Happenstance Ch. 02

"But you must also know that if we are to continue to live together, our feelings toward each other must remain platonic. There can be nothing of either a romantic or physical connection between us. Besides, I'm fifteen years older than you. You need to find someone your own age to share your love with.

"You're a very attractive young woman, and you must have young men falling over themselves to get your attention. Hell, if things were different, I'd be one of them. But they're not different. Even though I'm not your biological father, I represent a father figure; both perceptively and - because of my previous relationship with your mother - legally. I could end up spending a long time behind bars were we to even think about acting on the feelings you stir up in me when you tease me the way you do.

"I'd hate to lose you so soon after we've reconnected, My Darling Girl, but unless we can live together without all the sexual tension, you'll have to find somewhere else to live."

A tearful Shelley went straight to bed when we arrived home that night, but when she appeared for breakfast the following morning, it seemed my message had been received. Rather than her usual tee shirt, she was wearing a set of loose-fitting sweats.

"You're right, Daddy," she said as she took her usual seat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a plate containing a couple of slices of toast. "I have been behaving like some love-struck adolescent child. But, after thinking about it, I've come to realise that the fault is not entirely mine. You also have to carry a large part of the blame."

"Me?" I asked, surprised. "How am I to blame?"

"Because you are who you are," she answered, her smile belying her accusation. "You are the kindest, most generous, most loving man I have ever met. Despite what Mum did to you, you didn't hesitate to welcome me back into your life when I needed you most. Not only that, but you provided me with a home and showered me with the love and guidance I'd been missing for so long.

"I'd loved you before I was stolen away from you, and that love continued to grow while we were apart. But that was a daughter's love for her father, and it became the yardstick against which I measured my interaction with my biological father. Unfortunately, he didn't meet the standards you had set. And I knew why when, rather than rejecting me when I turned up on your doorstep, you pulled me into your arms, and I felt your love flowing into me. Your welcome was everything I'd dreamed it would be during those years apart. That was when I fell in love with you.

"What I didn't take into account was the possibility that you didn't feel the same way about me."

"It isn't that I don't love you, Sweetheart," I responded. "It's that I can't love you in the way you want to be loved. There are just too many other factors that must be taken into account; not the least of which is the moral aspect of our relationship.

"I understand that you might be infatuated with me, but our past father-daughter interaction means that in the eyes of the law, I'm still seen as your stepfather. That makes anything other than a continuation of that arrangement impossible.

"If we can't stay within the bounds that imposes on us, we will have to take a serious look at whether or not we can continue to live under the same roof. Even if I were willing to indulge your fantasies, there are too many people who know of our present and past living arrangements - I'm speaking here of your grandmother and mother - who would take great delight in seeing me carted off to the calaboose because I couldn't control myself."

I don't know whether Shelley saw through my non-denial denial, but she agreed to moderate her behaviour and, as she had done that morning, dressed less provocatively when we were together.

The downside of the lessening of the sexual tension that had existed between us up to that point was the reduction of the affection we displayed towards each other. Although we still hugged from time to time and kissed each other on the cheek when we left the house each morning and arrived home at night, we no longer cuddled up together on the lounge. I missed that; more than I could have imagined.

She'd occasionally forget herself, however, and would turn up for breakfast in her sleepwear. That was when I realised she'd not given up on wearing my tee shirts to bed. After giving me a good morning hug, she'd suddenly become aware of her state of undress and would scurry back to her room to slip into something less revealing. It didn't happen often, but often enough to remind me what it felt like to have her breasts pressed into my chest.

Whether by accident or design, her occasional lapses of decorum had their desired effect. Fortunately, by the time she arrived back at the table wearing something more appropriate, my reaction to her 'inadvertent' dress mistake had subsided, and I would be enjoying bacon and eggs while thinking about what might happen if I were to ever allow my latent desire to override my self-control.

---oooBJSooo---

Shelley passed her first-semester final exams with flying colours, repeating the high passes she'd earned in her mid-terms; thus ensuring an offer of an internship with my newspaper during the long Christmas break. Acting on the terms of our agreement, she accepted an invitation from one of the young reporters to accompany him to the firm's Christmas party.

Apart from my managing editor, no one was aware of any connection between Shelley and me - and even he wasn't aware of our familial relationship - so I stayed out of sight when her young man came to the house to pick her up. He had no idea that when Shelley yelled out, "Goodbye, Daddy", she was talking to someone who could destroy his career if he put a foot wrong. Of course, I would also be attending the function, so any misstep on his part would be noted and dealt with should the need arise. He turned out to be the perfect gentleman, though, and his plus-one was delivered home safe and sound. He received a brief kiss on the cheek for his efforts.

A similar hug and a kiss on the cheek were what I was expecting when Shelley and I joined thousands of others on the banks of the city's river to welcome the new millennium on New Year's eve. As one would expect for such an occasion, it was a huge event, with barges and all the city's bridges loaded with fireworks of every kind. What wasn't expected, however, was the passion in the kiss I received from my companion when the clock struck midnight and the fireworks were ignited.

I'm sure that had we been drinking - which we hadn't because of the ban on alcohol in the public park - that kiss would have been enough to break my resolve. It didn't help that Shelley was pressing her body so tightly to mine that it would have taken the jaws of life to separate us. As it was, it took every ounce of self-control I possessed to resist my desire to lay her down on our blanket and give her what she wanted... what, I had to admit, we both wanted. But as our tongues untangled and our lips parted, I knew I had to keep a tight rein on the yearning that was growing within me for the forbidden fruit she was offering. And it had nothing to do with the fact that we were surrounded by people.

I saw the sadness cloud her eyes as I pushed her away from me. Instinctively, I pulled her back into my chest, trying - but failing, I'm sure - to avoid allowing her to feel my arousal as I comforted her.

"I'm sorry, Daddy," she said quietly. "But I've wanted to do that since you first welcomed me back into your life. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing brought on by the excitement of the occasion. I won't let it happen again."

Driven by the guilt I felt for my own lustful thoughts, I remained silent while I packed up our picnic basket and folded our blanket.

She stuck by her word, and, apart from a short period of awkwardness, our lives returned to normal; including the occasional memory lapse when she'd turn up for breakfast in one of my tee shirts.

Our truce was an uneasy one, however. That kiss had stirred something in both of us that couldn't be extinguished. I knew it was only a matter of time before we would either go our separate ways or we would consummate our feelings for each other. I thought the former would be the case when Shelley started spending more nights away from home than she had done in the past. I assumed she had taken my advice and had found someone closer to her own age with whom to share her affection.

My response was to do the same thing, resulting in my spending more time with one or two of my lady friends. It was petty, I knew, but I needed to rid myself of my sexual frustrations without giving in to my growing desire to step outside my own moral limits.

By November of that year, Shelley had finished her exams and was looking forward to starting an internship with the local office of the country's national television broadcaster when, on a Friday night, we were hit by a series of intense storm cells that were predicted to sit over the city for a couple of days, bringing with them heavy rain and large hailstones.

I was lying in bed listening to the rolling thunder, remembering how scared Shelley had been of storms when she was younger and wondering how she was coping with the one currently raging above us. We hadn't had storms like these for a few years, and the less intense ones we'd had the previous year hadn't seemed to worry her.

'She must be scared shitless,' I was thinking, just as I heard a knock on my bedroom door.

"Daddy," she pleaded, "can I come and climb into bed with you? These storms are frightening me."

"Of course you can, Baby Girl," I answered, turning down the empty side of the bed. I could see she was shivering as she entered the room. I also noted that she was wearing another of my tee shirts. It didn't hide much, I saw, as she was silhouetted against the light from her own bedroom.

'Oh, shit!' I shouted silently to myself as she lifted the cover and prepared to slide in beside me. It had suddenly occurred to me that, as was always the case during the warmer months, I was as naked as the day I'd been born.

"Um, Sweetheart," I said. "Would you mind reaching into the second drawer of my dresser and grabbing a pair of sleep shorts and a tee shirt for me? It seems you've caught me in my birthday suit."

Shelley screamed as my request was drowned out by a loud clap of thunder exploding directly overhead. She dived beneath the doona and threw herself into my arms. Ignoring my own predicament, I held her close as the storm erupted around us.

When her shivering had subsided and she appeared to have drifted off to sleep, I attempted to extract myself from her grip so I could retrieve my sleepwear. As I moved to slide out of her embrace, however, her arms tightened around me.

"Don't leave me, Daddy," she murmured when she felt me move. "I need you to hold me."

As uncomfortable as I felt, with her lithesome body pressed so firmly against mine, with only the thin material of her tee shirt between us, I relented and, while struggling to keep my erotic thoughts at bay, I slipped into an uneasy sleep.

I was woken by Shelley's quiet moaning the next morning. As my brain began to fight through the fog of an erotic dream, I found that she had rolled over during the night and was now lying with her back spooned against my chest. As if they had minds of their own, my hands were playing with pair of the firmest breasts a man could possibly imagine.

Even though they were outside the tee shirt, her nipples were so prominent that they nestled between my first and second fingers, which I was using to squeeze and stretch them as I massaged the firm but supple flesh of each breast that fitted neatly into my cupped palms. Suddenly realising what I was doing, I reluctantly forced my brain to instruct my hands to release their hold.

"Don't stop, Daddy," she begged, raising her hands to prevent mine from loosening their grip on her perfectly sculpted orbs. I could feel her elongated nipples being stretched and twisted as I fought to pull away from her while she fought equally hard to keep them in place. "I'm almost there."

As she breathlessly uttered those words, I discovered that playing with her breasts wasn't my only sin. Her shirt must have ridden up as she'd rolled over in her sleep, and my rock-hard morning erection had found its way between her legs and, as if on auto-pilot, was sliding backwards and forwards along her well-lubricated slit, rubbing its head against her clitoris on every forward stroke. I had never considered myself to be overly well endowed, but I was obviously long enough to reach her sensitive nub from behind.

'No! No! No!' I told myself as I tried to pull away from her. 'This can't be happening.'

But it also appeared that my girth was enough for her to hold me tightly in her crotch gap, which she did when I tried to extricate myself from between her strong athletic thighs.

'At least I'm not inside her,' I thought as I gave up my struggle and, after a brief pause, resumed my efforts. I knew I was as close to coming as she was.

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" she yelled as she began shuddering through her climax.

That was enough for me, and I let out a long groan as, with one final stroke, I felt my climax hit. I pulled back a little as my sperm erupted between her legs, adding my ejaculant to the lubrication and juices she had generated during the breaking of our self-imposed abstinence.

We both lay perfectly still, with my hands gripping her breasts and my unflagging shaft buried between her thighs while we caught our breath.

"Thank you, Daddy," Shelley said as she sat up and removed her nightshirt before turning to face me. The feeling of my penis sliding from between her legs and along her buttock crack as she turned was painfully exquisite.

"That was so much better than me satisfying myself while picturing you doing it. But as good as my imagination might be, I have to admit that none of my fantasies came close to the real thing. And what we did wasn't even the real, real thing. I can't wait to find out what that feels like."

I was torn. Lying there and looking up at her, I couldn't avoid admiring the beautiful breasts I'd just been playing with. It was the first time I'd been able to observe them exposed in all their glory. Having only seen them hidden behind the fabric of her shirt, I had never noticed that her long, dark, delectable nipples sat proudly on little hillocks that raised them above the flesh of her pale mounds; little hillocks that highlighted her areolae, which were only slightly lighter than her nipples. I desperately wanted to get my lips around them and find out how she reacted to my giving them a good tongue lashing.

On the other hand, I was consumed by guilt at having allowed myself to step across the line I had drawn in the sand that defined our relationship. I had stepped outside my own moral boundaries by doing what I had done.

"This can't go any further," I said, rolling onto my back and pulling myself up to sit with my back against the bed's headboard.

"We've spoken about this before, My Darling. If we haven't already done so, we would be committing incest if we were to take things to the next level. So far as I am concerned, I am your father, and you are my daughter. And that has been the case since you came to live with me when your mother and I decided to move in together."

"But that's just the thing," Shelley said. "You were never my father. You might have been a father figure - and I will always think of you as my Daddy - but you were never my father; neither biologically nor legally.

"While there may have been a few people back in those days who thought of you as my stepfather, that was never the case. In any event, all those people - neighbours and such - have moved on. No one currently living in the street knew me when I lived here back then; except, perhaps, for old Mrs Jessup, who suffers from dementia and will soon be moved to a nursing home.

"I know you asked Mum to marry you several times, but the stupid woman refused. And that prevented you from adopting me, as I knew you wanted to do. In hindsight, that was a good thing, both from your point of view - because you didn't have to divorce her when she ran off with Jim Davis - and from my point of view, because it means there is no formal recognition of our earlier relationship."

While speaking, she had moved down the bed and had settled herself with her breasts pressing into my stomach. She had also thrown her right leg over my left, and I could feel her soft pubic hair rubbing against my thigh. The eroticism of the moment was countered, however, by the way she looked up at me as she spoke. It reminded me of when we'd lie together and talk while storms raged outside when she'd been much younger. I found it difficult to reconcile my feelings toward the young woman now lying naked beside me with those paternally protective feelings I'd had for her back then.

My penis had no such qualms, though. While it had partially deflated when I'd been overcome by guilt, the constant rubbing of her flesh against mine and the image of those magnificent breasts in my mouth had brought it back to full attention. It took all my self-control not to come when she reached down and wrapped her long pianist's fingers around it.

"Mmmm," she murmured as, using our combined juices as a lubricant, her hand glided along its length to take its measure. "Now, that's a knife." Her mash-up of the line from the film, Crocodile Dundee, shifted our focus away from the seriousness of the subject under discussion and had us both chuckling.

Her words, and the way she was working my shaft, told me that mine wasn't the first 'knife' she'd handled. But that didn't surprise me. She'd once told me she'd found ways to satisfy her boyfriends without going 'all the way', so I didn't expect it would have been. I hadn't for a moment imagined that she'd been playing cards or studying with her fellow students on all those nights she'd stayed away from home during the past couple of years; as I'm sure she didn't imagine I'd been drinking beer and playing pool with my mates when I'd spent nights away.

It became obvious when Shelley released her grip on my now painfully rigid rod that she wanted my ejaculant somewhere other than where it would end up if she continued her masturbatory attention. Pulling her hand away, she threw her leg over my body and slid upwards, locking her lips to mine in a repeat of the kiss we'd shared the previous New Year's Eve. Her new position resulted in the helmeted head of my penis being comfortably nestled in the flowing lips of her vaginal slit. It would have taken only a slight thrust for my blade to enter her scabbard, but I decided to let her drive the action. After all, if what she had inferred was correct, I was bigger than anything she'd experienced in the past.

While we'd been tongue-jousting, she'd been wriggling her body to get my penis lined up with the entrance to her vagina, which told me she had gone past the point of no return. She wanted me inside her, and nothing I said would change her mind. Mind you, I had no intention of trying to change her mind. I, too, had passed the point of no return and wanted to be inside her as much as she wanted me there.

"I need you to claim me as your woman, Daddy," Shelley said after breaking our kiss. With that, she raised herself by placing her hands on my chest and, pushing herself backwards, forcing the bell end of my penis past her tight entrance. As soon as it had passed through her gateway, she began shuddering and collapsed onto my chest, convulsing in the throes of an explosive orgasm.