Page 10 of Dear Daddy, Please Want Me

Fortunately, Saul either didn’t notice or pretended not to. “I just gave you 24-hour access to our floor, but the building security is managed by another company so it won’t go through till Monday. So if you need to leave and come back, just let me know so I can come down and fetch you.”

Levi nodded. He liked the idea of Saul coming down to fetch him, though of course he didn’t want to bother his CEO.

“Thank you,” he said. That seemed appropriate. He needed to get out of his dirty fantasies and back to work.

They walked side-by-side across the lobby and Saul continued. “So I was thinking that maybe I could check the logs on the live site while you tried to replicate the error on a sandbox. I just finished replicating the current state of the site so you can mess around.”

“That sounds good to me. What exactly is the error?”

Levi positioned himself off to the side as Saul pressed the button to call the elevator. Once they entered, he didn’t even attempt to select their floor. He hadn’t meant to say that stupid thing about the door, but now he felt like he was kind of bound to it. The elevator didn’t even have a door that Saul could open, but he liked the idea of his Daddy opening doors for him.

Not that Saul was his Daddy or anything. He didn’t even know what Saul was into. There was just something about him that was so…. Daddy.

The conversation that was happening in his head was very different from the one in the outside world. But that was always how it was when Saul was around.

“Basically, there seem to be couples who should have a very high compatibility rate, but they’re not showing up in each others’ match list. They can still search for each other by username, but the algorithm’s gone wonky.”

Huh. That was weird. “How do we know that?”

“We’ve had some users writing in about it. And you know that if five or six people bother to write in, there must be dozens of others who are just as annoyed and didn’t bother to report it. The first one was a couple that was looking for a third, so the Dom was expecting to see his sub’s account. We also have two pairs of friends who made profiles together and were just surprised. One set is in a pretty rural area, so it was an obvious miss when they were only getting two or three screens of matches total, when earlier they’d gotten twice that many.”

Levi narrowed his eyes. “You know I don’t know anything about the matching algorithm. It scares me.” He shuddered for effect. He usually worked on interface design, cross-platform compatibility, and data storage. The matching stuff was Christy’s baby and Saul poked around in it from time to time.

Saul grinned up at him. “It’s not that bad. Anyway, we don’t even know if it’s a matching problem. I’ve been looking at it all day and I can’t find a damned thing. There are a few more people who’ve emailed with complaints, but it’s mostly an I can’t find this specific person on my match list even though they used to be there thing. So the problem could be anywhere.”

If Saul couldn’t find it, that didn’t bode well. Levi wrinkled his nose. “Better not be in the algorithm.”

He thought he caught something in Saul’s eyes just then. They landed on his scrunched up nose and then lingered on his lips. Like maybe Saul wanted to kiss him. Then it was gone, as quickly as it had appeared.

Levi tried to get his own face under control. He didn’t know what it was that made him feel so silly and hopeful around Saul. Well, he did. But that didn’t mean that Saul would think he was as cute as he liked to think he could be.

That was that too-tall, too-skinny, too-plain, too-pushy thing all over again. Being cute worked for cute people. He probably just sounded whiney.

Saul kept up the monologue as they walked down the hallways, going over potential issues he’d already checked and things he was considering.

Levi finally got his brain on track and asked what he hoped were good questions, but honestly, it seemed like the whole bug was a “who the fuck knows?” Because everything came back looking correct, except that a randomly selected third of the match results never showed up.

When Levi reached his cubicle, he sunk automatically into his chair while Saul perched on the edge of his desk.

That was all it took to get his mind completely off track again. Saul was so close, the outside of his thigh was practically brushing Levi’s cheek. He could just lean forward a little bit and Daddy would guide his head down and…

“Thanks again so much for coming in today. I’ll be in my office if you think of anything,” Saul concluded.

And then he walked away. Dammit.

Levi had thought they were going to be working on this thing together. Like, maybe in Saul’s office, sharing that elegant wooden desk. Or at least in a conference room or something.

Still, he couldn’t help but lean back to watch Saul’s ass until he disappeared around the corner. It was a luscious ass. A little curvier than other guys’ and even tastier because of it. It was a delightful view, but apparently not for him.

Ugh.

Well, he was here anyway. He might as well do some work.

He flipped open his laptop which immediately turned on his other two monitors. That was the nice thing about being at his desk, he reminded himself.

He pulled open the sandbox, cleverly labeled with today’s date, to start poking around. Now that he was here, he was actually curious.

The support ticket program turned up a handful of reports with the error, so he started there.