Dear Daddy, Please Praise Me - Luna David

1

Sanders

“Daddies are like good decaf coffee. They don’t actually exist,” I said as I poured a cup of decaf for a drive-through customer.

My family’s coffee shop, The Little Bean, served the best decaf in Red Canyon, but it was still decaf. Which meant it tasted like ass.

Leo rolled his eyes as he snapped a lid on the coffee cup in my hands. “That’s not true. You just have to keep trying. You haven’t gotten laid in three years, Sanders.”

“It hasn’t been that long, has it?”

He folded his arms across his chest and nodded.

That couldn’t be right.

I ambled over to the drive-through window and pulled it open to hand the coffee to a sweaty brunette wearing a camo jacket and yoga pants.

“Just so you know, your mic is on,” she said.

Fuck.

I switched it off. “Sorry, that was really unprofessional. I didn’t mean to—”

“Don’t worry about it. Good luck with the whole, ahem, Daddy thing.” She smiled and pulled away from the drive-through.

“And you just gave that decaf away for free,” Leo said.

Shit. What was wrong with me today?

I picked up a wet rag from the sink and started wiping down the counters. Had it really been three years? The last time I had sex was a random hookup during our trip to Vegas… which had been three winters ago.

“It’s not like there are a lot of options,” I reminded Leo.

We lived in a small resort town where we were literally the only two gay guys who weren’t married or obsessed with football. I had tried dating the football-obsessed guy, but it didn’t worked out. He was always at the gym, and I… well, I wasn’t at the gym. Ever.

I wasn’t the sporty, muscular, drop-dead-gorgeous kind of gay. I was more the hopelessly uncoordinated and shaped-like-a-spaghetti-noodle kind of gay, complete with the shoulders of an awkward teenager even though I was twenty-five.

It wasn’t all that surprising I was single.

Leo leaned back against the counter and flashed his standard smirk that made his dimples pop. He had proper man shoulders, quirky plant tattoos that wrapped around both of his toned arms, and an asymmetrical haircut that made him look much cooler than me. He also had a boyfriend.

While I had failed spectacularly with the gay football enthusiast, Leo had done rather well with him. Their relationship was largely comprised of sex and hanging out at the gym, but that seemed to work for them.

“You know that kink app I made you sign up for a year ago?” he asked.

“You mean the app where I got rejected by both of the gay Doms who live within twenty-five miles of here?”

“Yeah, that one.”

I sighed. “What about it?”

“They have a new Christmas feature.”

I turned my back to him. As much as I adored Christmas, I couldn’t go down that road again.

“I hate internet dating, Leo. My dyslexia makes me look stupid.”

Both of the Doms I’d tried to connect with had been put off by my spelling mistakes.

“Which is why I thought we could try putting the app on my phone this time.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and swiped across the screen a few times, turning it toward me when the handcuff icon for the Cuffd app dominated the screen.

“Shhhh! What if someone sees?” I scanned the coffee shop, which was mostly empty at this time of day, except for Mrs. Avery, who sat at her regular table near the door. She was a very good-natured seventy-year-old woman who drank tea and read in the coffee shop every afternoon.

“Oh, stop worrying. Mrs. Avery turns down her hearing aids when she’s reading,” Leo said. That was true. And it looked like she was already in the thick of it with a murder mystery. This one had a ball of yarn on the cover. I wasn’t sure what yarn had to do with murder, but who was I to judge?

Leo typed something on his phone and brought up a tab with a Santa head above a bunch of text. “Look. You can write a letter to Santa.”

No way.

“Here, I’ll read it out loud,” Leo offered, then continued in a whisper:

Wishing for a Dominant of your own this Christmas?

Send a letter to Santa with a wish list describing your perfect Dominant, and we’ll share it with our Santa Doms and Dommes here at Cuffd. If one of them fits your list, they’ll message you back with a simple question: Have you been naughty or nice this year?

It’s up to you how you want to answer…

“That’s… kind of