Page 71 of Tessa

Thankfully, Beau immediately slid out of his chair and onto his knees in front of her. “What? Oh, honey, of course you can call me Daddy. I am your Daddy, and you’ve got the tattoo on your ass to prove it.”

Tessa giggled, but Dax worried his lip. He still felt bad about the tattoos, like getting them had somehow forced Beau to make decisions he wasn’t ready to make.

As if reading his mind, Beau brought that up next. “And that’s another problem, isn’t it? Both of you expressed guilt over your tattoo choices and at feeling like you had claimed me as your Daddy whether I was ready to be claimed or not.”

Dax counted off in his head. “That’s seven problems, Daddy.”

Tessa bugged her eyes and dropped her jaw. “Seven!” she hissed incredulously. “That’s a lot of problems!”

Beau nodded sagely. “It certainly is. Luckily, I’ve had all day to think about it, and I’ve had some help. So what I now have is a lot of solutions.”

Dax gnawed on the inside of his cheek while he waited to see what Beau had come up with.

He frowned when Beau reached a hand into his hoodie pocket and pulled out two keys, holding them out as if they were a prize. “Ta-da!”

Tessa cocked her head to one side, obviously confused, and Dax just waited.

“C’mon, follow me.” Beau jangled the keys, walked to the center of the room, and turned one way and then the other, looking at the adjoining doors. Beau had wanted to take them out in the design but Baze had insisted that adjoining rooms would be a huge draw and convenience for his guests. It looked like Baze had made his point as Beau turned on his heel and made for the door on the left.

He unlocked it and pushed it open, revealing a room that was almost identical to the one they were already in. It had been decorated in light blue and gray, relaxing colors, and boasted another bed—queen sized instead of king, a couch and recliner, a large TV and video game station with special gaming chairs and a popcorn machine.

“This is your room,” Beau said to Dax. You can come in here whenever you need to take some space, or if you and I need to have a private conversation, just the two of us. We can come in here.”

Dax’s eyes grew wide, glistening with unshed tears. He shouldn’t be so surprised, but he was. Beau had listened to him and created the perfect space for him, to have a place of his own to breathe while he sorted out his two separate roles in the relationship. It solved not only the problems he’d been given, but several that could potentially arise.

With a gasp, as he realized that not only had this been going on practically underneath his nose all day, it was also only one of the possible solutions Beau had up his sleeve. “What’s the other key for, Daddy?”

“Not so fast,” Beau tsked, holding up a finger as he crossed the room and threw open the door to the closet, withdrawing a large, bright-blue gift bag stuffed with tissue paper, and handed it to Dax with a smile.

“Here you go, babyboy.”

Dax sank to the floor with a curious frown and sat crisscross applesauce with the giant bag in front of him. He wasn’t sure what to expect and he sincerely hoped that Beau had done something just as nice for Tessa.

Dax had no expectations as he pulled layer after layer of fluffy tissue out until he reached the first present—a teddy bear with scraggly-soft, chocolate-brown fur and a big blue bow around his neck.

“Oh, wow.” Dax blinked. He didn’t really consider himself a little Little, and he’d never been gifted a stuffed animal before—at least not since he was a small child—but he was overcome with the urge to cuddle the soft bear to his chest and hug it tight. The fact that Beau had thought to get it for him meant everything. “I love it. Thank you.”

“Keep going,” Beau urged excitedly.

The next gift was far less Little and far more confusing. It was a pair of designer sunglasses.

“They’re a secret code,” Beau explained.

“They’re a code?” Dax repeated, completely lost.

“Silly Daddies.” Tessa giggled. “They’re just sunglasses.”

“No.” Beau shook his head and lowered his voice to a hushed whisper. “These sunglasses are a secret code. When Dax puts them on, it’s his way of telling us that he needs a minute or he wants to switch roles, especially if we are out in public. If he slips these on, it will be a message to me to treat him less like my co-Daddy, and more like my babyboy.”

Dax raised his eyebrows, impressed with the thought Beau had put in. “That is really cool. Thank you, Beau,” he said, carefully folding them and placing them back in their case so that Beau would know he was not feeling that way at all in the moment.

“There’s one more thing.”

The one thing ended up being a huge box of different items. A t-shirt with Dax’s favorite cartoon characters on it, a children’s book that was Dax’s favorite from childhood, a Lego set, and a soft blanket.

As Dax cuddled the blanket, rubbing the fabric across his cheek, Beau knelt down in front of him. “I love having you as my best friend and as my business partner, and as my co-Daddy for Tessa. But I also love having you as my boy. Any time you need to destress and have a moment where you don’t want to have your Daddy pants on, you have a whole room to decompress in, and now you also have some boy things too.”

He picked up Dax’s hand and squeezed it. “I love you in all your roles, and I know how stressful they can be sometimes. I don’t want to lose what we had before Tessa came into the picture just as much as I don’t want to lose what we have now that she’s in the picture. Once a month, we are going to have a special day where you and Tessa can both be my Littles. We will do fun things and you two can team up against me and get yourself in all sorts of crazy shenanigans without it causing the same kind of balance issues that we had yesterday.”