College or Cribs

Chapter 21
Pick Up

Chapter Description: Chris leaves the hospital to try and pick up the pieces of his life and his lies. But who will pick him up from the hospital?

Pick Up

Christopher Cole IV sat in a wheelchair the next morning, being wheeled out of the hospital, a bag of prescription medication in his lap and the morose expression of a condemned man approaching the gallows on his face. His lie to the girls about not sleeping well turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and he had witnessed the sun set the previous night and rise this morning without even a hint of sleep to comfort him.

His mind wouldn’t let him. He couldn’t stop thinking about the bizarre yet warm fantasy world he’d been drawn into, and the harsh and cold reality- a reality without fantasy- that encased him at present. Was he truly mad or at least dreaming as he had initially suspected? No. Most certainly not. His memories of his time as a literal adult baby were far too vivid and lucid to be the deranged fantasy of a waking dream. But how to convince anyone of that fact was beyond his capabilities at present.

Worse yet, in order to preserve himself from his loved ones, he had by necessity been concocting a web of lies and excuses. Chris had known secrecy before, mind you, but they were lies of omission; the lie of “Nothin’”, when someone asked “What were you doing in there?”. Chris didn’t even have that anymore. His whole family, even Sherry, now knew “something” was going on, but none of them knew “what”; only that he had been acting strangely over the last few days since returning home for summer break.

Everyone, though, had a different view of what that “something” was. Samantha and Brianna knew that he had had a mental breakdown that involved him pissing himself right in his own room (he really had). But reality had for some reason adjusted itself, so that everyone remembered he had gone into an infantile fugue state soon after, when to Chris’s memory he had spent two straight days wearing oversized Pampers and sleeping in a crib instead of incontinence briefs while strapped to a hospital bed. The two had bought his lie about sleep psychosis and an old fashioned stress break down. They had wanted to believe it.

Roxanne had walked in on Chris’s breakdown just as the magic of Wubby the Teddy Bear had begun to take effect and warp the world around him, and while Chris remembered the scene changing to a simple matter of a wet bed and a leaky diaper; Roxanne’s experience was likely of a thrashing 20 something throwing chairs around his bedroom while the woman had likely been forced to dial 911. Chris had told her half -truths; the emotions without the details as he knew them. Roxanne had left it at that and accepted it as all she needed to know at the moment.

Sherry, Chris’s sweetheart and girlfriend, now knew about Chris’s supply of diapers- in this reality at least- and had known about them for some time, now. However in this reality (Chris made sure to keep internally referring to his current situation as “THIS reality” instead of just “reality”, something about all of this wasn’t normal either no matter how much his rational mind insisted), Sherry had written it off as a simple case of a young man having a bed wetting problem and trying to hide It for fear of turning his girlfriend off. God bless her for assuming the best about him. In a way she was closer to the truth than any of them. He had bought diapers before with the express intent of using them and hid them from everyone; for the express purpose of how he feared they might react. It’s just that accidentally peeing his pants had nothing to do with it.

Chris’s father, Dr. Christopher Cole III, M.D. had found all of the evidence and more and made entirely different conclusions. Chris’s father found the diapers hidden under his bathroom sink; found the google searches for “Adult baby” and had assumed that Chris was a pedophile of some sort. Dr. Cole KNEW that Chris was a pedophile in the same way that the people of Salem KNEW that they had been hunting and trying witches. There was no convincing the man otherwise. Not that there was any evidence to convince his Dad, Chris had somberly thought while tossing and turning in his bed.

This reality Chris found himself trapped in was almost the same as his real life before coming home from college in every way except for one important detail: Infantilism did not exist. There were no ABDL websites, no ABDL products, or any mention of the fetish in any form of media that Chris could find. Even “Oprah versus Adult Baby Midget”, had ceased to exist. Circumstance propelled by Wubby’s magic had first buried Chris so deep in the closet that he found Narnia on the other side, and then dragged him out of the closet while slamming the door shut and bricking it up so that no one could even take a peek inside. The closet world of Chris’s fetish didn’t exist anymore. It was all or nothing, it seemed. And in this world, it was nothing.

Chris felt like nothing, too, his father had seen to that. Dr. Cole was not a man of half-measures. His experience as an Emergency Room doctor hadn’t given him the luxury of a wait-and-see approach. Every problem was solvable in some form or another, and if it wasn’t, then the person was just going to die, and there was nothing that could be done about it. No sense in crying, just move on to the next person who can be saved.

Dr. Cole had written Chris off as “dead”, and had already moved on. Chris was a sexual deviant as far as his father was concerned, and a danger to society who just hadn’t got caught yet. Worse yet, Chris was a threat to Dr. Cole’s and his family’s reputation. The only thing worse than being a sexual deviant was being the father to a sexual deviant. What might the neighbors think? So Dr. Cole had written Chris a big prescription of “don’t talk about it ever again”, to be refilled as often as necessary. There would be no explaining to his father. His father didn’t want to hear any explanations and Dr. Cole was a man who got his way.

Those last, cutting words of “You are a Cole, not an invalid. And definitely not a freak,” had echoed through his head all that night. Those words, the way “freak” had practically been spat out, had been bouncing around his brain and just wouldn’t leave. That’s what his father had thought of him. He was a freak to be quietly swept under the rug until he straightened himself out. That’s what had kept him awake.

Between the choice of being trapped in a fetish story, and living in a world where his father hated him, Chris knew which he’d choose. He couldn’t live in a world where his own father had all but in name disowned him. He just couldn’t. Yes, the thought had crossed his mind that in the fantasy world, he might never grow up, and that his whole family might see him as a baby forever, but that was better than being the family freak, wasn’t it?

All that night he kept staring at Wubby in the visitors chair, its eyes coal black again, instead of the sparkling blue and red that always seemed to signal that something magical was about to happen. But the damned bear did nothing, save sit there the whole night. Additionally, Chris’s own active imagination and paranoia had kept him awake. At first, when he was alone, he’d part way suspected, part way hoped, part way feared, that he was going to lose bladder control. His fantasy world seemed a lot like the stories he had read so many times, and the most common trope about a dream world was that it leaked over to the real one and the protagonist inevitably lost bladder and bowel control and wound up needing to be diapered “in real life”. Naturally the cycle continued from there, till for better or for worse, the subject was completely mentally regressed and more or less treated like a real baby in the real world, and depending on the author this was either a thing of joy or a thing of horror.

Evidently, this wasn’t going to be like one of those stories. While Chris had needed to go to the bathroom more often, due to the IV the hospital staff had insisted on inserting into him, Chris had maintained perfect bladder and bowel control. He had not had even one accident. Not even close, damn it!

As day turned to night and night shifted into late night and beyond, the sleep deprived young man even hoped that perhaps, at his lowest of lows, reality would shift again and he’d return to his baby-self. Overcome with tears, reality would freeze again and rearrange itself.

The railings of his hospital bed would shoot up around him and turn wooden, becoming a proper crib. The nurse call button would dance out of reach and turn into a baby monitor as the walls would become pastel blue once more. An adult incontinence brief would appear magically, or maybe even a pillow would wrap itself around his loins and transmogrify into a puffy white diaper with cartoon characters on the front just as his hospital gown reconfigured itself into a onesie. The next thing he’d know, he’d be back in his nursery, ready to go back to sleep before releasing a stream of pee-pee into the diaper as he drifted off.

He allowed himself to break down, thinking of all that was wrong with his life, and hoped against hope that he would get to be a big baby again; but all thinking about this really accomplished was him crying with an erection. Even more annoying, was even beating off wasn’t enough to relax him so that he could sleep. So, with no other options, Chris had seen the sun rise that morning.

True to his word, Dr. Cole pulled some strings and Chris was being released just before lunch. It must have been quite a few strings, considering that standard procedure typically required at least 72 hours of observation to make sure the patient wasn’t going to relapse. But, Dr. Cole typically got his way. There was no mention of a ride waiting for him when he was released, so Chris, already in a foul mood for reasons that have already been explained, suspected he’d have to do his own “walk of shame” all the way back home. He wouldn’t put that past his Dad just to get a point across.

However, a nurse had dropped off some clothes just after breakfast that morning. Apparently, Roxanne had left some clothes for him to change into, and they had been forgotten about till just before check out. “How conveniently petty”, Chris thought.

They were his blue and silver basketball shorts from when he played back in high school and a matching jersey. Roxanne had definitely dug this out of the closet at home, though for the life of him, Chris couldn’t fathom why.

Chris had been a decent player, but a better bench warmer, as it turned out, and had really only done it to meet new people and impress Sherry. He played for his junior and senior years, scoring a whopping career total of 6 points, and had basically hidden the uniform in the back of his closet since graduating High School.

Chris had gone through the whole “freshmen fifteen” phase of gaining weight his first year at college; the allure of Taco Bell every night had been too strong. But he had shed it through diet and a lot of jogging as soon as he realized that he didn’t want to buy new clothes and/or order a size up of fresh Bambinos. So, the clothes still fit. In fact, Chris couldn’t help but think, the short weres baggy enough to where he could probably wear a diaper underneath and no one would notice, and the jersey would probably cover up any bit of a diaper peeking out over the waistband as they so often did.

There was no underwear though, not that Chris minded. Free-balling was fine by him at the moment, (though there was a Tom Petty joke in there somewhere that he just couldn’t wrap his head around). So, Christopher Cole IV, pre-Med student in his early twenties was escorted out of the hospital wearing an outfit that he hadn’t worn since high-school. In a bizarrely mundane way, his age regression was in fact commencing, just at a snail’s pace and at a stage in his life that wasn’t that long gone from him.

“Here you go,” the nurse announced as Chris was wheeled past the final pair of automated sliding doors. Chris blinked and squinted as the sunlight hit him in the face. Even a short time being stuck bombarded by the hospital’s fluorescent lights had sensitized him to actual factual sunlight.

Shielding his eyes, Chris stood up and took steps forward on the hot concrete of the hospital parking lot. He sensed, more than heard the nurse turning around with the wheelchair and going back through the solid glass doors into the hospital.

“Hey, babe,” a familiar voice called out nonchalantly while he adjusted to the noon-day sun. Like out of a movie, or a mirage, Chris’s eyes zeroed in on the sound of the voice, and a smile came to his face as the form came into focus. Those hips, that hair, those lips. Chris couldn’t help but smile.

“Hey, babe,” Chris called out to Sherry, as he took her in. She wore jean shorts and a pink t-shirt with a black headband holding back her auburn hair. His eyes traveled up her legs, to her hips, his mind briefly wishing her top was just a little shorter so he could catch a peek of her belly-button, and up to her perky breasts, before settling in on her face. She was leaning against her 2000-something red Honda, and smirking at him, as if mildly amused at his stumbling about in the sun.

“Damn,” he whispered to himself. He had gotten his rocks off during his adolescence more times than he could count, picturing a cooing Roxanne holding his diapered form to her breast; but Sherry had the distinct advantage of being someone whom Chris’s libido lusted after in more than one way. The night that Sherry had been magically cast in the role of Chris’s Adult Baby-sitter had been a weird twist on one of his regular little fantasies, but she was still the only woman in Chris’s life that he genuinely lusted after. Chris had just as many fantasies about going all the way with Sherry, as he had ones of her babying him, or when he was feeling particularly imaginative, her being babied beside him.

More than that, he had actual memories to go on, too, to fuel and reinforce his lust. They hadn’t “rounded the bases” yet, so to speak- one of them always chickened out, or life gave them one more reason not to; what if the condom broke, or a roommate or family member way to close by to hear- but they had done almost everything leading up to it. No homeruns yet, but plenty of doubles and a few triples.

Maybe it was religion. Both of them had grown up and gone to the same church. Both of them had had the same “wait till marriage” mentality beaten into their heads since before they really understood what they were supposed to be waiting for. Maybe God wanted them to wait till they got married. Maybe not. Though in the deepest part of his mind, this craziness at least confirmed that there were some things science couldn’t really explain, so God was not completely out of the possibility. What neither of them really wanted to admit was that, flirt as they might, they were two sheltered suburbanite kids from well-to-do families who were overly paranoid and afraid to take that last risky plunge into adulthood via sexual activity. That’s what Chris told himself anyways.

They hugged each other, and Chris closed his eyes in relief as he felt her breasts against his body. “I’m so glad it’s you,” Chris sighed in relief.

“Who were you expecting?” Sherry asked as Chris released her from the hug.

“No one,” he answered.

“No,” she persisted, “Who? Really?” She smiled. She was enjoying this.

“No one,” Chris laughed. “I mean literally no one. I thought I was going to have to walk home by myself.”

“That wasn’t going to happen,” Sherry replied.

“Hello?” Chris answered back, “Have you met my father? He’s pretty pissed.”

“Really?” she asked. “I didn’t get that vibe at all. I don’t really get vibes from him at all, though, y’know?”

“Yeah,” he sighed, deflated.

“What’s he mad about, anyways?” she half asked, half wondered. SHIT! Chris should not have said that. He was too tired to make up a convincing lie right now.

“He…” Chris began, then stopped himself. Too late now, he supposed. “He may know about the…well you know…” he trailed off. Sherry stood there, shaking her head very slowly. She didn’t know. “He found the diapers” he hissed under his breath.

Sherry’s eyes began to widen in realization, then narrowed back down into a confused, if thoughtful expression. “So?”

Chris grunted with exasperation. “So…” he hesitated, then elaborated, “so, he thinks I’m some kind of freak.”

“Because you wet the bed?”

“He doesn’t think I wet the bed,” he grimaced, “He thinks I’m a pedophile.”

There was an awkward pause, and then Sherry guffawed so hard that the birds and squirrels in the noon day parking lot were sent scattering in a panic. Chris just stood there for several uncomfortable minutes as Sherry leaned against the car, holding onto it like a drunkard trying to keep her footing.

“Sorry,” Sherry finally said, still giggling slightly while wiping a tear from her eye. “That’s just, really funny to me, y’know?”

“Why is THAT funny?!” Chris wanted to know, slightly indignant. Wait, was he defending his father’s accusations? “I mean, this is not a good situation I’m in here.” Sherry, for her part, just waved him off.

“Here, turn around, let me check something,” she instructed, making a circular motion with her finger. “I think you put your old jersey on inside out, let me see the tag.” Too baffled to argue, Chris did as told and faced the hospital with his back to his high school sweetheart. He felt a slight gust of air on the crack of his ass as Sherry pulled back the waistband of his shorts and looked down inside.

His mind flashed back to a very similar diaper check a short time ago. But he wasn’t wearing a diaper, was he? As if on cue, he felt a warming sensation in his crotch, and a swelling sensation of his pants getting tighter. Was he wetting his pants?

‘Oh no, the realities are bleeding over again!’ Chris thought, in a panic. He felt the tingling hot sensation in the front of his pants, and reached down to cover his embarrassment, lest the wet spot of his pee be seen on the front of his shorts. Not that it would matter, within seconds he’d be standing in a puddle of his own piss, he knew.

But he felt no wet spot on his crotch. His ears were filled with a plastic, almost crinkling noise. A diaper? No, the transformation was happening again! Right now when he was finally getting some relief, someone who understood and supported him. That was how this cursed shift always seemed to happen! Right when he wasn’t ready!

“Thought so,” Sherry proclaimed knowingly, looking down into his diaper. Had he pooped his diaper too, and not realized it?

“Aaaaaaah!” Chris screamed, as reality slowed down to a halt. Soon, he knew, Sherry was going to be declaring him in need of a change and strip him down to just his diaper before changing him in the back seat of her car and then strapping him into a modified baby seat. Then it would be time for another ride on this roller coaster.

“Knew it,” Sherry interrupted Chris’s scream. “You’re not wearing any underwear.” She stepped around and looked at Chris. “And,” she added with satisfaction, pointing to his crotch, “if just me looking at your bare butt makes you that excited, I highly doubt you’re a pedophile.”

Chris took stock of his surroundings. Time had not, in fact, stopped as it had before a reality shift, it hadn’t even slowed down. Chris had not, in fact, suddenly been wearing a diaper underneath his basketball shorts, nor had he wet himself. The sudden rush of heat to his genital area had simply been due to arousal not incontinence, and his shorts feeling smaller the result of his penis swelling, not his diaper. The slight crinkling and rustling noise had been from the plastic bag holding his newly prescribed medications, still in hand as he had instinctively whipped his hands to his crotch.

“Over react much?” Sherry chuckled as she walked back to her car, and opened the door, to get in.

“That was not cool!” Chris spat as he opened the passenger side door and slid in.

“Fine,” Sherry remarked, turning the engine on. “I’ll never give you an erection again. I promise.”

“Not what I meant!” Chris blushed, as he buckled up, absentmindedly tossing the unneeded medication into the back seat. “And you know it!” he added.

“Yeah, but got your mind off your dad, didn’t it?” she teased.

“Fair enough,” he conceded.

“Besides, we’ve seen enough of each other,” she added. “This week I got the shock of my life and got to walk in on you with a wet diaper on, I think I’m a little entitled to some fun.”

There was an awkward silence that followed as Sherry backed out of the parking space.

“So…besides stuff with your dad, did you at least sleep well?” Sherry asked as they pulled out of the parking lot. “I think I woke you up there, but you kind of look like crap, y’know?”

“Yeah, I know.” Chris yawned. “I didn’t sleep all night. I was just too scared to close my eyes.”

“Wait,” Sherry interjected with new concern in her voice. “Wasn’t this whole mental break down thing due to a lack of sleep?” The blood in Chris’s veins turned to ice as soon as the words hit his ears.

“Talked to the girls?” Chris asked nervously.

“Yeah,” she confirmed, “why?”

Chris was at an impasse now. Did he tell her something resembling the truth, or did he let her believe the lie that his little sisters had so easily swallowed? At least with Roxanne he hadn’t needed to change his story. She hadn’t heard the first draft to begin with. To switch things up with Sherry would be trickier. But could he really let her go on believing what had to be an obvious lie to anyone with at least a middle-school education? Then Sherry took the matter out of his hands.

“Wait, I get it!” Sherry exclaimed as the lightbulbs in her head came on. “That’s why this is happening, isn’t it?”

“What’s happening?” Chris asked, completely not following.

“You’re a bed wetter and embarrassed about it!”

“Huh?” The hamster in Chris’s brain hadn’t just stopped running, the poor thing had had a stroke and was now seizing up. Where was Sherry going with this?

“Think about it, hon! You didn’t want to wet the hospital bed last night, buuuut you didn’t want to wear a diaper because of how your dad made you feel about wearing them. So you couldn’t sleep!” Her eyes were becoming exited, like someone who had just solved the mystery ahead of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock and now got to brag to all of her friends. Chris, still not quite seeing where this was going nodded dumbly.

“So,” she concluded, “you hide the diapers, because you’re ashamed, but you have trouble sleeping without them since you’re afraid to wet the bed-“

“-And the lack of sleep is making me go crazy and have breakdowns.” Chris said dumbly, a relieved numbness overtaking his body.

“It’s like you’re in a Catch-22 or something.” Sherry said. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

“You have no idea,” Chris said, as he put his head back.

Holy crap. It made sense. It made complete and total sense. Sherry had, in fact, come up with a way to make all of his bullshit make sense. If he hadn’t known the truth, he’d believe it himself. Her complete faith in him and wanting to see the best in him had helped her concoct for him a plausible explanation, at least for now. He still had to erase his browsing history, come up with a way for “Adult Baby” to fit into this explanation, and he’d have to get it past his Dad, but maybe there was still a way to survive this world, or at least do damage control with his family.

Chris smiled, and finally having at least one good thing happen today, started to softly snore in the passenger seat.