Incest, He Wrote Pt. 01

Incest, He Wrote

I realized that Rose was sexually active one Saturday in July, that last summer before she was to leave for college. My daughter and her best friend Callie were giving off all the signs and I was bemused and a little sad.

It didn't bother me a bit that she was with a girl. Auburn-haired Callie was a great friend - smart, bright-eyed and sleek as an otter. Rose and Callie swam on the same team in high school and they'd been BFFs since fifth grade, virtually sisters. It meant I was losing her a little quicker, though. After it being just the two of us for the eight years since her mother'd died, I was facing an empty house in September. I hadn't expected her to pull away this early in the summer but I couldn't begrudge her a romance. Or a sexual awakening. Callie would be a safe first lover. I'd been dreading the boyfriend challenge, but Rose had been too busy, she said, swimming and studying, to try one. It took all of her time to make herself eligible for a Division One scholarship. She'd been awarded by NC State, her first choice, and I liked it, too, since it was an east coast school.

From my second floor office I watched the two girls toasting on the lounges by our pool and saw that they held hands. I noted that their giggles had recently been especially throaty and private. There'd been a lot of sleepovers out in the east wing and bleary mornings with them in long sleep shirts in the kitchen as late as noon. Then some grab-ass in the pool. Yeah, they were getting it on, I was certain.

Their affectionate touching was a welcome distraction from my faltering effort to finish my seventh novel. I didn't have any New York Times bestsellers yet, but made enough to live on comfortably, better than most writers, and I'm grateful. Still, I had an August 31st deadline and an impatient editor. I wondered if my inability to bring the latest adventure of detective Brett Highland to a satisfying conclusion was a result of my angst over Rose leaving or just early-onset Alzheimers. When you're forty-one and can't seem to string a snappy volley of dialogue together you have these kinds of doubts.

I had written deep into the night and slept late, as I often do. The girls...pardon me, young women, as they insist I refer to them...probably thought I was still snoring in my bed, but I'd had an idea that needed to get into the story. This being the southern Georgia coast it wasn't unusual for them to be by the pool at 9 am on this last summer, browning face-down in the sun topless, no straps to disfigure their glistening backs. Both girls wore the new thongs that they'd dared each other to buy, the thin canary-yellow strips joined by a shiny, gold ring at the tailbone. Their nut-brown glutes shone firm and round.

Over the years of hauling Rose to swim meets and practices I'd seen her in a speedo so often that her exposed body didn't register with my libido. My job as father was to raise her into an independent and capable, self-directed adult. I appreciated that she was achingly attractive, her short blond hair and swim-muscled body many boys' wet dream. But whatever firewall existed in my brain kept my own lust directed to other women. I dated some, but over Rose's teenage years I'd not found anyone we could both settle with. Rose and I had a shared mission, since she was fully on board with becoming an adult (and a national class, maybe even olympic, swimmer at the same time). It would take an exceptional woman to make it worth disrupting our life. Fortunately, Callie's stepmother had taken my daughter under her wing and provided the feminine skills I lacked. It was a tremendous help that our two families could share the burden of the swim meet schedule. Being self employed was a big plus, too.

I couldn't help but notice the extra flesh exposed by the thongs. I can't say it had zero effect on me. I sighed over page two-hundred thirty-seven and looked to the photo on my desk. In it, my late wife and I cuddled newborn Rose.

"Honey," I said, "our little girl's growing up. You'd be proud at how well she's doing, how beautiful she is. Smart, too. Confident. A lot like you at that age." Aileen and I had been married right out of college and had Rose within the year. We'd settled down to a normal life and checked all the expected boxes. We worked, she in an environmental non-profit, me in advertising, writing on the side. We got a house in a good school district and put in a pool with my first book's paycheck. There was a second child on the way when a drunk driver took Aileen from us. "Honey," I was misty-eyed now, "If you were here we could send her off together and have each other to keep this house alive."

I shook myself hard. Maudlin thoughts weren't going to get this book done or make the next six weeks any easier. I was determined to make Rose's going away smooth - she was on a new adventure and I was mostly done with my job of raising her. What was I going to do after that? I wasn't sure, but I really had to let her go.

On the page my detective was trying to pin a murder on a playboy billionaire, visiting his Aegean island and verbally fencing with him on the sunlit terrace overlooking his saltwater pool. They say to write what you know. Well, I may not be a world-class detective, but I was looking out at a pool in the sun. With two nearly naked young women beside it. I just wrote what I saw.

Highland makes a feint, baiting the tycoon with calm detachment, then keeps silent. He waits for the oily trust-fund man-boy to find a witty comeback to the fact that his alibi is pure tissue, flimsy as the scraps of cloth on the two sex kittens stretched out below them. Highland appreciates their decorative qualities amidst the tile and pastel stucco excess of the estate. They're soft and brown and warm in a harsh, hard-edged world. The sleek women apply lotion, stroking each other's tanned limbs with a delicate and slow intimacy. The short-haired blond leans over the sleek brunette, her hands roaming down and smoothing the oil into the prone girl's firm behind.

That one turns over, her barely-there breasts pinched with hard nipples, and pulls the blond down into a kiss. The blond's fingers slip under the patch of yellow fabric at her delta and tease there.

I watched Rose and Callie on the lounges as my fingers ran over the keyboard transcribing their lovemaking. Rose's breasts were hidden from me as she leaned over Callie. I heard them laugh, saw her friend writhe under her hands. In my story the women looked up smiling at my detective and his quarry, obviously happy to be playthings of the tycoon.

"You can have one tonight, Highland," says the killer, smugly, I wrote, "or both."

I stopped typing. Callie was looking up at me over Rose's shoulder with smoldering eyes. I snapped back to the real world. What was I letting myself imagine? One of the great things about writing is that you can create any world. But sometimes thoughts lead from one idea to another and take you to strange places. Was it because Rose was sexually active that these thoughts appeared? Did seeing them pleasure each other weaken my firewall? Why was Callie so unabashed at my voyeurism? Was she shocked? Thrilled?

All this ran through my mind as Callie and I locked eyes. In a detective story you're inventing clever ways for motive, means and opportunity to make an intriguing puzzle. I didn't look away...was I motivated to have sex with Callie?...with my daughter? Suddenly my brain was contemplating the crime of a three-way with Rose and her best friend. I had the means - a throbbing cock of hot steel in my sweats. The opportunity...oh my god, part of my brain was calculating how easy it would be to get alone with them, one or both.

I watched them caress each other in the sun as Rose brought her girlfriend to orgasm. Callie kept my gaze until her eyes rolled up in her head and she shuddered and whimpered to my daughter's fingers. That girl I'd known for years gave me a look that sounded in my head like, "you can have one tonight"... I turned back to my keyboard and hoped that if I pretended this hadn't happened that Callie would too. Of course I had to keep it a fantasy. No way I would let my writer's unbridled imagination translate to action in the real world. Detective Highland, on the other hand, did spend several blissful hours on page two-hundred forty with those two sex kittens as the sun dripped slowly down the Mediterranean sky.

**************

As you can imagine, I had strict rules for Rose about alcohol. That is, I knew it would be worse if I tried to prevent it altogether, but I insisted she never get in a car with anyone who'd been drinking. At all. That's why I was the designated driver sitting at the curb outside the suburban party three cul-de-sacs over that same Saturday night around 1 am. I drove over when she texted and, not unusually, she kept me waiting. So I popped open the safe folder on my phone and looked at some of my favorite porn vids.

I'd saved one earlier and I watched it then, taking time to appreciate the effort at a plot (I could have done better) and the performers' efforts at acting (one pretty good, the other two comically bad). I could almost believe it when the two sisters snuck into their brother's bathroom and teased him about the size of his equipment. Of course, complete suspension of disbelief was engaged as they spent the next twenty minutes trying all the basic and some of the more exotic sexual positions. I kept a hand on my jeans, kneading my own equipment in anticipation of rubbing one out later at home to visions of slim young things bouncing on my balls.

The tap on my window startled me and I fumbled to close the vid, slamming the phone face-down on the passenger seat, trying to look nonchalant up into the face of Callie, whose knowing smirk told me I'd failed. "Mr. Bernstrom, Rose's smashed. S...sorry. Bobbie's carryin' her out here."

I looked up and saw the tall boy with Rose draped in his arms crossing the lawn in the moonlight. Unfolding myself from the Outback I turned to him, noticed one of his hands engulfing my daughter's little cotton-clad breast, and I felt the adrenaline hit.

"Paws off her," I spat and the startled boy dropped her into my arms and backed off fast, glad I didn't have a fist free to pop him. Rose hung limp, yet her swimmer's muscles were firm in my embrace.

"Daddy...," she mumbled.

"Did she puke?" I asked, "Smells like it. Good."

"Yeah," Callie said as she opened the back door and I leaned in to stretch my daughter out on the seat. It was awkward and in the effort to slide her in I learned she was still wearing the bright yellow thong under her short denim skirt. Rose was completely gone.

When I dropped into the driver's seat, Callie, sitting shotgun, held out my phone with a sly grin, saying, "Don't feel bad about lookin' at porn, Mr B.'' I turned deep red, the adrenaline and arousal from earlier suddenly diluted with embarrassment. I grabbed the phone, started the car. "It's perfec'ly normal," the young woman smiled.

"You're pretty smashed, yourself," I said and was silent for the careful few minutes to my driveway. As the engine died I glanced at Callie, "Look, I really don't want you to tell Rose..."

"You don't think she knows you're a normal guy?"

"Too personal."

"We talk about you sometimes."

I just looked at the girl. That part of my brain that had clocked the recent sexual behavior of these two noticed what it had blinded itself to before. Callie wore a fine-ribbed, spaghetti-strapped, midriff-baring white top like a second skin. No bra - didn't need one - but her nipples tented the fabric, sharp and thick. The sun-bleached hairs on her tight belly made the brown skin softer. I could see by the thin yellow strings at her hips that she, too, was wearing just the thong under her shorts.

"She feels guilty that you're single," Callie continued, "an' lonely."

"Not her fault. Why would she think that?"

"Well, she sulked so bad when you brought that date home when she was thirteen that you never got serious with a woman again, right?"

I had to think that through for a minute. She wasn't entirely wrong. "It was best to focus on raising my girl, not complicating our lives with a stepmother." That sounded lame when I said it out loud. This wasn't some fairytale. "Look, I'm worried about Rose getting so drunk that she's unconscious. You both know what I think about alcohol, Callie. And your mom and dad won't like it much either."

The girl looked appropriately uncomfortable, defensive now, a little angry. "Yeah, I know about stepmother complications. Mr. B. we've only got this summer to train for college. We're tryin' to catch up with our class in partyin' and, you know, sex." She sounded plaintive, peeking from under her lowered brow. Too cute to condemn, but too naive to forgive, I was thinking. I ignored the sex reference. I felt bad about the stepmother remark, not meaning to appear to judge Callie's family situation.

"Let's get you both to bed," I said, meaning that in the most utilitarian sense; they needed to sleep it off. I hauled Rose out to her bedroom and eased her into her queen bed, still rumpled and smelling of women in heat. I realized that the two of them must be sharing it, though probably they didn't know that I suspected it. Well, maybe Callie, who'd gone straight to the bathroom, wouldn't blush at my finding out. I was beginning to think she was more worldly than I'd noticed.

In the dim room I took the liberty of slipping Rose's miniskirt off - that was easy. Being a good father I didn't remove her tube top or thong. God, I hadn't undressed a woman so fresh and trim, or drunk, since my days with her mom in college. I pulled the sheet over her.

I turned and, silhouetted in the bathroom light, Callie stood wearing just the patch of thong, her skimpy clothes in a small pile on the floor. Her cloud of auburn hair glowed. Her strong legs, as sculpted as a marble goddess's, toes turned in, and the two smudges of her dark nipples sent an electric spark down my spine. My balls tingled. My mouth watered.

"Callie, put yourself to bed," I said, swallowing hard and carefully making a wide pass toward the door. She pouted, but sat heavily on the bed, then lay back, splaying her legs. Callie pulled the thong aside and in the dim light I guessed at her tender flesh there, pink and warm and moist. I backed out the door, saying with authority, "Goodnight, Callie."

"You could have me," she slurred. I hoped she was too drunk to remember this in the morning.

Worried about Rose being sick again in the night I pulled a chair into the hallway, propped my chromebook on my knees, and worked on Detective Highland's adventure until past dawn. By eight o'clock I had another chapter done and I needed coffee badly.

In the kitchen, on auto-pilot, I fired up the espresso machine and thought, not especially clearly, about the day before. All the careful defenses my brain had erected to shore up sexual taboos were badly shaken. Before, I hadn't allowed myself to even imagine intimate relations with either of these kids. Now they clearly weren't kids and my brain was flooding with imagery of what their womanly bodies would be like shared with mine. I couldn't turn off the porn video in my own head: Two oiled and tan vixens kneeling at my feet, smiling as they fought over my swollen prong, me on my elbows looking into Callie's awed face as I sank my cock in her wet, warm sex, Rose smiling down at me as she rose and fell on my pole.

As these fantasies spooled out Callie came limping into the kitchen. "I've got the flu or something," she said, leaning on the counter. "That coffee smells terrible." At least she'd pulled a long t-shirt over herself.

I sighed, "You're hungover. It's part of your training, I suppose." I set about finding some Gatorade.

"Why's the floor slanted in here?" The young woman pressed both hands firmly on the counter as she sat heavily on a stool.

"You need some electrolytes and some toast, I think. Always worked for me, anyway," I said, locating the english muffins. "You'll feel better in a couple of hours."

She just groaned and put her head down on the counter, her hair tangled and toes gripping the stool rung.

I looked at her with my new eyes. This svelte yet vulnerable woman had offered herself to me. She hadn't been in her right mind, of course, but it was also without doubt the kind of truth that alcohol enabled. Some part of her wanted to have sex with me. That part of me that wanted sex with her was awake, too. But shouldn't we chalk that up to the inhibition-lowering effects of drink and go on living our ordered lives? In six weeks we'd all cross the finish line we'd been aiming at for so long. A new kind of existence for each of us; college for them, an empty nest for me.

Besides, Callie probably didn't remember it. I wished I couldn't. Even with a hangover her young, tight body radiated a vital desirability. And the memory of her looking at me as Rose fingered her to release haunted me. No chance she'd forget that.

"Try to get some of this in you," I set the Gatorade and muffins in front of her and she tentatively ate, groaning all the while. I left her alone and went to take a shower, munching a muffin of my own on the way. I took a detour to the east wing and checked that Rose was OK. Peeking through the cracked door I watched her breathe for a minute, her body at complete rest, her face angelic in the dim light. I'd checked her sleeping a thousand times as she grew. My memory filled with Rose at every age, safe and happy in her bed. That little girl was just about gone, replaced by a thong-flaunting coed.

In the shower I set about enjoying my overdue daily wank. Usually, recollections of recent porn vids got me off. Today, my thoughts strayed to Brett Highland and his sex kittens, the girls I'd conjured watching Rose and Callie make out. In mainstream fiction you can't describe sex in much detail even if you can suggest your detective took full advantage of the guilty tycoon's carnal offer. I couldn't not think of the missing details there in the shower.

I fantasized - Highland's in his warm room watching the Mediterranean breeze move the sheer curtains, the moonlight casting a blue glow on the tile floor. And on the two naked women at the foot of his bed. The girls whisper in an eastern European language that he doesn't understand, but they're clearly eager. Highland's toned body responds, his heart thuds, his cock rises.

I modeled Highland after myself physically. He appeals to my female readers because he has the same chiseled body as I do. Again, I'm writing what I know. And I know my body - six-two, ripped from the gym and a three-days-a-week run. A tolerable amount of hair everywhere and a short beard with just the first hint of gray. It looks great on the dust jacket.

I have some of my best writing ideas while I'm working out. In the shower, too, but that morning I was Brett Highland with his kittens. I wasn't having sex with Rose and Callie, Brett Highland was. That was the thin argument I made for plausible deniability. I surrendered to the fantasy.

The brunette with Callie's body climbs in bed with me first and grasps my cock, smiling. Behind her the one who looks like Rose eases into bed and kisses me. She tastes of strawberries. Now there's a girl on each side and two hands combing my chest hairs.

I couldn't see the women as anyone other than my daughter and her friend no matter how hard I tried. I felt guilty, but my organ didn't care. Apparently it really liked the idea. In my hand it swelled and heated as I stroked. Thank God no one could read my mind.