Rachel Takes the Long Way Home

[another in a series about Rachel and Paul – first chapter is here – comments welcome]

Rachel Takes the Long Way Home

Chapter 1
It was a bring morning and the sun was pouring through Rachel’s window. Finally, it felt like spring was here. She could hear robins singing outside her window, mixed with the sound of her boyfriend Paul shaving in the bathroom. She was still in a daze, but as she rolled out of her bed, she noticed two things that surprised her. First, she not wearing her usual thick nighttime diaper, but a pair of crisp white French-cut cotton briefs. Second, and perhaps even more surprising, she was dry. How had this happened? What was responsible for this miracle? Was her long nightmarish struggle with incontinence over?

“Paul,” she called out to the en suite bathroom, “I’m dry! I literally can’t believe it.”

No response from the bathroom.

“Paul?”

Still nothing, just the sound of running water.

Rachel pushed open the door to see what he was up to, but to her astonishment, he wasn’t there. In fact, it wasn’t her bathroom at all. It was, instead, a glassed-in conference room at Data Solutions, the firm she worked for. In front of her was her team leader, Brian, and the rest of the members on her team: Cori, Diane, Steve, and Tony.

Rachel gasped. What? Here she was in front of all her co-workers, whom she had rarely if ever seen in person before, wearing nothing but her white panties and a skimpy pale yellow tank top.

“Rachel,” Brian said with an amused little chuckle, “so good of you to join us.” The rest of the group chuckled as well.

Rachel felt herself moving forward ever so slightly to the main conference table, conscious that the group could see her in all her barely-clothed vulnerability. But if they did notice, they didn’t say anything. Still, Cori and Diane seemed to be holding back laughter as they looked up expectantly at her.

“Well,” Brian continued. “Are you going to walk us through your code? Or are you just going to stand there? Come on Rachel, we don’t have all day.”

“Uh, s-sure,” Rachel stammered, though she wasn’t exactly sure what she was supposed to be walking them through. Before her was a computer screen with some numbers and letters on it, but she couldn’t quite make them out.

At this point, Cori interjected in a rude tone: “Can’t you find your code to pull up?”

“Pull up,” Rachel repeated the words as they echoed in her head. “Pull up.”

Then, without warning, though as if on an unseen cue, she felt a familiar feeling of warmth burst out into her panties. She looked down and saw to her horror that before she could get out a word about her code, she had begun to pee herself, right in front of her colleagues.

Brian chuckled again. “Pull up,” he said in condescending tone, “Yes maybe that’s exactly what you need. You probably need to be back in pull ups.” The rest of the group now started to laugh too.

Rachel stared down again, to see if it was over, since she could not sense one way or another if she had stopped peeing.

As she looked down at herself, she wasn’t just a tank top and panties anymore but a white and pink fuzzy sweater and pair of light khaki pants, across which a pee stain had begun to spread. “Huh?” she thought. As the laughter continued, she realized it wasn’t that of her colleagues anymore, but her classmates from what must have been 6th or 7th grade. The conference room had mutated into her old classroom at St. Andrew’s middle school. She now held in her hand what must of been a book report she had been giving. Looking up from it, she saw her old teacher, Mrs. Kelleher, glaring down at her.

“Rachel O’Malley, this is the third time you’ve peed your pants in class this month. Honestly, what are we going to do with you? Does someone need to be put back in pull-ups?” The class roared with laughter and she felt tears streaming down her face.

Before she knew what was happening, her mother had appeared at the front of the classroom and quickly walked over to grab Rachel’s hand.

“Come here, young lady.” her mother said sternly, as she walked Rachel to the classroom door.

Time appeared to speed up. Suddenly they were walking at what felt like a glacial pace down the hallway of her old school. It must have been between class periods, because the hallways was filling up with students, who began to stare at Rachel in a mixture of amusement and disgust. Laughter echoed down the hallways at a piercingly high decibel level. She thought they must have been looking at the giant stain on her pants. But when she glanced down at herself, she wasn’t wearing any. In place of her khakis, she was wearing a pair of pull-ups training pants with an especially childish Tinkerbell print on their front. Worse still, they were visibly yellowed and sopping wet. With each step she made, she could feel the heavy mass shift uncomfortably between her legs.

“Look, it’s tinkle bell,” she heard a voice call.

Rachel tried to run away to find some refuge from her predicament, but she was no match for her mother’s iron grip.

“Rachel, I am very disappointed with you,” her mother said, “I thought you were really making some progress this year. All those good marks in math and English. And no accidents. But it looks like I was wrong. It’s back to square one for you young lady. We’re going to have to start your potty training all over again aren’t we?”

“No!” Rachel cried out as she looked at her mother, who seemed so much taller than she remembered, even in her youth. “I’m a big girl! I don’t need diapers!”

Almost immediately after she said this, a voice she didn’t fully recognize, and which must have belonged to someone behind her, whispered out to her: “I’m not sure you have any evidence to support that.”

Rachel whirled around and at once recognized the diction and the voice as belonging to Laura Watson, her friend throughout her school years, but also — secretly — her arch-nemesis. Laura, the science whiz, Laura the track star, Laura the successful student-council president. Laura, the example Rachel’s parents always held out of everything she could be and wasn’t.

“Laura!” Rachel shrieked. “That’s not fair.”

“I mean Rachel, look at yourself. You can’t even keep your little training paints dry.”

As the sound of laughter rose again, Rachel sobbed. When the tears cleared somewhat from her eyes, she realized that the scene had changed again. She was in her childhood room, on her little-girl bed, still in her wet pull-ups. She looked up to see her mother hovering above her, fluffing out a thick white diaper.

“Here we go little Rachie — mommy will make it all better,” her mother chirped.

“Oh god no,” Rachel thought.

“Aw Rachie, Rachie, Rachie,” the words were still coming out of her mother’s mouth, but the voice was no longer hers. It was Paul’s.

She dimly became aware that she had been sleeping. Light streamed through the curtains again, and she felt her thick nighttime diaper, obviously wet, underneath her.

“Rachie,” Paul said. “It’s time to get up. I’ve got a plane to catch and you need to get on the road.”

She sat up a little in bed and bristled at the thought.

She did have to get on the road. She was going to see her parents and her hometown for the first time in a few years. And Paul, her loving boyfriend, her rock, was going to be in Paris on a business trip.

“I know you’re not looking forward to it very much,” as Paul said, pulling on his sport coat.

He was right. She hated her little backwards, nowheresville hometown, with its cornfields and megachurches and chain restaurants. And then there were her parents, who she often fought with but whose respect she secretly craved. They didn’t know that her incontinence had returned several years ago. They knew only what she told them: that she was a successful data scientist living in the big city and that she had a charming and handsome boyfriend named Paul.

Rachel groaned as she felt how wet she was. “How am I going to get through this?”

[to be continued]

2 Likes

Looking forward to this! If all of that happened growing up I have a feeling her being back in diapers will not be much of a surprise…

Very good start

Totally! Though I think the conceit I’m going for is Rachel deluding herself into thinking she can hide it

Chapter 2
She was somewhere on the edge of the city when her morning coffee began to take hold. Hands tightly gripping the steering wheel as she maneuvered her car through the crush of holiday traffic, Rachel muttered to herself something like “if I ever get off this freeway alive I am never driving home on Easter weekend again.” Suddenly there was a terrible roar all around her, the sound of a truck’s airhorn as it narrowly avoided a collision with a minivan several hundred yards ahead of her.

Rachel gasped, thankful the worst hadn’t happened. She was hardly halfway to her parents’ house and already the trip, which was nominally for “Auntie Rachel” to see her now 2-year-old niece and 4-year-old nephew—was getting the better of her. The traffic was excruciating enough. The thought of her parents and her brother learning that she was wearing diapers again was mortifying beyond belief. And now, to top it all off, the thermos of coffee Paul had made for her was catching up with her limited bladder control. At least she was protected, she reminded herself as she looked down at the slight bulge underneath her sweatpants. But that thought alone led her right back to her primal fear of going home.

It wasn’t that Rachel hated her parents. Of course they disagreed on many things, but if she thought about it, they were really better than most people when it came to putting aside their differences. There were broad swaths of subjects — politics, TV, music, football, you name it — that they just agreed to talk about only in the lightest and most skin-deep of ways. No, it wasn’t that. In fact, she wanted nothing more than her parents’ love and approval, some kind of recognition that she was, despite all their worries and perhaps despite her unconventional lifestyle, a success. She hadn’t become a doctor like her brother, or a lawyer like her cousin Lana. But she was, she wanted them to see, a brilliant (however unconventional) adult—not to mention the kind of caring and humane person they’d always hoped to raise.

But at home, she never felt quite that way. In fact, she felt very much like she was still a child. This had, Rachel thought to herself, nothing to do with the diapers in particular. It was that they saw her as a child, even using her old childhood nickname, and at times forgetting that she was no longer in school. At bottom, they seemed to not trust that she could make her own way in the world. As soon as she entered their house, she’d experience a flood of criticism about her appearance (slovenly), her work (not much of a career), her new hometown (too dangerous), her ability to manage her own finances (poor at best). They’d prod and prod and she’d snap at them, then feel guilty about it and cry sporadically on the drive home. On top of that, being at home meant sleeping in her childhood room, which hadn’t changed much since she’d left, with the same somewhat juvenile bedspread and posters on the wall. At times, she half-expected to open up her drawer and find her old Goodnites staring her back in the face.

This time, that wouldn’t be the last of it. Now, she had to somehow either explain that her overactive bladder had returned, forcing her back into diapers, or otherwise hide the fact from them completely. All of this brought up painful memories from her youth. Her nightmare the previous night had been, as all nightmares, had really been an exaggeration of her memories. Her mother had never led her down a school hallway dressed in a sopping wet pull-up. Her mother was, despite her flaws, always very protective of Rachel’s privacy. She’d also never peed herself in quite the same humiliating way in front of class, though it had happened once or twice. And Laura had never caught her in quite so compromising a position. Still, her weak bladder had made an ordeal of her youth into her early teen years. There was no sleepaway camp for Rachel, only math and computer day camp. Sleepovers were a rarity and, when they did happen, were carefully choreographed affairs—a network of secrets kept between moms propping the whole thing up and Rachel slinking around in dark hallways to change into her Goodnites and tiptoeing past her girlfriends to muffle the sound of, well, big-kid-diaper-under-flannel. It had all come to an abrupt end at 13 or 14, Rachel couldn’t quite remember. But the whole thing had set a tone for how Rachel’s parents dealt with her into her twenties, with a kind of silent assumption that she was one accident or incident away from needing their near-constant supervision.

To take her mind off these things in the car, Rachel had put on her favorite true crime podcast, which kept her wrapped up in a terrifying mystery of a serial killer stalking a remote southern town. It was a tense and chilling story, and she could hardly keep herself focused on anything else. This, of course, had distracted Rachel from attending to her bladder, which was now full to capacity with her morning coffee. At times, Rachel could sense the pressure, but the story was so good, the feeling never lasted long. At one particularly scary cliffhanger ending to an episode, the sound effects crescendoed at the exact same moment Rachel’s compact car hit a gigantic pothole in the road. The sudden shock brought Rachel out of her podcast trance. She now felt the pressure in her bladder tightening like a small balloon filling up inside her. She squirmed a bit to try to control the pressure. But it was no use, she’d simply overshot her capacity. At another small bump in the road, she felt her bladder release. Warm pee flowed out in a steady stream, hitting the padding in her thick nighttime diaper which began to expand, and gradually seeping onto her butt. Rachel let out a little whimper as she felt the rest of her bladder empty out into the diaper. She was thankful, at any rate, that she was wearing something with a high level of absorbency. Nevertheless, this called for a pit stop.

At the next rest area, Rachel pulled off and parked. After retrieving her small knapsack that contained her changing supplies from the trunk, she began making her way to the restrooms. As soon as she started walking, however, Rachel noticed a problem, actually a few problems. Most importantly, she’d really had to go. And so now her thick diaper was really sagging against her sweatpants and swaying precariously off her hips. Walking like this felt downright dangerous and so she had to move with the care of a ballet dancer to keep everything in place. Worse still, she noticed that she really smelled like pee. Maybe it was the coffee or something she ate last night, but the smell was definitely more noticeable than usual. And there was one thing she hadn’t noticed exactly. Her sweatpants had begun to sag a bit from the weight of her diaper, while her alma mater sweatshirt had begun to ride up a bit so that now Rachel’s thick white badge of shame had begun to show a bit.

Rachel discovered this last element of her predicament while she was in line for the bathroom. Behind her was a young girl of perhaps six and her mother. Still yawning and rubbing her eyes, Rachel had barely noticed them. And then, clear as day, she could hear the girl say whatever popped into her head.

“Look mommy, that big girl is wearing a diaper. And eww, she smells like pee pee!”

Rachel froze like a deer in headlights. Suddenly, she became more aware than ever of how heavy her diaper was and looked around to see, to her horror, that her sagging sweats had given her away. She averted her eyes from the mother-daughter pair and inched forward to see if a stall had opened up. Surprisingly, instead of ignoring her daughter, the mother seemed to pile on.

“I know. And now her mommy is probably going to change her so she’s all nice and dry.”

Rachel turned crimson as the line crept forward. While the mother and daughter exchanged no more words, she imagined the situation unfolding in even more humiliating ways. She thought of the woman tapping her on the shoulder to ask if she’d lost her mommy and if she needed her diaper changed. She imagined being led by the hand, shame-faced and crying, to be propped up on the changing table in front of the whole mass of holiday travelers, to have her legs pushed open and her giant sopping wet diaper exposed. She imagined random strangers cooing at her and perhaps even her own mother showing up to thank the lady and to finish powdering her and taping up a fresh diaper before leading her back to the family minivan, chastising her for still having accidents at her age. On and on it went.

Before Rachel’s waking nightmare could unfold too much further, a stall opened up and she quickly made her way over, though at this point she realized that—without even thinking about it—tears had started to form on her cheeks. As she sat in the stall and dropped her sweats to reveal her swollen diaper, she knew something had to be done. There was no way she was going to face her parents like this.

A plan slowly took shape in Rachel’s head. First, and most importantly, she could not stay with her parents. She’d find accommodations at the nicest hotel near their house. This would help to avoid the humiliation of staying in her childhood bedroom and to hide Rachel’s obvious bedwetting problem. To boot, it might help to convince her parents that she could afford a nice hotel on her salary. Second, while she was around them, she’d take a big risk. She’d go without protection and try, hope against hope, to do what her doctor called “bladder re-education”, something she always felt sounded like life in a totalitarian country. What it meant was that she’d set an alarm and go to the potty every fifteen or thirty minutes or so, whether she had to or not. It was risky, but anything beat her parents seeing her as their little diaper girl. Rachel summoned all her courage and marched back to the car, determined. Would her plan work? Or was she just fooling herself? She didn’t have time to think. She had another hour or two of driving to do.

[this chapter was kind of rough, but to be continued!]

Glad to see another chapter. She’s going to have to accept the truth here at some point and just rip the bandaid off. Good writing here. Somehow I don’t think the parents will be happy with her not staying with them… I doubt that plan comes together!

Looking forward to more! :slight_smile:

Thanks for the advice. Strong agree. And thanks for the support too. I definitely feel like a first timer here so any bit of advice helps !!