Daddy Dom
By the time we left the hotel and headed home in the evening, the air inside the car had become completely different from what it had been at lunch. Cool air from the AC filled the cabin, but the girl in the passenger seat kept her head turned toward the window, sunk deep in thought. The brief surge of passion laid over the fresh, unseasoned innocence of a girl who had only just turned twenty seemed to shove her into a complicated guilt as quickly as the scenery outside the glass returned her to reality. The crash hit her hard.
The silence was broken by my light question.
“Come to think of it, we don’t even know each other’s names.”
I never bothered fishing for names or personal details when I met someone online. From experience, I knew that plenty of women found even that much information burdensome. I believed it was the polished, mature way to behave: not to force the issue until the other person opened the lock on her own heart and spoke for herself.
“My name... I’d rather not say.”
Still looking out the window, she answered in a small voice.
“All right. Whatever makes you comfortable.”
Only then did she turn and look at me for a moment. I could feel her guard easing, however slightly, in response to that refusal to pressure her, to that small consideration. By the time the dusk had deepened and the streetlamps were coming on one by one, I had pulled over at the mouth of the narrow alley near her apartment, and at last she brought out the thing she had been holding inside.
“Today was really wonderful. The way you looked after me, and all the things I felt for the first time... I don’t think I’ll ever forget them. But the whole ride home, I kept thinking, and thinking. You know I have a boyfriend... Even if we don’t get to see each other often, I still feel like I’ve done something far too wrong to him. I feel so tangled up inside.”
She paused, looked at me with wet eyes, and then lowered her head as if she had already decided.
“I don’t think we should keep seeing each other. Before this goes any deeper, I think we should stop here. I’m sorry, sir.”
Instead of showing disappointment, I loosened my grip on the steering wheel and answered in the gentlest voice I could manage.
“It’s all right. I understand why you’d think that way, and I can imagine how complicated you must feel. It was sudden, and you’re still at an age where there are a lot of emotions you feel responsible for. I respect your decision completely.”
I rested my hand lightly on the back of hers for a moment, gave it a soft, unintrusive pat, and then let go.
“But there’s one thing I want you to remember. Don’t feel pressured to meet me again just because you think you have to do something. Life has a way of bringing you worries you can’t tell anyone about. When that happens, or when you suddenly feel like leaning on someone... call me. Even if we don’t meet, I’ll be here to listen and make sure you have someone solid beside you. I’m an adult, after all.”
My calm, grown-up answer made her expression tremble ever so slightly. She gave a short, grateful bow, then carefully opened the door and got out. I watched her from the rearview mirror until she disappeared into the darkness of the alley. Her steps still looked heavy as she vanished into the dim street, but I was certain of one thing: she would go on worrying over the anchor I had thrown her.
After that night, as if it had all been a lie, contact stopped. One day passed, then another, and still there was no message.
Even while I sat at my desk and worked, I kept checking the smartphone lying on the table to see if anything new had come in. I made and deleted a few similar profiles, exchanged meaningless chatter with a few people, and in the dull, routine rhythm of company life, my memory of her seemed to fade little by little. But in truth, I knew better. This was not forgetting. It was patience.
In relationships, I had always been the one who adjusted to the other person’s pace with attentive kindness. Because of that, my relationships had always lasted a long time, and even after a breakup, the other person would remember me with a stubborn, almost vicious intensity. There were even plenty of one-night encounters that ended up becoming attached to me first, addicted to the considerate softness I gave them. I used to think it was just because I had good manners, but one intense memory from a girl I had once met had already clarified exactly who I was.
She had been much younger than me, but in matters of intimacy she was more aggressive than anyone. The girl who trembled beneath my gentle touch on the hotel bed looked at me through hazy eyes when her excitement reached its peak and murmured, “Master...” in a low voice. And then, at the very instant she hit her climax and every muscle in her body twisted, she clung to my neck as if she meant to crush it and screamed, “Daddy... Daddyy...!” before collapsing into my arms.
As the sweat cooled in the silence, we lay side by side, and she rubbed her face against my chest before saying,
“You’re really kind, but you’re so sexy. That’s why I like you.”
With a wicked little smile, she asked if I had ever taken a style test. She said it was like MBTI, something you could check online, and right there she opened her phone and pulled up a personality test site. We leaned our heads together and read through dozens of questions one by one, while I answered in ways that reflected my instincts more than my usual principles, matching the questions she asked. A moment later, the result that appeared on the screen was a phrase I had never heard before, yet one that made immediate sense.
Daddy Dom.
My most overwhelming tendency was Daddy Dom, followed by Degrader. The rest—owner, hunter, spank—were just seasoning scattered in here and there. At the core, I was a controller wearing the face of a gentle father, slowly eroding the person opposite me.
I was nothing like the ordinary Doms who commanded and suppressed. Instead of a forceful whip, I used warm embrace; instead of cold orders, I used kind advice, and with those things I broke the other person’s mind. I looked like a father who cared and provided, but in truth I was a being who trapped her completely in the net of that tenderness. Without forcing anything, I could make her depend on me little by little, and then I would take control of her mind and body, bit by bit. It was domination at the highest level.
I had never once defined myself as an SM-er, but in the end, that was always how things turned out. Real practitioners would probably laugh at me and call me a shallow amateur.
Still, whether I went looking for a D/s arrangement or not, my tendencies were what they were, and little by little my experiences with younger women who had a thing for older men—women with a strong age-gap fetish, girls with Little or Brat tendencies—kept increasing. They could never easily escape the touch that filled both their hunger for protection and their thirst for stimulation at once. In particular, my second tendency, Degrader, showed its real synergy when that tenderness on the bed turned into the most humiliating kind of pleasure.
It was Friday, six days after our first meeting. While I was slogging through another boring afternoon at work, my phone gave a short, sharp vibration. An alert from the messenger I knew so well.
A victorious smile spread across my lips.
Her reply was fairly long. She was in the middle of finals season for remote classes, so she had to take exams and submit assignments on her laptop, but some strange adware she couldn’t delete kept covering the screen, making the machine unusable. She said she had thought of me, since I’d mentioned working in IT last time, and had reached out shamelessly because she had no one else to ask.
There was no way a freshly twenty-year-old college student couldn’t find “how to delete a program” with a search engine. In the age of remote classes, a dead laptop was a serious problem, sure—but contacting me was a painfully transparent excuse. What she really needed now was not the program. She needed a thread to connect her to me.
I accepted her excuse with generous ease and, to make myself sound like a genuine expert, launched into an overlong explanation packed with technical jargon.
As expected, she sounded flustered after hearing my explanation.
Seeing the pleading emoticon she sent, I didn’t miss my opening and moved naturally to the next step.
There was a brief silence, and then a reply arrived as if she had been waiting for it.
I scolded her with adult calm, intending to settle the promise and close the conversation. But just as I was about to do so, a final message appeared on the screen, as though she had sent it after long hesitation.
The stubborn refusal to say her name had finally given way. I murmured the three syllables on the screen in a low voice.
“Nayeon. That’s a pretty name. See you tomorrow, Nayeon.”
As I set the phone down, I sank back into my chair. I pictured the week she must have spent hurt by the immaturity of a reckless boyfriend in his twenties, trapped alone in her apartment like a punishment. My presence—calm, considerate, overflowing with ease—together with the vivid memory of that brief, intense pleasure, had finally beaten down her guilt and her sense of morality.
For now I would approach her as nothing more than a kind older man fixing her laptop, but before long she would once again start craving my low voice and my carefully delivered touch. I tapped lightly at the keyboard and waited for the weekend to arrive. This time, I was going to sink deeper into her soul than I had the last time, and do it more quietly, more intimately. The outcome had already been decided.