✅1️⃣ Trusting the Babysitter

Chapter 23 - His and Hers and Mine

It wasn't easy to navigate the stairs without standing. Adam wasn't used to crawling, and probably hadn't done it since he was really a baby. But when he started on the stairs he felt the blood rushing to his head after only a couple of tentative steps. And there wasn't space to put his knees on a step behind him without pressing his shins into the edge of the step above. He backed up, and forced himself to think about it again.

After a couple of false starts, he realised that he didn't actually have to crawl. He just couldn't walk, the same as a baby. He could rock back and sit on the top step, leaving his hands free to grab the bannisters. And then he scooted forward a little, and carefully lowered himself down to the next step. It was slow progress, but he was moving. He was in no hurry today, he was only coming down at all because he had been told to. Anything that delayed more orders from the baby had to be a good thing.

Eventually he reached the bottom, and managed to get his hands in front of him again. Then it was back to crawling to get him to the lounge door. He should have been able to open it easily enough, but he found that from his current position it wasn't so easy to reach anything above his shoulders. He would need to sit up first just to reach the handle, echoing Lorelei's problem getting into the linen cupboard before. He rocked to one side and managed to get onto his butt, but then his shoulder and elbow hit the door hard. He would have sworn under his breath, but he knew there was a child listening and was able to stomp on his instincts before he made a sound.

Instead he leaned on the door, trying to get his balance enough that he could bring the other arm up to turn the handle. He would probably have managed, but before he could the door sprang open. Claudia was standing on the other side, and laughed at his misfortune as he fell onto the soft carpet.

"Awww!" she squeaked, "Look at the little baby in just a dipee!"

"What?" he answered, slightly taken aback by the change in her tone. But then he realised that it was obvious: Lorelei had given her more instructions. He'd not satisfied the little kid in his attempts to tease and humiliate her sister, so she must have decided that they would switch roles. It wasn't the best situation, but he hoped that she would enjoy it a little more than he had. Today was certain to be uncomfortable, but there were hours left. If they couldn't get out of it, he could at least hope that there was some scenario that wasn't hell for either of them.

"Little baby!" she repeated, and then grabbed his hand and tried to pull him into the middle of the room. There was something like a playpen there, with a ring of cloth fence that was probably better suited for containing toys than an actual baby. Adam did his best to keep on crawling with one hand being gripped, and mostly just ignored Claudia's interference. In the time it took them to get there he had plenty of opportunity to justify his instinctive actions, and he told himself he was doing the right thing. She was a strong person, who made a big deal about not needing people despite her popularity. She cultured her mystique, making sure she was in control of how people thought about her even as she pretended not to care, and he wasn't sure how she would feel about any proof that she couldn't actually pull him around. Adam wasn't particularly heavy, or particularly strong, but he did his best to just keep moving to avoid embarrassing her.

On the way across the room he glanced over at Lorelei, who was watching them from the armchair but apparently only giving half of her attention. She had an electronic device in her hands, with stickers that showed it was the tablet he'd last seen charging on the desk upstairs. As worried as he was about his own situation, Adam found time to hope that Claudia wasn't too upset about her electronics being hijacked by her sister, and that any important data on the device hadn't been touched.

Then he got to the playpen. The toybox, it turned out, was a large toy chest that would have been a lot easier to move with two people. The fence surrounding the play area was apparently connected to it at the edges, reinforcing his opinion that it was designed to keep toys from rolling away. But it was just about tall enough that he couldn't easily get over it without standing. That meant Claudia had to help him over, lifting one of his legs and then the other up in the air, laughing all the time. He told himself that it wasn't her fault, and that he wasn't going to hold this humiliation against her afterwards. But that was hard to believe, and he knew that if there was any chance of a normal friendship Claudia would have to be a lot more rational than he was.

"Now play!" Claudia said. "Play blocks. You're naughty babies. Like you want all the blocks."

Adam looked across as Claudia sat down again. There were a bunch of blocks there. Wooden building blocks, the kind that you can stack up until they fall down. Mostly chunky cuboids, with a few more complex shapes like a pillar or the top of an arch. And there were blocks with letters and pictures on the sides too, both wooden and plastic, in almost the same size. Claudia had apparently started building a little house for a Barbie doll with an arm missing, using a couple of the larger alphabet blocks to make one wall. There was a big pile of loose blocks to one side, ready to be added as the structure grew.

So of course Adam took one of the big blocks from Claudia's construction to start his own building. He put it down in front of him, and then reached out for another one to put on top. He didn't care about the blocks that were off to one side, or whatever toys were still in the box. He'd been told to play with the blocks, and that meant all of the blocks. And using all of the blocks would only work if he could take them before Claudia did. Naturally, the only way to start was with the ones she had already claimed, so that he could have the full set. He hoped she wouldn't mind, and that she would quickly understand that he needed the full set to build a tower that would satisfy his orders.

"Bad girl!" Claudia yelled. "Mine!" Adam just ignored her, assuming it was another of Lorelei's attempts to make him feel bad. He reached for the next block instead, focusing on his own toys until his attention was captured by a chunky wooden block smashing into his fingers.

"No! Mine!"