Discovery of the Moment Ch. 08

Kelly returned the cuddle warmly, gently pushing her perfectly-formed rear end into my groin. "Can you believe that we actually pulled it all off?"

I smiled into the darkness and her soft hair. "We put plenty of thought into it, honey," I answered. "More than a year, really. And I like to think that we considered every angle. New names, new home, new lives... Jonathan and Kelly Baker, for all intents and purposes, have fallen off the face of the earth. Now we're just an unorthodox couple, lost in the rural suburbs. John and Kelly Fuller, beautiful younger woman married to a handsome older man. For all the world knows, I was born with a massive trust fund and married a hot trophy wife who had the good sense to fall madly in love with me. No one here knows us, we're far enough away from California that we'll never run into the people we knew and, as far as Johnny Law is concerned, it's all legal."

It took two months to lose our old identities and lives, eight months to build the new house and an additional four months to truly settle into our new lives in Tennessee, but our new earth-berm home on a large plot of land with no one around us for miles helped to make up for the inconvenience. It was worth the wait and provided us with plenty of time to get comfortable in a new town. At first, people tried to engage us in conversation, trying to learn as much about us as they could (small-town people are like that, I guess), but we managed to evade them all while remaining polite. After awhile the locals lost their interest in us and just accepted the fact that we were there. Even when the house was completed and we moved in, no one seemed to take much notice and left us alone, which was just fine by Kelly and me. "I can't think of anything we overlooked."

Kelly cooed happily. "Neither can I, Dad," she said. "So... now that we've got everything squared away here, when do we begin my training? I've been feeling myself get stronger lately and I haven't had much opportunity to use it. I feel The Fold calling me and I wanna start soon."

"We can start tomorrow," I told her. "You've already got some of the basics out of the way, really. All you need to do is learn how to better control it and make it last. Get that down and we move on the Phase Two."

Phase One was to get our personal lives situated so that our old identities could be left behind and our new lives could be firmly settled. Phase Two was to start hitting the criminal elements inside the city- starting off with small gangs and then moving on to bigger game like the mob and drug cartels in the local area. The main goal was to get the gangs and criminals to fight amongst each other until they either left town completely or wiped each other out. Either result would be acceptable to us. It was criminals who took Sarah away from us and it was criminals who would suffer the consequences; location was an academic matter of chance, as far as we were concerned. We'd resolved to go after only the big guys- drug dealers, killers, rapists, crooked politicians and other major criminals. Lesser criminals like petty thieves and thugs would be left for the police to take care of. We figured that if we got down to the root of the problem, "organized crime", then the rest would take care of itself. Phase Three was the simplest of all: retirement. We understood that we couldn't eliminate ALL crime, but we were certain that we could make a pretty sizable dent in it and give criminals everywhere considerable cause to avoid the nearby city we'd chosen to protect like the plague.

Kelly snuggled in a little more tightly against me and wrapped her soft arms around mine. "I love you, Dad," she said softly.

"I love you, too, sweetheart," I replied and then kissed her lovingly on the back of her neck. "Now... we've had a long day getting everything into place around here. Let's get to sleep and see what tomorrow brings."

Shortly thereafter we both drifted off to sleep, father and daughter in each others' arms.

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The next morning came much as any other in recent months. I woke, once again, with my lovely daughter naked beside me, with a prayer of thanks on my lips. The sun's rays drifted through our ceiling window and graced us with care as the day began its regular routine. I got out of bed to freshen up in the bathroom and, as usual, by the time I was coming out, Kelly was already on her way to the shower and making herself beautiful. By that point clothes had become a happily forgotten memory around the house (we each had bath robes hanging in the closet by the front door, just in case somebody came by unexpectedly), so we very rarely wasted time on getting dressed except on special occasions. Breakfast was quick and simple oatmeal and, when we'd finished eating and putting the dishes away, Kelly was bright-eyed with anticipation. "So what's the first exercise in my training?" she asked as we settled onto the living room sofa.

"Right," I said, happily noting how her nipples were stiff and crinkled in the brisk morning air. It wasn't cold, thanks to the built-in insulation provided by the earth heaped around the house's outer walls, but the temperature was enough to give us goose-pimples sometimes. "First, we focus on your concentration."

"How's that?"

I held up the remote to the sound system. "With this. I'm going to turn on the stereo as loud as possible, so loud that we can't hear ourselves talk, and when I give you a nod, I want you to try and concentrate on going into The Fold."

Kelly gave me a skeptical look, but shrugged. "Okay," she said. "Sounds a little mundane to me, but I'm game. But first, I'd like to know how this exercise is going to help."

"Fair enough. The world offers all kinds of distractions- noises, sensations, movement. Part of what we do requires us to concentrate. If we can't focus, then we can't Flip. You have to learn how to filter everything out."

"Okay," she replied. "And what then? Once I learn concentration, what comes next?"

I wagged a finger at her. "Ta-ta," I said warningly. "One step at a time, my dear. If I tell you what comes next you might start focusing on that instead of the task at hand, which only proves my point: you need to concentrate."

Kelly crossed her arms under the bountiful breasts, making them jiggle slightly with the effort, and pouted. "Spoilsport."

I chose to ignore that while my cock, ever vigilant to respond to anything even remotely erotic these days due to my youthful exuberance inspired by The Fold, stirred at the sight of my daughter's bosoms wobbling softly. I chose to ignore that, too. "And so we begin," I said without fanfare. With the press of a button, industrial "music" filled the room. I'd already cranked the volume knob up, so the sounds coming out of the speakers were so blaringly loud that we both jerked with surprise. Kelly immediately cupped her ears with her hands, her eyebrows knit in frustration, and tried to say something to me above all the racket. It was no use. Sitting just two feet away from her, I couldn't hear a word she said. Again, she tried to say something, but I simply looked at her and gave a nod of my head. Her mouth opened up once more in protest, but she snapped it shut as she realized that saying anything would do her no good. I watched her for a few seconds as she tried to tune out the din that was blaring from the surround-sound speaker system. Finally, after about a minute, she disappeared from sight and tapped me on the shoulder from behind me.

I quickly turned off the "music" and smiled up at her. "Very good!" I said. "Now sit down next to me again and we'll try it some more. When you can do it within a few seconds we'll move on to the next step."

It took seven more tries before she finally got it down to two seconds between me turning on the stereo and her going into The Fold. When she sat down after the seventh time, she said, "Okay. So what's next?"

I pressed another button on the remote, moving to the next disc in the CD changer, and said, "More of the same," as I pressed the Play button.

The look on her face at that was priceless and I'm glad that I couldn't hear what she was saying because I'm certain that it was far from lady-like, but she resigned herself to the situation and managed to go into The Fold despite the loud outpourings from Tori Amos. Five attempts earned her an earful of Vivaldi. Eight attempts earned her Van Halen. And just two attempts brought us both some blessed silence. By the time we were done, two hours had elapsed and Kelly seemed to have a fairly good grasp on the concentration-through-noise exercise.

It took about a week of testing her reflexes (throwing a basketball at her), physical discomfort (tickling) and multi-tasking (running and then going into The Fold in mid-step) before I declared her fit to work on her own. But her training wasn't complete until I was absolutely certain that she could bring, at first, inanimate objects into The Fold with her and then other lifeforms (insects first and then mice that I'd bought at the local pet store). By the time we were completely through, almost a month later, Kelly could perform at the same level of expertise as me and could even bring me along with her. She kept railing against me the whole time, questioning every exercise that I could devise, but she never gave up, which kept me proud of her. The days were spent getting her prepared for The Big Game (that's what I called our first foray into criminal ass-kicking) and the nights were consumed with limitless amounts of sex and love-making.

The sex, I must admit, was always good. I oftentimes felt like running out into the streets and shouting at the top of my lungs, "I'm fucking my daughter and we both love it!" Naturally, I never actually followed through with that impulse, but it was frequently there. The funny thing about our arrangement was that, while I never once stopped considering her as my daughter, our "cover" as husband-and-wife began to take on a very real life of its own. She cooked for me, I provided security for her; she cleaned and I tinkered around the house; she nagged after me to do things and I studiously ignored her nagging (while still doing the things she asked of me, of course)... and there was a level of intimacy that developed over time that only a married couple can know.

Subtle things, like knowing what drink your spouse will order when the waiter comes and they're in the latrine or how to maneuver around their personal quirks in the morning routine. She still called me "Dad" or "Daddy" and I still thought of her as my daughter, the beautiful baby girl that I'd changed diapers and mended wounded knees for, but under it all was the unspoken love that two people share for each other which is aside from the love of a father and daughter. Even our lovemaking changed over time to something less than eager lust and more than fleeting romance. There was a sense of permanence to our relationship now and I found myself never wanting to lose it.

Practically speaking, I knew that I was significantly older than her and that, eventually, I wouldn't be able to keep up with her, but I never got the sense that she cared about those things. In her mind, it seemed, I was her Man and she needed to be with me, no matter what. I occasionally pointed out younger handsome men when we went out, but she barely registered them and seemed not to care. She only had eyes for me, her father, and didn't seem to be in any hurry to change things. On the one hand, this flattered and humbled me a great deal, but on the other, it gave me pause. I was concerned that my little girl would find herself alone, sooner rather than later, and wouldn't allow herself to grow as a normal woman should in Life. I never spoke of these concerns to her because, frankly, I didn't think she'd appreciate them, but they still niggled at the back of my mind some nights. At the end of the day, however, I only wanted Kelly to be happy and, for that time, she appeared to be utterly blissful with joy and peace.

Our forays into crime-fighting, too, were rather mundane in the grand scheme of things. Of course we were jazzed with our first few outings, and the money we netted was spectacular ($200,000 in less than a month is nothing to scoff at and by the time we were through we'd amassed another $2.6 million with our vigilante proceeds), but after a few weeks of our adventures, it began to feel less like an adventure and more like a job. The news services got wind of what was happening, with no explanations I might add, and that satisfied us a great deal. Things cranked up a notch when we started to focus our attention on local politicians and corrupt civil servants, naturally. Word began to spread that our city was to be avoided for the criminal elements, which was our ultimate goal. But despite every victory and flawless triumph, things still seemed to ring a bit hollow. Months passed, crime rates dropped like a rock and we suddenly found ourselves both financially richer and paradoxically less busy.

Crime had dropped so low in our area that, for all intents and purposes, we were left with virtually nothing to do or combat except our own boredom. On the one hand it was a blessing to be rid of such prevalent crime in our area, but on the other it was a bit of a let-down. Politicians resigned, crime bosses left town, corrupt police got imprisoned... everything we could have hoped for and more, really, resulted from our efforts, but it left us wanting in the long run. After almost a year of crime-fighting and baffling everyone on the planet, we decided to initiate Phase Three: retirement. By then Kelly was twenty-two, but neither of us really looked our age because the effects of The Fold kept us young and vital.

And even the decision to retire had an undercurrent of lack-luster enthusiasm. Instead of going out to a posh restaurant for celebration, we elected to stay at home and cook dinner for ourselves. The meal itself was nice and it was elegant, in a homey sort of way, but it wasn't anything to write home about. December 13, 2010 was the day that we retired from making the lives of every criminal in our area miserable and, in the end, it was destined to end in elation. As we finished consuming our desert that evening (cheesecake that had been imported from New York which, admittedly, was a bit of a splurge), Kelly said in an manner as though she would announce that she wanted to get a new shirt, "I think I want to have a baby." She got up from her seat, dessert plate in hand, came over to my place at the dinner table and retrieved mine for me. "I'll take these to the sink and be back in a few minutes."

And there she left me, for the longest five minutes of my life, to ruminate on this bombshell that she'd just dropped on me. My mind was awhirl with all kinds of conflicting emotions and thoughts on the matter. She wanted to have a child? I considered the problem in as detached a manner as I could manage at the time. Okay. Let's face it: she's not getting any younger and probably doesn't want to wait until she's thirty to start having kids. That's reasonable and perfectly natural. But I presumed that she meant that she wanted to have a child with ME, which was a bit of sticky point. Intellectually, I knew that it COULD be done; lots of other people in the past have had incestuous children before with no maladies or deformations at all. Statistically speaking, the chances of having a healthy baby with my daughter were upwards of 90%, if the geneticists were to be believed. But why me and not someone closer to her age who could keep up with both her and a child? By the time the child turned 18 I'd be well into my sixties, for crying out loud! But, then again, why NOT me? I was the only significant male in her life (unless you count the post man and he'd barely exchanged ten words with us since we moved into our new home), I have proven countless times that I love her, I have just as much vested interest in keeping her time-stopping ability a secret as I do about mine, and I was wealthy enough to provide a comfortable life to our child. The whole incest issue, from a societal point of view, was nothing to worry about- we'd indulged in incest for so long that, by now, we weren't worried about it and no one knew that she was my daughter anyway so nobody could cry foul.

So the only negatives to her proposal were the potential health risks to the baby and my age (which, honestly, really wasn't that much of an issue thanks to the rejuvenating effects of going into The Fold). I thought about it a bit more. Was it worth the risk, just to make my daughter happy and give her a baby? Children with congenital health problems are born to non-related couples often enough- Parkinson's Disease, Downs Syndrome, hemophilia, hemochromotosis... those were all common genetic disorders which appeared in "normal" babies all the time. Being her father, I knew that Kelly suffered from no such disorders and neither did anyone on my side of the family tree. So I guessed that the chances are very good that any child I sired with my daughter would be healthy and fit as can be.

Kelly came back into the living room and took a seat caddy-corner from mine. She took one of my hands in hers and said, "Of all the people I know, Dad, you're the best man I've ever met. Any guy I ever meet will always be compared to you, consciously or unconsciously. We've had this wonderful relationship for almost three years now and I know that I can trust you in every possible way. So why go looking for water when I'm standing right next to the well, right? Dad... will you be the father of my children?"

My back stiffened and I fixed my daughter with wide eyes. "Children? Plural?"

A wisp of a smirk formed on her beautiful lips. "Well, a girl can hope, can't she?"

I took a deep breath and focused on calming my heart, which was racing considerably at the notion that I may be a father yet again. "Are you absolutely SURE that you want this?" I asked her.

The sly grin spread quickly into a full smile and my heart melted at the sight of it. "Listen, Dad, as far as the outside world knows, you're my husband. Don't husbands and wives end up having children eventually?"

"Well, sure, but-"

"What?" she cut me off. "Are you worried that we'd make ugly babies together?" She leaned over to me and planted a soft, loving and yet deeply passionate kiss on my lips which, for a fleeting moment, left me feeling whimsical and dreamy.

I shook my head, however, and found my wits. "Of course not, Kitten. Any child that you and I produce will undoubtedly be beautiful and a true gift to the world."

"Then why hesitate?" she asked reasonably.

At that I looked down at our hands, which were still intertwined on the dinner table, and found that I didn't have a good answer to her question. So I looked back up at her, a smile on my face, and asked, "So when do we begin?"

Kelly squeal liked a little girl but quickly got herself under control. "That's my daddy," she whispered with joy on her face. I could literally feel the love flowing out of her hands and into mine as she said it. But, suddenly, she seemed to draw up short and grew somber.

"What?" I asked. "What is it?"

Her look became bashful and she wouldn't look me in the eye anymore. "Dad, I have a small confession to make. But, in light of our decision, I hardly see how it makes any difference now..."

As I studied her, I felt a growing unease develop within my gut as realization began to dawn. I then suspected what she was about to tell me. "Ohhhh, Kelly... you didn't."

"Well, the thing is, Dad, I kinda guessed what your reaction would be, so... yeah... uhm... I stopped taking my birth control about two weeks ago." She slowly brought her eyes up to meet mine again and said, even more softly, "Right about now I should be fertile as a turtle."