Page 250 of Daddy's Pride

Owen and I texted every day, multiple times per day, and yet I was still greedy for every bit of contact I could get with him. And I wasn’t sure what it said about me that I was more excited to see the picture of the salad he’d promised he was going to eat today than I was about the idea of putting a pretty boy who would call me Daddy on his knees at the club this weekend and letting him suck my cock, but I also didn’t feel overly invested in figuring it out.

I unlocked my phone and grinned at the expected picture and accompanying text.

Was I also a little disappointed that, as always, the boy had sent me proof that he was following my “eat vegetables every day” rule, but had left himself out of the picture?

Yes.

But a part of me that I also didn’t want to look too closely at was fine with not receiving any selfies from him. Not that I wasn’t curious, but at the same time, I didn’t want to break this fragile but important thing between us by rocking the boat in any way.

I liked having him in my life like this. Hell, I loved it. And if the sweet boy didn’t know the name of my company, even though he knew all about the projects we were working on right now, and I didn’t know which school he was enrolled in, even though I knew his entire class schedule.

Well, that was just fine. It kept a boundary in place that I was sure we were both safer for being on opposite sides of. And if I ever craved more of him, all I had to do was remind myself that he’d come into my life purely by chance, and would more than likely slowly fade out of it again once he finally met a girl he was interested in.

And if I happened to feel more and more invested every day, to feel closer to him after just a few months than I had to anyone other than Juan, ever…

Well, that was on me.

“I’m a fool, but I’m not giving him up,” I muttered, my thumbs flying over my screen as I sent him a quick reply. “Not until I have to.”

MONDAY 1:22 PM

Proud of me, Daddy?

MONDAY 1:24 PM

Yes, sweetheart. It looks delicious.

MONDAY 1:24 PM

Um, it’s salad? It’s healthy. I don’t think that really goes with “delicious.”

He sent an emoji that had me smiling, even as I shook my head. The boy had definitely not been big on vegetables before I’d… suggested it. And the fact that he ate them daily now, for me, that he’d let me set rules for him and told me he liked it was?—

Well, I wasn’t sure what it was, but it definitely had something to do with why I hadn’t been to the club since I “met” Owen.

MONDAY 1:25 PM

Did you convince Tyler to get one too?

MONDAY 1:25 PM

Ha! No. But he did ask the waitress out!

I should be used to smiling this hard since it had been happening for months now, but it still caught me off guard sometimes to realize just how frequently it happened now.

When I told the boy that he was my own personal ray of sunshine, it was the absolute truth.

My fingers hovered over the screen, eager to keep the conversation going a little longer, when something in the photo he’d sent caught my eye.

I zoomed in, my eyes widening.

The front of the restaurant was in the background of the picture, with a backward version of their logo on the window and a bit of the street view visible beyond it.

I’d never been to Wisconsin, so I couldn’t say what it looked like, but I knew what that looked like, and what it looked like was downtown Portland.

But even if that was just some strange optical illusion or a pure coincidence, the artisan pizza logo wasn’t.

I recognized it.