Kimmy & the World of Dating, page 1
Kimmy
&
The World of Dating
Copyright 2022 Monica Clayton
Published by M.E. Clayton
All Rights Reserved
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction. The entire content is a product of the author’s imagination, and all names, places, businesses, and incidences are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), places or occurrences, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any manner, whatsoever, without the express written consent from the author, except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Formatting: Smashwords
Cover: Adobe Stock
Warning: This book contains sexual situations and other adult themes. Recommended for 18 years of age and over.
Table of Contents
Author's Note
Contact Me
Dedication
Prologue
1. The Request
2. The Accept
3. The First Messages
4. The Dick Pic
5. The Need For Rulers
6. The First Suspicions
7. The Video Proof
8. The Sexting
9. The First Conversation
10. The Truths (Maybe)
11. The Lies (Maybe)
12. The First Meeting
13. The First Surprise (Not Really)
14. The Second Surprise (Oh, Wow)
15. The First and Last Time
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books
Author’s Note
Just a couple of things before I let you go and get your read on. While I am doing my best to work with better editing and proofreading software, all my books are solo, independent works. I write my books, proofread my books, edit my books, create the covers, etc. I have one beta who gives me feedback on my stories, but other than that, all my books are independent projects.
That being said, I apologize, in advance, for the typos, grammar inconsistencies, or any other mistakes I may make. Since writing is strictly a hobby for me, I haven’t looked into commitments in regard to publishers, editors, etc. My hope is that my stories are enjoyable enough that a few mistakes, here and there, can be overlooked. However, if you’re a stickler for grammar, my books are probably not for you.
Also, I am an avid reader-I mean an AVID reader. I love to read above any other hobby. However, the only downside to my reading obsession is when I fall in love with a series, but I have to wait for the additional books to come out. So, because I feel that disappointment down to my soul, when I started publishing my works, I vowed to publish all books in my series all at once. No waiting here…LOL. Now, the exception to that will be if enough readers request additional stories based off the standalone, such as in Facing the Enemy. At that point, if I decide to move forward with a requested series, I will make sure all additional books are available all at once. As much as this is a hobby for me, I am writing these books for all of you, as well as myself.
Thank you, for everything!
Contact Me
I really appreciate you reading my book and I would love to hear from you! Now, unfortunately, because I do have a full-time job and one part-time job, plus a family that I love spending time with, at this time, I’m afraid it would be very hard for me to maintain a multitude of social media sites. However, for the sites I do participate in, here are my social media coordinates:
Website
Newsletter
Dedication
For anyone who has ever tried online dating –
Good luck and God bless.
Prologue
I counted them again, and I wasn’t sure if the number made me bold, a free-thinker, or pathetic. It was anyone’s guess, but I was going to choose bold. I liked bold, and there was a certain amount of admiration in trying to take control of your life and putting yourself out there. Although, six could seem a bit more than just putting yourself out there. It could be akin to running across the freeway during rush hour traffic.
Blind.
Granted, when I had started out on this particular adventure, I honestly hadn’t any idea of what to expect; I’d been a novice, a newbie, an amateur. I had also been idealistic, eager, and excited, though. I had been excited about the endless possibilities, and I’d been certain that there was no way I could lose. I mean, how could I?
However, I had lost.
Time and time again, I had lost.
Staring at the apps on my phone, I could admit that all my experiences hadn’t been bad. Stale, maybe, but not all bad. Some had been eye-openers, and others had been cringeworthy, but I hadn’t been looking for all that had been offered.
I had been looking for love.
Plain and simple.
Growing up, society had pushed me into believing that all anyone really wanted was for someone to love them unconditionally. Well, that was a load of crap, and it was a load of crap that I’d had to learn the hard way. Now, while I wasn’t a love-hater-in fact, quite the opposite-I had learned rather quickly that not everyone was looking for love. Some people were looking for sex only. Some people were looking for ego boosts. Some people were looking to cheat ‘safely’. Some people were looking for casual dating. Some people were looking for friends only. Hell, the possibilities were endless. Unfortunately, there were also people out there who were looking just to mess with someone’s emotions, and there were a lot of those assholes out there.
Still, it hadn’t been all bad. If nothing else, it’d been entertaining as hell most nights. There’d been Frankie Dolson, the guy who kept lifting his stomach out of way for the best dick pic angle. There’d been Patrick Racine, the guy who had mentioned that bodily fluids were unnecessary during sexual intercourse. There’s been Trevor Anders, the guy who had insisted that women’s rights dictated that I should pay for dinner should we meet. Also, there was no way that I could forget about Pete Holland, the guy who didn’t know the difference between inches and centimeters and had quite forcefully informed me that I had no idea what I was talking about.
The trouble with online dating-besides the obvious-was that it wasn’t the horny men that were the problem. With the horny men, what you saw was what you got. There were no additional expectations with them. While they should stick to the personal sites that were strictly for hookups, they were still honest about what they wanted, and you really couldn’t fault that.
No, my problem was with the guys who played games for no purpose other than breaking some girl’s heart. The men who said all the right things, led you on with promises of not being like all the others, then turning out to be worse.
Why?
What was the point? What was their endgame? Why string a woman along? What did they get out of catfishing a girl or ghosting her? What did they get out of it? Had they been betrayed and that was their petty revenge against women? Were there really that many narcissists out there?
I just didn’t get it.
Taking a deep breath, I tapped on the first dating app that I had ever signed up for and deleted my account. It wasn’t enough to just delete the app, I had to delete my account, and it actually felt like a sad goodbye, though it really wasn’t.
A few minutes later, all six dating profiles and apps had been deleted, and I felt a little weird about it, but a lot relieved.
No more drama.
The next thing to address was all my social media accounts. It was time to make things clear about who I was and what I wanted.
It was time to be bold again.
Chapter 1
The Request~
I liked working the graveyard shift, though many people hated it. However, for me, it fit perfectly with my life. As a single mom, I was able to work while my daughter was sound asleep at home with no worries. The graveyard shifts also made it possible for me to get off work, send my child off to school, sleep without interruption, then spend time with her when she came home from school.
Now, to say that I was a single Mom might give off the impression that my daughter’s father wasn’t in the picture and that wasn’t entirely true. Oscar was a weekend dad, and a good one for the most part. However, his weekends were only every other weekend because he worked out of town a lot, so it could be a challenge at times. Still, I loved Jackie to pieces, so no serious complaints with the custody arrangements.
Oscar Abbiati had been a casual thing, a friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing, and we had ended up hooking up more than once. After a while, we had become friends with benefits, and everything had been going great until he had ended up meeting Holly, a really sweet girl that he had ended up marrying. However, almost two months after we had called it quits, I had missed my second period, taken that dastard pregnancy test, then had called him to break the news. Unplanned, but not unwelcomed, Oscar, Holl
At thirty-seven, I wasn’t looking to have more kids. While I had nothing against them, I was too old to try to tackle a newborn, and with Jackie already ten-years-old, the idea of a newborn was enough to make me break out in hives.
Still, even though I didn’t want to have any more children, that didn’t mean that I was closing the door on love. I wanted someone that I could come home to. I wanted someone to share my day with. I wanted someone to discuss my troubles with. I wanted someone that I could team up with when problems arose. While I considered Oscar and Holly friends, and they were a great support system, I wanted someone for myself.
My phone pinged with a notification, and after grabbing it, I saw that it was a new request from the latest dating app that I had created an account for. With a fulltime job and young daughter, going out wasn’t much of a possibility for me, so online dating had been the only option. Even though Oscar took Jackie every other weekend, those two days and nights were usually spent catching up on sleep, running errands, or taking care of things around the house that needed taking care of. While my dad was a huge help in that regard, I was doing my best to be a grown woman and handle my own responsibilities.
Giving the monitor screens a quick once over, I opened the app to see what the new request was all about. I wasn’t addicted to my phone, so I wasn’t on it all night at work. I took my job seriously and kept my phone with me just in case there was an emergency with Jackie or my father. Hell, even if there were an emergency with Oscar, Holly, or their kids, Oscar Jr. and Lena.
I’ve been online dating-if that’s what you could call it-for about two years now, so I knew the drill. Bringing up the profile, I checked out the phone and the details that may or may not be true.
Hal Garland.
His picture boasted of blonde hair that was kept short and neatly styled, dark blue eyes, and a clean-shaven face. The photo was angled from the chest up, so it was easy to tell that he was in shape. In fact, experience was telling me to be wary of the good-looking Hal Garland.
See, as a general consensus, sexy or gorgeous people had no reason to be on dating sites like the rest of us. Why would they need to be? Of course, that wasn’t true for every person or every situation, but when you looked like Hal here, it didn’t make sense to me. Plus, while I wasn’t exactly roadkill, and provided that Hal Garland wasn’t a serial killer, he could aim a little higher than a woman who thought that daily makeup was a chore.
My medium-brown hair was usually thrown up in a ponytail because it suited my professional needs. My eyes were a lighter shade of brown and could probably look pretty if I tried, but I didn’t unless it was a special occasion. Plus, at thirty-seven and with one child under my belt, I had a body that looked thirty-seven and like it’s had a kid.
Now, most people would think that I was putting myself down, but I wasn’t. I just preferred to live in reality, and reality was that Hal Garland could probably do a little better.
So, why did he send a request to me?
*****
When I first got this job eight months ago, I thought that I was going to hate it. While I had nothing against being a security guard, everyone knew that the night shift was rough. With nothing really going on, it made for a long shift sometimes. Still, it worked for what I had going on at home, so I couldn’t complain.
A year ago, I had quit my job as a Millerton police officer and had found a job with Silver Security. Oliver Silver was the owner, and he was a retired police chief who took his company seriously and considered it a win whenever he hired an ex-cop or retired one. So far, he’s proven to be a great boss and things could be worse. It was also a win that he paid well. Sure, not as well as being a cop, but it was well above minimum wage.
At forty-two-years-old, I had gone to college, then the police academy, then worked my ass off for twenty years before I’d had to retire early. Sure, I had put in my twenty years, but I was still too young to draw from my pension, so I had needed a job, but not just any job. I had needed one that would disrupt my life as little as possible.
Five years ago, my father, Arlo Russel, had started showing signs of declining health. Two years ago, I had finally had to put him in an assisted living facility because he had needed more than just physical care, he had needed medical care, too. Luckily, his care was covered by his medical insurance, and it hadn’t put a strain on our finances. Still, even if it had, I would have figured something out.
So, even though he was being taken care of, and being taken care of well, the demanding hours of being a detective had become too much for my conscience. My mother had passed a few years ago from an aneurysm and it had devastated my father in a way that I never could have imagined. Though it had gutted me to lose my mother that way, her death had crushed my father’s soul. Willa Russell had been his soulmate, and he still hasn’t recovered from losing her.
When it had become obvious that my father’s health wasn’t going to improve, I knew that I had needed to make a decision, and I had chosen him. I had chosen to find a less demanding job, one that would allow me to spend as much time with him as I could before he was also gone. My twin brother, Jayden, was a career military man, so he kept in touch as much as he could, but the man was always on assignment, and he loved it.
The only regret that I had was the knowledge that my parents had been denied grandchildren. As a die-hard military man, Jayden had never married or had kids. While I had one ex-wife under my belt, we had divorced years ago because, not only did everyone know that it was difficult to be married to a cop, but I also had a low sperm count, and Candace hadn’t been open to adoption. Since I had found it hard to fault a woman for wanting to experience the wonders of pregnancy, we had parted amicably, and Candace was now remarried with two kids.
On the last leg of my rounds, I had only one more hour left on my shift, then I could go home and get some sleep. That was my routine; I’d go home, sleep some, wake up, run errands, then spend the evening with my dad. His days were occupied by his routine living at the Marshall Rehab Facility, so I spent most evenings with him, so as not to disrupt his meals, physical therapy, and medical rehab.
As for my own life, I still had some free time of my own, so I went out with friends, read books, went on dates, things like that, but I made Dad a priority because I refused to live with regret. I had enough of it where my mother was concerned, so I didn’t need to add to it with my father.
So, this job with Silver Security had been a godsend, and I found that I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Used to the excitement of detective work, I’d been certain that I’d be bored out of my mind working the graveyard shift at Future Pharmaceuticals, however, I’d been pleasantly proven wrong. My first day of the job, I’d been paired with Kimberly Gallagher-Kimmy to her friends-and I was glad that I had.
Kimmy was the perfect partner, and I liked that she took her job seriously. Though our shift was very uneventful, she didn’t get lazy or bored. She didn’t assume everything was good and cheated on her rounds. Kimmy earned her paycheck, and she did it with a smile. Beautiful and personable, we got along famously, and there was no shortage of conversation.
There was also the fact that I have learned more about online dating in the past few months than I could have ever imagine existed. While I had nothing against meeting people that way, Kimmy’s stories have been terrifying enough to keep me from ever going on one of those things.
