Page 2 of More, Daddy
I clamp my hand on his shoulder for a quick, reassuring squeeze. “I won’t do that to your tired pop. Anyway, this is a good thing. We’ll see who is cut out to take charge.”
Ryan nods, bringing his gaze up to me. “You think someone’s gonna fail?”
I glance back to Maven. With a shrug I say, “The temptation to screw around rises greatly in the absence of an adult. We’ll see.”
After finding the coaches and running through the itinerary one last time, I lock the training office, get in my truck, and drive home.
I never wanted to teach but I always wanted to advise, and I played football most of my childhood, so athletic training became the marriage of interests for me. The thing is, when you work hard and the students like you, it doesn’t go unnoticed. And after just a few short years, I’d become the athletic director for the entire district. When transferring to Bluebell, I kept that title, the first to have the role.
I like advocating for youth sports, fighting for them to be celebrated and honored, but just as much, I like working with the athletes, teaching them how to move through soreness and fight injuries.
I like my job.
But for the last month and a half, maybe two months, my head has been somewhere else.
While everyone is at the away game, I will be at home talking to a stranger onVeiled, the most recent anonymous online community I joined.
Years ago I quit using online dating services and hookup apps. Absolutely fucking refused. Mr. New to Town and Freshly Divorced had to prove to himself thathewasn’t the problem.
I wanted to prove to myself that my ex-wifewasn’tright about me.
I gave it two full years. But after seven hundred and thirty days and not more than twoactualdates, I stopped fucking around with algorithm-based dating sites and apps. Besides, I never wanted to be a guy whose marriage begins with swiping a certain direction on my cell phone.
I didn’t want to define myself in a handful of sentences, hoping that five photos I uploaded would speak all the right things about me. I didn’t want to believe my soulmate found me witha computer.
I didn’t have to worry about those things, though, because for the life of me, I couldn’t make those sites work. Not a single one of them.
First there wasFish in the Sea. Fucking bust. They only matched me with younger women, women that were wearing diapers when I was having my first wet dream. No fucking way. My first rule: I only date women my own age. I left theSeafast.
Then there wasFlickering Flame. God, even the name of that one made vomit creep up my throat, I swear. Then again, the app was probably developed by a bunch of twenty-year-olds that didn’t have to worry about being single because twenty is the age where being single is fun and kind of sexy. At my age, people start to wonder what’s wrong with me. Why am I single if I’m employed and middle aged? Not that I consider myself middle aged. Thirty-six is not the middle of my life—fuck that.
Anyway, the matched profiles theFlamehad suggesteddid the same thing as the last service—matched me with women I said I wasnotinterested in. Most of them too young, some of them in locations undesirable to me (I’m not leaving Bluebell), and some of them had NO KINKS written clear as day in their profiles.
I never used to think of myself as kinky. Or at least, I never diduntilI divulged it to my ex-wife. Her reaction to my needs opened my eyes and it turns out,I am kinky, and my thing? It’s not for everyone.
A “NO KINKS” banner is a red flag for me.
After leavingFlickering Flame, I downloaded and made a profile withSaddles ‘n Sparks. That app had potential. It said there were women in Bluebell with registered profiles. What it didn’t tell me—until after signing up and creating a profile—was that the women who signed up wereseniors. AndSaddles ‘n Sparks? Asenior dating service, completely and mistakenly mis-marketed.
I am not that fucking old.
It was after that conundrum that I threw in my proverbial towel and decided to pause the hunt for my soul mate. According to Dean, you never find her when you’re on a hunt anyway. She’s gotta just come to you. Fall into your lap or some shit. I don’t know.
I don’t necessarily believe in that either, so after my year hiatus, I joined a new app.Veiled. One that requires far less of me. No profile photos, no bio, no voice memo, just a user name and a simple set of rules: no exchanging real names or addresses—chat is AI monitored for user safety.
The purpose of the app is finding someone anonymously with your kink. You can chat, send photos, have a good time, but no information is stored, and you’ll be banned from the app if you try to connect with the person outside ofVeiled.
I found the concept of discretion and kink to be greatlyappealing, so I signed up. I had very little hope of finding someone to chat with, even for a night, much less for any long duration of time.
The first few messages I received were met with silence when the time came to swap kinks. Though kinks are selected and then shown in each user’s profile, and mine was out there clear as day, finding a woman who actually enjoyed my thing proved challenging… even for a kink app.
After the forth consecutive “what the fuck?” I was just about to delete my profile and tossVeiledin the trash along with all the other letdowns.
But I got a message, and the username made my throat go dry.
DaddysGirl
Hey - I saw your username pop up on the kinks list. Wanna chat?
