Sophie's Choice

This is the true story of how my stepdaughter chose to lose her virginity. Names, places and ages have been changed to protect our anonymity and to make the story suitable for publication but the events described actually took place during the summer of 2007.

The introduction is perhaps a little too long, but please be patient because without understanding our backgrounds, Sophie's story might seem unbelievable.

They say all happy families are the same, but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.

I can tell you that this is simply not true. My own family was happy, is happy and, I hope, will remain happy. But I know for certain that we are not like most other happy families.

My name is Mike. I'm 42, a family doctor and live with my lawyer wife Susie and my eighteen year old stepdaughter Sophie. Both Susie and Sophie are sweet, bright and beautiful and I sleep with both of them.

From a very young age, I had suspected that things in my family were not quite like in 'normal' families. I grew up acutely aware of my older great uncles and aunts whispering about things which we children should not be told, and it was common knowledge that our family had 'secrets' which must not be revealed.

From the Victorian prudishness with which the little I knew had been talked about, and the salacious glee with which they discussed it among themselves, I guessed that the secrets were sexual in nature.

The nature of the secrets became more obvious to me when my own sexual preferences began to manifest themselves. As I grew older, went to University and eventually qualified, I resolved to investigate.

In times past – even recently past - so many things were kept hushed up that it's hard to find reliable details of things that took place even one or two generations back. Our parents and their parents took most of their secrets with them to the grave, but sometimes left the odd letter, photograph or other form of record which gives a clue to the hidden truth.

These days, analytical techniques are much better too. Blood matching and even DNA tests are available to professionals like me so I have been able to find proof of relationships which had been little more than suspicions for many years.

We are certainly a family of secrets and are used to living with them. However, after nearly twenty years' genealogical research, I'm fairly certain about a few things.

Further back than my grandparents I can only conjecture. I hope to discover proof eventually but the first person I am truly sure about is my grandmother.

An extraordinary lady, my father's mother was a single parent, which was a real scandal for her era. Most girls were forced by peer pressure, cultural pressure or even the police to reveal the father's name and to marry, but throughout her life, my grandmother remained strong and silent despite the shame it brought her.

Evidence I now have suggests very strongly that my father's father was actually his uncle. In other words my grandmother was made pregnant by her own brother (is this making sense?) We certainly know they were very close and actually shared a house in later life after his wife, my great aunt, died. My father was an only child and my grandmother died, still unmarried, shortly after her brother.

Next, I know for certain that my father married his first cousin (his mother's brother's daughter), who became my mother. This is not illegal in the UK - indeed if cousins couldn't marry then most European royal families would have died out centuries ago. It is, however, considered inadvisable and runs the risk of birth defects.

If you have read the above carefully, and my suspicions are correct, you will have noticed this means that my mother was actually my father's half sister as they both shared the same father – my great uncle. (Am I still making sense?) Their relationship is therefore incestuous (they are both still alive and well by the way).

My parents had three children – my two older sisters and me. My sisters are twins – not uncommon in families with some in-breeding – and are three years older than me.

My own childhood was characterised by love and confusion. When I was very young, my rather domineering older sisters used to treat me as if I was another girl. Often they would make me dress up as one, and for many years we thought nothing about being half dressed or even naked around each other – almost as if I wasn't a boy at all. As a result I grew up slightly effeminate and suffered the usual consequences at school.

Then, of course, as I matured, the physical differences between us began to become more obvious. I still vividly remember the first time I had an erection in their presence.

I was horrified and almost paralysed by embarrassment as my sisters pointed to the obvious hardness between my naked thighs. After shrieks of horror and amusement accompanied by tears of humiliation, they finally let me go to my room where I cried on the bed in shame, my face buried in the pillow, hating the horrid long thin pink thing that had divided me from my beloved sisters. I tried to hide it between my thighs and stood in front of the mirror wishing my pubic area was as smooth and pretty as theirs.

After about an hour, my older sister Sarah came to see me. She wiped the drying tears from my face with her sleeve and hugged me, all the while whispering how sorry she was that they had been so nasty to me.

I began to feel better and hugged her in return as she stroked my leg affectionately. To cut a long story short, I had another erection but this time instead of shrieking, Sarah just looked at it, then gently touched it....and touched it some more.

She wasn't laughing at me. She was curious – gentle and affectionate, but .... interested.

When she left I was even more confused. For the rest of the day she behaved as if nothing had happened, but that night, after I had gone to bed, she crept into my room and, after a few minutes' pretending to read to me, touched me again.

This happened every night for nearly a week until, eventually, Sarah let me touch her in return. A few more secret visits passed before our 'touching' became mutual masturbation.

This secret enjoyment went on for many months. Sarah enjoyed making me cum with her hands, and I obeyed her every command with my fingers in return. It was genuinely mutual and loving in every way and I became less effeminate by the week. Indeed after a short time the bullying stopped altogether and I found myself much more attractive to and confident with the girls at school.

Finally, after nearly two years of touching, we made love properly in my bed. It was the first time for both of us and....it was sweet and gentle and caring. And clumsy and messy and short! I now felt a real man.

This loving relationship continued for some time without either our sister Samantha or our parents knowing, until Sarah got married at the age of twenty one.

We have never had sex together since then, but we are as close as a brother and sister can be. Samantha is quite jealous of my relationship with Sarah which I consider to have enriched my life to a great degree.

I married somewhat later at the age of 32. My own wife, Susie, was a single parent when we first met and is not genetically related to me at all – unusual in my family, but all the more healthy for that.

Susie is average height, average build but with a sweet, youthful 'come to bed' face that I find incredibly attractive. Both she and Sophie are fiery redheads with delicate pale skin, freckles and strong characters (just like Susie's father in fact).

We first met through an 'incest interest' message board in the early days of the internet. Susie's experiences of the on-line community had not been very happy ones and she was very wary with new acquaintances. However she had eventually learned how to separate the perverts from those who genuinely had been the 'victims' of incest, and after a handful of on-line 'dates' felt confident enough to tell me that she had slept with her father since she was quite a young girl, after her mother had been killed in a road traffic accident.

I explained my background and my experiences and we agreed to talk on the telephone. It took a long time for us to get to know each other well enough to meet in person, but after that our relationship developed apace.

Susie did not feel she had been abused – rather it had given her sexual confidence and deepened her love for her father – but now he was no longer alive, she felt the need to talk to someone about it and of course could never tell her family or friends. The closeness of her relationship with her father had contributed to the failure of her first marriage and she had been involved in a number of short term, unsatisfactory relationships since then. My own love life had followed a similar track so I suppose we were well matched.

Her daughter Sophie is the happy but unplanned result of Susie's affair with her father, a fact that was covered up by the two of them until he died of cancer at the early age of 57, leaving her feeling abandoned and alone. Her family were quite unable to understand just why his death had affected her so very badly and of course she could not explain, hence turning to the on-line community.

Sophie is a little taller than her mother and as long as I have known her has been very slim – almost skinny - making her seem much younger than she actually is. She is very attractive to boys, but her red hair and strong character seem to intimidate the many under-confident ones she meets. I know her as the sweet, insecure little girl she will probably always be.

With my own family history, I had no difficulty in accepting and understanding Susie's attitude and she began to trust me. After a while, with so much in common, we fell in love. Within a year were married, became a family of three and have lived together for over ten years.

Sophie took a full year to accept me into their family, but eventually moved from hostility to tolerance and finally to affection. She and I had been close for a long time before the events told in this story took place. It's likely that my not being a blood relation made the whole thing more possible.

This is a long introduction, I know, and I hope you're not bored yet, but I thought it would make the following true story more meaningful. Without knowing our backgrounds, the following events would be hard to believe.

Sophie's Choice

I'm not entirely sure when my interest in my step daughter Sophie changed from fatherly to sexual. For most of our life together, my attitude was that of a normal, if perhaps over-protective protective stepfather. However, it was impossible to live in the same house as such a beautiful, maturing girl without noticing 'things' developing about her.

As her teenage progressed, the pale skinny waif of a girl I had known seemed to grow suddenly before my eyes into a fuller, more rounded woman and I found it impossible to see her around the house without feeling strong sexual urges. I'm not sure whether she consciously did it, but to this day I'm certain that Sophie played up to my increasingly obvious interest in her.

For several years I managed to suppress my feelings – although my dreams were haunted by her - but eventually during the early hours when I had woken both myself and Susie up by calling Sophie's name in the night during a particularly vivid and obviously wet dream, I could no longer conceal the attraction. It was simply too strong to be ignored and confessed it to my wife.

To my eternal gratitude, Susie listened to me calmly without passing judgement and without the violent, emotional reaction I expected. She is a truly extraordinary woman who continues to surprise me. When I had finished my confession, to my astonishment, Susie sat in silence for a full five minutes then, to my relief, told me she understood my predicament.

With a new frankness and openness, she explained that her own father had made advances to her at a much earlier age than Sophie was so she did not find my desires for the girl I considered more my daughter than a stepdaughter to be either incomprehensible or revolting.

She asked me how far I had imagined it going. I confessed that I had fantasised often about making love to her in her own bed, but had never imagined anything could happen 'for real'.

Susie gave me a strange, analysing look which I'm sure would have unsettled her most strident clients. It certainly unsettled me. All sorts of possible outcomes sped through my mind, but the words that finally left my wife's mouth were ones I had never even dreamed of.

To my amazement, Susie suggested that she gradually introduced the idea of a sexual relationship with me to Sophie over the next few weeks. At first I could not believe my ears, but she assured me she was deadly serious – her own relationship with her father had been so close, strong and positive for her that she wanted her daughter at least to have the chance of having something similar.

Naturally I was excited at the idea, but at the same time apprehensive. After all, I had little or no reason to believe Sophie had any sexual feelings for me at all!

Meanwhile our own sex life inexplicably took a sharp turn for the better, and although I said and did nothing untoward, I found myself fantasising about my Sophie more and more often.

Over the next few weeks I found myself noticing the things she did more as well - little things like the accidental leaving open of the bathroom or bedroom door while she was changing or bathing, or the careless flashing of her panties getting in or out of the car. And she seemed to have started wearing exceptionally short skirts around the house. In fact I had twice sent her back to her room to change into something more modest – an action that seemed to hurt her rather than make her angry.

I put it down to coincidence and an over active imagination on my part. But it kept going on!

After six weeks of increasing frustration, I plucked up the courage to talk to Susie once again about how I felt and about the difficulty of living with a girl whose sexuality seemed to grow by the week. Susie's response knocked me sideways.

"Haven't you two done anything yet?" Her voice sounded exasperated. "Just how slow are you, Mike?" I stared at her dumbstruck. "She's been sending you messages for weeks – so clearly even I can see them!"

I just stood there, speechless.

"I thought you two had already started..... Christ, Mike, for an intelligent and successful man you can be really stupid some times!"

"Wh..What?" I stammered, making even more of a fool of myself. Susie made an exasperated sound and walked across the kitchen to where the kettle was boiling.

"I spoke to her as she went to bed the day after your 'night time confession'." Susie began, pouring two steaming mugs of tea and sitting down, indicating that I should do the same. I sat, and as we sipped our tea, a strange unreal feeling crept over me.

"What...What did she day?" I asked, my voice surprisingly hesitant. Susie sat back in her chair.

"I won't pretend she was pleased, Mike. Actually, at first she was horrified." Susie said and my heart sank like a stone. Had I just destroyed our family? Susie leaned towards me and stared straight into my eyes.

"I said, at first!" She continued, seeing the look on my face. I pressed her for more news.

"We have had a few mother / daughter heart to hearts since then." She went on. "I told her – well, I told her how much you loved her and that it was because of that love, not in spite of it that you felt this way towards her."

Nice words, I thought. All the nicer for being true!

"What eventually got through to her – and you'll understand how difficult this was for me Mike – was when I told her about my Dad and me. How special our relationship was and what it meant to both of us."

I was amazed. Susie had barely mentioned this part of her life since we had been married. It was an unwritten rule between us.

"And what did she say to that?" I asked, eager to learn.

Susie leaned back again and thought for almost a whole minute.

"Actually I'm surprised how mature she was. I can't be sure she really understood everything, but we both cried quite a lot and hugged each other a lot."

"Did you explain who her father really is?" I asked tentatively.

"Not directly. And she didn't ask directly either, but she's a bright girl and will certainly work it out. She asked me lots of questions about her Grandfather and – to my surprise – I answered them all, truthfully. Actually it was good for me to talk about it all again."

Susie looked genuinely pleased. She continued.

"I asked her a few questions too – including if she was still a virgin and she said she was."

This was a genuine surprise to me. Sophie had a constant stream of boyfriends coming to the house. Although I hated the thought, I had just assumed that, now she was eighteen, she must have slept with at least one of them by now. She might, of course have been lying to her mother but I let that thought go, and listened intently.

"She told me she was frightened about giving herself to a boy who might hurt her both physically and emotionally." Susie explained. "She told me she'd heard lots of 'kiss and tell' stories from the boys at school." She laughed. "Some of them might even have been true!"

I smiled, remembering the nonsense that had been talked when I was her age.

"What did you say to that?" I asked.

"I told her I had felt exactly the same, especially with all the pressures that there are on both boys and girls of her age." Susie replied. "It seems she's reached the point of no return several times with boyfriends but has always stopped them short of full sex."

I nodded, oddly pleased.

"Now, of course, she has the reputation of being frigid." Susie said unhappily. "But she's genuinely scared of what might happen if she lets a boy go any further."

"What did you tell her?" I asked, eager to know what happened next.

"Well, it took a while to summon up the courage, Mike, but I told her how good it had been for me to learn about sex in a safe and loving environment with an experienced man whom I could trust absolutely."

At this point I began to have doubts. Was my interest really a manifestation of love and trust? Or was it just lust on my part? To be truthful, I'm still not sure of my own motives then, but it was too late to go back now, and Susie was still talking.

"I told her how I had given my virginity to my Dad and in return had learned how wonderful sex with the right person could be. How it had given me confidence to deal with boys my age on equal terms, and how, after a while, I had felt able to try new things with him in a loving, supportive and safe environment."

I could tell the memory was still vivid in her mind by the tears welling up in her eyes. She seldom talked about her father these days.

"In fact, I told her how it gave me the confidence to really enjoy my sex life with the few partners I'd had - right up to – and including - you!"

This was certainly true. From the moment she had eventually decided to go to bed with me, Susie had been an exciting and adventurous lover. She still was.

"That's the advantage of being married to a lawyer, Susie." I joked. "You could persuade me to do anything if you talked to me like that."

She smiled broadly.

"Well, as a lawyer I should tell you I also explained to her that having sex with her father or stepfather is, strictly speaking, illegal, whatever your ages, and that she must never tell anyone about her Grandfather and me or I could go to prison.

"I also told her that she should think hard about whether she wanted the same relationship with you and that if she decided she did want it she must remember that, although she would have my approval and help if she wanted it, in the end you are married to me, not to her."