Page 255 of Daddy's Pride

He was still the nicest person I knew and obviously cared enough about me to want to help me out, and that was… it was fine.

I was lucky.

How many people had someone like that in their lives, who was so great all the time and made every day feel hopeful and the bad stuff not so bad and who also seemed to like me, too? No one I knew.

“Owen.”

I jumped, letting out an embarrassing squeak when Jacob suddenly started pounding on my bedroom door.

“Uh, yeah?” I asked, scrambling off the bed and rushing over to open it.

His hair was dripping into his face, and he was wearing nothing but a towel. “Were you doing something with the water?”

“What?”

“Like, I don’t know, fucking with it?”

“Um, no?”

He grunted, gave me one more cranky look, then turned to walk away.

I leaned out of my doorway. “Hey! Wait! What happened?”

He shrugged. “The temperature kept jumping around when I was in the shower even though I wasn’t touching it. And the water was looking orange again. Tyler and Ryan are out, so I figured it was you.”

“Oh. Okay. Um, but no? Sorry about that, though.”

He waved away my apology and shut the door on his bedroom.

I hesitated for a second, but then headed down to the basement. I didn’t want to find another leak in there, but I really didn’t think rusty pipes or whatever it was were enough to justify me bothering Daddy to come over.

And there was no leak. Not that I could see. So… okay. No reason to call him. And I wasn’t disappointed, because obviously it was better if things were actually working instead of breaking down.

Even though I really, really thought the whole, like, system needed to be checked and maybe upgraded?

That was what all my Googling plus some of the things Daddy had said seemed to point to, anyway. But even though I had the guys paying their rent mostly on time now, there were still a bunch of other expenses to keep on top of, and there never seemed to be enough money left over to hire a plumber.

I’d tried telling my parents that they should just put some extra money into the house account, but they’d said figuring out how to cover it all out of the rental funds was basically, like, my job. A “learning experience” or something, to prepare me for the real world. More sink or swim stuff.

And so far, I guessed I was swimming?

Or at least… treading water.

But I was pretty sure that if I hadn’t had Daddy to lean on these last few months, I’d have been sinking for sure.

I still wasn’t entirely sure why he was willing to take so much time with me. I knew what I got out of our, um, friendship, but he didn’t seem to get much for himself. Nothing, really, other than having to put up with all my clinginess.

Clearly, he wasn’t interested in anything more than… than helping me out, since he didn’t even want to meet up unless something breaks or goes wrong over here. And why anyone would volunteer to do more work on top of all the work he had to do all the time just for his job was a total mystery. Unless maybe it was a “Daddy” thing?

Back when we’d first started messaging each other, I’d done about ten seconds of Googling the term “gay daddy.” I’d wanted to, um, well, I wasn’t sure what. Make sure it was okay? Because at the time, it had still felt weird to call him Daddy, even though now I can’t really imagine calling him anything else even if I did know his real name.

Bob?

Jared?

Monty?

Harlow?