Body Language

Back when I was about twenty, my old dad said to me, over a beer one day, "A divorced woman is a bit like a used car." I had to ask him what he meant by that, and he clarified by saying, "Just remember, a man gets rid of a used car for a reason." Looking back, I'm not sure if he was just making blokey conversation, or whether he was actually offering me some fatherly advice, but sadly he never lived to see my own wedding day himself, seven years later. He'd been gone two years by then, after we lost him to cancer, but if he had been there to see me tying the knot with Lyndall, I sometimes wonder if he would have reminded me.

Technically, Lyndall wasn't divorced, because she'd never actually been legally married, but she'd been in a de-facto relationship for about six years, so she was the nearest thing to a divorcee. She already had two kids when I met her, so I kind of got a package deal when we got married, with a ready-made family, consisting of a wife and two young girls: Krystal, who was seven, and Karla, who was only four years old.

I've got to say, Lyndall and I were happy for the first few years, or at least I know I was. I grew to love those two girls like they were my very own, and they grew to love me right back. Lyndall and I also tried for another baby, but mid-term, she developed some complications, and she lost him. That's right; we would have had a son, but fate decided otherwise, and the doctors told us that another pregnancy would probably kill her, so I went in for the snip, and had a vasectomy, so there was no chance of that ever happening. We decided it was better for me to get the snip than for Lyndall to get her tubes tied, because her body had been through enough as it was.

I remember, the doctor emphasising that the procedure was permanent, and then asking me if I was prepared to accept that it was irreversible, in case my marriage didn't work out down the track, but I laughed at that, and said, "I'm married to the woman of my dreams, and that's just not gonna happen." How was I to know what the future held?

Looking back, it almost seems that losing the baby was a turning point, but things were never the same after that. Lyndall said she'd sailed through both her pregnancies with the girls, so it must have been something that came from my side. She was bitter for a long time, and I told myself it was hormonal, then when things didn't improve with time, I just tried to ride it out, but I really don't think things were ever the same again. Not that it was all bad times, though. We had long periods, years in fact, when things were really good, and I had my wife and two great kids to come home to, and when the bad times came, I just accepted that this was how life worked.

Those two girls were great. They rarely gave us any grief, and they made our married life so much better. They became very close to me, and often when Lyndall and I argued, they would take my side, not that I needed backup from two young kids, but it just shows the bond that had developed between us. Things got really bad for a period between Lyndall and me, around the time Karla started high school, and as far as Lyndall was concerned, I just couldn't do anything right, but then we kind of got over that, and settled back into normal family routine for the next couple of years. I stuck it out, telling myself that I loved her, and I loved those girls too much to walk out, even though I was sorely tested a few times, but then, when Karla was sixteen, Lyndall got pregnant.

She told me the vasectomy must have failed, but these things can only stay hidden for so long. It turned out she'd been screwing a sleazy little guy called Vinnie for ages, and Vinnie had told her a little white lie, saying he'd had a vasectomy as well. Lyndall had been playing an unwitting game of sexual Russian roulette for months, but unfortunately, Vinnie wasn't really shooting blanks at all, and one must have hit the target.

The pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, and Vinnie disappeared for a while, but once again, Lyndall and I stayed together, for Karla's sake, I told myself, because by this time, Krystal was nineteen, and although she was still living at home with us, she was already working full-time, and was old enough to fend for herself if the marriage broke up.

A year later, Vinnie was back on the scene, and in spite of what he'd done to Lyndall the first time, she got back with him again, and incredibly, she moved out of our place, to move in with him. The night she moved out, two weeks after Karla's seventeenth birthday, things got very ugly at our place.

Lyndall managed to drag up something from every argument we'd had, in thirteen years together, and throw it in my face, and I put Vinnie through our front screen door, although I didn't bother to open it first. Karla finished off the evening's entertainment, by screaming at her mother, "Go and fuck yourself! You're not a mother, you're not even fit to be called one!" and then, adding, "Go and fuck your sleazy little boyfriend, see if we care! We'll be happy without you!" as Vinnie reversed his car out of the driveway, with Lyndall stone-faced in the front seat next to him. Karla hardly ever swore, so her tirade made the whole thing much more disturbing.

That night, the three of us, Karla, Krystal and me, slept in my queen-size bed, the two girls huddled together on one side, crying themselves to sleep, while I lay on the other side of the bed, my anger at the hurt Lyndall had caused my two girls blotting out any pain I felt on my own behalf.

The next day, we got up and started our new lives together, without Lyndall, and in time, we got things going really well. We were a family, a man and his two stepdaughters, we all got on perfectly together, and every day, the girls did things to show me they loved me.

For sisters, Karla and Krystal weren't much alike. Krystal, at twenty, was very much like her mother to look at, being tall, fair-haired and curvy, with a pretty face. She was a looker, with rounded, perky breasts, and a beautifully shaped backside that got a lot of second glances from guys when she walked past. Karla, on the other hand, was more like her father, being tall and slender, with dark hair, and a little darker complexion than Krystal. Both girls had brown eyes, and their mother's mouth, although when I say that, it means their mouths resembled their mother's to look at, and not because of what came out of them.

Karla was about five feet eight inches tall, and was slim built, like her natural father. She wasn't straight up and down like Olive Oyl, but was just slender, with a few modest, girlish curves, just the same. Her boobs were fairly small, but were nice enough in shape, and her bottom, while not the traffic-stopper her sister had been blessed with, was still worth a second look, especially in the cute little denim shorts she liked to wear in summer. Those shorts also used to show off her legs, and while they were still a little on the thin side, they definitely had a nice shape to them.

If Karla wasn't a stunner to look at, she made up for it with a certain amount of style. She was bright, she spoke well, she had a ready wit, nice manners, and rarely swore or used foul language. She didn't smoke, and she was fairly popular at school. All in all, Karla was a really great girl, and I was proud to have helped bring her up this way.

Not long after Karla turned eighteen, she got her first boyfriend. His name was Anthony, and he was two years older than she was. He was a decent enough young guy, and he had a job, dressed respectably and had good manners, so she could have done a lot worse. Nobody needed to tell me that Karla lost her virginity to Anthony, I just knew. It was little things, like their body language, a subtle change in Karla's demeanour, and of course, as homicide detectives often say on TV, Anthony had motive and opportunity. She was still in high school, in her final year, but even as close as we were, with no mother around to handle the issue, I felt a bit strange about talking to her about contraception, so I had a word with Krystal, who had a word with Karla, and then took her to the doctor to get a prescription for the pill. Maybe Mike Brady might have handled it differently, but at least I did something.

Karla and Anthony kind of petered out after a few months, and it wasn't like some traumatic break-up; they just stopped going out together, but remained on good terms, with no fuss or bother. Then, Krystal moved out of our house, to move in with her boyfriend, so by the time Karla was eighteen-and-a-half years old, there were just the two of us living there.

By that stage of my life, things seemed to be going okay. I was forty-one years old, and I'd gotten over losing Lyndall to her sleazebag boyfriend, but although I'd had a couple of brief flings, and one or two one-night stands since she walked out, I didn't have a woman in my life. Karla was in her last year of high school, with a part-time job at McDonalds after school and on weekends, and she was living happily at home with me, and we looked after each other as best we could. All in all, I thought life was pretty good.

About halfway through that year, my niece, Jenna, got married to her fiancé, whose name was Damien. Jenna's father was my elder brother, Frank, and although his four daughters weren't related to my girls by blood, they all considered themselves to be cousins, and they got on famously together. Naturally, Karla, Krystal and I were invited to the wedding, which, ironically, was held in the same church where Lyndall I got married fourteen years earlier.

The wedding was on a Saturday afternoon, with the reception held afterwards, in a function centre, not far from the church. I had given Krystal and Karla my Visa card during the week, to go and buy a new outfit for Karla to wear to the wedding, and I had trusted their judgement in getting her something appropriate, but I hadn't had a chance to see what they had bought for her. Shortly before we were due to leave for the wedding, I called out to her down the corridor towards her bedroom, "You ready?"

Karla stepped from her bedroom, wearing a sleeveless, formal dress that was knee-length, and deep purple in colour, with black lace rim. The neckline showed off some of her modest cleavage, and the dress hugged her slender curves on the way down. She had a silver necklace, with matching earrings, her dark hair was up, and then to top it off, she was wearing black high heels. She rarely wore heels, not that she needed them, and when she stepped out of her room, she walked a bit like a young foal finding its feet. Her air of elegance and sophistication was in contrast with her coltish gait, as she walked down towards me, and I said, "You look, umm," but I paused, to think of an adequate word, and then just settled for, "beautiful."

"Well, don't sound so surprised," Karla said, smiling as she walked up to me. With her heels, she was only about an inch shorter than I was, and she added, "You don't look too bad, yourself," as she looked me up and down.

She gave my suit a quick adjustment, by tugging at the shoulders, and then at the bottom of the jacket, and she stood back for another look, and said, "There, perfect. Watch out ladies, Allan Maxwell's dressed up in his best suit, and he's on the prowl."

"Come on," I said, and Karla linked arms with me as we walked towards the front door. She had only passed her driving test a few months before, after three attempts, and she liked to drive the car every chance she got, so she grabbed the keys from the side table, and said, "Can I drive?" and headed for the driver's door, without waiting for an answer. She took off her heels in the car, and she drove to the church in her stockinged feet, and then as she sat with the driver's door open, putting on her heels again, she looked up at the church, and said to me, "This is where you and Mum got married, isn't it?"

She was only four when I married her mother, and I wasn't sure if she'd remember, but I said, "Yeah," without elaborating, and as she took my arm to walk over to the group of guests waiting outside in the sun, she said, "Happy memories, then." Her tone was ironic.

"I got you and Krystal out of it, so I'm not complaining," I answered, smiling back at her. "We aren't, either," was her reply.

After the wedding, we adjourned to the reception, where Krystal, along with her boyfriend, Dale, Karla, and I were seated near the bridal table. Early in the evening, the deejay played an appropriate song, as Jenna and her new husband did their bridal waltz around the floor. Then, he invited everyone else up to join the happy couple in a slow dance. "Dance with me?" Karla said, giving me a smile. "My pleasure, young lady," I responded.

We got up together, and walked to the floor, and we took hold of each other to join the other couples waltzing around the room, and as I held my pretty, eighteen-year-old stepdaughter in my arms, in her pretty purple dress, with her sweet, stylish perfume, I felt to my embarrassment, that my cock suddenly went rock hard. I shifted my stance slightly, so my erection wouldn't press against her, and after a minute or two of awkward dancing, Karla said, "I'm not made of crystal, you know."

Preoccupied as I was by what was happening in my pants, I didn't understand her properly, and I thought she had said something about her sister, Krystal. I looked over at our table, to where Krystal had been sitting, but she was now on the floor, slow-dancing with Dale. "What are you talking about?" I asked.

"You're holding me like you think I'm gonna break in half," Karla said, speaking low so no-one else would hear, "What's wrong?"

She adjusted her own stance and pulled me in closer to herself, but within only two beats of the music, my hard tool bumped her lower belly through our clothing. "Oh," she said, looking down. I felt hot with shame, and all I could say was, "Sorry. I'm really sorry."

"Now I know why you didn't want to get too close," she smiled, leaning closer, so she could speak quietly.

"Look," I started, "I'm really sorry about that. Do you want to sit down?"

"No!" Karla said, as though sitting down was a totally ridiculous idea, "It's all right. Your body doesn't know who I am," she said, as she calmly adjusted her own pelvis and her own stance, so my horn wasn't touching her.

"But you're my stepdaughter," I said, looking down, still burning with shame.

"So what?" Karla said, breezily, still smiling, still dancing, "It's not like we haven't been properly introduced." Then, she leaned in so our faces were close, as we danced, and added, "Although, I gotta say, I'm a little surprised Mum left you if you had that to bring to the table."

We both giggled explosively, and quite a few people looked around at us. After we had regained our composure, Karla kept eye contact me with me, as though she didn't want to look at anyone else, and said, "I can't believe I said that." At least the laughter and conversation made my erection subside, and we had one more slow dance, before the deejay put on a rap song, and Karla said, "Not your style, is it?" We left the floor to rejoin Krystal and her boyfriend.

"What was so funny out there?" Krystal asked.

"I stepped on Allan's toe," Karla answered, to my relief.

"Heels," I added, to help out.

"I guess you had to be there," Krystal said, looking at us like we were two very odd people.

Later in the evening, I stood with my brother, Frank, and his daughter, Jenna, the radiant new bride, as we watched the couples on the dance floor. There was another slow song playing, and there were only about half a dozen couples dancing to it, including Karla and Krystal, who were slow dancing with each other, doing exaggerated dips and turns, laughing, giggling and generally having a ball together.

"You've done a great job with those two," Frank said, as my two girls paraded across the floor in a parody of the tango, "especially the Little One, all by yourself, since Lyndall fucked off." Frank was a man who didn't mince words, hence his use of the words, "fucked off," and The Little One had been his nickname, and term of endearment, for Karla, ever since he met her, when she was four years old, and so much smaller than her big sister. He still referred to her by that name, even though The Little One was now only a few inches shorter than he was, and Karla herself, who loved him dearly, would still send him birthday cards, signed, "Your loving niece, Karla, a.k.a. The Little One."

"Those two girls love you more than anything, Uncle Allan," Jenna added, but somehow, after what had happened earlier on the dance floor, all this praise for my standing as a stepfather made me feel like some sort of fraud. "I was just lucky," I guess," I answered, as modestly as I could.

In time, the reception ended, and everybody left. There was a feeling of happiness, and hope for the future in the air, as we watched Jenna and Damien leaving the centre in a hired limo, with everyone smiling, hugging each other, promising to keep in touch, and Karla and I were among the last to leave. On the way home, as Karla drove, and I sat in the passenger seat, she said, "Well, Jenna's all married up, now. I guess she and Damien'll be making sweet music together before long." She chuckled, and added, "I guess that's what weddings are all about, you know, romance, love, yada yada yada," and then she added, like it was an afterthought, "making love." She turned to smile at me, like she was waiting for a reply, and then looked back at the road, but I didn't answer. I didn't think I had much to offer on the subject of marriage.

After a moment, Karla went on with, "Come on, Al, I'm trying to get a conversation going over here, but you're not helping much. I'm getting sore gums from flapping them." She only ever called me Al when she was fooling around with me like that, because she knew I preferred being called Allan.

"After my experience with marriage, I don't think I've got much to say about that subject," I said, keeping my tone light, and ending with a smile, so I didn't sound like I was whining.

Karla took one hand off the wheel, and gave my arm a gentle squeeze, and said, "Your marriage gave you two charming, charismatic young stepdaughters, oozing with panache, who love you to pieces. So it wasn't all bad, was it?"

I reached over and gave Karla's arm a squeeze back, and I said, "When you put it that way, I did have pretty successful marriage, didn't I?"

Karla and I arrived home, and we went inside to the family room, where I wasted no time in taking off my tie and jacket. As I stood there, Karla casually put a hand on my shoulder to steady herself while she took off one high heel shoe, then the other, and placed them together beside the couch. I looked around the room, thinking it was too early to go to bed, and Karla said, "Would you like some coffee?"

"Yeah, sounds good," I said, and Karla flicked on the TV with the remote, and she added, "Let's watch the late movie. I'll find a foreign one with subtitles, so we can laugh at it, even if it's not a comedy. I'm not tired, are you?" I shook my head and sat on the end of the three-seater couch, near the right arm.

A few minutes later, Karla came back in from the kitchen, with two mugs of coffee, and set them down on the coffee table. I saw that she had taken off her stockings, but was still wearing that pretty purple dress, along with her earrings and necklace. She really looked beautiful.

Karla and I were very close, and it was not unusual for her to sit right next to me, or to lean against me, even when there was plenty of room on the couch. It was a habit she started as a small child, and had never really grown out of. She sat next to me on the couch, on my left side, and as she so often did, she sat right up against me. I felt the warmth from her girlish, young body through that thin material of her dress for a moment, and then I remembered what had happened on the dance floor, so I shrank back slightly.