts a third finger and moans. He reaches his other hand out and rubs at her clit. “Mister Cooper,” Lucy sighs.

“‘Mister Cooper...’” He sighs, even as his cock starts aching for more. “Mister…That a kink for you?” 

“No. I think it's one of yours though.” 

“Oh, really? Why's that?” He drawls, having to stop touching himself lest he come, too pent up for much foreplay. Under her watchful eyes, he places it on her stomach, feeling an odd curdling in his own at the sensation of her ribs under his fingertips when he slides it up to cup one of her tits.

“I have a sixth sense for these things.” She moans coyly, voice hushed like she's sharing a secret. “I'm your kind’s type.”

"My kind?" He echoes quietly, too preoccupied to think of anything more clever as her voice pitches up and she starts letting out these airy whimpers. 

“Older men. Don't stop, mister…Older men traveling alone. They like me calling them things like that.”

Cooper draws his lip between his teeth, his eyes locked on her shiny mouth as it gapes open with her brows knitted together in pleasure, flushed all the way down to her chest as she starts to tremble. “Jesus,” he whispers.

Her head lolls back just for a moment before she lowers it and hazel meets hazel. “Daddy.” She moans high and saccharine, shuddering through an orgasm.

He jerks under her. “That’s…Don't." He says, hands falling away. 

She takes his still hard cock in hand and tears the condom open with her pointed teeth before lightly pushing him back. “Let me ride you, daddy? I'm good at it. Let me repay you for the water and food.” She expertly rolls it down his shaft, hovering over it with excitement in her eyes.

“Don't call me that.”

“But you like it? Liking something kinky isn't a crime, daddy." Lucy breathes, steadily lowering herself onto him with her hands on his chest as she gives herself a moment to adjust. 

Cooper almost, almost, laughs through the sensation of tightness gripping him. He knows all about what is and is not a crime. “Prostitution is,” he spits.

Because they're strangers, his snippy retort doesn't faze her. She visibly rolls it off her narrow shoulders with a shimmy. “Am I, like, the only girl to call you that or something,” she asks.

“Yes,” he grits out.

“Oh,” she says with a blink before smiling. “I have to say, I feel a little special," she purrs impishly. 

He moves his hands to her hips. “Yeah, yeah…Just get to riding my cock, baby." He urges breathlessly, rocking her. 

“You're big, daddy,” she remarks, following his prompting and moving atop him, lifting and falling.

“Harder. Want to see these little tits of yours bouncing,” Cooper tells her, humming throatily when she obeys that order too, those blood boiling noises of hers starting back up. “Mm, that is nice." He whispers, his hands kneading at her hips.

He lays back and watches this girl vigorously ride him. Watches and listens to the way she bites her lip and whimpers whenever he surprises her with a sharp buck. 

“You're big, Mister Cooper.” She hiccups like a broken record, her eyes struggling to stay open.

“I know. And yet you're taking it all anyway, aren't you?” 

She shivers. “Uh-huh…” 

“Little trooper.” He croons, before planting his feet and fucking up into her three times in quick succession, his lips twitching at the corners as she lets out a soft squeal. 

“God, you're so big,” Lucy whines, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt. “Reaching so deep, daddy…”

He hisses in a breath. “You trying to make me blow my load already? Cause that's what’ll happen if you keep talking like that.” 

Lucy falls forward then, face suddenly inches from his, her swollen pink lips suddenly inches from his and takes to rocking her hips, her hands grabbing the pillow either side of his head as she keens needily. 

Eyes moving back down to her mouth, Cooper swallows thickly, tightens his grip, and rolls them.

She flinches as his hands move to brace himself beside her. He hasn't apologized for jackshit in years though. Not after leaving the hell that was his childhood home. But she doesn't hold the lack of apology against him and just moans loudly when he takes charge.

Cooper drops his head to watch his cock pull all the way out before spearing into her again and again. He rasps, “Touch yourself.” 

Gasping, she slides a hand between their bodies to rub circles over her clit, her pussy starts fluttering and clenching. “Close. I'm so close,” Lucy whimpers, her silky thighs trembling. “So close.” Overtaken by writhing only two thrusts later, she chokes out, “Daddy,” through her high cries.

The girl’s clenching pussy milks his cock, and biting his lip until he tastes iron, Cooper shoots his load into the condom with a rough groan, his muscles going taut.

He pulls out of her, removes the condom and ties it off before tucking himself away and twisting to toss it in the trash. When he turns around, she's kneeling at the foot of the bed to rewrap the towel around her and grabs the remote, flipping the TV on and channel surfing before stopping.

David Bowie in an atrocious blonde wig and gaudy outfit is dancing with a young brunette girl in a poofy gown among a crowd of oddly masked attendees as he mouths along to the song playing. Lucy sighs dreamily, pulling the thin blanket around her as she curls up in a ball. “I love this movie…”

Cooper's never seen it himself but he vaguely recalls the advertising for it when it came out.

He sits down near the headboard, a pillow propped behind his back and watches as the other dancers begin to stare at the girl before a gold clock draws her attention and starts to chime, her confusion turning to determination as she struggles to push through the people attempting to stop her from leaving. “Kind of trippy.”

“But pretty, right? Did you see his face? He was so sad. And did you hear the song? He loves her and would have done anything for her.” She says, sighing dreamily once more. 

“That girl looks way too young for him though,” he observes.

“So? It's not real,” Lucy nearly whispers before yawning into her hand.

They watch the rest in silence until a confrontation between Sarah and the Goblin King where the man pleads, “Just fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave…”

Both of Cooper's brows go up high. “This is a kid's movie?”

Lucy hums an affirmative.

The girl is spirited to her home and is celebrating with her friends when he gets up and walks to the bathroom. In the minute it takes to piss and wash his hands, Lucy has fallen asleep with her arm tucked up by her head, her face buried in it. 

He's not tired though. Not really. Christ, he should be. But he feels too wired by everything, even with the drug’s effect well over.

What should he do? 

He sits at the table with the old chairs that are cracked and missing the vinyl in some places, quietly tapping his fingers against the scratched wood. Cooper glances around the room and pauses, seeing her white outfit folded on the counter and then her shoes neatly lined up beneath it. Her socks have been rolled together and are sticking out of the left one. 

Hm. 

He had spotted a map of the place behind the desk and saw a Laundry Room marked. He fucking hates doing laundry but he himself has a few white items of clothing that he's been putting off washing. He gathers up her clothes and slips out the room to his car to get his own and the soap. 

It occurs to his tired-not tired mind as he's twisting the knobs to start up the machine that maybe he shouldn't have taken a prostitute's clothing. That her waking up with nothing to wear and essentially trapped in that room with him might induce some hysteria.

He walks back to the room and sits at the table, wincing as the chair creaks under his weight. Lucy doesn't stir at all. Not even when a woman in the movie now playing on the TV lets out a shrill cry of terror. 

Turns out the stress of losing all your shit in a two day swoop followed by a good fuck is a mighty sleep aid. Who knew?

Cooper lights up a cigarette and tilts his head back, breathing in deeply and exhaling slowly. He's surprised it's taken him so long to reach for one after that mind-blowing sex. He closes his eyes with a low sigh. He never thought he'd be into someone calling him daddy…He glances at the girl through slitted eyes. 

That thing is back, making him wonder if there was a reason she wanted to come to this state…Work brought him here. A job he completed in the midnight hour.

Lucy makes a huffing noise in her sleep then, her fingers curling a bit and that gnawing thing has him wanting to know if anything is tethering her to this place or if she has the freedom to leave. 

He sharply stubs out his cigarette in the dirty ashtray before getting up and going to transfer their clothes to the dryer. She's still asleep when he returns. And as he sits back down and watches her sleeping so innocently across from a murderer, a paid killer, he thinks:

Where is your real daddy? Why is he not protecting you? How has the world not eaten you alive? 

And then:

Fuck it. The worst she can do is say no. 

Cooper smokes another cigarette and puts his feet up on the table, crossing them at the ankles as he rakes a hand through his dark hair. The nicotine is making his heart race. 

He has two more in the time it takes for their clothes to dry and bring them back to sort them.

It's a quarter to 4 o'clock when Lucy finally stirs and sits up, looking around confused, before her eyes land on him still seated at the table. He clears his throat. “I washed your clothes.” He announces, pointing to her folded outfit with the panties and socks now placed over the other articles. 

She clears her own throat, pushing the blanket off her to groggily walk over while rubbing at one of her eyes. “Thanks. You didn't have to do that.” 

“I threw them in with some of my own things, so.” Cooper shrugs. “No big deal.”

“Oh. Well, still. Thank you so much…” 

Lucy bows her head over the clothes, the towel riding up, and blissfully breathes in the scent of laundry soap. Straightening, she then shamelessly drops it to slide her white panties up her hips and the pert swell of her ass as Cooper shamelessly enjoys the scene.

Next are her short shorts and that skimpy top that she struggles to tie behind her neck and under her shoulder blades. When she grabs her socks and shoes and sits down across from him, he opens his mouth. “Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“You barely ate earlier.”

She looks up at him as she puts a sock on. “You didn't eat at all,” she points out quietly. 

His lips twitch. “And now my stomach is growling and I feel starved. Let's go eat at that place across the street.”

She thinks about it for a moment before putting her other one on. “Okay, sure.”

Cooper watches her slide her feet into her tennis shoes before she wiggles her right foot, and making a face, she takes it off to fuss with the toe seam of her sock before sliding it back in and tying a nice bow. Then she puffs her cheeks out over the left and reties those laces to form a better, more matching bow. 

He stands. “You ready?” 

“I have to use the bathroom.”

He sits back down. 

The restaurant is literally across the street. They get seated at a booth and order drinks. “Thank you." Lucy says, looking the older woman in the eye with a smile that the waitress returns.

Then the woman comes back with a notepad to take down their food order. A burger and French fries for Cooper. And just a serving of fries for Lucy. 

“What's your favorite movie?” She asks him after the woman rips out the paper and scampers away to give it to the cooks. 

“Don’t have one.” 

“Everyone does.”

He shrugs. “I don't.”

“Favorite song,” she asks next after a sip of her drink.

Cooper mulls over that for a moment. “Don’t think I have one of those either. You?”

Their food arrives before she can answer and then they're too busy eating to really talk. Or, he is too busy eating. Lucy slowly works her way through not even half of the basket of fries before pushing it away and focusing on her pink lemonade. 

He chews his bite of burger and takes a sip of his water to help wash it down before leaning in and bluntly asking, “Are you anorexic?”

“No! God, no..." She drops her gaze to the table, wiping the grease and salt off her fingers, before her body starts swaying side to side. Then with distant eyes and a small voice, she murmurs, “I just haven't had much of an appetite these past few years…”

Cooper’s eyes narrow. 

The waitress cheerily flounces up to their table. “How is everything? You two need any refills or anything?”

Lucy pastes on that false smile from this morning. "It's good! I don't need anything, thank you. Do you?” 

“No.” 

The woman blinks uncomfortably at him and glances back at the smiling girl. “Alright…” With one last concerned look at the two of them she stiffly turns on her heel in the direction of another of her tables. 

“What's your story,” Cooper asks again.

Lucy slumps back, that smile leaving as quick as it arrived. “Bad home life.” 

“Is it really bad enough to do what you're doing?”

“What's your favorite color?” 

He squints at her but relents and looks pointedly down at his clothes. “Black. Is yours white?”

She shakes her head and takes a pull from the straw in her glass. “It's blue, actually.”

Cooper goes to grab another of his fries but stops, realizing he isn't hungry anymore. He finishes the meager amount left of his ice water and flags their server down for the check that he pays with some cash he withdrew at the rest stop he showered at. 

He only has $20s, so he slips an extra one in for a tip and stands, pushing his seat in. “Let's go back to the room.”

“Wait?” Lucy stacks their glasses and grabs his plate to dump the remaining food in her basket of fries, places that atop the plate, and tosses their trash into the basket as well. “Okay, let's go.” She pushes her seat in too before following him when he begins walking out. 

Her cheeks are pink when he glances over at her at the crosswalk and finds Lucy already looking at him. “What?”

She shakes her head with a flustered little smile tugging at her mouth. “Nothing.”

He knows in her line of work there's a disconnect between having sex and being attracted to someone, and oh, it's now clear to him that this sweet little thing is attracted to him. 

They walk back to the motel and he sits at the end of the bed with a sigh. She passes him to sit at the table to remove her shoes and tuck them out of the way where they were earlier. Shutting the TV off, he's unsurprised when Lucy slides out of the chair and crawls over to kneel between his legs. 

"Thanks for feeding me, Mister Cooper,” she purrs before letting a beat pass. “Again." She tacks on with a giggle, walking her index and middle fingers up his knee towards his groin. 

His lips twitch. “You're welcome.”

She palms him until he's gritting his teeth, his head falling back shortly before he dips it to look at her. “If you're gonna suck my cock, just do it. Don't tease me.”

She unzips him and pulls his cock out, and seeing it jutting up all large in front of her pretty face is so fucking obscene that he groans before she even sticks her tongue out to lick up the length of it. He has to taste like latex but she has no visible reaction as she kitten licks the tip before pressing her lips to it. 

Girl will kiss the head of his dick but not his mouth...Her eyes watch his hands when he grabs fistfuls of the blanket as her lips part and she starts taking him in her hot mouth, his abdomen clenching with a gruff noise when she gags but powers through to keep going until he enters her throat.

Like the seasoned little whore she is.

He bucks his hips and her lashes flutter, eyes glistening before pulling off to the crown and bobbing her head back down, he shallowly rolls up into the clutch of her throat when she repeats it. “Can ride and suck dick like a dream, baby…What can't you do,” he pants. 

Lucy moans and the vibration has him grunting and sinking his teeth into his lip. “I'm gonna fuck your throat now, that okay?”

Slurping crudely, she looks up at him. “Mhm.”

Keeping his hands down by either side of himself, he lets go and thrusts up into her throat until she's gagging continuously and tears are streaming down her red face, mixing with saliva and she cups her hands above her chest to keep her clothes clean.

Feeling his orgasm approaching, he groans, “Gonna come and I want you to swallow it all. Will you do that for me, baby?”

Lucy draws off until the tip is in her mouth instead of her throat and she's rolling her tongue along the head, dipping it into the leaking slit. He shudders with a harsh exhale as he empties his load for the second time in a day.

What the fuck? 

One quick pump and dump is usually enough to satisfy his body’s urges for a good while before he feels the stirrings of that biological need again and picks the nearest willing woman to rut into in the backseat of one of their cars…If they're not in a bar with a bathroom stall, that is.

Lucy waits until he lowers his head from where it fell back to see her throat work to swallow and then she's getting up, her hands still in that cupped position as she huffs out a soft laugh and walks to the sink where he hears the water running so she can clean up. 

He’s finally tired.

Cooper puts himself away, zips his trousers, takes his boots off, and rests his head on a pillow. He feels the mattress shift next to him with Lucy's weight.

He falls asleep. 

And when he snaps his eyes open at 7 in the morning, fourteen hours later, and sees that where he crashed on top of the blankets, she cocooned herself under them, curled up in a ball again. He can hear her soft, even breathing as she sleeps. 

He pisses, takes a shower, brushes his teeth, his hair, puts his shoes on and then calls her name a few times until she wakes. Uncurling and blinking up at him with bleary eyes. “Hm?” 

“Breakfast. Same place as yesterday.” 

The girl tiredly drags her feet to the toilet before brushing her own teeth. “Can I use your comb, please,” she asks from in front of the mirror. 

“Yeah, go ahead.”

With her hair brushed and in a high ponytail that sways as she walks, they get into his car to drive the distance neither of them feel like getting to by foot this early. After he stops by the lobby to extend their stay, that is. He orders a black coffee and an omelette while she gets water and pancakes that she eats one and a half of out of the five.

“Where are you from?”

It takes a second for him to answer her, not because he's chewing or has the mug to his mouth, but because Cooper despises thinking of the past. “Nebraska.”

“I'm from LA,” she says.

As the server comes back to check on their satisfaction levels and offer refills of their drinks, he sharply asks, “Is there a shopping center nearby?” 

Rob, who appears to be his age, possibly even a handful of years older, takes a second to tear his eyes off of Lucy's perky little tits and look at him…Pervert. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, about 15 miles out.” 

“Where exactly? Not from around here. Use your notepad and write it down for me.” 

Blinking, the man takes out his pad and pen from a pocket in his apron, puts the cap between his teeth, and does as directed under Cooper's baleful stare. He plucks the paper from the man's hand and dismissively turns his attention to take a drink of coffee.

“Bring me the check.”

Rob hurries away. 

“I'm assuming you're done?" He dryly asks Lucy, grabbing his wallet after the perverted cowardly Rob drops it off with his eyes fixed to the floor. He uses more cash to pay for the meal. No tip. 

"Going shopping? What for,” she asks once they're seated in the car.

“You need things." He mutters, perusing the directions to see which side of the road to turn. 

“What? We're going shopping for me? I can't accept that.” 

“You can and you will,” he says.

"What exactly are you going to buy me?”

“You need things,” he repeats. “You know, toiletries and clothes and shit to hold it all in.”

“That’ll probably be really expensive,” she frets. 

“Maybe. But I make good money."

She looks over at him after two songs go by, pulling her ponytail over her shoulder to twirl the end around her fingers. “I'll let you pick out some of my clothes.”

His lips twitch. “Alright.”

“You can choose all my panties. Then you can grab some dresses for me and sit in the changing room while I try them on for you, Mister Cooper,” she purrs. “After that we’ll go back to the room, put everything in the washer, and I'll take a shower before showing you more of my appreciation…”

Cooper's grip tightens on the wheel. 

The shopping center is a mall with a couple other stores located in the lot. The first building they enter is a simple department store where Lucy opens up countless bottles of shampoos, soaps, conditioners, and lotions to smell.

She picks out floral scents for all of them except the lotion. It has a vanilla fragrance. Next is a razor, shaving cream, deodorant with a shy apology over stinking even though he hasn't noticed anything offensive from her, floss, a set of colorful scrunchies, a hairbrush, larger tube of toothpaste, a pack to hold the toiletries in, and a purple suitcase with wheels. 

Lucy is beaming at him as he pays for it all and still is when they drop everything off into the car before walking into the mall for clothes. Where, despite her saying he could pick out some things, Cooper ends up deciding most of her new wardrobe. 

Skimpy tops, shorts, and skirts and dresses that she models with girlish twirls in the cramped room and giggles with rosy cheeks when he lets out low hums of appreciation before unabashedly reaching into his jeans to tuck his stirring dick up against his waistline.

Pinks, whites, blues, reds, purples, yellows, and greens…Shs looks good in them all. 

Outerwear purchased, they stop by a store for her underthings where she gets her bra size measured by a shrewd woman who doesn't bat an eye at seeing them walk in together. Not even when he saunters around to boldly gather frilly brassieres, panties, and nightgowns in various cuts and materials for the girl.

Cooper is fully hard while paying for the pile of delicates. 

Now in the motel with her new clothes being washed as Lucy showers and he lays on the bed, still hard and aching from the girl pawing at his dick throughout the duration of the drive back, he ponders over this new development. 

He's never asked for the women's, and he means women because they were all around his age, names he got his rocks off with in the past and they didn't get his. Nor did he ever give them any pet names. He didn't call them anything.

He’s never fed them.

He's never listened to their woes.

He’s never gotten a room with them.

He’s never inquired about their stories.

He’s never had thoughts of kissing and going down on them. 

He’s never bought them essentials and cute clothes.

He has never, ever thought about asking them to travel with him. 

But while taking his own shower this morning, Cooper decided to just give in and listen to that thing inside him. That thing that feels awfully similar to his gut instinct. He just doesn't understand why it's giving him all these urges in regards to Lucy…Seeing as it's kept him alive for this long in his particular line of work though, he's rather inclined to listen to it. 

So he will. 

The shower cuts off but she stays in there for a while longer until she's walking out wrapped in another towel, carrying the scent of flowers but most strongly smelling of vanilla as she straddles his lap again with a soft exhale and just looks at him with pink cheeks before he raises a brow. 

Lucy blinks and then her hands go to his third shirt button, the top two usually kept undone by him. “Can I undress you,” she murmurs. 

“Yeah.” 

He's not a shy man by any means of the word. To her credit, as she unfastens them and reveals more of his tan and scarred skin, she doesn't gawk or anything. Doesn't have a look of discomfort or pity. She does pause her eyes near the inside of his right elbow though.

Her soft index finger traces around the circular reddish-brown mark. “Cigarette,” she whispers. 

Cooper swallows and nods, his eyes going heavy as his hand slowly lifts to remove the towel and he licks his lips when he drops it to the floor, eyes going straight to her chest. “Let's switch, baby.”

He's shifting her under him and kneeling between her parted thighs before she can form a response, his hand gliding up to a small peak and rolling a nipple, drawing out a shiver and soft mewl. 

“Sensitive little thing, huh,” he husks. 

Lucy nods, slowly blinking those big eyes up at him and he ducks his head and she gasps sharply when he takes a nipple into his mouth, her hand sliding into his black hair for just a moment before it grabs a hold of the bedding instead. “You can touch me,” he whispers before latching back on.

Lucy releases a gust of air and her hand returns to grip as a leg goes around his waist and she grinds up against his straining dick with a moan. He switches, squeezing a hand between them to unzip and shove his pants down and off. 

Whimpering needily, she extends her arm to yank the drawer open and pull out a condom. 

“I'm not done,” Cooper tells her, moving his mouth between her slender legs where he pushes them wide apart and stares. And stares. And stares. Until the little whore is squirming like a bashful virgin. “You've got a pretty little pussy,” he compliments.

Little Lot Lizard Lucy and her Pretty Pussy, he thinks, letting out an amused huff through his nose to accompany the twitch of his lips. 

“Mister Cooper, please…” 

His dick is so hard it hurts. 

“Daddy!” she squeaks when he swoops in and swipes the flat of his tongue over her clit, her legs jerking with another squeak, both of her hands flying to his hair. She doesn't tug or pull at him.

Cooper likes the taste of her.

He lowers his mouth to lick inside her with a groan. His hands tight around the backs of her knees, he keeps her held open for his pillaging tongue as she lets out noises, her stomach starting to clench under his heavy stare until she comes with a keen. 

Panting, Lucy pinches the condom wrapper between her index and middle fingers and holds it in the air towards him as he sits up for a breather through his wet, parted lips. 

“Not yet.” 

He goes back down and her thighs clamp around his head with a loud whine before he grabs her knees and pushes them apart. If they're going to fuck again though, and they are…He releases his right hand. “Stay,” he orders before pushing a finger into her pussy and moving back up to her clit.

Cooper laps and sucks at the pearl between her thighs and crooks his thrusting fingers until Lucy is shaking and noises are spilling from her as much as her arousal is until she seizes with a hiccup, her legs remaining obediently spread for him as she orgasms for the second time. 

He smoothly rises and grabs the condom. “I'll take that now, baby,” he husks to the spacey looking girl as he opens it with his teeth and then rolls it down his cock before he takes a hold of her hips and slides inside.

Cooper doesn't give her time to adjust. She got hers already. Twice. Just gets right to plunging into her, his gaze straying to her lips when her head falls back with a shuddering inhale and a lustful wince, her hands kneading at the blankets by her sides. 

“Am I, like, the biggest you've ever had or something,” he asks.

“T-Think so, yeah.” 

“Have to say, I feel a little special," he purrs.

“Daddy, please..." She gasps, teeth biting at her reddened lip. 

Cooper's fingers grip at her soft flesh, his teeth sinking into his own lip. Giving her plenty of notice, he slowly drags his hand up her body, her breath hitching when he pushes his index finger into her warm mouth, his others resting on her soft face.

It knows his dick and now his finger before it knows his mouth.

Lucy's soft skin feels nice under his touch but her tongue feels even nicer stroking along the pad of finger as she hollows her cheeks around it, her eyes peering up at him from under her lashes. Her cunt feels better than both those things combined though as it clenches around him. 

“Fuck.” He whispers under his breath, his rhythm growing uneven. Driven too close to the edge in the car earlier to last much longer, he moves the hand on her hip between her legs to rub at her clit. His finger is still in her mouth and muffling all her moans. “I'm gonna come, baby.”

Few more juddering snaps of his hips and the girl inhales through her freckled nose, her head lolling to the side, the suction around his finger increasing as she shivers through another orgasm.

Two more and Cooper finally, finally, gets his own, his eyes squeezing shut as he fills the condom. 

Later that day, with her new clothes put away in her suitcase, having gone back to the restaurant for a dinner that she just picked at, with Cooper freshly shaven and Lucy now dressed in a silk babydoll as she curls once more at the foot of the bed to watch a movie that's making her laugh, he exhales a plume of smoke and clears his throat. 

“I'm leaving tomorrow.”

She turns to look at him in the dark of the room, he can't see her face backlit by the TV, but she tilts her head. “When,” she asks quietly. 

“Want to get out of here around 9 AM.”

“Oh.” 

She shuts the television off as the credits roll, encasing the room in complete darkness before scooting up the bed and curling up in that sphere with her face hidden away in her arms before her breathing slows and she falls asleep. 

Cooper smokes another cigarette and joins her in rest. 

Lucy is silent when he wakes her up, dresses, and goes to breakfast with him. She packs up her toiletries once they're in the room and sits on the end of the bed with them stacked by her feet as he starts doing the same. The television remains off. She stares down at her lap, scraping away at old nail polish.

Ready to go, he walks to the door where he pauses grasping the handle. “You coming?” He asks, not turning around. 

“Think I'll stay until 11. Don't have anything else to do.” She murmurs, not understanding him.

“Are you coming with me?" Cooper reiterates, all the damn nicotine he smokes making his heart suddenly pump faster again. 

Lucy is silent for a few moments, until she softly asks, “Are you inviting me to travel with you?” 

He sighs. “Yeah. Yeah, I am…”

Even softer, sounding like she's saying it to herself, “Okey-dokey.”

He listens as she gets up from the bed and her suitcase rolls on the floor until he can feel her presence and warmth at his back. 

Cooper smiles.

Day three of traveling with Lucy and he's staring at her as she stares back at him, looking like a kicked puppy. “What? What's wrong?”

“You're not going in?” 

He scrubs a hand down his face. “No. I'm not. I've got a fuckin’ headache so just hurry up and go to the bathroom.”

She lets go of the door and gets up on her knees to reach into the back, trying to force her suitcase to fit in the space between their seats.

“What the hell are you doing,” he asks.

“You're ditching me." She mutters, a petulance to the downward curve of her lips as she gives hard yanks at the thing. 

“I'm not ditching you. If I wanted to put an end to this, I'd look you in the face and tell you to fuck off, okay,” he huffs.

She falls back in a sprawl against the glovebox as she finally manages to get the suitcase wedged through. She blows hair out of her face and peruses him from the side of the purple obstruction, breathing heavily. “You promise?” 

“I promise,” he says with an amused twist to his mouth.

Lucy clears her throat. “Okay…” 

She still brings her suitcase in with her though, coming out a few minutes later where her face lights up with surprise when he's still parked in the same spot, as promised. 

She puts it back in the backseat and settles into the passenger side next to him and buckles up, avoiding his eyes. 

“Feel better,” he drawls wryly. 

She flushes with embarrassment. “Mhm. Sorry about that, Mister Cooper,” she murmurs. “Do you forgive me?” She asks, finally glancing over with those big cartoon eyes of hers. 

“Nothing to forgive.”

She kisses him. Not right then but several hours later.

Cooper rouses at movement before letting his eyes fall back shut as he assumes Lucy is rising to use the bathroom, but no. His eyes open at more shifting to find her face inches above his, her hair down and draped over a shoulder as she braces herself on a hand beside him. Streetlights are cutting lines of light over them through the blinds. 

Hazel meets hazel. 

She tilts her head then, eyes drifting down to his mouth before going back up to his. When he doesn't react negatively to the signal, her tongue wets her lips and her lashes lower to her cheeks as she closes her eyes and presses her soft mouth to his in a chaste kiss. Cooper sighs through his nose and returns it. He hasn't kissed anyone since goddamn highschool…Before his life became what it is now.

His next job is two weeks away in Chicago. He wonders how Lucy will react to him leaving her in a room by herself for a couple hours at night. He sighs again when she pulls away and watches as she wordlessly resumes her protective circle off to the side. 

The next morning, Cooper thinks he must have dreamt it because Lucy doesn't do it again or give any other indication it happened. It's around noon he's proven that it wasn't just a dream his mind conjured up. 

They're parked on the side of the highway. “Do you not know how to read a map,” he questions without any meanness.

“I do, it's just faded here. See?" She says around a piece of his gum and he leans forward, squinting over the rim of his sunglasses at the illegible lettering on the new map he'd bought only a week ago. 

“Oh. Huh. I never noticed that,” Cooper sucks his teeth. “Well, shit. We'll have to go back to that last plaza and get ano-”

Pop!

“Don't fuckin’ do that right next to my ear..." He mutters under his breath, hackles raised. 

Lucy giggles, sounding appropriately chastised as she grabs the gum out of her mouth and drops it into the plastic bag they're using for trash by her feet. “Sorry, daddy.” 

He slowly lifts his head to look at her. She's blushing with a little smile on her lips as she bites the bottom one. And then she's unbuckling her seatbelt and clumsily crawling over the console to sit in his lap and press her mouth to his, her hands on his shoulders while her tongue swipes hotly over the seam of his lips. 

Cooper’s eyes widen before slipping shut and he opens his mouth for her, his hands on her waist guiding her to grind against his dick as she breathes a moan. 

For someone who had a no kissing rule, Lucy is very good at it. Rolling and flicking her tongue, making him groan softly when she teases the roof of his mouth before suckling on his tongue until he bucks his hips.

His hand is just beginning to snake up her dress towards her panties when a trucker driving by honks at them. A line of spit breaks between them that she wipes away from her chin with another little laugh as she throws herself back into her own seat. 

Cooper blinks at his suddenly empty lap before dazedly turning the key in the ignition and reaching for his cigarettes. 

So kissing is on the table now.

“You're not going in again?” Lucy pouts a couple days later, her eyes anxiously flitting to the backseat where her suitcase always is.

“Again, I promise that I'll still be here. Kept my last promise, didn't I?”

She chews her lip. “Yeah, but…”

Cooper sharply pulls the keys out and hands them to her before she can finish. “There. I literally can't leave without you.”

She flushes with shame. “Sorry. I'm not usually so paranoid, I swear,” Lucy sighs but she still accepts the keys before hurrying off the bathroom. 

And so becomes the new normal every time he doesn't want to leave the car. 

They're seated in yet another diner, this time right in front of a window, and Lucy is doing more people watching than eating. 

“That man just littered,” she whispers in a hiss.

He lowers his coffee mug. “Mhm.”

“I hate litterers! A trash can is like six feet away from him but he just dropped his soda can on the ground instead of holding onto it a little longer…” 

“Mhm.” He repeats before picking up his fork and taking a pointed bite of his food. “Keep eating.” 

She slowly eats her way through some of her club sandwich and barely touches the side of curly fries.

As they're walking out, there's a loud clatter from the kitchen and Lucy gasps, jumping bodily before laughing softly in embarrassment with her hand over her mouth as a couple other patrons glance disapprovingly at the girl. 

His jaw ticks. 

“When's your birthday,” she asks him while on the road. 

“November 9th,” he mumbles around his cigarette. “Yours?”

“May 5th.”

“Damn. So you lost all your shit in the following two days…”

“Yeah," she sighs heavily.

He squints at Lucy storming back over to the car with a scrunched up expression as she quickly reaches into her new light blue handbag to give the keys back to him. “What's with the face?”

“Ugh. Some places are so disgusting,” she grouses. “I felt like I needed to shower just by stepping foot in that bathroom...I know it's a bit early but can we please stop for the day?

Cooper snorts, putting his freshly wiped sunglasses back on. “That bad, huh? Sure. Expect an early start and a late end tomorrow though.”

“Anything to feel clean again.”

Once in a room, Lucy gets him all revved up before slipping away to take the shower she wanted, leaving him aching for her, nothing on his mind but sinking into her pussy. 

Like she does just about every time she bathes.

And upon getting out, she walks over and continues right where they left off, making the wait worth it.

He wonders if it's a tactic she employed with past Johns too. 

“What will you do after?”

The man blinks. “Come back here.”

“Promise,” she nearly whispers the request from the bed as he stands near the door. 

“I'll come back Lucy, promise.” 

“You're not ditching me,” she asks.

"No."

They haven't been apart for very long at all since beginning to travel together three weeks ago….Now they get a room in Chicago and he tells her he needs to leave for something work related at 10 PM and that he'll be back in a couple hours?

It's weird and dredges up a fear of abandonment. 

“Can I get a kiss,” she asks softly. Lucy really likes his kisses. She really likes him. He's funny and attractive and good at sex. A dangerous combination that she never learns her lesson from. 

“You can get one when I come back, alright,” he offers with a roguish curl of his lips, flashing those bright, straight teeth. He has a nice smile. 

She likes the deep, smokiness of his voice too.

Lucy bites her lip. “Okay....” 

“See you later.”

She watches the beguiling man turn on his heel and stride out the door, listens to the smooth rumble of his car start up as he leaves and she's left to her own devices. 

She doesn't like being alone. Bad thoughts she'd prefer to stay buried come creeping up. She grabs the remote and turns the television on to have some noise in the room with her. 

She distractedly watches some black and white episode of a show before getting up to take a shower where she repeatedly hums an earworm of a song currently getting a lot of radio play as she washes and conditions her hair, before moving on to soap up her body and shave her legs and underarms. 

Lucy is still humming it as she gets out, applies lotion, and tends to her teeth, before putting on a soft sleep set made with warm nights in mind and climbing onto the bed where she curls up to try to watch more television until she falls asleep.

She opens her eyes to Mister Cooper shutting the door and her heart leaps in her chest, she unfurls from her sphere and quickly glances at the clock to see its glowing red numbers displaying 2:15.

“You’re back," she murmurs to the man once more hovering by the entrance. She sits up, rubbing at her right eye as her opposite hand shuts the TV off. He came back. Like he promised. He didn't dump her off here after leaving his things behind to lull her into a false sense of security. He seems rich enough to be able to do such a thing. 

He sniffles and she finally registers his labored breathing. 

Lucy’s sleepy grogginess fades as concern floods through her, thinking he's crying. “Are you okay?”

That also goes ignored as he strides through the small room until he's towering over her kneeling position and grabs her hair, leaning down to press harsh, sloppy kisses on her mouth. “Let me fuck you, baby.” He rasps, eyeing her hungrily. 

She's very well acquainted with how that one version of Little Red Riding Hood must have felt before being gobbled up by the wolf but she still shivers under him.

She can't see any, but she smells it.

Iron. 

Mister Cooper smells like iron and cigarette smoke. She left the bathroom light on and the door cracked open and staring into his eyes that are blown out and look frenzied, Lucy recognizes the sniffle and rapid breathing for what they are. 

The man is on something. He's on something and has the scent of blood clinging to his dark clothing but she doesn't even really care at the moment, does she? Because he’s back. He's kept this promise too…She finally nods and then his hands are moving fast again, and she doesn't flinch this time either. 

When was the last instance she did? And why did she stop?

She knows it's not a matter of if, but when, he’ll strike her. Always when. That's just what men are like in this life she chose. After all, why not unload those urges on this random girl they picked up? What can she do about it? Go to the police later? Nothing would happen except her getting charged with prostitution.

“Daddy,” Lucy hiccups in between more messy kisses as he groans and yanks her clothes off of her and pushes her flat onto the mattress, scrambling to get a condom on before filling her slick body roughly and starting to fuck her even rougher as her back arches. 

“Sweet little whore, just taking it like this...” Daddy hisses after another harsh kiss, his fingers gripping her hips before one of his hands slides up to grope at a breast. “Gonna jerk off and come all over these cute tits of yours one day. Wanna try and fuck ‘em too. Mm, yeah, you like that?”

She nods, her lips agape as she desperately sucks in oxygen.

“They're so small I might just have to settle for rubbing my dick on 'em,” he groans. “More than alright with me though, don't get me wrong. Got the rosiest nipples I've ever seen…”

“Daddy, daddy, daddy," She keeps whimpering brainlessly, biting at her lip before tightening around his cock.

He makes a noise like a growl and thrusts four more times before coming himself. 

Cooper is still dealing with the aftermath the next day. He feels like he's been wrung out to dry, like he always does when he uses what he did last night. A little boost that made him overcome with a frenetic energy that needed to be burned off with more activity…Because nixing his pistol and ending the mark with a knife clutched in his gloved hand after hearing the click of the man's emptied gun wasn't enough. 

Fucking Lucy afterwards was though.

Now the girl is inside yet another place to use the bathroom, didn't even take the key from him before darting inside. He's swallowing a drink of water when she comes striding out towards the car.

Instead of walking up to the passenger side though, she stops in front of his window and clasps her hands behind her back.

“Yes?”

“Can I have some money?" Lucy murmurs, with her head ducked as she peers up at him from under her lashes. “Not a lot, just like,” she purses her lips for a second, “I actually didn't even see the price but it probably won't cost more than $10 with tax?”

He reaches for his wallet with an upward quirk to his own. The girl politely looks away as she usually does whenever he opens it and only looks back after he's closed it with a soft snap and holds out two $5 bills. “Here.”

She takes it with a smile and a tooth rotting coo of, “Thank you, Mister Cooper.”

He watches the swish of her skirt as she walks back inside. So does a young redheaded man in a cashier uniform she passes as he leans against a beat up car smoking a cigarette. 

The stranger whistles at her as she comes out with a small bag and Lucy doesn't even look back at him, just speeds up her walking as her smile dims. Cooper's eyes narrow. Once back in the car, it regains some of its luster as she gives him his change and then fishes in the bag before thrusting her hand out.

A teardrop shaped acrylic encasing a black scorpion is dangling by a silver split ring from her curled index finger. “I saw this and wanted to get it for you. I know you already have a scorpion on your zippo but, I don't know, I just thought this was neat.”

He stares at it. 

Lucy's smile wavers again, her voice petering out into something weak. “It glows in the dark too…” 

When her hand and gaze starts to drop, Cooper reaches out and takes it, looking more closely at the arachnid forever suspended in time she has bought for him. “Thank you.”

Pulling his keys from the ignition, he attaches the gift to it, feeling almost blinded by Lucy's smile as she watches him do it.

“You're welcome.”

A few days later, he's inside a similar place as Lucy dozes in the passenger seat, when he passes a stand that he pauses at upon spotting a miniature cowgirl boot made up of three different shades of pink with a red heel, hanging by a gold clip that has an even tinier gold star dangling from it. 

He adds it to the waters and snacks in his hand and walks to the register. 

She stirs when he shuts the door. Cooper multitasks by opening a bag of peanuts with his teeth as he holds it out to her, not looking over until she gasps softly and slowly takes it from him. 

Jesus, she's cupping it in her soft palms like it's something immeasurably precious and better than all the cute clothes he's gotten her instead of being a kitschy thing that cost him six bucks. 

“I love it…Thank you.” Lucy breathes, looking at him with big eyes, before she clips it onto the strap of her bag, having no keychain of her own to add it to. 

He glances at her several times throughout the day and sees her running her finger along the tiny shoe.

In between staring at the road and catching her stroking the thing, his eyes keep darting to the only trinket on his keychain, especially when the sun sets and it starts glowing green again. 

“Can I get a long island iced tea, please,” Lucy asks the man. 

Cooper raises a brow. She's never shown any inkling towards alcohol in the 29 days they've known each other. 

The waiter squints at her. “You have ID?”

“No, but-”

“Sorry. Can't get you one, miss.”

Cooper gets an idea. In the meantime though, he stops by a store and buys the makings for the drink before checking into a room at this none too shabby inn. 

It takes just half of the cocktail he poured into a red plastic cup for her to crawl into his lap from her own cushion on the compact two-seater couch. Her face is flushed and her eyes are hazy as she gets all settled on him, her back against the arm rest. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Cooper purrs at the intoxicated girl staring at him. Lucy sighs then and his hand lands on her hip when she begins harmlessly mouthing along his throat and jaw, his head swimming from the rum he's consumed as he lets it fall back with a breathy groan. “Baby…” 

She clumsily moves into a straddle, her arms wrapping around his neck, and he hisses when she suckles at his earlobe. “Touch me.” 

He smirks, tightening his grip where his hand slid down to her ass over her dress while she rearranged herself on him. “I am touching you.”

“No, touch me, daddy..." She begs, before inelegantly pushing her panties to her ankles, grabbing his wrist, and moving his hand between her legs where his fingers find a pool of liquid heat. 

Cooper has her squirming in no time at all. Lucy, so close to his ear, thoughtfully keeps her noises restrained down to airy, soft whimpers and mewls as he thrusts and crooks his fingers inside her cunt until she starts to pant and rock down into his hand, pulsing around his fingers.

Before she's even finished coming, he's guiding her onto her back with her legs sprawled open so he can kneel between them, grab the condom he's taken to keeping in his pocket for moments like this, and get his cock in her sopping pussy.

“Daddy! Feels so good,” Lucy keens, her head tossed skyward. 

Cooper detours to an electronic store once on the road again and buys a camera to take a picture of Lucy with in their next motel room. “Cute as it is, put down that peace sign and smile normally. This is for an ID,” he tells her. 

“Huh?” 

“You need an ID but you don't have an address or any of the legal documentation necessary for it, so ergo, fake ID. I know a guy. He'll make one so good it'll fool even the best cops. Now, c’mon, plain smile.”

“O-Oh. Okay,” she murmurs.

“3…”

She lowers her hands. 

“2…”

She straightens up and looks into the camera. 

“1…”

She gives a small, closed mouth smile. 

Click!

He looks down at the screen and nods. “This should do.”

And then they're en route so he can meet up with his contact while Lucy stays in their room and he gives the man the camera to extract the image from and do what he's paying him an exorbitant amount for.

They fuck around with each other in that city for two days, sexually and non sexually until the man is done and he's leaving Lucy in the room again so he can pick it up. 

She snatches it out of his hands with a gasp when he presents it to her, moving it closer to a wall sconce to inspect it at every angle. “Whoa...It’s just like the one I lost.” 

Which is part of why it was so expensive. The man had to do some hacking for the information. He drops down beside her on the bed, leaning back on his elbows. “Yep.”

Lucy kisses him firm and deep in between ecstatic giggles and trills of, “Thank you, thank you, thank you…”

They're in yet another room, Lucy sitting on her calves in front of a floor to ceiling mirror on a section of wall, as she rifles through the new makeup spread out around her.

She's getting ready to put that fake ID to use at a bar across the street she is not really appropriately clothed for in a dress that looks more like a pastel slip than something she should be going out and about in. 

Most of her dresses are cut like that though. 

Cooper blatantly watches from his seat on the side of bed behind her, prepared to leave for a while now.

She puts down her eyeshadow brush to pick up her eyeliner pencil and then mascara. It's not until she has lipstick in her hand that she looks at him in the glass. “You're staring, Mis-ter Coo-per,” she singsongs. “Why? Do you think I look pretty?” She asks, batting her dark lashes. 

“As a doll.” He says as she removes the cap, twists the bottom, and begins applying the red to her parted mouth before twisting it back inside and closing it to drop onto the carpet. 

Slowly leaning forward and up with her hands braced against the glass, Lucy presses a lingering, staining kiss to his mirrored self. 

They don't make it out of the room as she lets him pull down her panties and fuck her on her hands and knees, the dress pushed up to her waist. His fingers are in her mouth, smearing her neatly applied lipstick and muffling her cries of pleasure.

And as Cooper unloads into the condom with a spew of curses under the steady weight of her done up eyes, he can't help but picture his come dripping out of her pretty, stretched little pussy. 

It gives him another idea. 

Cooper’s blood is thrumming sitting in the pink and aqua painted waiting room with Lucy at a gynecologist office, paying no mind to the looks they're getting from some of the other women in the chairs nearby, as his hand on her knee occasionally drifts up to her thigh until his fingers brush the fabric of her shorts while the girl flips through a magazine. 

His blood is thrumming when they walk out of a pharmacy with a case of birth control and his blood is thrumming every day for a week when he stares at her slim throat working as she diligently swallows down one of the pills.

When Cooper is finally able to spread her out on a bed and his eyes roll back with a choked noise as he slides inside hot, tight, wetness with no condom to dim the sensations as Lucy shudders under him and bites her lip? His blood feels like it's boiling.

He wonders how his parents would feel about their 45 year old son having the moment he's ever felt close to God being between a 21 year old’s thighs while grabbing her small hips, pushing deep, and coming inside her cunt.

Lucy hopefully presents him with a bag of assorted candy while they're inside a gas station and though he curls his lip at it, he still lets her carry it to the register. 

He knows there's little to no nutritional value but she's never asked him to buy her anything to eat before and her big eyes sparkled like her bright teeth while waiting for his answer. 

He doesn't care for sugar, but when she later takes in a sucker to enjoy on the bed in a room like countless others they've been in…Listening to her crude slurping? Seeing her red lips wrapped around the candy, the flash of her pink tongue as she rolls it in her mouth, and the round shape of it pushing against her cheeks? 

It makes him so goddamn hard. 

Cooper leans over, takes the sucker and tosses it into the trash by the door while she softly whines a complaint, before licking the taste from her sticky mouth. His thumb ruining her lipstick further, he whispers, “Get on your knees and suck my cock.”

Giggling and licking his finger, Lucy scrambles to comply, kneeling on the floor between his legs as her small fingers tipped with painted nails reach to pull his zipper down as he gathers up her silky hair.

The smell of candy seeps out the plastic bag and the seam of the glove box where it's stored. The first thing he does now upon re-entering and starting the car is roll the windows down, airing out the most overpowering stench of all. Those nuggets of bubble gum. 

How those small things have such a kick to them, Cooper will never fucking know. 

“Oh my god." she breathes in admiration, her wide eyes on a lean young man a couple years older than her in ripped, dark clothing walking towards the parking lot from the convenience store they're currently heading to. 

He doesn't notice her attention, too busy fiddling with his portable CD player. She's not staring at him though, but his hair. 

His icy blue hair. 

“Do you think I could pull that color off? Oh, or maybe a pink?" She asks him quietly, leaning in and angling her head up towards him for discretion. 

Cooper glances down at her consideringly. “Think you can pull off anything,” he says plainly. 

She ducks her head with a smile. “Oh, thanks. But,” she scrunches her nose, “on second thought, I'd have to mess with bleach and I don't want to do that…”

Drunk Lucy isn't always a needy little sex kitten, he finds out when they go to a bar and she gets her hands on some fruity cocktails. Curled up on his lap again back in their room and kissing on him, she pauses to ask, “What was your home life like growing up?” 

He opens his hazy eyes. “What?” He asks, though he's already processing the words. “Oh. How about this…You tell me about yours, and I'll tell you about mine.”

Lucy falters, her eyes lowering. “You don't wanna know about mine, Mister Cooper…” 

“I do.”

She squirms then and not in a seductive way. Anxiously. “You first,” she murmurs. 

Cooper heaves a sigh. “Home life was miserable. Parents were forced together for Bible study sessions and forced to marry after one evening alone where they started studying the birds and bees instead of the Holy Book.”

“You're religious?” 

He barks out a sharp laugh. “No. And there was a great deal of tension in the household over it when I got older and really started protesting wasting my Sunday mornings in church. But even before that my,” his stomach twists, “my father didn't spare the rod, his fists, or the cigarette…”

She gasps. 

He's never told anyone this before and the words just keep pouring right out of his mouth. “My mother tried to keep herself happy on gin and valium and never did anything when my father would take his own unhappiness over everything out on me…I got the hell out of dodge as soon as I could.” 

She's frowning down at her lap by the time he's done, fidgeting with her jade ring. “Sorry that happened to you.”

Cooper squints at her. “Why? You didn't have a hand in it.”

She shrugs her small shoulders. “I don't know. Just felt right to say, I guess.”

Amused, he just looks at the girl for a moment. She's chewing on the inside of her lip, digesting it all. “Your turn. Call it another honest exchange, doll.”

“Okay.” She takes a deep breath. “My dad didn't hit me but he definitely became very…belligerent for a couple years? But that's after,” she sighs with a shake of her head. “Let me start from the beginning. When I was seven, my mom…”

Lucy tells him about her mother grabbing her and running off in the middle of the night, her father showing up and taking Lucy back home some weeks later, how he stopped caring for her with the patience a father should have for his young daughter. 

That she found her mother's jade ring under the dresser playing in her father's room a year after while the man was in his home office and knew to hide it away in her room because, “Daddy got mean whenever I brought up mommy...”

That he eventually stopped interacting with her much at all after she turned 10 and could be more self reliant. When she could make herself the simplest of meals, do her own laundry, and get to and from school all by herself. That he'd wordlessly leave money out for her for clothes and other necessities to keep up public appearance. That the distance became mutual and she decided to stay out of the man's way until the clock struck midnight on her 18th birthday and she left.

Lucy is squirming and fidgeting incessantly on his lap by the time she's finished and he's frowning at her, confused about something. 

“What happened to your mother,” Cooper questions. “Where was she when he emotionally fucked off and started neglecting you?”

The girl bites her lip, a sob ripping out of her throat as tears roll down her flushed cheeks and she clams up. Refusing to say anything more. 

He drops the subject and turns the television on, putting on a show with bright colors and studio laughter. 

He locates her in the store standing in front of a mannequin wearing a pleated skirt, rubbing the material between her fingers. 

He knows blue is her favorite color but the girl is just obsessed with it. Within reason though. No matter the shade, it always compliments her. He buys the skirt and a red and white striped shoulder baring top that she pairs together on the Fourth of July. 

Cooper doesn't give a fuck about the holiday himself but he still parks in this clearing in the woods, sitting on the grass on a thin plaid blanket, drinking from a bottle and observing the tipsy girl playing with sparklers. 

There's a battery operated radio with music coming from the speakers to spare the car from needing a jump. It's still loud after Lucy had heard drums and a bass guitar start up before a woman's raspy voice hummed a few notes, making her gasp and tell him, “Turn it up! I love this song…”

Cooper called her over after watching her ruby lips move along to the lyrics and now has his fingers in her cunt and his tongue in her mouth, sharing the taste of whiskey amongst themselves, until she breaks it when her head falls back, mewling and tightening around his fingers. 

Fireworks go off some miles away and she turns her head all around, her bleary eyes widening when she spots them. “Oh, wow. So pretty,” she slurs.

“Yeah,” he whispers, his eyes on her awed face as he unzips and shifts beneath her so his cock can fill her up, her soft whimper almost lost under the booms and music.

Lucy slowly tears her gaze away from the rainbow of explosions in the night sky and gives a meager little roll before sloppily kissing him with a blissful sigh of, “Daddy.”

“Just watch the fireworks, baby..." Cooper breathes, his hands on her hips while she returns her attention to the show, her mouth hanging open with her eyes hooded and fluttering sporadically as he moves her atop him.

They sleep in the car. He doesn't drive drunk and even if Lucy knew how to drive, the liquor has hit her harder than it hit him.

He shaves with one of those scary looking straight razors. 

Lucy's palms get sweaty from her seat on the rim of the bathtub where he lets her watch, incapable of looking away as he maneuvers the sharp thing along his face and jaw and throat. Not when she half expects him to slip any second and slice into himself, expects blood to start flooding out of the man.

But it never does.

He handles the blade with too much precision and grace for something like that to happen. 

“America's Largest Ball of Yarn,” Lucy reads off a billboard. “Exit 168.”

Cooper rolls his eyes, taking a drag from his half finished cigarette. “No.”

“I've never stopped at one of those tourist attractions before, Mister Cooper. I want to see it and I want my picture taken in front of it, please. That camera has just been going to waste.”

He clears his throat with a smirk. “Close your eyes and imagine yarn,” he smoothly instructs before sardonically asking, “You know what that is, right? It's like a thick, fuzzy string. Now imagine a lot of it but in the shape of a ball…No need to make a detour. Isn't the power of imagination wonderful?” 

She turns to him, her lips jutting in a pout with her doe eyes wide and entreating. “Please? I'll make it worth your time,” Lucy purrs, her hand going to his upper thigh and squeezing.

He drops his cigarette into the ashtray as she drags his zipper down, her soft hand wrapping around him while he bites his tongue. 

This sweet, clever little whore.

“Will you take me to see it, daddy?” She murmurs, unbuckling to lean over, the smell of vanilla hitting his nose, and filthily letting a glob of saliva drip off her tongue to land on his dick that she spreads around with her thumb to ease the friction. 

This sweet, clever, nasty little whore.

“Fine. But we're leaving if it's crowded.” He grits out, swallowing thickly with a shudder when her hand twists on the upward stroke. 

Cooper turns down exit 168. It is not crowded. He snaps a picture of her beaming in front of the ball of yarn in its display case while the fingers of her left hand, the one she jerked him off with, form a peace sign.

Cooper randomly takes the girl's picture throughout the next few days. 

Click! As she walked out of a gas station.

Click! As she held a fork to her mouth.

Click! As she's in mid sentence. 

Click! As she stepped out of the shower, making her blink rapidly at the sudden light in her face. 

Click! As she sits at a table painting her nails.

“What? The camera’s not going to ‘waste’ anymore..." He drawls, when she huffily looks at him from over her shoulder after that one.

Click!

It's meant to be a petty careful-what-you-wish-for thing but the camera adores her and the pictures all come out nicely.

Little Lot Lizard Lucy likes reading. 

He discovers that when she suggests that they go to the thrift shop right next door to the laundromat they're currently sitting in, waiting for their clothes to finish washing. 

With 45 minutes left on the machines, he boredly nods his assent and they're back outside in the arid warmth for the few seconds it takes to turn left a couple paces and pull open the door. 

He's walked through all the color coded aisles of vases and plates and bowls, mugs, dusty looking electronics, board games, and miscellaneous knickknacks when he decides to thumb through the music available. There's still some empty slots in the large album he keeps under the passenger seat. 

Lucy is nearby and must have been there the whole time because he hasn't seen her anywhere else. She's perusing a book shelf and has three in her arms, one he distantly recognizes as a Nancy Drew book from the bottom half of the cover art he can see. 

He sidles up next to her. “Bookworm, huh,” he murmurs in greeting. 

She bites her lip, shifting her weight and looking at the books she's grabbed. “Kind of…Haven't read a book since before I left home but I used to read like all the time. Helped pass the days until I could leave, you know?" She says, just as quietly. 

He nods. 

“Sorry if that ruins some of my appeal,” she breathes with an embarrassed little laugh. 

“No, no. Intelligence is sexy." He drawls, tilting his head to read some of the titles. Nothing interests him here either. He turns back to her. “You being a fan of hers doesn't surprise me by the way. Feels fitting for some reason.”

She starts compulsively twisting the ring around her finger. “My mom was reading one of the books to me before my father took me back home.” 

He hums in acknowledgement. 

“Yeah,” she whispers. 

He glances down at his watch after a minute of silence. “Alright, c’mon. Let's pay. It's time for the clothes to be put in the dryer.”

It's 1 o’clock when Lucy withdraws and is quiet for the rest of the day until they check into a room a quarter to 10 PM where he fucks her until she's loud again. Moaning and crying out at such a volume that someone starts banging on the wall, making her burst into flustered laughter, clamping her hands over her mouth as he continues undeterred, pulling her hands away. 

Lucy being quiet is wrong. 

She opens one of the books to read in the car the next day for a couple hours. She never touches the Nancy Drew one. Maybe it's enough just for the girl to have it, a link to her mother. 

Cooper strongly suspects she died. 

“I want to go to a fair and ride on the carousel. Those are so fun," Lucy shares. 

“Is there a fair in town I somehow missed? They're usually pretty obnoxious with the advertising..."

“No, one of the books I got takes place at a fair. I started thinking and I really like them. Especially the carousels. Have you ever gone on one at night? There's something magical about it." She sighs, taking a sip of her water. 

“Those places are crowded and dirty, there's children running all over screaming and crying, the rides are dangerous and not maintained properly,” He lists off. “Plus, carousels just aren't as fun when you've been on real horses growing up.” 

“Oh.” And then, “You grew up around horses?”

“Lived in rural Nebraska so, yeah. My family didn't own any animals but a neighbor couple did, I think they felt bad for me. They taught me how to ride when I was nine years old and would let me go over whenever I wanted…Up until I was 13 and they were placed into a retirement home in the city close to their children.”

“What are horses like?” 

Cooper leans in to tell her. Those horses are the only happy memories he has of his boyhood. 

Drunk Lucy has confided in him some other information regarding her past. She didn't ever really go into detail though and would start swaying back and forth before checking out of the conversations completely. Fucked up things had happened to her, he gathers. 

He unknowingly triggers memories of some of the bad shit this evening.

They're getting hot and heavy on the bed with her legs wrapped around him, when he asks if she's ever done anal, she says yes, he smirks and with a grind of his hips purrs, "Aren't you just a dirty little slut?" 

Lucy stiffens, her breath hitching, her legs falling from his waist as she starts frantically squirming under him where he’s caged her in. “No, no, no, nononono, no! Get off of me!” She gasps out, high and choked and panicky. 

His eyes wide, his erection gone, he gets off of her and she flees to the bathroom, locking herself inside. The door is a thin wood and he can hear her uneven breaths through it. There's a gap between the door and the floor that lets him know she doesn't even turn the light on. 

He gets up and walks over, doesn't knock or anything, just says a quiet, “Lucy.”

Her breathing cuts off, like she's holding it, like if she's silent he'll forget she's in there and go away. 

Cooper sits down at the foot of the bed, his eyes following her as she comes out almost an hour later. She sits down in a chair, not looking at him. 

Half an hour passes Lucy gets up to stiffly sit next to him. 

“There was a man.” She whispers, her nails digging into her bare knees, still not looking in his direction. “He wouldn't let me leave and he kept saying that, calling me that…‘Just a dirty little slut’ as he-” she bites her lip, unsuccessfully holding back a wounded animal noise. 

Cooper clenches his jaw. 

“Don't touch me right now?" She chokes out, pulling her knees up to her chest and rocking herself. “Please?”

He wasn't going to. 

“It's okay. You're okay,” he finds himself saying. 

She takes a shuddering inhale, sniffling wetly. 

“It's okay. You're okay,” he repeats. 

She glances at him then, hazel meets hazel, her face blotchy and messy with dark lines from the makeup she had so happily applied earlier in the day.

“It's okay. You're okay…”

She's been left in yet another room while Mister Cooper works. 

As she lays on the bed, holding the pillow he had briefly reclined against for a while before leaving, she gets to thinking. Because there's nothing else to do.

She's taken a shower, has applied her pretty smelling lotion, has put on one of the pretty nightgowns he's gotten her, has brushed and flossed her teeth, her books are in the car, and the TV was unbearably snowy so she shut it off. 

Her hand is on the nightstand where her purse is and she's fingering the cowgirl boot he gave to her. 

Monty had been the first man. He was 26 to her then 18. They had met while she was working at this club. He had seen her and asked for a private dance and like many others, her awkwardness when dancing, even months after working there, charmed him. 

She filled a market that men really liked. It's why the boss hired her. She was some wide eyed thing of innocence they could coo over, could ask while giving her money, “What's a pretty thing like you doing here, baby? You don't belong here.”

The blond man had met her at just the right time. The last boss had mysteriously been replaced by his less nice, sleazier cousin who didn't care as much about the girls working there. He went lax on security to save money as well as filled his pockets with cuts from the girls’ tips. 

She had enough creepy cousins to last a lifetime after her own cousin came into her life when she was 15 and he was 19. He had moved nearby for college and would be hanging around their house most days by the time she'd come home from school.

Chet never touched her but he wanted to. 

He would just stare at her and sit right next to her even though there was plenty of other space. Would enter her room and touch her stuff instead, squeezing the stuffed animals scattered about as he asked if she's ever had a boyfriend because, “You're a pretty girl, you could have anyone you wanted, i-is there a boy you like right now?” While giving her these hopeful eyes. 

Rinse and repeat until she left. 

It made her so uncomfortable but she never told daddy, her real daddy, because she tried to be as unobtrusive as possible and also because she didn't know if he'd even care that her cousin unnerved her. Maybe he would have, maybe he wouldn't. 

The logical part of her tells her he probably wouldn't have though…He didn't seem to care about her at all. Not after-

But Monty. Back to Monty…Through the week straight that he visited her, she had learned he was a trust fund baby setting out to find himself in the world. Regardless, she liked him, she thought he was attractive and funny, so when he asked that she join him, she agreed. 

It had taken three weeks for him to start putting his hands on her. It was so sudden, too. 

The first instance had been when he was driving down the highway too fast for comfort and she had anxiously asked that he slow down. Next thing she knew, her cheek was stinging and he was glaring at her, ignoring the road to hiss, “Don't ever tell me what to do. I got enough of that shit from my parents. I'm a grown man.”

It had taken her three months to pick her body up off the floor for the last time, feeling like a walking bruise as she glanced over at Monty’s now unconscious form on the bed, his dick still out and smeared with red. 

With shaking hands and legs, she gathered her strewn clothes to gingerly redress before entering into the bathroom where she wet a cloth with cold water and wiped her face clean of literal blood, sweat, and tears. She steadfastly avoided the girl's hurt eyes reflected back at her in the mirror.

She didn't know who that girl was. 

Then she went around the room, not needing to be quiet with everything in the man's system, as she packed her things and walked out with her left hip bone searing from a fresh burn she knew would scar. 

In real time, the door finally swings open with Mister Cooper's return and she hurries over to him, ignoring the smell of iron to kiss him with a happy sigh. His hand squeezes her rear and she giggles and he laughs lowly. His eyes are dilated but he's not in the same state he came back in the first time he left her alone. 

When they tumble onto the bed and he removes her nightgown and panties, he's hyper focused on her face as he stretches her open on his fingers and then his cock and starts to fucks her. 

“Daddy,” she cries when he rubs her clit until she falls apart.

“That's a nice color,” he says to the girl with her dainty foot propped up on the dash so she can paint her toenails black. 

Lucy nods and blows a bubble almost as big as her face. 

“Sure would be a shame if I hit a pothole or something, wouldn't it?” 

“Don't," she laughs. 

They're in another thrift store Lucy asked him to take her to so she could donate her finished books and pick out some more. 

“Look,” she says behind him while placing two thick books down in front of him. 

Cooper turns, holding onto a CD he's going to buy, and sees her in these red sunglasses with heart shaped frames. Lucy purses her lips and sucks her cheeks in like a model, her hands on her hips as she turns her head this way and that. “Cute, right?” 

He snorts at her silliness. “Yeah.”

“Will you buy them for me?” She asks, her lips in a smile. 

“Sure.” He takes them off her face and stacks the books and CD, balancing the sunglasses on top. 

It's eight in the morning when he rouses upon feeling Lucy sit up to grab the large plastic bottle from her nightstand. The sun is shining under the thin curtains just long enough to cover the glass and allows his tired eyes to see her throat working as she chugs the remaining half of yesterday’s water. 

A trickle of water catches his attention as it slips past the corner of her mouth to roll down her jaw and throat before disappearing in between her small tits, which are rising and falling as she breathes harshly through her nose.

Blood rushes to his dick and he swoops in, licking the trail of water and pushing her nude body back down onto the bed, the bottle and it's remaining few ounces, falling from her hand and landing on the floor. 

“Hey,” she whines breathlessly. 

Cooper kneels between her legs and thrusts himself to the hilt inside her slick cunt. 

She moans lustfully, her back arching. 

He leaves the girl alone for a short amount of time to duck into the restroom and buy some fruit while Lucy stretches her legs outside only to exit and find some older boy chatting her up. 

Initially, he tenses before he notices her uninterested body language. She is not even looking at the rambling boy as she stretches her arms in front of her and slowly rolls her head around. 

“So uh, you're traveling, huh? Where you headed?” The brunette asks, eyes roving over the skin revealed in Lucy's pink overall shorts and midriff baring top. 

She looks good, better, he realizes then.

She wasn't skeletal when they met but her bones were certainly more prominent. Now, after a couple months of regular meals, her appetite slowly increasing, she's filled out some. Oh, the girl’s still a skinny little thing though despite the food and all the sugar she tends to consume. 

Genetics, maybe. He doesn't know. She's never described her parents’ appearances to him. And vice versa. 

Lucy sighs, pushing her sunglasses higher up her nose and lazily turning to the nuisance, her mouth opening until Cooper, now less than a foot away, sharply cuts in. “None of your goddamn business.”

The boy jumps and turns to look at him striding towards them. “Sorry, sir…Wasn't trying anything with your daughter,” he mutters before quickly walking to his white car. 

She's not his daughter but the boy absolutely was trying something. 

Cooper sucks his teeth at the liar and Lucy presses her lips together, she always finds it funny whenever someone makes that assumption about them. Which, given their age difference and eye color, it’s only natural, he supposes. 

“Alright, let's rock and roll.” He drawls, putting his own sunglasses back on. 

His hand stroking along her knee finally snakes between her thighs, and he pauses when he feels damp curls and flesh before he smirks. “No panties, baby?”

She looks at him with flushed cheeks and bitten lips, squirming and spreading her legs. “You ripped most of them, daddy. And the ones I have left are all dirty,” Lucy bemoans.

“Guess you just bring out the animal in me. You want to go shopping for more? I mean, I wouldn't be opposed if you nixed wearing panties altogether but one strong wind and you'd get a public indecency charge, huh?”

She huffs then, her fingers digging into the hardcover of her book. “I hate the police.”

“Oh, me too…Keep reading." Cooper instructs, his finger tracing along her slit. He wasn't bullshitting when he said intelligence was sexy, seeing her so consumed with reading is doing it for him. 

Her lip enters her mouth when his fingers push into her body, his thumb stimulating her clit. In between glances at the road, he takes in the way she shudders and sighs softly, her page turning slowing down and becoming less frequent with her eyes darting along the same passages again and again. 

Cooper feels it, hears it in the catch of her breath, the moment it becomes too much and, currently alone on the unwinding stretch of road ahead of them, he turns to watch the way her head falls back, her eyes shutting as Lucy lets out breathy moans, her hips undulating into his fingers. 

And then he's licking her wetness from his hand and her book is being placed in the backseat and she's unbuckling her seatbelt, a soft, “Pay attention to the road," leaving her before she undoes his jeans and the warmth of her mouth envelops him, making him buck with a curse, white knuckling the steering wheel. 

Panting, he repetitively glances into the side mirror to search for more cars coming or God forbid a highway patrol because her ass sticking up in the air the way it is is a lot less subtle than a prior handjob and fingering. 

“Fuckin’ Christ, doll,” Cooper gasps. 

She finishes off the bag of candy and he nearly heaves a sigh of relief over having that smell out of his car only for the girl to walk up to him holding another at the next gas station they visit. 

With a bat of her lashes and a shift of her weight that briefly draws his eyes down to her popped out hip, he's buying it for her.

Lucy has been in a rambunctious mood all day. 

“Daddy! Daddy, look! Look at me!" She says, oddly, as she doesn't usually call him that in public. 

He glances up from where he is bent over a map on a rest stop picnic table, charting out a course to Florida. He hates Florida. Well, he hates the humidity of Florida. He can handle a dry heat all day and night, but humidity? He can't stand it. 

Alas, a job is a job. 

“No,” Lucy whines, “watch me…” 

He tightens his grip on his pencil, lifting his head again. People are starting to look over at them. He doesn't give a shit what they think but attention isn't something he particularly likes. It's not good for his line of work. 

Some people are even shooting her dirty looks, instead of minding their own fucking business, that she's ignorant to as she focuses all her attention on him. 

Cooper's jaw is clenched until she does four consecutive cartwheels, one leading right into the next before sticking the landing with a peal of cackling laughter. Her tongue is stained orange. “Did you see that, daddy,” she asks with sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks. 

“Wow…” He's never been able to do a single one. 

“I have more in me! Watch,” she cries. 

One, two, three cartwheels. 

She fumbles and lands in a heap on the overgrown grass. “Wait, no! Let me try again.” 

One, two, three, four, five cartwheels. 

“Good job,” he praises when she breathlessly looks at him for approval. 

“Thanks." Lucy giggles, blowing an escaped strand of hair out of her face. 

Lucy gasps upon seeing the state sign. “Florida?! I love Florida…”

Of course she does. 

“Yeah,” he hums.

“Yeah! I stayed there for a month, I liked it so much. I would roller skate at the boardwalk when I wasn't, um,” she chews on her lip, “working.” 

His eyes narrow. 

“I had to leave though because I think some cops were getting suspicious of me…Also because, well, this girl I was staying with wanted to introduce me to her pimp and I wasn't going to start giving my money to a pimp,” she confides with an eye roll before aiming a hopeful smile at him. “Can you buy me some roller skates and take me to the boardwalk, daddy? Please?” 

Cooper blinks at the new, casually dropped information. “I don't want to roast while you skate around, baby.” 

She grabs his right hand to bring to her face and press butterfly light kisses along the back of it before sucking his fingers into her mouth as he breathes out slowly. “Please..." She whispers, releasing his finger to glide his hand down her throat and chest and stomach until it's on her thigh. “You can stay in the air conditioned room while I-”

“No.” 

She pouts. 

“No, I'm not going to stay in the room. I'll go. But only for two hours." He says, pushing her panties aside. “Okay?” 

“Okay,” Lucy agrees airily. 

He checks them into a room and completes his job with a single expertly aimed gunshot before going back where Lucy enthusiastically greets him and then he wakes them up early to take her to get some damn roller skates. 

It's now only 10 AM and already so muggy by the time Lucy is skating around, showing off with twirls and even some backwards skating that he finds impressive, and tells her so, but after she nearly falls on her little ass, she goes back to skating forward. 

His watch finally reads 12 yet she's somehow able to squeeze out another hour, and then another hour, and then another. 

Which is when Lucy meets her.

Stephanie. 

A 23 year old blonde who gives Cooper the stink eye when Lucy points at him from their spot at a vendor buying bottles of the disgusting, syrupy shit that is Nuka Cola. Lucy waves at him, not seeing the scornful look from her new friend that disappears when she starts turning back to her. 

No, Stephanie is all smiles again while gesturing to her blue romper with the sailor style collar and white buttons lining down both pockets in a row of three before running a finger along one of her braids. He lip reads a clear, “So cute…”

She beams at the older girl. “Thank you!” He hears her chime.

Then he's made to walk behind them, forgotten, as he glowers at the exposed portion of Lucy's back under her collar and above the bow around her waist as they link arms and start skating together. Giggling like they're best of friends despite only just meeting.

They eventually stop under a shop awning for some shade where they stand around talking animatedly with each other while he loiters a couple feet away under a different shop front, smoking. 

Little Lucy had asked for a straw to drink her cloyingly sweet soda from and the white plastic is stained with red rings from her lipstick. His eyes remain unwaveringly honed in on the girl as she tosses her head back, baring her delicate throat with a loud, happy laugh before lowering it to wrap her lips around the straw again. 

Cooper is overheating, pissed off, and horny. 

He wants to grab her and drag her away somewhere private. He wants to push her onto her knees and get that lipstick smudged around his cock instead. Fuck her throat until she's gagging and her face is streaked with mascara and eyeliner before pushing her down on all fours and rutting into her so deep, she feels the ache of him in her pretty little pussy for days. 

Teach the brat not to ignore him like this…She wouldn't even be here in this beloved state if not for him. Wouldn't have her new skates if not for him. Wouldn't have met her new best friend if not for him. 

“Oh, I don't know.” He hears Lucy hemhaw. “I'd have to as-”

“It's time to go," he calls, snuffing his cigarette out on the brick wall and striding over to them. Stephanie glares at him from behind Lucy as she immediately, rightfully, gives her attention back to him. 

“Aw, okay…Bye,” Lucy morosely says after swiveling towards the blonde who wraps her arms around her. 

“Bye, Lucy. See you later?” 

She shrugs in the girl's embrace and murmurs something unintelligible to his ears and if Stephanie gives him another nasty look before they leave, he doesn't see it as he dismissively turns his head to stare up at a towering palm tree. 

Lucy rolls back to the car, keeping pace with him. “I had so much fun today,” she softly gushes with a radiant smile. “And I love my new skates. Thank you, thank you, thank you…” 

Once in the car, she leans over to kiss the grin off his lips and he doesn't find the taste of Nuka Cola so offensive when it's on her tongue. 

Pulling back, Lucy giggles and straightens her skewed sunglasses, his own having yet to be replaced after he accidentally crushed them stepping into the car a few mornings ago, before wiping their mouths clean with a soft hand and getting herself settled into the passenger seat to reapply her lipstick.

Upon getting back in their room she sprawls herself on the bed with a yawn. Lazily rolling her light blue, so light in color that they're nearly white, skates up and down the headboard with her hands resting on her stomach. 

She doesn't do drugs but if she could inject the color blue into her body, she just might be tempted, Cooper sometimes thinks. 

He unbuttons his shirt and grabs a change of clothes. “I'm taking a shower and when I get out I want you packed and ready to go. Then you'll get in the shower and we’ll leave this place.”

No response and when he looks over before entering the bathroom, the girl is frowning up at the ceiling. Pouting again. 

Cooper cools off in the shower only to get reignited when he steps out, ready to pack his own things only to find her exactly where he left her. He cocks his head. “Did you not hear me?” 

She tips her head back to look at him upside down. “About that,” Lucy starts before swinging her legs off the side of the bed and removing her skates, leaving her feet in yellow polkadot socks. Next she slinks onto her hands and knees where she crawls to him with her big cartoon eyes at half mast. “Stephanie invited me to a roller rink tomorrow at 11:30.” 

He scoffs. “No. I just said we're leaving today.”

She sits on her calves with a sigh, her hand coming up to rub over his groin, her pink nails standing out starkly against the dark fabric of his trousers. “Please, daddy? Just one more day?” 

“Oh, like it was ‘one more hour’ earlier until you got three more?” Cooper retorts sharply, stepping back even as his dick instantly protests with a painful throb. “No.”

She just shuffles after him and leans up to rest her cheek against his erection, her eyes never leaving his face. “Please, daddy, please,” the menace repeats, honey sweet. 

His hands land on her shoulders, getting ready to push her back but she unzips him and pulls his hard cock out before he can muster the willpower to do so. 

“This is what you wanted, isn't it?” The girl breathes, stroking him a few times before nuzzling it, smearing glistening stickiness on her beautiful face. His breath hitches. “Staring at my mouth the way you were…”

“Fuck, baby." He chokes out, eyes rolling, as her lips move to teasingly pepper kiss marks onto his dick. 

“Take me to the roller rink?” She begs, batting her lashes and dragging her painted lips from the base up to the crown, leaving behind a streak of scarlet, before her tongue laps firmly over the tip and she coyly whispers, “Pretty please? With a cherry on top?” 

Goddamnit. Fucking fine. She wins. 

He opens his mouth to verbalize this when Lucy sweetens the deal even further. “Afterwards, we'll come back here where you can fuck me so, so, so hard, daddy..." She purrs silkily, nuzzling him again. “'Cause I'm a little trooper, remember?” 

“Okay, okay. T-Tomorrow. 11:30. Roller rink. Just suck my cock already, sugar.” Cooper groans weakly, breathlessly, and she finally swallows him down her delicate throat. 

The next morning after breakfast, he once again finds himself observing her from the bed as she hums while putting on makeup. Blush across the apples of her cheeks, a shimmery gold applied on her large eyes, eyeliner, mascara, and then lipstick. 

Cooper wonders if their, her, plans can be derailed again. If he kneels behind her and slides his hand up her dress, starts teasing her nipples between his fingers while kissing down her throat…If he can get his cock inside her, will she forget and have a rush of a day alone in this room with him? 

He's just getting up to try when Lucy rises and hurries to slide in front of him on her socked feet where she gives a twirl with her arms posed like a ballerina above her head. The skirt of her dress, that she chose for this very reason, fanning out in a swish of fabric. 

“How do I look?” She coquettishly asks him, now running her fingers through her long hair, fluffing it.

He pulls her to him, his hand firmly grabbing a pert asscheek and she giggles and squirms free to sit and get her skates on. 

“You can put your hands on me later, daddy.” Her voice softens into a sly hush, “I'm already wet thinking about it. See?” She improperly lifts her dress to show him the wet spot on the gusset of her mint green panties. 

Cooper's dick twitches. “Then why don't we stay in and just get to what'll actually be fun to me?”

“Because I like Stephanie and it's nice to hang out with another girl." Lucy says before standing and grabbing her purse. “Now can we go? I don't want to be late…”

Heaving a sigh, he snatches up his keys and they leave. 

Lucy is too busy looking around the dark roller rink scarcely lit by overhead lights to see Stephanie's beaming smile upon spotting her fading into a downward curl of her lips when she notices Cooper behind her.

“Lucy,” Stephanie shouts, coming over to grab the shorter girl up into a hug. “You look so beautiful.” 

Lucy ducks her head. “Thanks. You too,” she tells her friend with a shy smile. 

And then the girls are off again as Cooper sits by himself at a tall table outside the rink. The loud music is already grating to his ears. The hell does the word Xanadu even mean? Mouth in a thin line, he jerkily nods his head in acknowledgement when they skate by him, and Lucy on the girl's outer side, waves with a toothy smile. 

They don't have anything to drink, even if they did, how would they get back? He doesn't have anything to snort either…And lighting a cigarette has some squeaky voiced boy coming over to stammer out the no smoking rule before taking the cigarette from him to extinguish somewhere.

At 3 PM a fucking disco ball lowers down from the ceiling and a lively voice announces from the speakers, “This one goes out to the girls!” 

“Oh, God..." Cooper whispers, pinching the bridge of his nose as Dancing Queen begins playing much to all the girls' delight in this building as their voices rise to a cacophony of cheers.

Stephanie twirls Lucy under her arm and spins her back in towards her, before holding both of her hands as the two skate in place in fast circles, laughing breathlessly. “I'm getting dizzy!" Lucy cries, beaming at the blonde. 

With a, "So am I," Stephanie stops them as the song ends and another one starts and they begin making laps again. 

Cooper agitatedly chews a stick of gum for 27 more minutes until Stephanie goes off towards the bathroom and he gets up to walk to the waist high wall framing the rink as Lucy rolls to meet him. “Playtime’s over, doll. Get ready to say goodbye to your little friend.”

She frowns. “Already?” 

“I think you should count yourself lucky that I let you stay as long as I have.”

Lucy's frown deepens as Stephanie comes up to them. “Hey, we have to go…” 

Her face falls. “You sure? You can't stay until closing time?”

She glances at him before responding. “No.” 

Stephanie pulls her into another tight embrace, giving him a dirty look over the brunette’s shoulder. 

Fuck you, too.

"I'll never forget you, Stephanie,” Lucy vows. 

Stephanie pushes her back to offer a comforting smile and brush some hair behind her ear. “I won't forget you either, okay? I don't know where I'm going from here but maybe we'll see each other again, huh?”

Lucy nods sadly. “Yeah…” 

Stephanie sighs at the girl, biting her lip with her blue eyes poring over Lucy like she's trying to burn the shorter girl into her memory. Cooper rolls his eyes at the melodramatics. He leans over and loudly spits out his gum into a trash can, smirking at the blonde's disgusted scoff. 

Lucy gives her friend one last smile before leaving with him. 

His hand is stroking her thigh the whole way back, even when her legs fall open to prompt it higher. Even when she grabs his wrist with a whine to drag it where she wants, he just puts it right back on her thigh, squeezing it…Until they're a couple of minutes away from the room and he finally delves his fingers inside. Perfunctorily stretching her for his cock.

In the room, she scurries to sit down on the bed to untie the laces of her skates until he pushes her back. “Hey,” Lucy bleats softly and Cooper pulls away with a huff to yank them off her feet, letting them drop heavily to the faux wood floor.

She yelps when he grabs a hold of her dress and impatiently pushes it up her body, her arms raising above her head to help as he removes that too. And then he's sliding her panties off with the same quick, sharp movements while she unsuccessfully fumbles with his shirt buttons. 

His zipper is loud in the room as he drags it down, the only other noise being their eager breathing and the drone of the air conditioner. Lucy's head lolls back, her fingers grabbing at his shoulders and her gold painted lids lowering with a tremulous exhale when he joltingly fills her. Those hazy eyes struggle to open hearing his voice ask, “This is fun, isn't it?” 

She doesn't answer. Just stares up at him with her mascaraed lashes fluttering, whimpering with every hard, fast, deep, plunge into her wet body. He crushes his lips to her ruby ones, swallowing her high, choked gasp.

“This is fun, isn't it?” Cooper pants, a hand tight in her hair so he can give a prompting tug. “Huh, little trooper?”

“Yes, daddy..." Lucy finally breathes, her lipstick a mess that only worsens as their lips meet again and she sloppily licks into his mouth with a mewl as he keeps fucking her so, so, so hard. 

Per their deal. 

Her orgasm is a loud squeal in juxtapose to his own low noise as he pushes his cock through her dizzyingly constricting pussy until he tenses and expels into her. 

Cooper stands after a minute, tucking himself away and heading towards the bathroom for a shower. “We're leaving tomorrow. Might want to start getting packed now.” 

Lucy weakly rises into a sitting position, grabbing one of the pillows and holding it. “We can't stay any longer? Do you have somewhere to be?” 

“No and no.” 

“Then why can't we stay,” she asks. “Just…five more days? I like it here…” 

Cooper pauses in front of the door. “Well, I don't.”

“I-I know but…” 

He grabs his carton of cigarettes and his lighter from his pocket, taking a long drag of nicotine. “You can stay here and I'll go.” 

“What?” 

“Was I not speaking clearly?” He exhales the smoke through his nose. “You can stay here in Florida and I will leave,” Cooper reiterates.

“I don't-” 

His heart starts racing and he glares down at the cigarette before walking over to the right side nightstand and dropping it into the ashtray, letting it burn itself out. “Maybe if you skate your ass back to the roller rink, Stephanie will still be there and you can start traveling with that little bitch instead.”

Lucy gasps. “Don't call her that..." she murmurs quietly, squirming, her eyes darting around the room.

“I’ll call someone who's spent hours shooting me dirty looks, for no reason at all, whatever the hell I want.”

“I didn't see her-” 

“Of course you didn't. She was too strategic with them." He mutters, walking back towards the bathroom. 

“Asshole.” Lucy whispers under her breath, like some rebellious teenager behind their parent’s back. He almost didn't hear it.

Cooper stops dead before slowly turning around to face the frozen, wide eyed brat. “What? Do you want to repeat that? After four months of clothing and feeding you, you're really going to call me…?” 

She tightens her grip on the pillow. “N-Nothing, nothing…” 

Scrubbing a hand down his face with a heavy sigh, he enters the bathroom. As he tiredly strips and steps under the cool water for a quick wash, he wonders if she'll still be on that bed when he gets out. 

She is. 

Lucy is cross legged, her dress thrown back on with her face free of makeup. Excluding her toiletries in the shower, sleepwear for tonight and an outfit for tomorrow set out, she's all packed to leave in the morning. She moves into a kneeling position, slowly looking up at him as he approaches. “I'm sorry,” she whispers. “Do you forgive me, Mister Cooper? I don't wanna stop traveling with you…”

He sighs again, pushing a finger into her mouth. “Nothing to forgive, sugar.”

Cooper isn't a young man though. Despite her tongue teasing his index finger, they just nap. Lucy curled up on her side as usual, until they wake at almost 8 o’clock where they proceed to eat dinner at a Chinese place nearby. 

Then they go back to the room where she rides him. 

He didn't hit her. 

Her heart feels like it swells in her chest and for one second, before she crushes it under her foot as he showers, she feels hope.

But it doesn't matter. Just because he didn't hit her after the asshole slipped out of her mouth when other men slapped her for less, have done worse than a slap...So it takes more for him to reach boiling point. That's fine.

She vows to make him blow his fuse. Because all men have one. They're violent and full of rage. Whether they let that rage show or let it simmer inside them, they eventually hurt her and girls like her. 

And Lucy needs him to drop the mask, to finally put his hands on her, spill her blood. Needs this weightless sensation that has been growing within her chest to stop, now unignorable as her heart feels like it has floated up into her throat.

So when the car starts smoking and has to be taken into a mechanic shop called Dave’s Garage? When his son takes one look at her and licks his lips, walking over to her, as Mister Cooper talks to his father? When the boy says a joke that actually makes her laugh and he turns to look over at them, his eyes narrowing as the boy hands her a drink from the vending machine? 

She knows what to do. 

She smiles up at Anthony, slowly licking a drop of lemonade from her lip. “My name is Lucy.”

He immediately launches into bragging about himself as she giggles and ooh's and ahh's like this 20 year old boy is the most impressive person she's ever met, nodding and gazing up at him with hooded eyes as Mister Cooper splits his attention between father and son.

“Anthony,” Dave shouts. “Actually do your job for a change and help me look under the hood, you damn slacker.” 

Mister Cooper is halfway over to them when she sympathetically hums to the visibly annoyed boy when he slinks off with a roll of his eyes. “Talk to you later,” she sighs. 

He sits next to her on the other rickety chair with the equally hard cushion. She avoids his eyes as he stares at her. “The fuck was all that,” he questions stiffly. 

Anthony glances over at them and she flashes him a smile.

“Yeah, okay. Great talk.” he scoffs, folding his hands together in his lap, his knuckles white, his eyes blazing and his jaw clenched as he peruses a corkboard to the right of them pinned full of local flyers. 

The boy takes another look at her a couple minutes later and she drapes one leg over the other, smoothing out her skirt. She giggles and waves at him after he blushes and drops a tool. 

“Stop that,” Mister Cooper demands. 

She bites her lip because he sounds so mad. Her heart pumping faster, she takes another peek at him. “You don't own me,” she murmurs. 

He cocks his head and raises a brow at her, he's so good at that, and opens his mouth but whatever he was going to say is interrupted by Dave calling him over. 

Anthony takes the opportunity to claim his seat. “My dad’s telling your dad that we don't have the necessary part. We'll have to order it. So you'll be in town for a few days..." He says, eyeing her legs. 

Then he starts telling her about his motorcycle. It's fast. He fixed it up all by himself. 

Lucy is toying with one of her pigtails when Mister Cooper begins to storms back to them after a while. Longer than it should have taken, she thinks. “O-Oh, yeah?" She asks after a laugh, probably colored with a tinge of hysteria. He looks livid. “I've never ridden a motorcycle before.”

The man sniffles, putting his sunglasses on.

Anthony doesn't notice him as he smirks, licking his lips again. His hand lands on her knee as her breath catches and not for the reason he presumably expects. “Well, don't worry. It'll be a nice, smooth ride..." He purrs, sliding his grip a fraction higher. 

Mister Cooper stops in front of them. “Get your hand off her then get the fuck out of my sight." He tells him, clipped and precise and nuclear sounding.

Anthony whips his head around at the upset older man and promptly skedaddles to stand at his father's side across the shop. Mister Cooper makes a derisive noise watching him flee. 

She can't see his eyes as he turns back to her but his mood hasn't improved any from the boy's cowardice. He jerks his head towards the entrance, not saying a word until they're outside and he briskly turns down the sidewalk. “There's a motel a mile out.”

She struggles to keep up with his swift pace, her heart has dropped down. Further, though. In her stomach. 

This is it.

Mister Cooper is going to hurt her. The knowledge almost feels good in its familiarity, like a sense of relief. They'll get in the room and he'll brutalize her like the rest and maybe she'll even leave depending on how bad it is. 

Will it be an open palm slap to her face? A punch? When she flies to the floor will he kick her? Really batter her? Will he follow her down and fuck her as she sobs and chokes on the taste of blood? 

She stands outside in the sun, arms wrapped around herself, swaying left and right while he pays for their room in the poorly lit lobby as she surveys the rundown town they'll be idle at for a few days. It's not even five and the bar a couple lots over looks crowded with trucks, jeeps, and cars. 

He doesn't say anything to her upon exiting, just takes off walking again. He unlocks room 08 and immediately she's getting crowded against the closed door by him. He removes his sunglasses, tossing them with a clatter onto the television stand behind him. 

“Daddy?" She murmurs anxiously as he just observes her with his dilated eyes mere slits only to yelp and jump when he suddenly moves and slams his hands down on either side of her head, trapping her. She swallows thickly, her lip quivering, regret settling in. “Daddy.”

“Polishing off the old money making skills, hm? Why? You planning on leaving? After all, I don't own you…That's what you said, right? Even though I've been the only one you’ve been letting inside your cunt these past months,” he spits out crudely. “Guess that's about to change though.”

Lucy sucks in a shuddering breath, turning her head to the side as trembling overtakes her. “No! No, I wouldn't hav-I’m sorry," she fawns. The man's presence and the room’s four walls all feel like they're bearing down on her, pressing relentlessly down on her chest and smothering her. 

“You haven't begun to feel sorry,” he whispers.

She squeezes her eyes shut. Oh, God.

And then he's dragging her over to the bed and her tears spill over with a whimpering sob, only…He sits himself down at the end of it, boots firmly planted on the floor and her bleary eyes are suddenly staring down at the blanket as he yanks her over his lap. 

What?

The flat of his large, open hand connects with her rear. Hard. 

What?

Another blow has a choked, wordless exclamation leaving her mouth. 

What? 

He yanks her skirt down and off and the next one has her feet reflexively kicking with a squeal, more tears rolling down her hot face.

What is going on?

“You ever let a man touch you again, I'll hurt him. Badly. You want that on your conscience? Someone thinking he's about to get lucky only to get severely injured? Do you?" He growls, never pausing in raining down powerful swats.

"No!" She gasps, reeling from this unexpected outcome and the terrible, physical hurt that is so similar but so different from anything else that has been doled out to her before.

"And then I'll drag you away, kicking and screaming if I have to,” he continues, “and spank your little ass even harder than this. I'll use a fuckin’ belt.”

Lucy is sobbing but her tears aren't only from the pain radiating through her bottom. She's being flooded with happiness. No, a sense of euphoria...He's furious and high on some drug but he's not making her bleed. He's not giving her a split lip. He's not giving her a blackened eye. He's not forcing his way into her dry, unreceptive body. He's not. He's not. He's not. Why is he not brutalizing her? They always do. 

“And after that? I won't even so much as kiss you until this cute ass is welt free and that's a promise. Do you understand me? Tell me you understand, you little brat,” Mister Cooper orders breathlessly.

Oh.

Lucy snivels, frantically nodding her head. “Yes, daddy, yes. I understand.” 

He promised…Daddy just made her a promise. He's kept all of his promises so far. Her tears, the spanking, feel like a release of sorts as she takes his discipline with her teeth digging into her newly stinging lip, muffling the cries that eke out of her with every devastatingly benign moment of contact. 

She nuzzles her cheek into the bedding with a surge of dizzying ecstasy. Much too soon but simultaneously much too long, he's lifting her upright and with her face still messy from her tears, she shuts her eyes tight and desperately fuses her mouth to his.

He's hard and she's wet when she fishes his cock out and takes him inside with a pitchy whine. Daddy groans savagely and rolls them, pinning her under him and she hiccups at the new sensation of his burning lips sucking marks along the flesh of her throat, shoulders, and chest not covered by her top while never ceasing driving his hips into hers. 

“Big,” Lucy bleats, clawing at the blankets.

She never claws at him. He's had an entire childhood of pain from his father. She doesn't want to add to it. 

He rucks her shirt up under her heaving breasts to grab at her waist, his grip feeling nearly bruising while the other braces himself beside her. He lifts his head then, hazel meeting hazel. “You're mine. Okay, baby? No one else is allowed to touch or fuck you," daddy rasps through labored pants. “Say it.” 

Her heart back in her throat, Lucy gazes up at him wide eyed, before his next series of thrusts has her tossing her head skyward until he fists one of her pigtails and uses it to angle her head back towards him as she lets out a high, puppy-like noise.

He sinks his teeth into his lip, his eyes rolling in pleasure with a ragged grunt before they lock onto hers again. “I own you…Say it.”

It's hard to even think when he's inside her like this but she manages to verbalize a, “Why?"

"What?" Daddy hisses, giving another yank to her hair.

"Why do you want me to only be yours?" She whimpers, moving to wrap her legs around his waist when he stops. 

Mister Cooper just stops and pulls out of her, tucking himself away as he stands and rakes a hand through his hair. He glances at her for just a split second before swallowing thickly, grabbing one of the room keys, and heading to the door. 

“Where are you going?” she asks softly through her heavy breathing, achy between her thighs from the orgasm that was so close in reach now ebbing away from the loss of friction.

“Bar.” Is his curt reply. 

Lust gone, she fitfully falls asleep and wakes up hours later to the noise of his boots being kicked off and braces herself for a feminine scent to finally come wafting off of him, the man having spitefully gotten his release with another woman, like some others have.

"You're not special,” one of them said.

“That's not what this is,” another said.

“You don't mean shit to me,” another one after that said.

But it doesn't come. Because he's not like the others. Not even in this way. She just picks up the scent of liquor and cigarette smoke. 

The mattress shifts as he lies down next to her. There's silence for several minutes before she licks her lips. "Are you mine?" She whispers, not unfurling from her ball to look back at him. 

A drunken snore is her only response. 

When they retrieve the fixed up Camaro two days later, Lucy doesn't talk to Anthony and Anthony doesn't talk to her upon seeing the dark smudges littering her skin. 

And the man's arm slung low around her hips. 

“One room left, the AC is on the fritz but the cold water in the shower works, so does our ice machine. Your poor daughter looks about ready to collapse...There's no other lodging for miles,” the Texan woman said.

Cooper didn't bother correcting her. He took it. 

While Lucy was laying on the bed in just her panties, no bra, her red lips parted as she dripped the last of her grape soda onto her tongue through a straw, he left to fill up the ice box. 

Sucking on one, he walked back, set the bucket down on the nightstand and held a cube between his fingers to glide the wet coolness over her nipples as she squeaked and shivered. 

Afterwards, when they were sweaty messes but sated, she had said, “We should stay another day and use the pool tomorrow…I wanna wear that bikini you bought me.”

“No.” Cooper had said, firmly. 

It's the next day and she's presently making use of the pool as he observes. Everyone else seems to have left this shithole place at sun up so it's just them in the gated off area. He's sitting on a lounge chair with a built-in awning as she cannonballs into the pool in a tiny leopard print bikini that ties in the front, the string hanging down nearly to her navel. 

His dick twitches when Lucy starts going under the water head first, her bikini bottoms clinging to her ass.

She seems to be testing how long she can hold her breath, looking all frustrated as she resurfaces again and again with a sharp gasp to suck in gulps of air, nearly two minutes after each instance she ventures down. 

He drinks from a bottle of water, his eyes heavy when she lifts herself out of the pool, droplets rolling down her body as she sits next to the edge and towels off, her slim leg extended in the air. 

Little Lucy then meanders over to sit on the chair next to him with a happy sigh as she picks up her Atomic Sunscreen to apply more, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye with an impish quirk to her lips. “Can you do my back, Mister Cooper? My arms are tired.”

He snorts. “You have no poker face. Good cards, bad cards…You have blatant tells.”

Pouting, Lucy tosses her cards down onto the table. “Whatever. I don't like this game anyway.”

“You haven't liked any of the games I've spent my valuable time trying to teach you tonight,” he points out to the frustrated girl.

“Maybe I would if you had let me win a couple.” 

Cooper glances at his watch and starts collecting the red backed cards to put in their case. “Yeah, yeah. We need to get to sleep. Early start tomorrow and I don't want any whining about it.” 

“When do I whine?" She asks, whinily, as she climbs into bed. 

His dry look is undermined by his lips curling into a grin.

Mister Cooper isn't the only one who experiences feelings of possessiveness.

They're in a gas station and the woman working the register is eyeing him up as he reads the back of a Nuka Cola bottle with a frown while they wait in line. 

She understands, of course. He's a very attractive man. He doesn't even seem to notice the attention from the woman but still, she doesn't like it. At all. Lucy steps closer to him and pulls his arm to her chest, hugging it. And he lets her.

He lets her.

His only outward reaction is to lean in and hold the beverage up to her face as he mutters, “Look at this shit. How do you not have a cavity?”

She looks up at him with her healthy teeth sunk into her lip before airily sighing, “I don't know…”

Daddy's eyes drop to her mouth and he leans in further with a smirk before the woman sharply clears her throat, now staring at the man with her expression dripping judgmental contempt as she rings him up. 

His finger snags her by a belt loop on her shorts. “Where you going?” 

“Bathroom,” she titters before walking unsteadily towards her destination as he watches. 

Cooper takes a swig of the bottle he purchased.

And then she’s sliding into his lap, her lips pressing kisses from his throat up to his mouth as he sighs and wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her closer to him, their lower halves grinding together. 

“You two need to leave." A deep voice states and they break apart, Lucy giggling bashfully with a hand over her mouth, to see a bearded and heavily tattooed man standing in front of their booth in the bar. “Don't gotta go home but I don't want to see you doing that here.”

They drunkenly stumble back to their lodging lit up by its neon sign with the girl pressed to his side, a breeze blowing her hair in her face that has her huffing and puffing to remove the strands.

Then they race through winding halls to get to their room, laughing much too loudly for the late hour, before he scrambles to get the key in while she squeezes between him and the door to wrap a leg around his waist and mewl in his ear, grinding against the bulge in his jeans. 

They're driving along the highway, one of her hands extended to flip through radio stations when Lucy sits upright with a high pitched cackle and joins in with the ending song. 

“It's, like, so gross. Like, all the stuff, like sticks to the plates and it's like, it's like somebody else's food, y'know?”

Cooper barks out a laugh.

“It's like grody, grody to the max. I'm sure…It's, like, really nauseating. Like, barf out! Gag me with a spoon! Gross! I am sure! Totally…”

“Aren't you from LA?," he asks her.

“Yeah." She snickers, reaching into the glove box to put a green, apple flavored hard candy in her mouth. 

“Making fun of your peers? Cold,” he tsks with a grin.

They're still driving hours later when they enter a dead zone where the radio picks up only two stations. An elderly man wispily preaching religion in between worship songs, because those always come in crystal clear for some reason, and one that is playing hauntingly grainy sounding oldies. 

Both have thoughts of Nebraska clawing their way up to the surface. Cooper's fingers tighten on the wheel. “Put a CD in." He mutters, reaching for his cigarettes and taking a deep inhale of smoke once he has one lit.

“But I like this old music.” Lucy pouts, not looking up from filing her nails. 

He sharply shuts the radio off. 

“What are you doing?" Lucy moans, flushed and wild with lust under him. “Put it in, put it in, put it in…Put it in now.”

“Don't tell me what to do.” He husks, gliding himself up through her wet slit to brush over her clitoris. 

“Daddy, please." She yowls, rocking her hips when the head catches on her hole, stretching her for just a moment before he withdraws with a hiss. “Stop that! Stop teasing.”

“If you don't stop making demands, I’ll have you watch as I jerk myself off over this pretty pussy,” he warns. 

“No, please, daddy. I'll be good.” 

“Is this your card,” she intones imperiously. 

“It is not.”

She falters. “What?” 

“My card was the six of clubs, not eight of spades,” he explains.

Frowning, she turns to flip through her manual before she fans them out again.

He takes one, looks at it, puts it back. She shuffles them.

“Okay, is this your card?”

He shakes his head. “No. Let me see that book.”

Cooper reads through the trick she's trying to perform. Then he fans the cards out towards her. She takes one, looks at it, puts it back. He shuffles them. 

“Is this your card,” he asks.

“Yeah,” she confirms in bewildered outrage. 

“Wow, you are just not good with cards in general, huh,” he comments. 

“Would you rather die in a nuclear apocalypse or live through one?”

Cooper mulls the options over while chewing mint gum. “Would I get anything from whatever caused this apocalypse?” 

“What do you mean?” 

“Let’s say a bunch of explosions fucked up the world…That’d give off radiation, right?”

Lucy nods. “Uh-huh.”

“Would the radiation mutate me and give me strength or super speed? Anything like that? Because if so, having enhanced abilities would be the only reason I'd choose to survive one.”

“Everything would be so miserable and dirty though…And I bet everyone would be crazy. Oh, and what would happen to all the animals,” she asks with a frown. 

“My name's Johnny and it might be a sin but I’ll take your bet and you're gonna regret, cause I'm the best there's ever been," Lucy drawls thickly along with the man's voice on the radio.

He snorts and glances over at her. “Really? That's the best accent you can do?” 

“Don't make fun of me,” she tells him before sticking her tongue out at him and launching back into the song with an unchanged amount of gusto. 

Cooper frowns at the girl on the counter while she twists a Rubik's Cube.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

Her feet are swaying and connecting with the cabinet under her. 

“Knock that off.” 

“What? Oh," Lucy breathes and sets down the puzzle, ceasing the swaying motion of her feet. 

He goes back to charting on his map. 

Thud.

He raises his head. 

Thud.

“I said to stop.” 

Her red lips curl into a devious smile. “Make me.”

Thud.

Thud.

Cooper stands up and her breath hitches. “Come here.” 

Thud.

She shakes her head, ribboned braids swinging. “Uh-uh.” 

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

“Fine. Make it worse for yourself.” 

Cooper bends her over the counter to deliver ten resounding spanks, her panties pulled down to her knees. 

They stop at an ice cream shop in some town and stay in the lot as Lucy enjoys her treat. They're not the only ones outside despite the cool temperature. Some high school looking boys are several feet away seated at a table under an umbrella. 

The umbrella they're under doesn't have one. It appears to have been ripped up, leaving just the pole in the center of the discolored asphalt.

“I was a dancer for a while, Mister Cooper," Lucy tells him.

“Really,” he asks with narrowing eyes. 

“Mhm. I wasn't the best, wasn't even in the top five of best dancers there, but the boss kept me on because the men liked me. Liked how innocent I was…”

She grabs a hold of the pole and does a slow walk around it, her doe eyes heavy lidded as she licks her cone, before posing her left leg over the metal.

One of the boys wolf whistles and Cooper whips his head around and stares at him until he suddenly finds the tabletop very interesting as his friends laugh at him.

Lucy titters and he turns to see her gazing up at him from under her lashes with her lip between her teeth.

“Can you do this,” he purrs playfully before taking a drag of his cigarette and blowing out a smoke ring. 

Lucy laughs. “Do it again!” 

He does.

“Bought you pretty bras to cup these pretty tits of yours and they barely get worn,” he husks, under the influence of some miniature bottles of vodka he'd pilfered from the fridge when he kneels behind her and shoves his hands up her top to toy with her nipples.

“Bras are uncomfortable…Da-daddy, I wanna watch the movie.” She whines, though she's actively pressing her small chest into his touches.

Cooper gives one last squeeze before pushing her onto her knees with her back in a dramatic arch and tugging her panties off. “So watch the movie.”

She grabs a hold of a pillow to rest her torso on, her head tilted to still see the television, while she rocks back onto the fingers working her open. 

Little Lucy gasps and squirms when he grabs her hips and pulls her onto his cock, his head bowed to watch her pussy take him inside. “Daddy…Oh, god, don't stop.” She begs, rubbing her flushed cheek into the pillow under her before biting one of the corners.

He lets his head fall back, mouth open to breathe through the pleasure setting his nerves alight. “So tight, doll,” he whispers. 

Her orgasmic cry melts into a breathless giggle and he glances at the screen to see a disgruntled character in a snowy environment clambering to get up in a slapstick display after falling on slick asphalt. She laughs again when he accidentally takes down another man trying to help him to his feet. 

Hissing in a breath, he brings his attention back to her clenching body as he curses through his own release and stares at his semen dripping out of her freshly used cunt when he withdraws. 

She cuddles the pillow and watches the rest of the movie on her stomach with heavy, satisfied eyes and her legs crossed at the ankles as she idly sways them in the air. Her toe nails are painted pink.

“Do you have any fives,” she inquires from across the bed, peering up at him over the cards in her hands. 

“Go fish.”

“Jukebox,” Lucy announces with a point of her finger at the machine. 

“Yes, that is indeed a jukebox right in the very middle of this diner." He hums, closing his menu. 

She widens her eyes at him. “Can I have some money to choose a song? Just one? Please? Jukeboxes are so cool.” 

He pulls his wallet out with twitching lips as she averts her eyes and slides money across the table to her that she scoops up and rushes over to put in the machine, flipping through the songs available. 

Despite the retro theme of the place, it has modern music that she chooses three songs from before returning to the table where their order is taken. She gazes at him with hooded eyes after her milkshake is set down in front of her. 

“I can tie cherry knots with my tongue, Mis-ter Coo-per." She informs him, grabbing the cherry from the dollop of whipped cream.

“Of course you can, baby..." He sighs, already aroused. 

“Huh,” she asks, sticking the stem into her mouth.

“Nothing. Let's see it.” 

She opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue to show him the cherry stem in a knot. She pinches it between her fingers to take a long, cheek hollowing suck from the straw before, “Can you do that?”

“Nope.”

“Have you ever cut yourself,” the girl asks from behind him.

Cooper pauses in his task of shaving. “I used to in the beginning. Weren't horrible cuts though, just nicks here and there.” 

She nods in acknowledgement, noisily rolling a jawbreaker around in her mouth.

“Look.” 

He turns to where she's holding out the yellow Etch A Sketch to him. 

In blocky, square lettering is his name. 

She shakes it blank and gets to work on her own.

“Giddy up, cowgirl,” Mister Cooper mumbles into her throat with an exhalation of a laugh. 

Moaning her own laugh, she kisses him, pushing his head back with it. She really does like his kisses. They always get her head spinning as if she’s intoxicated even when she herself hasn't had a single drop to drink.

She likes his kisses even when he tastes like cigarettes, alcohol, coffee and mint, or a combination of those flavors. Likes them even when it's sloppy and barely can be called one at all as she frantically rides him, her orgasm just within reach. 

“Jesus, you get so fuckin’ wet,” he shakily rasps into her mouth. 

He tastes like tequila right now.

“Would you rather…Lose a hand or a foot?” 

“Neither!”

“You have to pick one.” 

Her face scrunches. “Can you make it like one finger instead? I think I'd rather lose a single finger than the other choices.” 

“Nope. Hand or foot, sugar.” 

“Foot...I guess. Would I lose it in an apocalypse with superpower gifting radiation,” she slyly asks.

Cooper is hungover and pissed off. 

They got caught up in slow moving traffic due to an accident after pulling off the highway into a town for fast food and now, upon finally getting something to eat, the girl is putting up a big fuss about spilling soda on her top.

“Turn right...”

He grits his teeth.

“Please? I love this shirt. Turn right. It needs to be washed right now. Please, daddy…” 

He snaps his head in her direction. “You sound like such a fuckin’ child sometimes, you know that?” 

Lucy closes her mouth, her brows furrowing, before, “Yeah?” She sneers, the attitude making him itch to take her over his knee again. 

His eyes narrow. “Yeah.” 

“Well, if that's true then maybe you shouldn't be fucking me, huh?” She snaps, putting her sunglasses on before crossing her arms and angling her body away from him as much as she can in the seat to stare out the window at her desired stop. 

Scoffing in disbelief, he lights up a cigarette with a shake of his head but finds himself turning the wheel right when the light changes from red to green.

“We're driving late tonight,” he tells her once they’re back in the car with their laundry done. 

And they do, Lucy still behaving brattily until she falls asleep around 11 PM and wakes up when it's nearly three in the morning. She stretches with a yawn and turns to look at him. “I have to go to the bathroom..." She murmurs softly, all traces of earlier displeasure gone.

“There should be one just coming up,” he responds in a similar tone.

Pulling into the rest stop half a mile later, he glances around for any other vehicles as she rushes out of the car. 

There isn't any. 

Eight minutes pass when he feels a prickle of unease. It never takes her this long in public bathrooms. Especially not the past times she's gone to use one after dark. No, the girl is usually in and out in a flash. 

He reaches for the rectangular lockbox kept under his seat and gets out of the car, forgoing a holster to just put the metallic object into his back pocket. All his senses on high alert as he walks towards the building.

Inside the place are two water fountains with a vending machine in between them selling nuts, chips, cookies, and chocolate bars that he wishes Lucy was in front of staring at instead of how he actually finds her. 

Pinned, terrified, against the wall in the men's bathroom, some coppery haired man in front of her. One of his hands is over her mouth leaving her to breathe heavily through her nose with the other on her chest. Her eyes are wide and wet and widen further upon seeing him as he aims his pistol at the back of the man's head. 

The man doesn't notice that he's entered or even realize that Lucy is gawking at something behind him. Moving the gun to the side, Cooper fires off a single shot. The man yelps and releases the frozen Lucy, scrambling away from her as he thrusts his hands up into the air. “Whoa! Whoa. I-”

“Shut up,” he orders, angling the gun at his face. 

Lucy is still against the wall. The girl sucking in high, panicky breaths and blinking rapidly at him as her tears spill over. 

“Go to the car,” he tells her.

“What are you going to do?” She gasps, stumbling over to him like a baby deer, reaching for him.

Cooper lowers the gun down to the man's groin who sobs pathetically. “Just go to the car.”

“Wait! I'm sor-”

“Shut. Up,” he grits out. 

“Oh my god." Lucy breathes, her hand dropping from his shirt, sounding like she's about to be ill as she dry heaves.

“It's okay. Just go to the car, baby…” 

Staring up at him, she opens her mouth before clamping her hands over it as she heaves again and does as he says. Nearly tripping over her own feet as she runs out of there, her high ponytail swinging. 

“You do this often,” he asks the trembling man. 

“No! No, this was the firs-this isn't even what it looks like! She came onto me.” 

Lies. Every word. 

“I hate rapists,” Cooper states. 

“H-Hey, so do I, man…Please…” 

“I especially hate that you tried your rapist shit with her.”

Bang!

Shrieking. 

Bang!

The shrieking stops. 

He leaves the body there, clicks the safety on, puts the gun in his pocket and walks to the car. Lucy is in the passenger seat, face hidden in her drawn up knees, her arms wrapped tightly around them as she rocks herself. 

She whips her head up when he opens the driver door. Those big, shiny eyes darting over him as he sits down and puts the weapon back where he got it from, as well as the metal box once engaging the lock. 

Turning towards her, his chest tightens as she hides her face away with a hiccuping sob before resuming her self soothing rock. “We'll get a room after the sun comes up. We should be in Washington then. Okay? Okay?”

“Okay." She whimpers, her voice thick and strangled from the wounded animal noises she's making. 

Inserting the keys into the ignition, the scorpion glowing brightly, he drives out of there. They hit a dead zone and he shuts the radio off. The CDs are kept under her seat. 

She doesn't stop crying for two hours and then she goes silent, her rocking stopping too.

Lucy being quiet is wrong. 

“You hungry?" He asks, exiting the freeway and passing numerous fast food places in the search for the advertised lodging. “Are you hungry?” He repeats, glancing at the top of her still buried head.

“No,” she whispers.

He pulls into a motel lot and idles after parking, staring out ahead of him. The windshield needs to be cleaned. “It's okay,” Cooper tells her before leaving to pay for a room.

Key procured, he reenters the car and drives the short distance to 14 and then parks again where he unlocks the door before gathering up their suitcases and toiletry bags and sets them down inside before going around to the passenger seat. 

Lucy raises and turns her head only when he inches an arm under her knees and across her back to lift her. She loosely wraps hers around his neck. “You're okay, babygirl. You're okay,” he whispers.

The new epithet rolls off his tongue without any prior thought. 

She breathes out shakily, nuzzling her face into his chest as he carries her inside their place of rest for the next few days. He sets her down on the bed and kneels before her, grabbing her fragile ankle as she tenses. “I-I don't want to have se-”

Cooper shakes his head. “Me either.” 

He lowers her shoe onto his thigh and unties the neat bow she puts her laces in before slipping it off and repeating the process with the other. 

She untenses, with her lip quivering that she bites, and ducks her head. It doesn't hide the fresh wave of tears that fall.

“You're safe."

Lilac colored nails stabbing into her bare knees, she doesn't acknowledge he said anything. He goes over to the coffee machine and grabs one of the Styrofoam cups available for use, filling it with water and setting it on the nightstand by her. 

“You want to watch some television?”

“No…Just want to sleep,” she croaks. 

The girl sluggishly wraps herself into a cocoon with the top sheet and curls up into that small sphere. He grabs the ashtray on the other nightstand and plants himself into a beige chair by the door.

“Daddy,” Lucy mousily pipes up a while later. 

He lifts his head out of his hand and clears his throat, looking at her back. “Yeah?” 

“Will you sit by me?” 

Leaving his fourth cigarette in a row burning away in the glass dish on the armrest, he walks over and sits down on the mattress, reclining against the headboard.

The girl wriggles closer after several minutes of silence between them to put her head on his lap. 

After a few more minutes, she takes her scrunchie out, lightly grabs his hand and places it on her head. Another minute after that, she grabs his limp hand again to glide it through her hair from roots to ends before releasing it. 

Cooper begins petting her, his eyes fixed on the faded green wall above the television as his fingers comb through her brown hair. She falls asleep but he doesn't stop until he himself drifts off.

They snooze the day away and wake up to the sun gone, the moon having taken it's place, he's wincing from a crick in his neck when Lucy sits up with a haunted look on her face, glancing around the room like she's never seen it before until turning her dull eyes on him when he shifts out from under her. 

“You hungry now?” 

She shakes her head, watching him take the car keys out of his pocket.

“I'm going to get some food, drop it off here, and then leave for work.” 

Her eyes lowering, she nods her head. 

“Okay?” 

She just nods again.

Instead of asking for a kiss as usual, she's silent as he walks out the door. 

Her late dinner is curly fries and a cheeseburger, no mustard and no onions. They have a chocolate chip cookie he buys from the desert portion of the menu that makes her lips twitch minutely upon noticing. 

She doesn't ask for a kiss when he leaves the second time either. Just sits on the bed with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders as she draws her knees up to her chest again. 

Cooper pauses with his hand on the doorknob. “I won't be long...Okay?” 

“Mhm.”

When he gets back, she's in that teeny tiny ball again. The food he got her untouched save for the cookie. It looks like she took a single bite out of it. The light is on. The television is still off. Her hair is damp and her skin is red. Like she's stood under scalding water or scrubbed herself raw. 

She doesn't initiate sex or even a kiss. Nor does he. 

He brushes his teeth, puts on looser clothes, and lays down next to the girl. He shuts the light off and they sleep again. Two days pass much in the same vein. Only he's there all night as Lucy twitches fitfully in her dream state. 

On the morning of the third, they pack silently and leave. It's daylight when they have to pull into another rest stop hours later, but she hesitates to get out and go to the bathroom. Not out of fear that he'll ditch her but a different fear. 

He walks her over and stands outside the door. 

Nearly a week later and Lucy, still quiet and withdrawn, surveys him from the passenger seat of the big and attention grabbing but wholesome RV, after the Camaro has been hitched to the back and their belongings has been brought on board. 

He slides the rectangular lock box in his hands under the driver's seat and turns the ignition and aims a grin her way as he glances around the interior. “Let's go pick out some shit for this thing, huh?” 

Her lips twitch and he sees a flash of white, pointy canines. The largest smile she's had in days. Lucy opens up the glovebox and puts a piece of candy in her mouth as she gazes out the high windshield. 

He lets her pick everything because he doesn't give a damn how it's decorated. Then they're driving to a laundromat to wash the hand towels and bedding. Because there's a bed. A full sized mattress in the very back, the frame fixed into place on the floor. 

When they park that night in an RV ground, far from the others, it gets christened. 

He's flat on his back with his head on a nice pillow, firm but not too firm. Her knees are pressed into the white sheets dotted in an array of flowers he doesn't know the name of with her soft hands on his bare chest as she rides his dick like a dream.

The lewd sounds of sex are almost lost under her frenzied voice. “Mister Cooper, daddy,” Lucy gasps and his hands tighten on her waist. She hasn't called him that since she softly asked him to sit by her, has barely spoken at all. “Daddy, I'm yours, I'm yours, I'm yours, I’m yours, I’m yo-” 

Cooper groans and yanks her down into a messy kiss. She hasn't said the latter, ever.

In the morning light, when she unfurls and sits up, the matching duvet pools at her waist as she twists to look at him over her shoulder. 

She smiles. “Good morning, Mis-ter Coo-per,” Lucy singsongs. 

She doesn't use rest stop showers and got anxious when he'd previously asked why, so they still very much check into places. Not just for showers though, they're also good for stretching and unwinding, keeping warm on some of these fall nights, and whenever he has a job to do because he's not leaving her alone at some parking ground where a madman could force her into his vehicle and drive off with her. 

They're in a room right now. 

It's early in the morning and Lucy walks out of the steamy bathroom and lazily plops onto the bed to apply her favorite vanilla lotion. She removes her towel to massage it into rest of her body and sleepily giggles when he whistles at her from his position on a loveseat. 

Grabbing her pink brush after dressing, she walks over and holds it out towards him while rubbing at one of her eyes, and stubbing out his cigarette, he slowly takes it.

The girl then turns around and sits herself on his lap. “Brush my hair, daddy,” she murmurs the request.

Cooper gets to work on the tangles in her long, wet tresses. 

Lucy begs him to get her a costume to wear for Halloween. A witch costume with green and purple striped tights and a hat. 

They don't do anything else special, don't go to any festive events of any kind. She doesn't even ask him to. They just laze around in rooms when it's too cold to sleep in the RV, watching various horror movies on the televisions as she pops some candy into her mouth. 

She has him take a picture of her in the costume she wears all of Halloween day.

Her black painted lips are curved in a beaming smile while she holds the witch hat on her head that the wind threatens to blow away. Her nails are blood red. 

November 9th, he's woken from his sleep still a little drunk from the previous night, with his dick in Lucy's mouth as she pulls out all the tricks to have him coming his brains out. 

“Happy Birthday,” she trills with a roughened voice.

“Dog." She states, standing by a lamp with the shade taken off, her hands pressed together in a way that puts a shadow of a canine head on the wall. 

"Ah, yes. I see,” Cooper hums with polite applause.

She throws her head back with her laughter, the dog head getting disassembled as she does so. 

“Sit down,” he directs and they switch places. It takes him a moment to remember how to configure his hands because it's been years since he's done this, but the memory comes back to him. “Rabbit,” he states.

Her large eyes twinkling, she imitates his quiet clapping with repressed laughter. “Yes, yes…Very good…” 

On Thanksgiving day they gorge themselves on cheesy, thick crust pizza.

Entering their room after work and rehitching the Camaro back behind the RV, he finds Lucy asleep. A lamp affixed to the wall above a nightstand has been left on as has the television. He grabs the remote and shuts it off, leaving the room in silence. 

Sniffling, he stares at her in the tiny babydoll that only just covers her ass when she's standing straight with her arms down by her sides. In her usual sleeping position, he can see the mauve panties framing her ass.

Cooper hums in his throat, taking a seat in a chair he pulls across the carpeted floor in front of her before his hand goes down to his groin.

It's not until he lets out a curse while jerking off that Lucy wakes up and blearily looks for the source of the noise, her eyes widening briefly before they go heavy lidded and her own hand snakes down her body, fingertips just sliding into her panties when he orders her to remove her frilly sleep dress and underwear. 

“Get onto all fours. Spread your legs and arch your back. Arch it more, sugar. Like I'm fucking you," he instructs lowly. “That's it…”

Swallowing thickly, Cooper greedily drinks in the sight of her gentle curves she puts on display for him. Her pert breasts with the sensitive, rosy nipples. The long, slim lines of her legs leading into the soft swell of her ass. Discolored by a recent spanking.

From his bare hand again, no belt necessary because while the sweet girl has unveiled a bratty side, she knows better than to ever repeat a stunt like the one from the mechanic. She's good even while being bad, he thinks with great amusement.

“Let me touch myself, daddy? Please?" She asks, pink cheeked and desperate as he languidly pumps his cock.

“No.” He rasps, licking his lips. “You're my own little pin-up girl right now…” 

“Thanks,” Lucy says, reaching greedily into the paper bag for her donut and he stills with the coffee cup halfway to his face to watch as she sticks her pink tongue out and licks off most of the white powder before biting into it, her tongue then flicking out to collect the cream from the corner of her lips. 

As much as the unintentional show arouses him, he also feels a strange disquiet, seeing her voraciously lick up a powdery substance. 

They're in a barber shop. 

Cooper is watching a boy sweep the floor at one of the stations as he makes moon eyes at Lucy seated in one of the chairs near the entrance, a book in her lap, the stick of a sucker poking out her mouth. 

The man cutting his hair notices.

“Sorry about him. He's a sweet kid though so, assuming your daughter is single, she'd be in good hands. Of course, he'd actually have to muster up the courage to ask her out first. That boy is way too shy for his own good.” 

“She's not my daughter." Cooper mutters, stretching and flattening gum under his tongue.

“Oh. My apologies..." The older man uncomfortably tells him, now periodically glancing at Lucy and then at him through the mirror with his bushy white brows furrowed.

Amidst a quick page turn, a riveted little Lucy adjusts the sucker in her mouth, the round shape of it becoming visible through her cheek with a slurp that barely reaches his ears and his eyes narrow and his jaw clenches when her admirer goes bright red. 

Neither of them grew up in a household that prioritized Christmas so that passed like just any other day, really. 

New Year's Eve though? They ring that in alone together in a room, both of them liquored up and ignoring the events preceding the ball drop in Times Square playing out on the television.

“Daddy, daddy, I can't…It's too much, please..." Lucy sobs, naked and shaking on the bed as the man coaxes her to a fourth orgasm in a row on his fingers, giving her no rest in between. 

It's too much, she feels weird, her body feels weird. Different. 

She feebly grabs at his wrist until one of his calloused hands pins them down above her head and she thrashes. “Daddy, I can't!” 

“Yes, you can, doll. You know why? Because you're my...?" He husks, trailing off for her to finish.

Lucy licks her salty lips, and looking up at his expectant face, she whimpers out, “Cause I'm your little trooper.” 

“That's right.”

She comes with a shriek and a squirt. 

“Holy shit..." Daddy whispers before he's rising up between her legs and undoing his pants with a quickness and then his cock is inside her and she cries even harder, pleasure frying every one of her nerves, as he fucks her to a fifth orgasm.

They're at a rest stop with green grass and trees that would be full and lush with leaves in the warmer months, picnic tables sprinkled about under them, and sidewalk evenly placed for people to walk on and stretch their legs after a long drive. 

Lucy is sitting on the sidewalk, having drawn a small hopscotch course in chalk after clearing away fallen leaves that she played on until she got bored of it and instead sat down to make doodles in the V her widespread, tights clad legs form.

Despite the bite in the air, it's been peaceful here. Because of the bite, actually. They've been scarcely joined by other travelers making use of the bathrooms and that's it. They've all rushed right back to their warm vehicles and left. But Cooper is freezing his ass off. 

“We’re done here,” he says around the last of a cigarette before stamping it out.

She pouts, not looking up at him where he's seated a foot away at one of the tables as she colors in a flower petal. “But we just got here, daddy,” she softly protests even though she's sniffling with a reddened nose and cheeks. 

“Two and a half hours ago, yeah. Now, come on. It's fucking cold.” 

“Oh. Can we stop somewhere so you can get me a hot chocolate,” Lucy asks on her hands and knees while gathering up all the colorful chalk scattered around her. 

“Will do.” 

Upon getting inside the RV, Cooper takes the time to press her back against the door and kiss away the blue tinge on her lips. 

“Hey, what do you think Stephanie is doing right now?”

He rolls his eyes. 

“Let's go to that sex shop, daddy? I want to get some fuzzy handcuffs and I wanna use them on you, please,” she had asked before starting to mouth at his jaw.

“I don't know," he said.

“Let me tease you until you feel like you'll go crazy if you don't get your big cock inside my little pussy,” she whispered in his ear. 

He had groaned at that and she giggled. 

“You could also buy some lube to use because you want your cock in my,” another coquettish laugh, “my other place, don't you? I'd let you…But first, will you let me make you out of your mind with pleasure? I wouldn’t try to hurt you or anything. Would never hurt you, Mister Cooper,” she swore. 

“Daddy,” Lucy bleats a day later, her voice high and thin as the tip of his cock breaches her tight ass.

“Need me to stop, doll?” He murmurs, stroking the girl’s flank. He's used the lubricant and thoroughly stretched her but if she needs him to stop he will. 

“No. J-Just been a while since I've done this and you're big.” 

Cooper exhales slowly, biting his lip raw before resuming filling her until all of him is inside the very depths of her. He lets her adjust while he bows his head over the planes of her back with his muscles tightly coiled and breathes, “Don't bring up your past Johns right now."

It's not a balmy night but sweat is still beading on his skin anyway. Her pretty little body was just made to take dick. Even her cute ass readily welcomes it, welcomes him. He groans. 

“I'm sorry. I'm yours." She keens, fisting the blanket. “I'm yours, daddy. More.” 

“What's the magic word,” he croons in a mimicry of her own teasing from yesterday.

“Please,” she gasps.

Yeah, that's the correct order of things around here. Begging is an art form that's all hers, one she has perfectly mastered. Hearing it helps soothe his still stinging pride.

Those handcuffs proved to be shockingly sturdy and he'd been unable to break free of them. Which she took full advantage of, ignoring his demands and threats of spankings and retaliation while the menace of a girl wouldn't do more than grind her wet pussy against his cock until she got him to start begging.

Cooper nearly pulls all the way out only to push right back in, gripping her hips as his eyes roll and he forms a rhythm that has her squirming and letting out squeaking moans. The beautiful, nasty girl saying, “A li-oh, a little harder? Daddy, plea-oh, please?”

“You're going to sweep all this up, right,” he asks her as she moves onto cutting paper into long thin strips after spilling glitter all over the floor of the RV.

“Of course.” 

“When,” he asks.

“When I'm done." She responds, her hands beginning to fold one of the strips into a tiny star, like her new arts and crafts book is teaching her to. 

“Which will be...?”

“...When I'm done,” she echoes obstinately. 

“Outside of one or two in elementary school, I didn't really have friends beyond that,” Cooper shares over a drink.

“Same here! They all thought I was just a nerdy, gloomy teachers’ pet.” She sighs, frowning into her radioactive looking cocktail she had asked him to recreate.

Lucy hisses and jerks her hand away from a shard of the broken plate she'd ropped. Cooper walks over to crouch in front of her as she stares at the minor, bleeding wound.

He's about to remind her of the first aid kit when she looks up at him with those doe eyes all shiny while her lip wobbles. “Can you get me a band-aid?” 

He brings her the entire kit and when she struggles to open it herself one handed, he takes the red case from her. He disinfects the cut with an alcohol pad as she cringes from the sting before tearing open the bandage and wrapping it around her right index finger. 

“Thank you.” 

He nods in response to the sweetly spoken gratitude. “Go…do something else. I'll clean it up.”

“You sure? I can do it." Lucy argues, already reaching for the piece that had sliced into her.

“I'm sure.”

“Where's the camera?”

He tells her and she retrieves it to aim it out the windshield. 

“The sky looks like cotton candy…I can see a million sunsets and never get over how beautiful they are.”

Little Lucy is sitting on his lap, they're alone on the highway after rush hour has passed and she's laughing as she repeatedly sets the horn off. 

“Are you really hard right now,” she drawls over her shoulder with a smirk. 

“You're bouncing around in my lap. Of course I am.” He husks, nosing at her neck. He retakes control of the wheel to pull into an RV ground and park for a spell.

“Did you see that guy with the guitar case,” she questions. “Wish I could play an instrument. Can you play any?” 

Chest tight, he nods. “Kind of. I tried to pick up playing the acoustic guitar when I was 17.”

Lucy smiles. “Really?”

“Yeah…Until my father smashed it to bits.”

Her smile disappears and she gapes at him in horror. “Why would he do that?”

“Said it was irritating noise…Even though he himself would get drunk and blast the record player all through the day and night sometimes.” 

A dawning look of realization appears on Lucy's face. 

“I say it's time to leave, what happens,” Cooper asks the girl sprawled face down over his lap.

“I'm sorry.” She snivels as his hand lands on her ass again, leaving behind another splotch of red.

“Wrong answer. I say it's time to leave, we leave. You don't call me ‘a boring old man’ before taking my fucking keys and running back inside, making me have to hunt you down…That was bad. Disrespectful and bad,” he seethes. 

“Sorry, sorry, sorry. Don't know what I was thinking.” Lucy gasps, kicking her feet when he doesn't let up.

“You weren't thinking, baby. You were just being a greedy brat focused on having fun. Well, is this worth the few extra minutes you got?” 

“No! No. Please, won't do it again. Never,” she wails. “Please, I'm sorry.”

“Oh, this band sucks..." She drawls, pointing at a new CD he had recently put in the album with the others he's bought throughout his travels.

He scoffs, shaking his head. “No, they don't.” 

“Yes, they do! They only have one good song and it's not even on this CD.” 

“One good song?’ Says who,” he inquires. 

“Says me.” She hums primly, her ruby lips in a smirk.

“Space buns,” Lucy answered his silent question earlier in the day as he watched her begin to twist the two pigtails atop each side of her head.

Now the sleepy girl sits on the bed, her cheek resting on his torso as he stands in front of her and removes all the bobby pins she used to secure the hairstyle before taking out the elastic band. “Thank you, daddy…”

The left side done, she slowly turns and switches the cheek so he can get the other side, his opposite hand cupping the back of her neck with his thumb absently stroking the soft skin. “You're welcome, babygirl.” 

“What is that smell,” he asks one evening while crinkling his nose. 

“It's that Ocean Dream candle,” she says with a serene smile, enjoying the scent. 

“More like Ocean Nightmare…Extinguish it. Now. It's making me nauseous. I already put up with your nail polish fumes and that fucking bubble gum smell, I'm not putting up with that thing, too.”

Huffing, she tosses her nail file down and stomps over to blow it out. 

“Happy,” she asks petulantly. 

He sighs with the utmost contentment just to rankle the brat and crosses his arms behind his head. “Yep.”

The weather was mild enough that they stopped to eat at some cafe with an outdoors section. 

“Are you two on a father-daughter outing? How fun! Wish my dad and I had time to do that,” the waitress said upon seeing him aim the camera at the girl before she rushed back inside to get their orders started. 

Lucy just laughed around the straw in her sweet iced tea as he resumed snapping pictures of her with a sardonically cloying, fatherly coo of, “Say cheese for daddy, my little gumdrop princess-pie...” 

“Cheese,” she trilled with a big smile, her sharp looking canines on display. 

Click!

"Mm yeah, now pull that top down…Let me see those little tits of yours." He purred lowly, lecherously.

Lucy gasped and giggled, putting her hand over her mouth as the waitress, wide eyed and scandalized looking, came from behind him and set their food in front of them without a word. 

Oh, well. 

Now in the RV after their meal, the girl is kneeling between his spread legs while he strokes himself on the built-in couch, her hands bunched underneath her as she grinds against them with her eyes hooded and her mouth parted to breathe out whimpers. 

Her pink tube top has been pulled down to her waist, and she's flushed as she watches him pant and swallow thickly, his release not creeping up but hitting him suddenly. Little Lucy, too. She barely closes her eyes in time for his come to splash onto her beautiful face and heaving tits. 

She doesn't pause to wipe any of it off. Just continues undulating against her hands until she comes with a keen, her bottom lip captured between her teeth. 

He breathlessly picks up the camera. 

Click!

Stepping out of the shower, he pauses seeing Lucy sitting under the oddly moving blanket.

“What are you doing,” he drawls.

“Come here.” She says, popping her messy head out at him before raising the blanket for him to get under with her where she starts quickly running her fingers over the fabric, creating little sparks. 

"Yeah…Static,” he mutters with nods of his head. 

“I know what it is. It's just neat.” 

He narrows his eyes as he spots some old pervert with all his attention glued onto Lucy, who is oblivious to it as she amuses herself with balancing on the ledge of the rest stop sidewalk, her arms held out for balance as she speeds up her back and forth pacing.

The wind is blowing her skirt around because Lucy refuses to dress differently other than putting on tights, sweaters or a coat, both of which she leaves unzipped, on particularly chilly days this winter. 

Cooper whistles sharply and she snaps her brunette head in his direction. “Get over here,” he calls with a beckoning gesture of his fingers. 

Lucy obediently rushes to him where she proceeds to drape herself over his back and press a kiss on his jaw that she titters at before wiping away the red mouth shaped mark with a cool thumb. “Where we going next, Mister Cooper?”

"Vegas."

“Come with me, come with me…The feeling's free, just come with me…We’ll get on a cloud babe, and ride it high, say ‘hello sun’ as we sail by,” Lucy sings along softly but soulfully. 

He likes her singing voice. 

Cooper wants to turn the blaring radio down to hear her better but he gathers this is a much loved song for her so he doesn't. 

Business is what took them to Vegas and once that's done, it's time for pleasure.

Lucy had tried her luck at the slot machines as he stood behind her, caging her in with his arms on either side of it, mouthing at her flesh. Teasing her. Physically and verbally. 

“Holy shit! A whopping win of-” 

“Whatever…How much do you think you'll win tonight,” she had snipped. 

“On these things? Not much, probably,” he confessed. “Cards are more my specialty. Remember being made a sore little loser when I just kept winning over and over and over,” he breathed while pushing himself against her and she shivered at his voice dropping to that rumbly register. 

Then he had led her over to observe some men playing poker before he sat down and pulled her into his lap to join. Two hours later, they're still at the table while he plays. She is among a group of strange men but she isn't worried because she always feels safe with her daddy around, doesn't she? 

Her funny, beautiful daddy who makes her feel so safe and happy. She nuzzles into his neck. Her funny, beautiful daddy who kisses and fucks her so good…Lucy sighs out in the smoky air. She also feels sleepy and drunk and needy.

Her fingers stroke along his jaw up to the threads of gray just starting to make an appearance in his side burns. “Can we go to the room, daddy?” She asks him, swaying her feet, the toes of her new silver heels barely brushing the red carpeted floor. She loves these shoes. They have a chunky three inch heel and ankle straps and they sparkle. 

“I'm on a streak, doll,” he tells her. 

“Please, daddy? I want you inside me. Let's go back to the room…”

One of the men whistles and another balding man jeers around his cigar, “Why don't you just do as your pretty li’l gal says, hm?”

Lucy blushes and giggles embarrassedly as she ducks her head, almost drawing her lip into her mouth before remembering her lipstick. She didn't think the others would hear that. Oops. 

“Hey, it was just a compliment. We're all buddies here…Didn't mean nothin’ by it,” the man then mutters. 

She swoons into Mister Cooper when he leans closer to answer her, his mouth pressing against her earlobe as he whispers, “If we leave now, you're getting put right over my knee for distracting me. So do you really want to go?”

She bites the tip of her index finger while she seriously considers the addendum before shaking her head. “No, daddy. No, I can wait…I'll be good.” 

And she is. Or, she tries to be.

But her funny, beautiful daddy is big and hard under her and when she squirms from the wetness pooling in her panties his breath catches and it just makes her wetter which makes her squirm more which makes him harder and, “I want you so, so bad,” she mewls in his ear. 

Her funny, beautiful daddy folds.

He hurriedly leads her into the elevator where he kisses her good and thorough all the way up, his hands tightly gripping her rear under her slinky dress. He tastes like whiskey, his usual drink of choice. Lucy's own mouth probably tastes like the pink cocktails she consumed. The elevator dings and there's a disgruntled scoff behind them before the steel doors shut again without the person stepping on. 

Once in their nice room, he gives her hard swats while she cries out before guiding her onto her hands and knees, but Lucy’s too sleepy and off-kilter to stay up like that so it's really her forearms and knees, and fucking her like she craved.

“Got me, mm, pussy whipped." Her funny, beautiful daddy groans as he comes inside her. 

“Wake up,” he tells the dozing girl in the passenger seat.

Lucy lifts her head from where it's fallen onto her shoulder with a noise of inquiry. 

She's been quiet and withdrawn again for the last few days. Not please don't touch me quiet but a different quiet. One that has her frowning down at her hands and neurotically playing with the jade ring on her right ring finger. 

“What are we doing here,” she murmurs.

“Stretching our legs, so c’mon. Up and at ‘em.”

They enter the aquarium and pay the entrance fee and she looks around in wonder as the place is immediately tinged blue upon entering the first area of aquatic exhibits, her mouth falling open as she takes in all the colorful reefs and fish swimming in the sizable tanks.

And when they get to a tank where a large sea turtle drifts past, Lucy gasps and giggles, grabbing a hold of his arm. “I didn't know they could get so big,” she breathes before excitedly entering into another room. “Dolphins! I love dolphins. Oh my god…” 

A dolphin stops in front of them and observes them back, bubbles coming out of its blowhole. She waves at it and its mouth opens as it swims in a slow roll that bares it's stomach and has it looking at them upside down, and Lucy laughs and waves again. 

He should have brought the camera, he thinks and is about to tell her to wait here so he can get it when, “Daddy, look!” A little girl cries, running up next to them and pressing her face right up against the glass. 

A man in his mid to late 30s comes jogging up behind her and scoops her into his arms with a gentle childing of, “Hey, wait for me, 'hun." And kisses her forehead. 

Lucy's face falls. “Can we go? Can we get a room?" She asks quietly, already tugging him away by the arm towards the exit. 

Once they're in the RV, she’s back to fidgeting with her ring, her head bowed with her brows furrowed. 

“What's wrong,” he asks.

“It's stupid,” she says with a shrug before pressing her lips together. 

Doubt it. 

Cooper’s own lips thinning, he runs a hand through her hair just once before taking his spot in the driver's seat, buckling up and starting the search for lodging where he pushes her towards the bed upon finding it to fuck her until she's limp with a little smile on her swollen mouth as she gazes up at the ceiling. 

Until it slowly fades and she clears her throat. “My parents have been on my mind lately. My dadd-father especially, his birthday was two days ago. I've been thinking about him. The man he used to be…at least to me…Before,” she trails off. 

Cooper can't quite relate. His own father was always a piece of shit, stemming from his birth all the way until he left, but when her expression crumples and she slaps her hands over her face, muffling a choked whine, he pulls her into his arms.

Her hands lower and hazel meets hazel before he leans in to kiss her on the forehead. 

Lucy stiffens, her lips parting. 

He does it once more and her eyes squeeze shut with a whimper before a sob rips free and her slight frame trembles in his arms. 

He gives her forehead another kiss as she keens and begins to desperately nuzzle into his bare chest, tears and most likely some snot wetting his skin.

He doesn't care. 

“Daddy.”

He doesn't know if it's in reference to her real daddy or him. “My poor little big girl," Cooper whispers nonetheless, tightening his grip around her quaking body while running his fingers through her brown hair.

“It's okay. You're okay. You're safe,” he also whispers to her. 

“Daddy?" Seven year old Lucy said from her seat in the back of the car that one night, a few months after being taken home. 

“I have to pee really, really bad." She told the shaking man as he frantically wiped his hands clean of a dark liquid with a dark colored towel before placing something wet with the same liquid inside and wrapping it up. 

“Is mommy inside that place? I think I heard her voice! I miss her…Can I say hi and go pee?” No response and she tilted her head. “Daddy? Daddy? Daddy? Daddy?” 

He whipped his head up to look at her from his frozen position, his normally neat hair messy and his eyes wild. “Shut up, Lucy,” he snapped and she started to cry because her daddy has never been so mean to her before. “Just…Shut. Up." He ordered through gritted teeth, before shutting the backdoor of the car and rushing over to the driver's seat where he sped away. 

She would remember all of this 10 years later. 

They’re in a thrift store for new reading material when he sees that her eyes keep darting to a certain book. 

“You want it?”

She scoffs, like it's preposterous she'd want a book of fairy tales. But she won't stop glancing longingly at it.

Cooper wordlessly grabs it.

Hours later, he's laying down smoking one last cigarette for the night when she climbs onto the bed and kneels beside him. “Will you read this to me, daddy?" She murmurs, holding the newly purchased book with her finger between some pages as a marker to the one she wants to hear.

He snuffs the cigarette out and reaches for it and Lucy immediately takes the opportunity to nestle under his raised arm to lay her head on his chest while he clears his throat and begins to read aloud:

“Once upon a time there was a sweet little girl. Everyone who saw her liked her, but most of all her grandmother, who did not know what to give the child next. Once she gave her a little cap made of red velvet. Because it suited her so well, and she wanted to wear it all the time, she came to be known as Little Red Riding Hood.”

“What?” He asks, squinting through his own simple black shades at his small reflection in those heart sunglasses of hers after catching her staring at him.

She opens her ruby lips before closing them definitively with a shake of her head. 

Little Lucy stops falling asleep in that itty bitty ball at night and begins to sleep with her back against his chest after silently pulling his arm around her. 

The first night she did it, Cooper had whispered, with his hand rising in an attempt to comb through her hair from that odd angle, “Are you okay?” 

“Mhm." She had sleepily responded before her breathing evened out minutes later, leaving him inexplicably unable to sleep for an hour afterwards. 

Now, five days later, he flops down beside her with his body buzzing with satisfaction, draws the sheet on top of them, turns onto his side and drapes his arm over the still gasping girl.

“Night, daddy.”

“G’night, babygirl,” he mumbles exhaustedly into her hair.

Lucy steps out of the bathroom in a powder blue mini dress with a cinched bust cupping her small tits, a bow hanging between them, and a pair of thigh highs on her slender legs in a darker shade than the dress. 

He drags his gaze away up to her face then and sees her large eyes done up with a vivid blue eyeshadow. 

Blue, blue, blue.

Except her full lips that are scarlet. 

She tilts her head at him and the eyeshadow shimmers in the light. Cooper stares, his lips parting. “What are you doing? You said yesterday that you'd take me to the fair,” she asks with a frown.

He sniffles and slowly sets the latest empty miniature bottle next to the others on the table. “I don't remember that…Did I promise?”

Her frown deepens, her arms crossing, and Cooper gets this tightness within his chest, and she shakes her head. “You didn't. But regardless, you said we’d-”

He clears his throat. “No, no, I believe you. Just don't remember but I'll still,” he pushes up to his feet only to sit right back down as the room spins and Lucy makes a sour face.

“Don't look at me like that. I just need to sober up and I'll tak-” 

She walks to the bathroom and comes back with toilet paper that she drops onto his lap. “Your nose is bleeding.”

Oh. It is. 

He grabs the toilet paper. “Give me at least an hour and I'll be good to go, okay?” 

A repetitive noise has his head turning towards the door in irritation. Who the hell could that be? 

Lucy scoffs. “That's not the door, that's me. I'm tapping my foot because I'm upset and want to go to the fair right now. So I think I will.”

He watches with disbelieving eyes as she puts on a white cardigan, grabs three bottles for herself from the fridge and a room key that she stuffs into her blue handbag, the pink cowgirl boot trinket swinging, and makes for the door. 

“No, you're not going by yourself.” Who knows what kind of creeps hang around those things?

“Yes, I am,” she says.

“No, you're not. C’mon. Do you even have any money? They won't let you in for free.”

“I have some left from Vegas…So, yes, I am,” she says again.

And she does. 

Nosebleed over, he drops his head back with a groaned curse, his eyes squeezing shut. 

He wakes up two hours later and instantly looks around to see if Lucy returned. She didn't. His heart rate fast, he stands on slightly unsteady legs, puts on a jacket, goes to walk out, pauses while thinking about disgusting and loud fairs and takes the fastest of bumps off the back of his hand.

It's only a block down from the hotel they checked into and immediately upon paying the entrance fee and stepping onto the grounds, a couple dragging their crying and protesting child towards the exit almost crashes into him and Cooper grimaces. 

More sounds of children screaming assaults his ears and he swallows thickly, burying down memories from Nebraska stubbornly clawing their way up to the surface. It doesn't matter if they're happy or distressed noises, they make him think of his father and all the times he himself has cried while being berated or struck…Burned. 

The ground is dirty with food wrappers and empty drink containers, still wet puddles of vomit on the dark cement lit up putridly by the lights. There's a nauseating mixture of sweet and savory scents entering his nose as he passes by the loud conversations, rigged games, and dangerous rides.

He's craning his head this way and that, looking for Lucy and wondering if this will be when he has to spank her with a belt, if maybe in her upset state she's spitefully entertaining some man. But no, he finds her near the end of the fairground. 

By the carousel. 

The brightly lit, brightly colored carousel playing its own music as it spins around and around. She's alone and standing by an almost full garbage can, her back to the people clustered around the ride with its assortment of smiling horses as she hunches over it.

Relief fills him. She doesn't notice him until he's a foot away. Lucy slowly raises her head, and he can tell she's drunk. Drunker than she's been in a while. “Daddy!' She trills, smiling widely. 

He smiles too. 

Then she grimaces and ducks over the garbage again. “I'm trying not to be sick…I rode the carousel so many times…Was just as magical as I remembered.”

“That's nice, doll. Where's your sweater,” he asks because he can see right down the scooped neckline of her dress. 

She puffs her cheeks out while glancing around. “I don't know. I took it off because I started getting kind of warm.” 

“That'd be because of the alcohol.” Then because some boys around her age behind her start nudging at each other with wide eyes while staring at the bent over girl in her short dress, “Stand up straight." He orders, glaring at them.

She does and then totters over to him, grabbing his hand to try to tug him over to the ride. “C’mon. Go with me for one last round.”

He raises a brow and plants his feet. “I think you'll throw up if you go again.” 

“Uh-uh, it passed. Now c’mon.” She whines loudly, giving jerks at his hand clasped between both of hers. “It's fun, daddy.”

“Not for me,” he reminds her. “Let's go.” 

“No...” 

“Yes. What have I said before?” 

“Um.” It seems to take a second for her cloudy mind to recall the words. “When you say it's time to leave, we leave." She quotes but complains noisily all the way to the exit he drags her towards by a grip on her wrist, attracting all kinds of looks from the various other attendees. 

Her petulant daddy's mixed in pacify them though and no one tries to step in.

Outside and at a crosswalk, it's with a clenched jaw that he drapes his coat over the spaghetti straps on her shoulders after a dark car driving by honked at her, covering the hard points of her nipples. And after nuzzling her cheek on the collar, she becomes amorous as they wait, plastering herself against his chest to kiss at him. 

“Want you, daddy. Missed you..." She sighs, her breath fanning out over his throat. 

She's never told him she missed him before. 

He speeds up the pace to their room upon finally getting the walk symbol while she entwines their fingers together into a proper handhold.

Also something she's never done before. 

She sloppily kisses him as he blindly unlocks the door to their room, her mouth tasting like Nuka Cola and vodka, while pawing at his dick through his trousers.

When they enter, she shrugs his coat off along with her bag and gives one last flick of her tongue against his before dropping to her hands and knees on the floor, arching her cute ass high in the air. Her panties those boys were seeing are a pastel yellow.

Peering over her shoulder at him with those large eyes, her blue makeup shimmering, she gives a playful sway of her hips with a sweetly breathy giggle. 

He sinks to his knees behind her, wasting no time in peeling off those wet panties. The only article removed. Lucy is too impatient and normally, he wouldn't reward this behavior by giving in but he does tonight. 

“Hurry, daddy, hurry. Stop, I'm so wet, why are you trying to finger me this time? I don't need it just-” Cooper withdraws his fingers, takes his cock out, grabs her hips, and slides home with a gruff noise muffled under her loud, “Oh! Yes…”

And it's the same red hot pleasure washing through him, as usual. The both of them release the same kinds of carnal and base sounds that blend with the filthy smack of their bodies colliding, as usual. 

But then. 

“I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, daddy." Lucy sobs, rocking herself back into his thrusts.

He freezes. His heart beat is thunderous in his ears. His eyes are wide as he stares at the back of her head, her long hair left to hang free tonight. 

She's never, ever said anything like that before. 

“What.”

“I love you, daddy. I love you so much." She tells him, inhaling shakily. 

“Stop that.”

“No, I love you and I think you love me too. Say it back…Say it or I'll leave," She threatens, her breathless voice high and desperate.

Cooper tenses further. "No. You won't." He dismisses, his breathless voice low and commanding.

"I will. The next time you pass out, you'll wake up and I'll be gone. You've been doing it a lot lately..." Lucy huffs before kicking her sparkly silver heels with a squeal, falling onto her arms, as he digs his fingers into her hips and resumes fucking into her even harder, rutting in punishingly deep. 

The threat rattles him to his core.

The thought of no longer seeing her face every day, no longer seeing her pointy toothed smile, not hearing her laugh and sing or calling him either of his monikers, not being able to keep her safe because she needs someone to, not holding her in his arms, never tasting the girl's sugary kisses again…No longer having access to this wet cunt that his cock fits into like a gun fits in a holster? 

It leaves him spitting out cruelty as the girl who has said she's his whimpers and squirms and wriggles.

“And where would you go? Huh? Back home to your real daddy and creepy cousin Chet? Or will you find some other man to stay with who’ll slap your face instead of just your ass when you piss him off? Stephanie? Who the hell knows where that uppity bitch is. Maybe she glared at the wrong person and is dead in a ravine somewhere.”

Lucy gasps, shaking her head in horror. “D-Don't-”

“Or maybe she isn't. Maybe she's alive and you'll miraculously meet again and stay with her. But, Lucy? You're a lot. She'll probably end up ditching you. Me? I haven't. I won't. I think I'm particularly equipped to handle you."

“Yes! Yes, you are. You are." She hiccups, nodding now. “Love you. Please, daddy.”

“I'm the only one you have, babygirl. You need me...And I," Cooper's breath hitches, his head tipping back. “God, I fuckin’ need you..."

She keens wordlessly, her fluttering, spasming pussy tightening up around him as she comes with a wail. 

Someone is banging on the wall but he doesn't pay it any mind as Lucy goes prone under him on her tummy, his dick slipping out before he readjusts himself over her and fucks into the sniveling girl until he paints her insides white with his teeth buried in her shoulder. 

Feeling gored through, he detaches from her and stands, tucking himself away. Ignoring the thought to comb through her hair, scoop her up in the cradle of his arms, settle down with her on his lap, kiss her forehead, and storms to lock himself into the bathroom instead. Cooper smokes three cigarettes that he drops into the toilet in lieu of an ashtray.

He hears her tears peter out and, raking a hand through his hair, he exits, seeing that she's moved onto the bed. Her shoes have been taken off and she's in that damn ball again, her face streaked with dark tears and scarlet smeared around her mouth like a Pollock painting. Things she seems unconcerned with as her large, red rimmed eyes survey his approaching form until he shuts the light off and removes his boots. 

“Daddy,” she mousily pipes up. 

His head makes a twitch in her direction that he puts an abrupt stop to while he stiffly lays next to her.

She reaches her small hand out for him. 

He shakes it off. 

She moves to wriggle closer, to lay her cheek on his chest. 

He turns his back to her. 

She tries to wrap her arm around him, to press her face in between his shoulder blades. 

He moves closer to the edge. 

“Daddy,” his little big girl whines.

Biting his tongue, he doesn't respond. 

Her crying starts back up. 

See? I'm not someone to have that feeling for. So let's forget this night and go back to normal, he wants to spit. 

As if reading his mind, she tremulously whispers a weak, “I love you.”

Cooper clenches his jaw. “Stop. That.” 

She doesn't. 

“I love you, Mister Cooper.” She now says to him in the morning, at noon, at night. Whenever she feels like it. Even after he snorts lines off a table right in front of her.

“I love you, daddy.” When she's still on her knees after he's fucked her face until she sounds hoarse and raw and kept her head pushed down with his hand knotted painfully in her hair, groaning from deep in his chest as she swallowed his load. 

“I love you, daddy.” When his fingers grasp bruisingly and his teeth bite into her body, drawing pinpricks of blood that he licks away.

“I love you, daddy.” When he has her holding her knees by her ears as he fucks her sopping pussy, lips inches from hers with his hand around that delicate throat and he spits into her mouth, Lucy hungrily swallowing that down too. 

“I love you, daddy.” When he has her squeaking into the mattress as his cock jackhammers into her ass. “Not gonna push me away. Not unless you beat me o-or be with someone else. But you never will, will you?" She keens, her fingers rubbing at that pearl between her thighs.

“Never, babygirl, never,” he promises. 

When Cooper wakes up and Lucy isn't in a sphere beside him, well she's just in the bathroom, his hungover mind fills in. And he goes back to sleep. 

When he wakes up less than an hour later, at 8:34 AM, and she still isn't beside him, or anywhere else in their room, there's a sinking in his chest and he lurches upright. 

Her things are around but that doesn't mean anything when she isn't. He throws his shoes on and rushes to check the RV for her. Maybe she's there. Maybe she unlocked the door and silently returned the keys before going back to hang out in there instead…Maybe. For the first time ever. 

It's empty. 

Cooper’s heart beating a mile a minute and his hands clammy, he takes a lap around the hotel for her, turning down every hallway before shuffling back to their room. Maybe she left a note that got misplaced and slid under the bed or something. 

There isn't a note. 

His stomach twisting, he drops heavily on the end of the bed and hunches over with his arms wrapped around it. He feels like he's going to be sick. He feels hot, feverish, and there's a stinging in his blurring eyes.

Lucy left. She's gone. She left her things strewn about. Doesn't want anything to do with him anymore to the point that she just abandoned everything with the exception of her purse holding her ID. He didn't want her to leave, just to stop with that bizarre love talk. They were fine. They were good. They didn't need it. He didn't need it.

But Jesus Christ, it's here anyway.

She feels, felt, or else she'd still be here, love for him and he feels…the same. Exactly what state did it start seeping into their vehicle? He doesn't know. But it’s become this undeniable thing between them, hasn't it? Especially lately. That's why he'd been imbibing and passing out so much, like she said.

He's only felt like this once before. Or something close to it while not being close at all because it was just towards his neighbor's horses. Mere animals he found comfort in that got taken away from him when they were sold. 

Then he found comfort in Lucy’s presence and she disappeared on him too. 

Cooper groans in between his rapid gulps for breath and rocks himself. She said she'd never hurt him but this fucking hurts...He makes a noise then. Almost alien to his ears after so long and with his voice having become ravaged with smoke. A noise that hasn't come out of his mouth since leaving Nebraska. 

A sob. 

“Fuck, no,” he whines.

After that one leaves him, he can't stop. No matter how hard he clamps his shaking hand over his mouth and squeezes his eyes shut.

He just wanted to prove that he wasn’t something lovable, he didn't want her to go away. But why the hell did he think she wouldn't? Of course she'd leave after all that. 

Digging the heels of his hands into his eyes until he sees starbursts, Cooper bites his quivering lip. He doesn't even have anything to take or drink, used it all up last night. He thinks of his cigarettes, but his stomach gives a roll. He should just get out of here. He won't even inquire about a refund for the two remaining days left. He doesn't care about the waste of money. 

He swallows around the lump in his throat because it hits him then that he doesn't really give much of a shit about anything at all. God, only Lucy. He wants her to come back so he can tell her this. 

Among other things. 

It's not until he's silently, hollowly, sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head resting on his clasped hands holding his keys by the scorpion trinket, his eyes blankly affixed to the floor between his shoes, that the door creeps open. 

He nearly gives himself whiplash turning to watch as Lucy steps in. Her back is to him while she slowly and quietly closes the door, like she expects him to still be asleep at, he has to tear his gaze away to glance at his watch. 

11:05.

She finally turns around after the door latches with barely a sound and jumps at seeing him positioned the way he is, her big cartoon eyes flitting over his features. Whatever she sees has her tilting her head with such unguarded, open concern as she starts walking over to him. “What's wrong?” 

Cooper reaches out when she's within arm length distance and yanks her, her purse hitting the floor, onto his lap while she gasps with surprise. He wraps his arms tight around her waist, breathing in the scent of vanilla from where his head has dropped into the crook of her neck. 

Her small hand cups back of his head as she lets out a note of confusion before asking, “What’s wron-”

“Where were you,” he whispers as he can't make his voice come out any stronger than that. 

“Well, I woke up really hungry and had a bit of money left over so I thought I'd pick up some breakfast for us from down the street...”

She could not have picked a worse time to stray from the usual morning routine. 

“Stephanie was there! She had a room here that we went to for a while before she had to leave to make it in time for a funeral back home. But I forgot to put your breakfast in her fridge and didn't want to risk you getting food poisoning so I threw it away…”

He shudders and nuzzles closer. She didn't leave him. This was just a ridiculous misunderstanding. 

“What’s wrong,” Lucy murmurs. “Are you okay?” 

“No.”

Her nails soothingly scratch along his scalp and he breathes out unevenly. 

“This isn't like you, you're worrying me…” 

“I'm…I'm sorry.”

She goes still in his arms. “What,” she utters with heartbreaking disbelief.

“I'm so sorry. I'm sorry for everything. I'm sorry for being so fucked up. The next fair we come across, we'll go together. Okay? From opening to closing time, we'll be there. I'll even ride the carousel with you. However many times you want. I promise." It all comes tumbling out of his mouth.

Cooper pulls back, hazel meets hazel. 

“Because,” he continues with a thick swallow and a lick of his dry lips, “I love you, sugar. I love you, Lucy.” 

She whimpers, her eyes glossy when they next travel over him. 

He cups her cheek and his sensitive, starved girl desperately leans into his touch. “Think I'd just kill myself if you ever leave me. You're all I care about in this world." 

“Don't say that,” Lucy croaks. 

“It's true,” he insists. “You're the best thing that ever happened to me. Can't go back to a life without you. I really do need you, I love you.”

“I love you too,” she so easily says.

“I know, I know…I should have-”

“I forgive you. You've had a hard life.” Is the amazing response she next blesses his ears with. 

Cooper huffs a brittle laugh of incredulity. “You’ve had a hard life too but you're still a fuckin’ angel.”

She shakes her head, averting her gaze. “I'm not…” 

“Yes, you are." He argues before pulling her into what is the most gentle kiss they've had to date, both of his hands framing her flushed, makeup free face with his thumbs stroking the apples of her cheeks.

Slowly, no rush to be had, he turns them and guides her down onto her back as she gazes up at him with that adoration she'd been looking at him with while he’d been treating her body so carelessly in his attempts at putting an end to the tenderness.

Their sex was always rather rough but those moments had been a whole new level of roughness for them. Her hand sliding down his forearm to the back of his hand beside her head has him leaning in to kiss her again. 

It's time to make atonement, isn't it?

He strips himself first and then her and, Cooper has had his lips on her before, but never so lingering, so worshipful. He kisses down her mauled looking throat and her right shoulder to her inner elbow, wrist, palm, and each fingertip and kisses his way back up to repeat it on her left. 

Then goes to her racing heart to press a long kiss there where he whispers, “You're beautiful. I've never said that before, have I? Only thought it.”

He glances back up at her face and she looks confused, lost. Unsure. He's unsure too. This is entirely new for him as well. He rises to press a kiss to the center of her forehead that she sighs at, and then her eyelids, cheeks, nose and mouth. 

“It's okay. You're safe." He tells her, combing his fingers through her hair after taking out the ponytail holding her braid together.

“I know...” She breathes, reaching to cup his cheek. 

He leans into it for just a moment before moving where he left off, apologetically kissing a bite mark on her right breast before taking the rosy nipple into his mouth, lightly stimulating the other between his fingers as she arches into him, stroking his dark head. And then switches until she's moaning and flexing her fingerprint smudged thighs with her own fingers remaining so gentle in his hair. 

He continues down, her waist and hips are also marred by his prints, and veers to the one and only scar on her body. He imbues the area with several kisses and she bleats out a strangled sounding, “Daddy.”

He doesn't fight the siren call that word has become, peering up at her. “Hm?” 

“Love you,” she whimpers.

He smiles into her skin. “Love you too.”

Bypassing her mound altogether, he tracks a path down her thigh, knee, calf, ankle and foot where he kisses above her black painted toenails that she giggles and twitches at before repeating it in the reverse along her left leg.

He reaches her wet, glistening pussy again and this gets bestowed with kisses as well. And drags of his tongue. And careful fingers gliding inside while she sighs and shivers and moans, her hands fisting the bedding as her stomach contracts to the rhythm of her spasming inner walls. 

Cooper laps up her release, his cock aching for more that he denies in favor of not stopping until his perfect babygirl is weakly pushing him away with high pitched pleas for mercy in between her gasps. 

Settling over Lucy, she turns her head towards him and kisses him, licking into his mouth, always undeterred by the taste of herself on his tongue.

She wraps her legs around him while he trails his fingers up her wrists and palms to lace their fingers together and slowly, so slowly, enters her body, their breaths catching. 

Slowly, so slowly, he withdraws and slides forward.

Oh.

“Oh,” Lucy mewls. 

Their kiss broken, he hides his face in her neck with a moan. It's not even a struggle to keep this shiver-inducing pace, to draw out every ounce of pleasure sparking between them as he rocks into where she's wet and warm and so familiar after nearly 12 months together. 

Nothing feels better than Lucy feels, he realizes. No synthetic high could measure up to the natural high he feels when he's with her like this. He quiets his noises further to concentrate on the ones she's making. 

Whimpery exhalatations of daddy's and Mister Cooper’s almost blending together with the I love you's and I'm yours' spilling continuously from her swollen lips. 

Panting shakily, he captures those lips again and sighs when she starts pulsing around him with a keen. He stills until she goes lax and he resumes the blissful pace while his own release builds and builds, tingles rushing through him until he’s tensing. 

“You’re perfect, babygirl,” he moans into her slackened mouth as he comes. 

Afterwards, she pulls the blanket over their nude forms and lays on her side. Not to be held, but to hold him. His face is coaxed by her soft hand on his head to rest on her chest before she pets his back and hair. He's nodding off but keeps stirring, as if she could somehow unknowingly slip away again in his less heavy, sober sleep.

Lucy kisses his forehead. “It's okay. I’ll be right here when you wake up, daddy. I love you.” 

He kisses her breast, the easiest area he can reach in his tired state. “I love you too.”

Cooper falls asleep. 

May 3, 1996

Simple ceremony completed and pictures taken at Cupid's Wedding Chapel, owned and operated by an elderly couple suffering from a bout of slow business, a laughing groom sets a giggling and blushing bride down on her feet in one of the adjoining rooms available. 

Cooper kneels before her. “Now, doll, did I feel a…?” Trailing off, he ducks under the skirt of her white dress and locates a garter around a silken thigh. She yelps and moans at the ticklish scrape of teeth as he pinches it between them and pulls it down, with a hand around her waist and the other raising her white heeled leg to aid him in its removal. 

Her hands fly to grip at his shoulders as he next nuzzles and licks at her damp slit through her white panties. 

White, white, white. 

She trembles under his hands. “I can't..."

Laughing lowly, he mercifully rises and wraps his arms around her waist, steadying the unsteady girl. Not because she's intoxicated, no. They're both sober. Kissing her face, he blindly fiddles with the back of her dress, drawing away to take in the sight of her when it pools around her ankles. 

She reaches to undo the front clasp on her matching lacy bra where, letting out an impish laugh, she holds it up between them with a flourish before flinging it away with a relieved sigh. 

She doesn't like underwires. The top she was wearing when they met didn't have any, he recalls her explaining once. 

Then she's shimmying out of her panties and shoes and he's pushing her onto the bed, undressing as she peppers him with red kisses. He tries to be slow when he spreads her open for him but she whines complaints. 

“You don't want it gentle? It's our wedding day, after all,” he breathes.

“Lovemaking can come later. Please, Mister Cooper, daddy, husband, oh my god, you're my husband now, mine. You're mine. You're mine, daddy. Mine. My husband…” 

Grunting, he readjusts himself over the dewy eyed girl to fulfill this desire of hers.

“Yes,” she moans, tossing her head back. “Please, please, please, pleas-"

He puts a hand over her agape mouth after an especially loud cry, the other in a fist by her head. “Hate to do this but let's try to be quiet, hm? They already looked concerned for you. Don't need them calling the police because they think I'm murdering my sweet little bride in here.”

Lucy grabs his wrist and he lets her tug it down, groaning when she briefly sucks his fingers into her mouth before guiding it around her delicate throat. Because she liked it, she had told him. She had liked everything he had done to her during that time. 

He kisses her forehead. “I love you.” 

“I love you too,” she gasps. 

He squeezes. 

He slowly turns to look up at the RV door upon hearing hushing and cooing and a, “You wanna meet daddy?” Lucy peeks her head in and beams when finding him reclined on the couch. “I found something.”

“I'm guessing it's not the snacks you went in for?”

“No, I bought some but also…” Her smile growing, she steps in fully and his brows shoot up at the dog, the puppy, in her arms. “She just came right up to me when I left!” 

She puts the plastic bag on the floor after shifting her hold on the German Shepherd puppy. Who is looking around the place with placid interest before looking back up at Lucy and licking her face, her tail wagging. 

“Sweetheart,” Cooper starts, getting to his feet, “we can't keep her. Dogs are so much work. Especially as young as she is. She's what, a few months old?”

Little Lucy pouts up at him when he stops in front of them. “But she walked up to me an-and just look at her…”

She holds the dog out towards him and he gets assaulted by the smell of an animal in dire need of bathing along with puppy breath. 

“Please? She's all alone and probably so scared. No one's taking care of her. You can see and feel her ribs and spine…” 

Goddamnit. 

He didn't say anything outwardly but with a joyful cry, Lucy cups his cheek with her left hand, her wedding ring warm, and kisses him again and again. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! I love her already.”

The vet they take her to determines the puppy to actually be a Belgian Malinois. Lucy names her Delilah and somehow, he's the one who takes up the role of disciplinarian and trainer while his wife is the one she turns to after he scolds her for going on the floor, instead of letting one of them know she needs to be taken out like he's trying to teach her. 

The only time Lucy ever scolds her for anything is when she ignores all her dog toys in favor of trying to play with Indi.

(Indi is an indigo colored stuffed teddy bear with a golden ribbon around its neck that he had tracked Lucy down in front of at a store. Its big black button eyes were staring at her. “Daddy, can I have him? Can you buy him for me? He needs a home..." She had murmured, gazing back at it with her own big eyes. So of course he bought it for her because he could never really deny her much of anything.)

Now, in addition to Lucy, their new four legged companion has carved out a place for herself in his heart and he's evolved from being a loner of a man into a man with an adoring wife that he adores in return and a bumbling, but ultimately good dog.

“Love you,” Lucy whispers breathlessly after a deep kiss as she cuddles into his chest before Delilah, all too happy to occupy herself someplace else until her owners are finished, climbs up onto their bed to lay by their feet.

“Love you,” Cooper whispers, enfolding her safe and sound in his arms. He never not echoes those words back to her, his little big girl.

She's much too precious and deserves to hear them as many times as she wants.