down through the screen.
I laughed. “Nice try.”
Her face fell. What, she’d been serious? The girl knew me better than that.
“I was hoping you’d found a hot daddy on that kink app. You know you have about a billion notifications, right?”
“You’re hacking my hookup apps now?”
She rolled her eyes. “I helped you set it up. It’s on my phone.”
“Well, delete it,” I said, not that I gave a shit about her seeing my info. I had no secrets from Nichol. But, “You know I was just putting on a show for the channel.”
“Actually...” she said, a gleam in her eye that made me freeze.
Fuck. I knew that look. “Delete it, Nic.”
“Okay,” she said, giving in way too easily and with a much too evil smile. “After you log on and look through some of these Daddies with me.”
“You’ve already looked at them.”
I didn’t even bother making it sound like a question. Of course she had.
That thing I’d mentioned about her almost always being right? Well, the “almost” part included one huge, glaring blindspot of hers, and that was this kick she’d been on ever since she moved away that I’d be happier with a boyfriend. It was almost like she thought she’d left me stranded (she totally had) and floundering (ditto) and felt guilty about it, and just because she’d drank the Kool-aid with this Scott douche, she suddenly thought I needed that, too.
How she was able to fool herself that I’d be either interested or any good at it boggled my mind. After being friends half our damn lives and sharing every secret known to mankind with each other, you’d think the girl would be smarter than that, but she was fucking relentless.
“You have no idea how many people want to spank that bouncy ass of yours, Jordan,” she said, clicking at something off camera. Then, “Okay, I’m in.”
“Fuck,” I said, closing my eyes and rubbing at the spot between my eyebrows that I’d probably need Botox for in a couple of years.
“Come on, babe,” she said, whipping out the no-nonsense drill-sergeant tone she’d perfected back when we’d co-captained our high school cheer squad. “Log in with me. Now.”
“I don’t even have the app on my phone.”
“So go to the computer, you lazy ass. It’s three feet from your futon.”
“I hate you,” I said, rolling off the futon and shuffling over there because I’d never been able to fight her when she got bossy like that.
I woke up one of the monitors and slumped down in the chair, clicking through to the Cuffd site. “What’s my password?”
She told me, and I managed to get into my profile, my own face staring back at me, a triple-digit message number in the inbox notifications, and that way-too-fucking-cheerful little Santa head bobbing in the corner.
“You know I’m not actually going to meet up with any of these guys, right?” I said, clicking on the notifications anyway and instantly filling my screen with an entire page of the exact same message. I didn’t bother to try to read them, but I knew what they all said. Have you been naughty or nice this year? That was the schtick with the whole Santa promo thing. It allowed a Daddies—well, “dominants,” since I guess not everyone on Cuffd was looking for a Daddy for Christmas—who liked your letter to Santa to reach out to you by sending that canned response. It put the ball in the submissive’s court… which I guess was me, since that was how I’d had to sign up to do the letter thing.
“Jordan,” Nichol said, sounding exasperated. “Why not? You know you were just going to go pick someone up in a club tonight anyway—”
Shit. She really did know me too well.
“—so what’s the difference?”
“Uh, does the name Christian Grey ring a bell?” I asked, rolling my eyes. “This is a BDSM site. You know I’m not into that shit. Besides—” I’d started randomly clicking through to the profiles who’d responded to my Santa letter, just for shits and giggles, “—these dudes are all old.”
Nichol laughed. “Well, yeah, you said you wanted a Daddy.”
“Well, yeah,” I repeated mockingly, “but I don’t actually want a Daddy.”
“But maybe you need one,” she said, so quietly I almost missed it.
“What?” I asked, looking away from the monitor to stare her down on my phone screen. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means, maybe dating a guy like that would be a good fit, you know?”
“A guy like what? Gray pubes and neck wrinkles? Dude. Pass.”
She