Page 100 of Don't Call Me Daddy
I tilt her chin up. “I’m only just getting started. I did try to warn you.” I glance down at where she’s gripping my cock. “You might want to save a little energy for tomorrow, but that’s up to you.” I flash her a challenging grin, and she slowly pulls her hand away. “Smart girl.”
We towel off, and just as I promised, I carry her upstairs and help her into one of my T-shirts before tucking her into bed beside me, right where she belongs.
“You know, I didn’t take you for a cuddler,” she says as I pull her into my chest, wrapping an arm around her to keep her close.
We feel so natural like this.
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. I guess because you seem so rigid all the time. You keep this wall around you and everyone at arm’s length. Why is that? What happened to make you so closed off?”
I let out a sigh, considering if I should tell her. She’s been nothing but accepting of my lifestyle, so I don’t see why I can’t trust her.
“Around ten years ago … I was in a pretty serious relationship. I’d had plenty of flings before then, slowly discovering my kinks along the way … but this was the closest I’d gotten to settling down with someone.”
Ivy runs a hand over my chest in soothing strokes, as if to tell me she’s here and she’s listening.
“I was still pretty young, and I had a big head, thought I knew everything. I’d recently gotten a promotion to be the VP of safety and sustainability for the entire North American region, and the added responsibility was more than I’d realized. The company was growing so fast, which meant I needed to hire more safety managers to supervise all the new factories we were building.
“I started working longer hours. The woman I was seeing—her name was Heidi—started expressing she was unhappy about never seeing me. She lived a few towns over, so we only saw each other a few nights a week as it was. Anyway, I did everything I could to make time for her, but she didn’t exactly make things easy on me either. Nothing I did was ever enough, and I found myself cutting corners at work so I didn’t have to stay so late.
“We were engaged in a Dom/sub dynamic, and after years of suppressing what I wanted, I finally started to open up and show her the real me. It was the first time I asked someone to call me Daddy. She was only a year younger than me, and she acted like she was into it—she never gave me a reason to believe she wasn’t. I realize now that what we had was toxic because our words didn’t mean anything. She’d promise me one thing and change her mind without telling me, but expect me to somehow know anyway.
“She was giving me heat about a work trip she didn’t want me to go on—I was supposed to be meeting a new safety manager candidate for our biggest factory yet, but it meant that I’d be gone during the week of her birthday. She threw a fit and gave me an ultimatum—said if I went on the hiring trip that we were done.”
I brush my hand over my face, feeling the painful memory stir back to the surface. “I made up some lie about having a mutual friend with one of the candidates, told my dad that he’d vouched for him, and promised him that the trip wasn’t necessary because I was confident in my decision. It was the first time I’d ever lied to my father, so he had no reason not to believe me …
“So, I didn’t go. And to make things worse, I skipped over countless candidates with more work experience in favor of some guy around my age, fresh out of school with the highest level of education I could find. I didn’t even call all his references; I just gave him the job.”
I blow out a sigh and shake my head, and Ivy runs her fingers through my hair, encouraging me to keep going.
“About three months later, I walked in one morning and found my father sitting at my desk, waiting for me. His eyes were swollen and puffy, and he had tears running down his cheeks. When I asked him what was wrong, he didn’t answer me; he justturned on the news. And that’s when I saw the headline—sixty-three workers killed in an explosion with over two hundred others critically injured. I’d been warned not to cut corners, but I didn’t listen. I knew what would happen eventually … I just hadn’t believed it until it actually came true.”
That chilling number sticks in my mind, and I have to shake the other memories back down.
Ivy’s face falls in horror, and then her brows cinch together like she’s confused. “What do you mean, you’d beenwarned?”
Of course she picked up on that. I shake my head, not wanting to get into it right now. It’s already so much to take in without explaining my childhood nightmares.
“Nothing. It’s not important.”
“So, what happened to cause the explosion?” Ivy asks.
“Turned out, the guy I’d hired to head up safety for the factory had a drug problem. If I’d done a thorough background check, I would’ve known that. He’d been fired from his previous job for showing up to work drunk and had a history of DUIs that he’d had someone remove from his record. He showed up to his graveyard shift strung out of his mind and missed a critical safety check. It was something so small that could’ve been easily fixed, but then a freak accident happened—a small fire ignited near the leak, and the factory exploded.
“That’s when we moved to being one hundred percent chemical-free in our manufacturing, so nothing like that could ever happen again.”
“Leo, that’s terrible, but it was a mistake. Please tell me you aren’t still punishing yourself for that.”
“It was a mistake I made from negligence, and it was unforgivable. I was on the phone all day, trying to clean up the mess, dealing with insurance companies, and writing settlements for all who were affected. I could hardly process the weight of it, but it hit me all at once in the car on my way home. Iwas so numb, hating myself for making such a horrible mistake, and when I walked through the door and I saw her sitting there, pouting and pissed off because I’d missed our dinner reservation without calling, I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. I knew I couldn’t have both.
“Lucky for me, she made it easy, so I didn’t have to end it. She was screaming and crying, breaking shit as she packed her bags. I didn’t even try to stop her; I wasn’t upset when she told me she’d been seeing someone else because I didn’t make enough time for her. It was the worst day of my life, and I hadn’t thought anything could make it any worse. But right before she left, she told me I disgusted her … that she felt like I’d forced her to play into a role she didn’t like.
“She said, ‘You’re such a perv, Leo. I never wanted to play into your disgusting fantasies. It made me sick every time I had to call you Daddy.’”
Ivy moves from my side, straddling her legs on either side of me as she covers me in a blanket of her body. She slides her hands from my chest and up to my jaw, where she holds each side of my face as she looks at me. Tears brim her eyes as she stares down at me like she can feel my pain as her own. “That was a horrible thing to say, but hear me right now, Leo Kingsley. There is nothing wrong with you, and you are far from any of those horrible things she said to you. There is nothing about you that needs fixing. You are perfect just as you are, and you deserve to finally forgive yourself and let go of this guilt you insist on torturing yourself with.
“I see you, Leo, and I’m not leaving …” My heart catches in my throat for only a moment before she adds, “Before I have to anyway.”
