Page 21 of Wrestling with Daddy

Ken could be patient, though.

What he couldn’t be was prepared to see Nathan—who matched his pictures perfectly—completely focused on the screen, shirtless, his hair mussed and pointing in all different directions.

All those freckles too, intensified by that natural tan.

“Did I wake you?”

“No.” That was how Ken discovered Nathan blushed beautifully. “I was… playing. You didn’t give me time.”

Ken frowned. He thought there was a smile hiding behind Nathan’s soft-looking lips, a glint in his eye trying to test him, but he couldn’t be certain.

They didn’t know each other enough. Ken found himself struggling to remember that part.

“Do you want me to hang up?” he inquired. “We can reschedule.”

“It’s fine,” Nathan rushed out.

Ken was still hung up on how prominent his freckles looked with the light coming into his room.

“Okay, I’ll trust you.” If Nathan was his boy, he wouldn’t have let him push whatever he was doing aside like this, but he wasn’t. Ken didn’t even know why he was thinking in those terms, where it came from. “What were you playing with?”

“Uh…” Nathan blushed beautifully, red spreading down his cheeks to his neck. “Just trying out some gear. Pup gear, I mean.”

“Oh.” Ken hadn’t wanted to assume the playing had a sexual connotation, but now he had to focus to keep a straight face, to not imagine the elusive pup with a hood on. “Is that something you’re going to tell me more about?”

He watched as Nathan’s eyes widened, as his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down when he swallowed.

“What do you mean?”

Ken would’ve liked more time to ease Nathan into showing him this side of him, but his instinct had hardly proved him wrong.

His instinct was now telling him to unleash the pup in the boy staring at him, to learn everything there was to know about the pet.

“I don’t know anything about you as a pup. Do you want to tell me?”

“I guess.” Nathan nibbled on his lower lip before he said anything else. Ken was patient, though, ready to wait for more of Nathan’s layers to peel and reveal themselves. “Do you wanna see my hood, then? I have an entire outfit, but it takes a while to put on.”

“You can show me anything you want, pup. Do you have a name, when you’re in pupspace?”

“Zeus.” If anything, Nathan blushed even more furiously than before.

Ken groaned—he wasn’t proud of the primal sound, but he couldn’t help it either as his brain provided him with flashes of images, scenarios where Nathan’s skin would color just as easily.

“That’s a good name.”

“I’m a big boy,” Nathan jutted his chin up, his body leaning forward until the screen only showed a pixelated patch of skin Ken wished he could see in higher definition. “I got the hood last year. Before, I just had one of the basic ones, but I saw this, and it made sense.”

It made sense to Ken too when Nathan showed him the purple muzzle with small lighting bolts framing big, floppy ears.

“That’s a very nice muzzle, Nathan,” Ken remembered to say before Nathan’s worry could surge forward, the insecurity Ken didn’t want to see even a hint of when he wasn’t entirely in adult, vanilla head spaces.

“Thank you, D-S-sir.”

Ken’s breath caught in his throat, the honorific unexpected and hitting him in all the right places. Yes, Nathan had called him Daddy when texting, half in jest, half not, as Ken had come to realize after their last phone call.

It held nothing to hearing a honorific pour out of his lips, seeing the way Nathan’s long eyelashes drifted down, the way he had to be wondering if he’d done the right thing.

“What does Zeus like to do? Does he have toys or things to play with?”