How They May Be

"That's true," I chuckled quietly. "But that was a long time ago, when you were a lot smaller."

"Oh, I see how it is," she pretended to be offended, turning her gaze away from me crossly. "You're saying I'm too fat to be picked up now. Is that it?"

"Fat like a fashion model, maybe." A genuine laugh, now. "I wish I could, sweetie, but your dad's not as strong as he used to be."

Emily turned back to face me, an amused half-smile on her lips, and said pleasantly "I don't believe you, daddy." Reaching up, her hand casually brushed at my chest, squeezed my bicep through the fabric of my shirt. "I mean, you feel plenty strong enough to me."

"Well..." I preened, a surge of crudely masculine pride washing over me at the compliment. I wasn't sure what to say, but refusal no longer seemed like an option. For a few seconds, Emily just stared up at me, eyebrow raised with an artfully expectant look, until finally I grinned back at her. "All right, I'll give it a shot. But you'll have to call the ambulance if I break my back." One arm thrust beneath her back, another hooked under her knees, and I swung her into the air with a grunt of exertion while she giggled and kicked her legs delightedly.

I was struck first by how easy it was, surprised at how light she felt in my arms. Perhaps I shouldn't have been. Being near Emily had always invigorated me, and that effect had only become more dramatic in the past week. I felt so alive around her, so vital, as though she lent her youth and her energy to the tired blood in my veins; in the face of that strength, she seemed to mass little more than a feather, and I hardly strained to lumber with her to the staircase.

It should have been a reformative pretense, casting her in the role of a child again, with me putting her innocently to bed. But baser thoughts stirred in my mind, aroused by our contact on the couch, and by the way her head now nestled at the crook of my neck, breathing warm and moist upon my skin. I was put in mind not of Emily's childhood but of my wedding night, of carrying Irene in just this manner across the threshold to our hotel suite, and of the pleasures we shared thereafter. It did not help that Emily had taken so much after her mother. Those eyes, yes, soulful and beguiling, but also the shape of her face, the ears just slightly oversize, the slim, seductive body that pressed against me as I carried her. Emily's rear rubbed with every step at the top of my right leg, perilously near my groin, which stirred and stretched with excitement at the electric tingle of her touch. And, I suddenly realized, I could smell her; the healthy waft of her skin mixed with the fruity medley of her hygiene products and the faint but definite scent of sweat to create a unique perfume, subtly feminine and powerfully compelling. By the time I reached the top of the staircase I was dizzy with desire - I had to hope that she would assume the heaviness of my breathing was merely from the effort of carrying her.

Emily huffed softly as I hitched her up higher, desperate to prevent any stray contact with my growing tumescence. But this had its own danger, as her right breast now was pressed against me, a supple temptation whispering insistently into my flesh. I swear I even felt her nipple through the twin layers of cloth, the fleshy nub sparking fireworks in my mind as I recalled how it had looked, firm and proud from the attentions of that punk I had discovered her with. I could not bear the thoughts, the sensations she evoked in me- she was a hot dish that I had to set down, and I accelerated my pace to something just short of a jog, barreling down the hall and into Emily's room.

In many ways, it still seemed the room of a little girl. Stuffed animals littered the headboard of her bed, bears and rabbits and horses, some picked out of a store and some carefully hand-made items, gifts from my days abroad. She still had her old yellow toybox in the corner of the room, though it looked as though it hadn't been opened in quite a while indeed. The eggshell-white walls were a better marker of her development. Once they had been littered with pictures of bubblegum pop singers, all she used to listen to, but in recent years these had been replaced by posters for alternative rock groups, art prints, and a collage of photographs of her and her friends. Against the far wall, an easel sat holding a half-finished watercolor of a garden vista, passably done. She'd decided some four years ago that she wanted to be an artist, and would occasionally engage in a flurry of painting for a week or two before forgetting about it for months. I thought she had real potential, but could never bring myself to enforce the kind of discipline she needed for serious practice.

But my attention then was not on my surroundings. Flicking on the light switch with my elbow, I tossed Emily to bounce twice on her queen-sized bed and come to rest with an intoxicating smile, blissfully unaware of the tempestuous desires that roiled in my heart as I gazed upon her form. Oh, but she looked beautiful there, long legs askew, hair delightfully disarrayed, clothing rumpled and begging for a man's hand to remove it. Only belatedly did I recall how my arousal was on display, and I turned about to sit at the foot of her bed before she could notice the suspicious bulge at the top of my slacks.

"And you said you couldn't carry me." Emily accused playfully, sitting up on the bed while I watched her over my shoulder. "You were practically running there."

"Well, I...I didn't think I could," I explained lamely, struggling by sheer force of will to lose my erection. "You're a lot lighter than I expected. But, ah, I hope you don't mind if I take a minute here to catch my breath."

"Of course not, daddy," she answered in a bemused tone, as though surprised I even bothered to ask. In truth it was a bit unusual, as we normally treated one another's rooms as public property. It was only in the face of my attraction to Emily that I had started to feel as though hers was a private place, that I had no business being there. There was a fugitive thrill even just sitting on her bed, in being so close to where she lay down in the serene elegance of sleep.

Such thoughts, though, did not help my predicament. I faced away from her, my body still groaning with desire, aching to reach back and grab hold of the delicious girl behind me. Merely trying to wish it away did not much help. Recalling the advice of the priest, I closed my eyes to mouth a silent prayer. Almighty God, take pity on your humble creature, and help me to banish these lusts that...

The words died on my lips as I felt Emily scoot up close behind me, leaning against my back as she straddled her legs outside mine. Her head came to rest comfortably on my shoulder, and her hands snaked under my arms to loosely entwine at my stomach - I almost cried out, feeling again the soft peaks of her breasts pressing into my back. But she was heedless of her effect on me as she spoke beside my ear, her voice uncommonly circumspect. "So, um, I was thinking."

My throat felt painfully dry, but I croaked out "What's that, pumpkin?"

"What if I didn't go away to college?" I could feel her body tense up with the question, an infinitesimal tightening of her arms around me. "What if I just stayed here?"

I was silent for a time, uncertain, ill-equipped to focus my attention on serious questions when distracted by the heady glow of her embrace. "I don't think I understand, honey," I finally answered, cautiously. "You got into Berkeley and Brown. Around here, there's what, a couple of community colleges?"

"No, I know. I didn't even mean..." She hesitated, and I glanced back over my shoulder, her dark, troubled eyes not quite meeting mine. "I mean, what would you think if I didn't go to college at all? If I stayed here with you instead?"

Again she clutched me nervously, her hands fidgeting at my stomach, and suddenly I thought I understood. A soft explosion of tender pity filled my heart, sharing space there with my attraction. She was afraid of losing me, afraid of leaving me behind, and once more I anguished that I was unworthy of her love. "Oh, Emily," I uttered gently. "Change really hasn't been too kind to you in the past, has it?"

She didn't answer. The question didn't really need one. "I - for me, sweetie, I would be overjoyed if you stayed here forever. There's nothing in the world that makes me happier than having you around." A trifle too much truth in that. "But for you, I'd be disappointed. College is important, both for your future career and as an experience. It's where you really start to build an independent life for yourself. I'd be remiss as a father if I let you...if I didn't encourage you, as much as I could, to go."

My abdomen still felt the delicate flutter of her hands - I reached down blindly and comfortingly clasped them in my own, enveloping them in my far larger grip and holding them warmly as her small tremors faded away. "Honey, I know it feels like a huge step, and I know that can be scary. But when you head out there into the world, you're going to have such a great life that you won't even think to miss me." It hurt to say it. Now more than ever I hated the thought of her leaving, my fatherly feeling of loss blended with a lover's desperation at being abandoned. The prospect of coming home to an empty house, of having no one to brighten my mornings, filled me with a silent, aching dread. Not to see her adorable face. To hear her only as a voice on the telephone. She had become such an integral part of my life, it was like imagining a world without color, joyless and grey.

Emily smiled half-heartedly and shook her head, her chin rubbing against my shoulder. "That's pretty hard for me to believe, daddy." Her voice was soft and intimate, almost whispering into my ear. "There's not many ways I can think of for my life to be better than it is right now."

"Well, all the same," I maintained weakly, feeling the tiny prick of affectionate tears welling in my eyes. Words came only with difficulty - I was drunk on her touch, muddle-headed with the finest vintage of woman I could name. "I just know there's some magic waiting for you. Call it - call it a father's intuition."

"Okay, daddy." There was the slightest air of the patronizing in her voice, of indulgence for her father's foolishness. But it came with so gentle a smile that I could not dream to take offense. A beat passed, an inhalation of breath, and she asked simply, "Goodnight kiss?"

I knew even in that very moment that I must not kiss her, that I could not hope to maintain this façade of a dutiful parent if my lips met hers even for an instant. But knowledge was not strength, and I was lost when I saw her lips pursed, moist and alluring with anticipation. As a moth to the flame I leaned in, planted upon them a kiss that was born of passion, an echo of those I had given my wife so many years ago. Emily was soft and yielding in all the delightful ways a girl could be; her lips squeezed gently beneath mine, slippery and sweet with the flavor of strawberry lip gloss. The kiss was like a snapshot of heaven - every nerve in my body sang with rapture, thrilled at the pleasure of contact. My hands quivered and reached for her of their own accord, held back only by our awkward positioning on the bed.

I cannot say how long that kiss lasted. Too long, to be sure, but by a second, five seconds, thirty . . . I don't know. Time itself seemed to vanish in the face of the joy I drew from her lips. I cannot say either what I would have done, where I would have stopped, if it were not for the primal sense of moral panic which stepped in and took control of me, wrenching me away from Emily and standing me up on legs that were rubbery and weak with want. I did not risk looking at her again, just choked out a "good night" as I strode from the room as fast as my condition allowed.

I did not pause until I reached my bedroom, and once there I nearly collapsed, my back pressed against the wall, my heart beating like a jackhammer as I slowly slid to the floor. Terror tightened my throat, my muscles straining against each other as though seeking to escape the reality I had just created. I wanted to scream, to protest at the unfairness of it - I had thought myself firmly under control, only for her scent, her touch, her look suddenly to power past my defenses and strengthen my desire until it could not be denied. Worst of all, I still suffered from it, longing to return to Emily's side, to shower kisses and caresses upon her body. I could taste her yet, a luscious poison on my lips, and thought that I felt the beginnings of addiction.

"Oh, merciful God," I prayed under my breath, bereft of other options, my hands clenched desperately together in something like supplication. "I beg you, give me relief from this sinful want. Please," I almost choked with the intensity of the request, "please, I am a wretched creature. I do not have the strength on my own to resist. I need your help, Lord, if only to protect my daughter. I beg you. I beg you."

I spent some minutes there against the wall silently repeating those three words, my eyes firmly shut, waiting for an answer, for a change in my feelings. For anything, really. But the heavens were deaf to my prayers. Emily still held the center stage in my mind, still damned me with memories of curves and kisses that inflamed the Id. Once again I despairingly wondered what I had done to bring this upon myself, what I could do now to escape it. Was I not yet humbled enough? Was my faith too weak? I cannot deny that I contemplated a third possibility, that if God even existed He didn't give a damn about one man's perverse attraction to his daughter. That I was alone with my problems in an uncaring universe.

I could not agonize forever. As the minutes passed, my horror weathered into a duller malaise, and I found that I could breathe again. The situation, of course, was not at all improved, but it was what it was, and there was little I could do to change it. I briefly contemplated returning to Emily to explain myself, to apologize, before discarding the idea. I couldn't stomach telling her of my feelings, and without that, there was nothing I could say. Instead I crawled miserably into bed, longing for the relief of oblivion to remove me from my troubles.

Frustratingly, even this was denied to me. Hot and bothered from my interactions with Emily, I tossed and turned on the bed, unable to rest, and all too soon my mind wandered to dangerous speculations. I wondered what her bosom would feel like in my hands. Her breasts like fleshy teardrops, with just that delightful spongy resilience when pressed against my back. There was nothing quite like breast flesh, really, nothing that captured the feel of it, the deep, animal satisfaction of taking a handful and squeezing it softly, letting it bulge slightly out in the spaces between your fingers. Emily had just the right size to squeeze, I had seen that; enough to get my hand fully around, with nothing wasted. And her nipples, a rich pink, on the verge of red - I could close my eyes and see them in front of me, dangling like Christmas lights. I wanted to lick them, suck them as though I were a nursing infant. I wanted to hear Emily's moans as I stroked her chest with my tongue, attended to her bosom with the reverence it deserved.

God, such thoughts. Conscience gave me a broadside, made me step back. I was painfully erect, my member grinding slowly of its own accord against the mattress as this madness circulated in my brain. I couldn't think these things, not about her. But I couldn't stop, either, couldn't control the libidinous diversions of a tired mind. Or I just wasn't trying hard enough. It hardly seemed to matter which. In my mind I was there on the couch again, my hand at the top of Emily's leg, her head in my lap, staring up at me with that mischievous smirk of hers. As though she knew the effect she had on me, as though she enjoyed it. Here and now I was under no compulsion to move her away; I rubbed at her leg through the rough denim of her jeans, my hand sliding inch by inch inward to where inner thigh met pelvis. Stroking there along the crease of flesh with my index finger, again and again, stoking the fiery heat that poured out from her. My left hand grasped the flesh of her shoulder just inside the collar of her shirt and massaged it roughly, my thumb extending barely across the pale, elegant flesh of her neck. I squeezed softly, and she did not resist - just let out a quick, quiet gasp, tilted her head back further, presenting her throat in a gesture of surrender. My erection throbbed under her, pressed insistently at the top of her spine, only encouraged by the pressure of her head holding it down.

"What are you doing, daddy?" It was barely a question, asked between her suddenly shallow breaths, and I did not immediately answer. My hand slipped off her leg, up and under her blouse, resting with splayed fingers on the warm skin of her stomach. My pinkie slipped beneath her jeans, hiding amidst the downy hairs at the top of her panties; my thumb nestled just at the valley of her breasts. "I'm showing you how much I love you, sweetheart."

Emily hummed in that pleasantly happy way she had, closed her eyes while I dropped my hand lower, turning so the tips of my fingers traced her panties' elastic trim, rubbing it ever so gently against her hidden, velvet flesh. Her murmurs started then, echoes of those that had started me on this path, and she crossed her arms at her chest, a gesture somehow both protective and vulnerable. Then lower still, forcing my hand down the tight waist of her jeans, I cupped her mound through the moistening fabric, rubbing with the bottom of my palm where I felt the hooded bud of her clitoris. And oh, she reacted to that, twitching her hips up to meet my hand, to press herself against my palm all the more firmly. Softly pleasured exhalations escaped her lips, her head thrown back ecstatically in my lap. My left thumb probed at her lips, much as it had that last Friday, but now pressing its way past them into the wet heat of her mouth, where her tongue lapped at it attentively, her teeth nipped it lovingly between her cries.

She looked up at me then, opening her eyes to reveal such love and longing that I almost cried out with want. Her panties were now soaked, my hand sticky with her honey, and with a single motion I slipped it beneath to glide across the dewy black hair of her muff, burning with a sultry heat like swampland in July. I could feel her labial lips, puffed up with blood, so sensitive she moaned uncontrollably when I tickled at them. With a deliberate, teasing slowness I forced my middle finger past these slippery gates and into her slick depths, hooking her like a fish on the line. Even with just my finger she was tight, her legs closing around my hand, squeezing together as though forbidding me to leave. I pulsed my hand insistently against her, fucking her with my finger, and she shuddered with pleasure, twisted spasmodically against me with a groan of transcendental rapture. For a moment her spasms pulled her head off my lap, and my erection finally pushed past her, a conspicuous bulge that her face was quickly pressed up against. Wordlessly, her hand reaching out to grasp with an adorable hesitation at my fly - she looked up at me for a moment, and I saw a question there, nodded ever so slightly. Delicate hands released me from confinement, and my cock rose up proudly, bobbing with my every heartbeat before her wide, hungry eyes.

She looked at it. I looked at her. There was a moment of stillness, of anticipation. And then she bent her head forward and kissed it, right where the foreskin met the glans, a closed-mouthed peck that would have been innocent anywhere else. There was only the barest contact, the slightest pressure, as it fell back before her touch. But it was as erotic a feeling as any I had known, and I tensed my finger inside her, ground my palm against her clit, trying to repay her in kind. A moan opened her mouth, and before it closed again she leaned in and took my cock inside - just the head, just the tip, tickling it with her tongue, her lips sealing in the groove behind it, soft and wet and warm. I couldn't stand it. Ecstasy surged forth irrepressibly as she suckled daintily at my shaft. I held on only long enough for her gaze to lock on to me again, to look at me with those adoring eyes that were mine alone, her gift to me, and I felt myself stiffen and spasm in rapture.