“How is that? Does it feel good?” he asks.

She presses her lips together but smiles and nods her head. The water is never the right temperature. In fact, it is always just a little too cold but tolerable, like a frigid tease on her sense of touch. Yet he always asks as though they might have a different internal gauge for frost. And she never tells him otherwise.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Good. Go. Take off your dress.”

She takes a few steps back, giving herself enough space, and clumsily begins to remove her dress. She is able to lift the fabric halfway up her ribcage before she hits the limit of rotation in her arms and can’t lift any higher. She tries to jerk her shoulders up, bound by the skirt, but the dress won’t budge. Like an animal in confusion, she writhes to break free but only stumbles in circles. She grows frantic. She can’t see, but she can hear her daddy’s laughter; her skin heats up in a blush. She squirms, her spine twisting like a trapped snake, desperate to remove the dress. He laughs some more and she begins to feel lightheaded. Still, he laughs and she wants to scream. Before she falls over to helplessly flop on the floor, the dress is tugged off her with ease.

Her daddy’s face is suddenly a breath away from her own.

Her face scrunches up, but when he kisses her hand, she releases her anger.

“Hi, Daddy,” she says forgivingly.

“Hello, my sweet.” He smiles, his pearly white fangs shining through. “Are you okay?” Laughter lingers on his lips.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

He puts the damaged dress down and picks up her naked body, walking her over to the bucket. “Are you ready?”

She gives a sharp nod and a toothy smile. “Daddy, look! I have teeth like you!”

He laughs. “No, my sweet.” A moment’s pause. He looks at her vacantly, and then with awful caring. “But maybe one day.”

Before she can respond, he dips her into the water. The drastic drop in temperature makes her skin freeze. She almost yelps, but gulps it down.

“Are you all right?” he asks. He can sense the spike of her heartbeat through his palms.

“Yes, Daddy!” She forces out the response, a load of shuddering breath escaping her lungs with it.

He stares at her curiously but says no more. If she chooses to suffer, that is her own freedom.

Submerged from her neck down, she acclimates to the cold. Her skin loses its want to shiver. She exhales and lets the muscles in her body relax, descending to rest against the wall of the metal bucket.

Sitting behind her now, her daddy tugs on her pigtail. Satisfaction bursts from one side of her scalp when he pulls out the band, like there was an itch in her skin she didn’t realize needed to be scratched. Her hair cascades down onto her shoulders. He pulls out the band to her other pigtail and runs his fingers through her golden waves. She purrs. After a few strokes, he grabs her hair in his fist and lays it like a rope across her collarbone.