My Obsessive Daddy (Obsessive Daddies #1)

Chapter 1

Billie

Iam sixty-three minutes into a live stream, my kill count is at thirty-eight, and I cannot stop thinking about Declan Maguire.

This is not new. This is, in fact, the problem.

More specifically, Declan’s hands. They're big.

Not in a way he seems to notice or care about, which somehow makes it worse.

Just objectively, structurally large hands attached to a man who has been sitting across from me at Sunday dinner since before I had object permanence, and every time he picks up a beer bottle my brain goes somewhere it has no business going while my dad is passing the bread rolls.

I smile. I pass the bread rolls. I am a perfectly normal human being about it.

I have been a perfectly normal human being about Declan Maguire for considerably longer than I've been performing anything else, which is saying something, because performing is literally my job.

The stream is carrying itself. My hands know this game well enough to run on autopilot while my brain wanders off to its current favorite destination: a man who is forty-eight years old, has been in my family's life since before I was born, and who I now know has been watching me on a screen every Tuesday night since October.

Watching me. The private tier.

I have been professionally sexually explicit for eighteen months and not once lost sleep over it.

I know my body the way I know my gaming stats: comprehensively, without embarrassment, through the kind of sustained attention that would be weird if it weren't also my income.

I've had a vibrator since I was nineteen and no particular interest in having a man involved in anything I do in the dark.

The private tier is mine. What I look like, what I sound like, how far I take it, when I stop.

Every frame is a choice I made on purpose.

The best part is that it’s all anonymous.

So naturally my dad's best friend has been watching all of it since October, without knowing that it’s me, and I haven't slept through the night in two weeks.

Not because I'm upset. Because the image of Declan Maguire sitting in whatever room he sits in on Tuesday nights, watching me come apart on a screen, and I don't know what his face does when it happens, and I want to know what his face does, and that wanting is keeping me up like some unhinged detective with a conspiracy board except the conspiracy board is just one man and several hundred hours of streaming data.

Very normal behavior. Very well-adjusted.

BILLIE YOU ARE UNHINGED!!!

That's GremlinKing, who has been in my chat since I had three hundred subscribers and a secondhand webcam, and who apparently intends to die here.

My kill count ticks to thirty-nine. The donations roll in the corner of my second monitor, peripheral awareness I've trained myself to manage without breaking focus.

Stream survival skill number one, right after don't let them see you sweat and right before your real laugh and your stream laugh are different, use the right one.

DarkWatcher45 tips two hundred dollars.

He always tips early.

I let myself look at the notification. BrattyBaby doesn't react to tips the way a new streamer does, all gasps and bright eyes and oh my god thank you.

BrattyBaby clocks it. Cool. Unhurried. Like a woman who expected exactly this.

It's a good bit. It works because it's half true: I did expect this.

I've been expecting it since eight forty-five when I went live, and before that since six PM when I started getting ready, and before that since basically two weeks ago when I figured out who he was and understood that Tuesdays were about to become a whole situation.

Two hundred dollars. No message tonight.

Sometimes he sends something short, specific, delivered without softening.

Sometimes just the tip and silence. Either way his presence in the chat lands the same: steady, patient, paying attention in a way that has nothing to do with the notification algorithm and everything to do with him.

I know who he is.

And because of this, I have been putting on the best streams of my career for fourteen days, which is honestly rude of me to my previous streams, but here we are.

I lean back in my chair. Not all the way, just the angle I've learned reads well on camera. I drop my voice to the bottom of its range and address my chat with the unhurried confidence that took me six months to build and now comes as naturally as blinking.

"DarkWatcher. Two hundred dollars." I let his name sit in the air. "You've been here since the start. I appreciate a man who shows up on time."

My chat explodes. Three hundred people with opinions about DarkWatcher45 and whether I'm flirting and whether this means something.

I let them have it. I take a long sip from my water bottle.

Hydration, yes, but also a pause. Also giving the camera a moment to hold the particular quality of BrattyBaby's heavily-filtered expression, which is the expression of a woman who has significantly more information than anyone else in the room.

Which is true. Spectacularly, almost dizzyingly true.

Somewhere in this city, Declan Maguire just heard me say his screen name.

He's been watching long enough to know that I read tips, acknowledge them, move on.

What he doesn't know is that I said it differently tonight.

A half-degree slower. A fraction warmer.

The exact calibration I normally reserve for the end of a long stream when I'm tired and my guard comes down and BrattyBaby and Billie Callaghan start to blur at the edges.

I did that on purpose.

I do everything on purpose now when DarkWatcher45 is in my chat.

The game loads into the next round. I roll my shoulders, crack my neck and drop back into the match. GremlinKing is already calling out positions. Three regulars filling the squad slots. Normal Tuesday night, to everyone watching.

Forty minutes later I've run the kill count to fifty-two and I've been doing the thing I've been doing for two weeks: performing for one person in a room of three hundred.

A particular kind of smile when the round goes well.

A particular frustration when it doesn't, genuine and unguarded, the version my chat has learned to love because it's the most real I ever sound on the public stream.

Around DarkWatcher45's tip I stop constructing BrattyBaby and I let something underneath show at the edges. The real version. The one I haven't made a joke about yet.

I'm working up to it.

Declan Maguire is not a man you notice once. He is a man you notice and then keep noticing, compulsively, the way you keep pressing a bruise to check if it still hurts. Spoiler: it still hurts.

Over six feet tall, built like someone who has worked with his body his entire life and never stopped.

A body full of tattoos. Dark hair that’s gone silver at the temples.

Not gray. Silver. The kind that does something genuinely unfair to a strong jaw and a pair of dark eyes that hold eye contact longer than is comfortable and somehow make that your problem instead of his.

He moves through rooms like he's already assessed them. He stands where he decides to stand.

I have been noticing this man at family dinners since I was old enough to notice men and I have never once in my life let anyone see me noticing, which I think qualifies me for some kind of award. Best Actress in a Family Gathering. I'd like to thank the bread rolls.

Moving on.

He's forty-eight. He's known me since I was born.

He is my dad's best friend of thirty years, the man my dad called first when my mom died, the man who showed up and stayed and has been showing up and staying ever since.

His name is in my phone under Declan with no emoji because he is not an emoji person and I have always known exactly what kind of person he is.

And he has been a top subscriber on my private content platform since October.

Not just subscribed. Top tier. Which means he's seen everything.

The public streams with the filter and the virtual background and BrattyBaby fully constructed, and the private content — low light, no face, just my body and my voice and the sounds I make when I'm not doing it for an audience.

I frame it dark and close on purpose. Collarbone down.

He's never seen my face on either tier, which is the whole point, and he's been watching for seven months thinking he was watching a stranger.

He was not watching a stranger.

The wrongness of it is not lost on me. I'm not naive.

This is not part of my world that I want anyone to know about.

All of my streaming is secret. My dad is one of my favorite people alive and the thought of him knowing any part of this makes my chest go tight in a way I don't have a smart remark for. The wrongness is real.

The wrongness is also, and I cannot fully explain this, part of what makes my hands go a little unsteady when DarkWatcher45's tip come in. I should probably talk to a therapist about that. I am instead going to keep streaming.

The way I figured it out was embarrassingly simple, which is its own kind of humbling.

I went through seven months of tip messages as soon as I had a hunch.

I put them next to a year of texts from the contact in my phone I've had since I was fifteen, and understood in about four minutes that they were written by the same person.

The syntax. The comma placement. The complete absence of filler.

No hey before the point. No emoji where a period will do.

Statements delivered like facts because to him they are facts. Short, deliberate, certain.

Declan Maguire does not text like a man who has ever once in his life used a GIF, and DarkWatcher45 does not tip like one either, and once you see it you cannot unsee it and I saw it at two in the morning on a Wednesday and said "oh, fuck" out loud to my empty apartment.

Four days I sat with it. Four days of Sunday dinner and family texts and completely normal interactions with a man who has a secret he doesn't know I know.

Four days of hi Declan, yes I'll have another glass, no Dad I'm fine, pass the salt.

Four days of watching him from across a table and understanding for the first time why I've always watched him from across a table.

And then I went live on a Tuesday and I put on the best stream I'd done in months.

He thinks he's watching a stranger.

He thinks the woman on his screen is anonymous, unidentifiable, no connection to his real life.

He's been managing his guilt about it for seven months.

I know because the tips have the quality of a man compensating for something he's not proud of, generous in a way that costs him something.

DarkWatcher45 has never once sent me anything inappropriate despite seven months on the private tier.

That's a man holding a line by sheer force of will and hating himself a little for being at the line at all.

He has no idea the line dissolved fourteen days ago.

The stream is in its final hour. Kill count climbing. GremlinKing being his usual unhinged self in chat. The usual.

DarkWatcher45 has been quiet since the tip.

He always is. He watches and he doesn't perform, and that restraint from a man, in this specific context, which is not a context that tends to attract restrained men, has been making me genuinely unwell for six weeks.

My therapist would have thoughts. Good thing I do not currently have a therapist.

I pull out my phone. Open my messages. Dad, house emoji, the contact I've had since I was nineteen.

I type: Tell Declan I said hi.

I hit send and then I end the stream.