"Would you mind if we made a stop to pick up a few things for dinner?" Marco asked as David pulled the car onto the road.
"Not at all," David answered, although in the back, all strapped into the safety seat, wearing only a pair of pull-ups, a T-shirt, and a pair of impossibly tiny shoes, Ollie kicked his feet restlessly. Ignoring the conversation, his face went beet red as he realized with a moment of adult lucidity, what he must look like to the rest of the world. He's a little boy, but he doesn't belong in the ridiculous pull-ups that hug around his middle, but that's sadly all that's he was left with after his accident at pre-school. He had been looking forward to getting home and perhaps getting into some less embarrassing garments and now Marco wants to make a stop at the grocery!
After the car stopped, Marco, not his daddy, appeared in the open door to retrieve Ollie from the safety seat.
"No! Not daddy! David's not my daddy!" Ollie thought to himself angrily. "Why am I getting so confused about that?"
In the meantime, Marco had him out of the safety seat and balanced on a hip, before Ollie could even react.
David came around the side of the car and smoothly took Ollie from Marco's arms. Just inside the foyer of the grocery, David got a shopping cart and surprised Ollie by standing him in the seat designed into the structure of the conveyance. Ollie felt David tug at his feet as he helped him sit in the compartment, his legs dangling, separate by a narrow metal grille.
"David, I want to go home," Ollie whispered.
David leaned down. "We'll be home soon, Ollie."
"And I want the wing..." Ollie winced at his mispronunciation of "ring."
"Why?" David, arms at his side, looked down blandly at his regressed boyfriend.
"It's too embawwassing," Ollie whispered fervently as Marco headed into the produce section ahead of them. "Wook at me!"
David chuckled, refusing to take him seriously as he mangled difficult consonants thanks to the childish lisp. "You look extremely cute," he said.
Before Ollie could respond, Marco returned with a bag of kale. "Now I just need an orange and candied pecans, and I will make us a fantastic kale salad."
Even as an adult, Ollie would have found the prospect of a kale salad horrifying. It paled, though, to his slowly building panic, which wasn't helped by the feeling of being trapped in the shopping cart seat intended for small children.
But, thanks to the ring, he was a small child, and David appeared content to keep him one. The shopping trip continued as Ollie obsessed over his mortified thoughts of finding himself stranded against his will in the body of an adorable tyke. The worst moment came as they emptied the cart at a cashier's station.
"Do you want to buy him, too?" The cashier asked, tugging on one of Ollie's shoes without asking permission to touch him. He hated how adults felt like they could touch, pat, or otherwise invade his personal space.
"No," David joked as he extricated Ollie from the seat. "Might just put him back on the shelf."
"That would be a shame for him to miss the dessert I have planned," Marco noted.
Lulled into the tempting security of David's arms, Ollie nestled closer into a cocoon of cologne and warmth. It didn't look like he'd have any shot of getting the ring back from David until after the dinner was over and the dinner guest had departed.
He hoped that wouldn't take too long.