Tess, in public
One
It started, as these things do, with a decision that seemed reasonable at the time.
Tess had drunk two coffees and a bottle of water on a Friday afternoon because the alternative was falling asleep at her desk, and at 5:20 she got on the 5:24 from the city with a bladder already at a six and a fifty-minute ride ahead of her. And she thought: it's fifty minutes. It's fine. I'll go at the other end.
It was not fine.
She got a seat, which was the trap — a window seat, no less, which meant that getting up would mean making the man beside her stand up too, and the carriage was already standing-room only. So she sat, and the train pulled out, and by the second stop she was at an eight.
She'd done the train a thousand times. She knew every trick. She crossed her legs and sat on her heel. She put her bag on her lap and pressed her thighs together under it. She did the thing where you lean forward and it takes some of the weight off, and the thing where you sit right back and it helps for ten seconds, and by half past she was doing the little rocking thing she was always embarrassed to see other people do, and she was doing it in public, and it wasn't working.
At a nine she started bargaining with the clock. Fourteen minutes. Fourteen minutes and you're off, and the toilets at the station are right there, second left, you can make fourteen minutes.
At a nine and a half, three stops later, she felt the first small slip — a hot little leak that got away from her before she could clamp down — and she pressed her legs together so hard her calves ached and made a sound in her throat, and the man beside her glanced over.
Four minutes. She could do four minutes.
She could not do four minutes.
The next one wasn't a leak. The next one was the whole thing, arriving all at once with a lurch like a dropped weight, and she knew the second it started that there was nothing to be done about it. She got both hands onto her bag and squeezed her thighs and held her breath and pushed back, and it came anyway, hot and unstoppable, soaking straight through her underwear and into the denim in a flood.
She heard it. There's a soft, muffled hiss to it that you can't mistake once you've heard it, and the seat of the chair under her went warm in a spreading circle, and she could feel it running back under her thighs and up the seam of her jeans, and the denim went from stiff to heavy and dark and clinging all at once.
Tess sat very still with her hands in her lap and her face absolutely burning and her heart going like a bird in a box.
She was thirty feet from the doors. She was forty seconds from her stop. She'd held it for fifty minutes and she'd lost it in the last one.
The worst part — the truly worst part, the part she would replay in the dark for weeks — was that she had to get up.
The train slowed. People stood. The man beside her stood, and looked down at her expectantly, and Tess stood up out of the seat and turned to go and every single person in that carriage behind her had a clear view of the back of her jeans.
She knew what they saw. She'd seen it on other people. A dark wet patch across the seat and down the inside of both thighs, a spread the shape of a hand, unmistakable, and a gleaming wet ring on the grey seat fabric behind her where she'd been sitting.
She heard a woman say "oh, love" somewhere behind her, in that tone of pure sympathy that is somehow worse than laughing, and Tess said "yeah" to no one in particular and got off the train with her bag held over the front of her thighs and her jaw clenched.
The platform was cold. The wind hit the wet denim and it went from warm to chilling in ten steps, and the cold against her soaked thighs was so shocking she actually gasped.
She stopped by the ticket machine and let herself look down.
It was as bad as she'd feared. The dark spread went down both legs to mid-thigh and across the whole front, and the denim was clinging to the shape of her, and there was a wet sheen on it, and it looked exactly like what it was: a grown woman of twenty-seven who had wet her jeans on a train.
Her eyes went hot.
"Fuck," she said, out loud, to the ticket machine.
Two
The walk home was a mile.
She did it with her coat pulled down as low as it would go and her bag in front of her, and it made no difference, because the jeans were dark indigo and the wet had turned them nearly black, and the contrast was obvious to anyone who looked. A man walking a dog looked. A group of teenagers outside a chicken shop looked and then, she was fairly sure, said something, because there was a burst of laughter just after she passed. It might have been unrelated. It was probably not unrelated.
The chafing started about halfway. Wet denim against the inside of her thighs, rubbing with every step, and the fabric had gone cold and heavy and the cold was now up into her hips and she could feel the trickle of it running down the back of one leg and into her sock.
At her front door she couldn't get the key in because her hands were shaking.
She got inside, got the jeans off in the hallway, stood in her damp underwear, and looked at herself in the mirror over the shoe rack. Red face. Mascara wrecked. Jeans on the floor in a wet heap with the crotch and thighs nearly black.
She sat down on the floor of her own hallway, in her damp underwear, and cried for about ninety seconds, and then she got up and had a shower and put on a pizza and thought, with real venom: never again.
She looked up "overactive bladder," and "how to hold it," and then, because she'd heard the word before and had always been vaguely curious, "adult diapers for travel."
She read for two hours. She read a forum post by a woman who said she wore one on trains and "never looked back," and another by a man who said the tapes were fiddly and you should always seat them lying down, and a third that listed brands by absorbency, and by eleven she'd decided that on Saturday she would go out and buy some.
And then, because she'd been thinking about it for two hours, she fell asleep thinking about it — which turned out to be the thing that got her into trouble.
Three
Saturday she went out at noon with no diaper on, because the plan was to buy them and there was no point in one until she had them.
She had a coffee first. And then, because it was cold and she was nervous, a second one.
By half past twelve she was in the queue at the pharmacy with her bladder at a five and a note in her phone that said TENA / Always / pull-ups? / thick, and she was fine. She was fine right up until the point where she was fourth in line and it went from a five to an eight in about ninety seconds flat, and she looked at the door of the pharmacy and realized the toilets were through the back, behind the counter, and the queue was long, and she'd committed.
The pharmacy was the small one on the corner, the one with the narrow aisles and the tiled floor and the radio on, and it was not a place with dignity in it.
She did the rocking thing. She crossed her legs at the ankle and then at the knee and then uncrossed them and put her hand on her lower stomach, and the woman in front of her was buying a birthday card and taking forever, and Tess's whole lower body had gone tight and hot and she could feel her pulse in her bladder.
Two people in front.
And then the pressure changed.
That was the thing she noticed first, and she didn't understand it — a deep, rolling sort of movement, low down, that felt different from the bladder. She shifted her weight and it moved with her and it was deep, and she thought, dimly: oh no, not both, not both at the same time.
One person in front.
The bladder went first, and she couldn't stop it, and she made a small noise and pressed her legs together and it came anyway — a hot flood into her underwear that ran straight through the cotton and into her jeans and down the inside of her legs. She felt the spread, the awful rapid spread, front to back and down, and the jeans went heavy and dark and wet and she just stood in it because there was nowhere to go and nothing to do but stand in it.
And then the deep rolling thing crested and she couldn't have held that either if she'd had all day.
The mess came slow and thick and she felt the whole of it go, felt it fill the back of her underwear and spread and sit warm and heavy against her, and she had to put a hand out onto the shelf beside her and grip it. It kept coming in stages. She pushed once, involuntarily, and it settled, and she pushed again and it was done, and the warmth of it was enormous and shocking and she stood in the queue of a pharmacy with her eyes closed.
The woman in front finished. The counter was free.
Tess did not move for a second. She was doing sums — the damage, the shape of it, the walk.
Then she stepped forward, in soaked jeans with a full load in the back of her underwear, and the wet denim moved against her with every step and the mess shifted with her and she felt every single part of it.
"Next," the pharmacist said.
Four
She got the words out.
"I need — " Her voice came out high. She cleared her throat. "Diapers. Adult."
The pharmacist was a woman of about fifty with reading glasses pushed up into her hair. She looked at Tess, and then, with the practiced, unhurried eye of someone who has seen everything, she looked at Tess's jeans.
"Oh, love," she said. "You've had a day."
Tess's eyes went hot instantly and she had to look at the shelf.
"That's — yeah."
"Right. What are we doing — pull-ups, or taped?" She was already moving out from behind the counter. "What happened there, if you don't mind me asking?"
And this was the humiliation, this was the real one — being made to explain, in a small tiled shop with the radio on, to a stranger who was being kind about it.
"Both," Tess said. "Yesterday and today. Um. On the train, yesterday. And in your queue, just now."
"Both today? Wet and — " She gestured, vaguely, at her own backside.
"Yeah."
"Right." The pharmacist took a packet off the shelf and turned it over. "You want taped, not pull-ups. Pull-ups are no good for the other thing, they don't hold, and you can't change them without taking your shoes and trousers off. You want these. Thick ones. Tapes."
She held the packet out. Tess took it. It was enormous — a plastic-wrapped brick of white, the words MAXIMUM ABSORBENCY across the front in blue, and a picture of a diaper on the side with a little diagram of four tapes.
"Size?"
"I don't know." Tess's voice cracked. "Medium? I'm a ten, in jeans."
"Medium, then. And wipes — you'll want wipes, don't use toilet paper, it goes to mush. Powder, or cream, or you'll chafe. And a bin bag for the used ones, don't put them in the bathroom bin, they swell."
The pharmacist was assembling a small pile on the counter. Wipes. A tub of cream. A packet of nappy sacks in a pastel box.
"How many packets of the diapers?" she said.
"Two," Tess said, faintly.
"Three's better. They're on offer and you'll want one in your bag, one at work, one at home."
"Three. Yeah. Fine."
The total was thirty-one pounds and Tess paid it with wet jeans on and the cream and wipes and the pastel box going into a carrier bag with the diapers, and the pharmacist said, "Do you want the toilet through the back to get yourself sorted before you go out?" and Tess said "God, yes," and the pharmacist said, "It's a state, isn't it. Half of that shelf is for people who won't admit it," and Tess laughed, once, shakily, and went through the back.
Five
She locked the door and put the bag on the floor and stood there for a second with her hands over her face.
Then she got her jeans and underwear off, and the state of them was almost funny — the underwear a total loss, the jeans soaked from waist to mid-thigh in front and across the seat, the whole thing warm and heavy and hers.
She cleaned up with the wipes, and it took a lot of them, and she had to do it crouched awkwardly over the toilet with the little bin beside her. Then she opened the diapers.
The packet was heavy. She pulled one out and it unfolded in her hands with a noise that was somehow louder than it had any right to be in that little tiled room — a crisp, crackling crinkle that went off in the acoustics like a crisp packet — and she stood there holding an unfolded diaper, thick and white and quilted, looking at the four tapes and the printed landing strip.
Right, she thought. Okay.
She'd read enough the night before to know the order. She didn't have a wall to lean against that wasn't a door, so she did it standing with the back of the diaper pressed against the door and her knees slightly bent, and she got the front up between her legs and the bottom two tapes on first, and then she had to lean away from the door to bring the top two round, and the whole thing hung off her and swung and crinkled.
The tapes were stickier than she'd expected and she did the first one too tight and had to peel it back, which took a little of the plastic's shine with it and made a ripping sound that she was sure carried out into the shop.
The second attempt was better. She got them snug, not tight, and pressed each one down flat with her thumb, and then smoothed the front panel with the flat of her hand — and the padding pressed warm and soft and thick against her, and her breath went out of her in a rush, and something in her stomach turned over.
She looked down at herself.
A white band across her hips. Her stomach above it. The padding pushing her thighs a little apart, a soft thick bulge where before there had been nothing. She turned sideways to look in the little mirror over the sink and the profile of it was obvious — a smooth white curve out from her body, the sort of thing you could not mistake.
She moved her hips, experimentally. The crinkle came out so loud in that room that she laughed, out loud, alone, at her own reflection.
Then she put her jeans back on over it, and it was a squeeze — the padding filled the seat and the front and the jeans went tight across it — and she got them buttoned and looked at herself again and you could see it. Not a shape. The shape. The thick, blocky front of it pushing out the denim, the smooth curve of it, the slight sag between her legs.
She was going to walk out of a shop like that.
Her face was hot and her heart was going and something between her legs had woken all the way up.
She went out through the shop with her carrier bag and her wet jeans in a plastic sack and her head down, and she could hear herself. That was the thing — she could hear herself, every step, a soft rhythmic crinkle under the denim, and the bulk shifting between her thighs, and she was sure it was audible to the whole shop, and she was sure everyone could see the bulge, and she got out onto the pavement and walked twenty feet and had to stop.
Her hands were shaking. Her thighs were pressed together and the padding was pressed between them, thick and soft and warm from her body, and she was so turned on she could feel her pulse in her cunt.
She'd had no idea. She'd thought it would be practical. She'd thought it would be a way of not being embarrassed on trains. She had not remotely understood that it would feel like this — like being held, like being swaddled, like there was something between her legs at all times and she could feel it with every step.
She walked home the long way, so it would last.
Six
At home she didn't take her jeans off.
She made tea and she sat on the couch in it, and the padding compressed warm under her weight and the crinkle went off under her and she pressed her knees together and just sat there feeling it. She'd had it on for forty minutes and she was already aching.
She put her hand between her legs, on the outside of the jeans, and pressed.
The thickness was the thing. She had to press hard to get through it, and when she did, the padding compressed and pushed back, and the pressure was diffuse and soft and everywhere, and she rubbed in a slow circle and it was nothing like touching herself normally and it was so much better.
She undid the jeans and got her hand inside, under the waistband, down the front of the padding. The papery smooth plastic was warm from her body and she could feel it give under her fingers, and she got two fingers between the padding and herself and rubbed, and the crinkle came out with every movement of her wrist, and the sound was doing something to her, the sound was genuinely doing something to her.
She came like that in under three minutes, with her jeans open and her hand shoved down the front of a diaper and her heels drumming on the couch cushions, and it rolled through her in long waves and she made a noise into the back of her other hand and then lay there with her chest heaving.
When she could move she looked down at herself. Open jeans. White diaper, pressed and creased from her hand. She hadn't even wet it.
She went and stood in front of the full-length mirror in the hall and looked, properly, with her jeans open and hanging off her hips and the diaper filling the gap, thick and white and unmistakable, and she turned sideways and looked at the profile of it.
Her eyes were still wet from coming. Her face was red. She looked — soft, and small, and padded, and nothing at all like a woman who'd got on a train yesterday afternoon.
"Right," she said, to the mirror.
She wet it, standing there, deliberately, watching herself do it — the front of it going dark and heavy and clinging to her in a spreading sheen — and the warmth came up through the padding and against her and she had to put a hand on the wall.
Then she got the wipes and the cream and did it properly, lying on her bed with her knees up, and taped herself into a fresh one, and pressed the front flat with her palm, and the last thought she had before she fell asleep in it was that she was going to have to be in public in one of these on Monday.
She couldn't wait.
It started, as these things do, with a decision that seemed reasonable at the time.
Tess had drunk two coffees and a bottle of water on a Friday afternoon because the alternative was falling asleep at her desk, and at 5:20 she got on the 5:24 from the city with a bladder already at a six and a fifty-minute ride ahead of her. And she thought: it's fifty minutes. It's fine. I'll go at the other end.
It was not fine.
She got a seat, which was the trap — a window seat, no less, which meant that getting up would mean making the man beside her stand up too, and the carriage was already standing-room only. So she sat, and the train pulled out, and by the second stop she was at an eight.
She'd done the train a thousand times. She knew every trick. She crossed her legs and sat on her heel. She put her bag on her lap and pressed her thighs together under it. She did the thing where you lean forward and it takes some of the weight off, and the thing where you sit right back and it helps for ten seconds, and by half past she was doing the little rocking thing she was always embarrassed to see other people do, and she was doing it in public, and it wasn't working.
At a nine she started bargaining with the clock. Fourteen minutes. Fourteen minutes and you're off, and the toilets at the station are right there, second left, you can make fourteen minutes.
At a nine and a half, three stops later, she felt the first small slip — a hot little leak that got away from her before she could clamp down — and she pressed her legs together so hard her calves ached and made a sound in her throat, and the man beside her glanced over.
Four minutes. She could do four minutes.
She could not do four minutes.
The next one wasn't a leak. The next one was the whole thing, arriving all at once with a lurch like a dropped weight, and she knew the second it started that there was nothing to be done about it. She got both hands onto her bag and squeezed her thighs and held her breath and pushed back, and it came anyway, hot and unstoppable, soaking straight through her underwear and into the denim in a flood.
She heard it. There's a soft, muffled hiss to it that you can't mistake once you've heard it, and the seat of the chair under her went warm in a spreading circle, and she could feel it running back under her thighs and up the seam of her jeans, and the denim went from stiff to heavy and dark and clinging all at once.
Tess sat very still with her hands in her lap and her face absolutely burning and her heart going like a bird in a box.
She was thirty feet from the doors. She was forty seconds from her stop. She'd held it for fifty minutes and she'd lost it in the last one.
The worst part — the truly worst part, the part she would replay in the dark for weeks — was that she had to get up.
The train slowed. People stood. The man beside her stood, and looked down at her expectantly, and Tess stood up out of the seat and turned to go and every single person in that carriage behind her had a clear view of the back of her jeans.
She knew what they saw. She'd seen it on other people. A dark wet patch across the seat and down the inside of both thighs, a spread the shape of a hand, unmistakable, and a gleaming wet ring on the grey seat fabric behind her where she'd been sitting.
She heard a woman say "oh, love" somewhere behind her, in that tone of pure sympathy that is somehow worse than laughing, and Tess said "yeah" to no one in particular and got off the train with her bag held over the front of her thighs and her jaw clenched.
The platform was cold. The wind hit the wet denim and it went from warm to chilling in ten steps, and the cold against her soaked thighs was so shocking she actually gasped.
She stopped by the ticket machine and let herself look down.
It was as bad as she'd feared. The dark spread went down both legs to mid-thigh and across the whole front, and the denim was clinging to the shape of her, and there was a wet sheen on it, and it looked exactly like what it was: a grown woman of twenty-seven who had wet her jeans on a train.
Her eyes went hot.
"Fuck," she said, out loud, to the ticket machine.
Two
The walk home was a mile.
She did it with her coat pulled down as low as it would go and her bag in front of her, and it made no difference, because the jeans were dark indigo and the wet had turned them nearly black, and the contrast was obvious to anyone who looked. A man walking a dog looked. A group of teenagers outside a chicken shop looked and then, she was fairly sure, said something, because there was a burst of laughter just after she passed. It might have been unrelated. It was probably not unrelated.
The chafing started about halfway. Wet denim against the inside of her thighs, rubbing with every step, and the fabric had gone cold and heavy and the cold was now up into her hips and she could feel the trickle of it running down the back of one leg and into her sock.
At her front door she couldn't get the key in because her hands were shaking.
She got inside, got the jeans off in the hallway, stood in her damp underwear, and looked at herself in the mirror over the shoe rack. Red face. Mascara wrecked. Jeans on the floor in a wet heap with the crotch and thighs nearly black.
She sat down on the floor of her own hallway, in her damp underwear, and cried for about ninety seconds, and then she got up and had a shower and put on a pizza and thought, with real venom: never again.
She looked up "overactive bladder," and "how to hold it," and then, because she'd heard the word before and had always been vaguely curious, "adult diapers for travel."
She read for two hours. She read a forum post by a woman who said she wore one on trains and "never looked back," and another by a man who said the tapes were fiddly and you should always seat them lying down, and a third that listed brands by absorbency, and by eleven she'd decided that on Saturday she would go out and buy some.
And then, because she'd been thinking about it for two hours, she fell asleep thinking about it — which turned out to be the thing that got her into trouble.
Three
Saturday she went out at noon with no diaper on, because the plan was to buy them and there was no point in one until she had them.
She had a coffee first. And then, because it was cold and she was nervous, a second one.
By half past twelve she was in the queue at the pharmacy with her bladder at a five and a note in her phone that said TENA / Always / pull-ups? / thick, and she was fine. She was fine right up until the point where she was fourth in line and it went from a five to an eight in about ninety seconds flat, and she looked at the door of the pharmacy and realized the toilets were through the back, behind the counter, and the queue was long, and she'd committed.
The pharmacy was the small one on the corner, the one with the narrow aisles and the tiled floor and the radio on, and it was not a place with dignity in it.
She did the rocking thing. She crossed her legs at the ankle and then at the knee and then uncrossed them and put her hand on her lower stomach, and the woman in front of her was buying a birthday card and taking forever, and Tess's whole lower body had gone tight and hot and she could feel her pulse in her bladder.
Two people in front.
And then the pressure changed.
That was the thing she noticed first, and she didn't understand it — a deep, rolling sort of movement, low down, that felt different from the bladder. She shifted her weight and it moved with her and it was deep, and she thought, dimly: oh no, not both, not both at the same time.
One person in front.
The bladder went first, and she couldn't stop it, and she made a small noise and pressed her legs together and it came anyway — a hot flood into her underwear that ran straight through the cotton and into her jeans and down the inside of her legs. She felt the spread, the awful rapid spread, front to back and down, and the jeans went heavy and dark and wet and she just stood in it because there was nowhere to go and nothing to do but stand in it.
And then the deep rolling thing crested and she couldn't have held that either if she'd had all day.
The mess came slow and thick and she felt the whole of it go, felt it fill the back of her underwear and spread and sit warm and heavy against her, and she had to put a hand out onto the shelf beside her and grip it. It kept coming in stages. She pushed once, involuntarily, and it settled, and she pushed again and it was done, and the warmth of it was enormous and shocking and she stood in the queue of a pharmacy with her eyes closed.
The woman in front finished. The counter was free.
Tess did not move for a second. She was doing sums — the damage, the shape of it, the walk.
Then she stepped forward, in soaked jeans with a full load in the back of her underwear, and the wet denim moved against her with every step and the mess shifted with her and she felt every single part of it.
"Next," the pharmacist said.
Four
She got the words out.
"I need — " Her voice came out high. She cleared her throat. "Diapers. Adult."
The pharmacist was a woman of about fifty with reading glasses pushed up into her hair. She looked at Tess, and then, with the practiced, unhurried eye of someone who has seen everything, she looked at Tess's jeans.
"Oh, love," she said. "You've had a day."
Tess's eyes went hot instantly and she had to look at the shelf.
"That's — yeah."
"Right. What are we doing — pull-ups, or taped?" She was already moving out from behind the counter. "What happened there, if you don't mind me asking?"
And this was the humiliation, this was the real one — being made to explain, in a small tiled shop with the radio on, to a stranger who was being kind about it.
"Both," Tess said. "Yesterday and today. Um. On the train, yesterday. And in your queue, just now."
"Both today? Wet and — " She gestured, vaguely, at her own backside.
"Yeah."
"Right." The pharmacist took a packet off the shelf and turned it over. "You want taped, not pull-ups. Pull-ups are no good for the other thing, they don't hold, and you can't change them without taking your shoes and trousers off. You want these. Thick ones. Tapes."
She held the packet out. Tess took it. It was enormous — a plastic-wrapped brick of white, the words MAXIMUM ABSORBENCY across the front in blue, and a picture of a diaper on the side with a little diagram of four tapes.
"Size?"
"I don't know." Tess's voice cracked. "Medium? I'm a ten, in jeans."
"Medium, then. And wipes — you'll want wipes, don't use toilet paper, it goes to mush. Powder, or cream, or you'll chafe. And a bin bag for the used ones, don't put them in the bathroom bin, they swell."
The pharmacist was assembling a small pile on the counter. Wipes. A tub of cream. A packet of nappy sacks in a pastel box.
"How many packets of the diapers?" she said.
"Two," Tess said, faintly.
"Three's better. They're on offer and you'll want one in your bag, one at work, one at home."
"Three. Yeah. Fine."
The total was thirty-one pounds and Tess paid it with wet jeans on and the cream and wipes and the pastel box going into a carrier bag with the diapers, and the pharmacist said, "Do you want the toilet through the back to get yourself sorted before you go out?" and Tess said "God, yes," and the pharmacist said, "It's a state, isn't it. Half of that shelf is for people who won't admit it," and Tess laughed, once, shakily, and went through the back.
Five
She locked the door and put the bag on the floor and stood there for a second with her hands over her face.
Then she got her jeans and underwear off, and the state of them was almost funny — the underwear a total loss, the jeans soaked from waist to mid-thigh in front and across the seat, the whole thing warm and heavy and hers.
She cleaned up with the wipes, and it took a lot of them, and she had to do it crouched awkwardly over the toilet with the little bin beside her. Then she opened the diapers.
The packet was heavy. She pulled one out and it unfolded in her hands with a noise that was somehow louder than it had any right to be in that little tiled room — a crisp, crackling crinkle that went off in the acoustics like a crisp packet — and she stood there holding an unfolded diaper, thick and white and quilted, looking at the four tapes and the printed landing strip.
Right, she thought. Okay.
She'd read enough the night before to know the order. She didn't have a wall to lean against that wasn't a door, so she did it standing with the back of the diaper pressed against the door and her knees slightly bent, and she got the front up between her legs and the bottom two tapes on first, and then she had to lean away from the door to bring the top two round, and the whole thing hung off her and swung and crinkled.
The tapes were stickier than she'd expected and she did the first one too tight and had to peel it back, which took a little of the plastic's shine with it and made a ripping sound that she was sure carried out into the shop.
The second attempt was better. She got them snug, not tight, and pressed each one down flat with her thumb, and then smoothed the front panel with the flat of her hand — and the padding pressed warm and soft and thick against her, and her breath went out of her in a rush, and something in her stomach turned over.
She looked down at herself.
A white band across her hips. Her stomach above it. The padding pushing her thighs a little apart, a soft thick bulge where before there had been nothing. She turned sideways to look in the little mirror over the sink and the profile of it was obvious — a smooth white curve out from her body, the sort of thing you could not mistake.
She moved her hips, experimentally. The crinkle came out so loud in that room that she laughed, out loud, alone, at her own reflection.
Then she put her jeans back on over it, and it was a squeeze — the padding filled the seat and the front and the jeans went tight across it — and she got them buttoned and looked at herself again and you could see it. Not a shape. The shape. The thick, blocky front of it pushing out the denim, the smooth curve of it, the slight sag between her legs.
She was going to walk out of a shop like that.
Her face was hot and her heart was going and something between her legs had woken all the way up.
She went out through the shop with her carrier bag and her wet jeans in a plastic sack and her head down, and she could hear herself. That was the thing — she could hear herself, every step, a soft rhythmic crinkle under the denim, and the bulk shifting between her thighs, and she was sure it was audible to the whole shop, and she was sure everyone could see the bulge, and she got out onto the pavement and walked twenty feet and had to stop.
Her hands were shaking. Her thighs were pressed together and the padding was pressed between them, thick and soft and warm from her body, and she was so turned on she could feel her pulse in her cunt.
She'd had no idea. She'd thought it would be practical. She'd thought it would be a way of not being embarrassed on trains. She had not remotely understood that it would feel like this — like being held, like being swaddled, like there was something between her legs at all times and she could feel it with every step.
She walked home the long way, so it would last.
Six
At home she didn't take her jeans off.
She made tea and she sat on the couch in it, and the padding compressed warm under her weight and the crinkle went off under her and she pressed her knees together and just sat there feeling it. She'd had it on for forty minutes and she was already aching.
She put her hand between her legs, on the outside of the jeans, and pressed.
The thickness was the thing. She had to press hard to get through it, and when she did, the padding compressed and pushed back, and the pressure was diffuse and soft and everywhere, and she rubbed in a slow circle and it was nothing like touching herself normally and it was so much better.
She undid the jeans and got her hand inside, under the waistband, down the front of the padding. The papery smooth plastic was warm from her body and she could feel it give under her fingers, and she got two fingers between the padding and herself and rubbed, and the crinkle came out with every movement of her wrist, and the sound was doing something to her, the sound was genuinely doing something to her.
She came like that in under three minutes, with her jeans open and her hand shoved down the front of a diaper and her heels drumming on the couch cushions, and it rolled through her in long waves and she made a noise into the back of her other hand and then lay there with her chest heaving.
When she could move she looked down at herself. Open jeans. White diaper, pressed and creased from her hand. She hadn't even wet it.
She went and stood in front of the full-length mirror in the hall and looked, properly, with her jeans open and hanging off her hips and the diaper filling the gap, thick and white and unmistakable, and she turned sideways and looked at the profile of it.
Her eyes were still wet from coming. Her face was red. She looked — soft, and small, and padded, and nothing at all like a woman who'd got on a train yesterday afternoon.
"Right," she said, to the mirror.
She wet it, standing there, deliberately, watching herself do it — the front of it going dark and heavy and clinging to her in a spreading sheen — and the warmth came up through the padding and against her and she had to put a hand on the wall.
Then she got the wipes and the cream and did it properly, lying on her bed with her knees up, and taped herself into a fresh one, and pressed the front flat with her palm, and the last thought she had before she fell asleep in it was that she was going to have to be in public in one of these on Monday.
She couldn't wait.
26-30, M
