Incest, He Wrote Pt. 02

Incest, He Wrote Pt 2

"You had sex with my daughter."

It sounded as much like an observation as an accusation from the short, curvy woman at my front door. Still, she sounded angry. Callie's mom, Aurora, pushed past me and said, "She told me you went to a motel? Is this true?"

It had been two days since that night at the Ramada Inn. The young women had moved their sleepover camp to Callie's house and Rose was avoiding me. Callie had texted and advised me to stay cool while she 'worked on her'. I worried, but I was making good progress on my novel. The night of lovemaking had worn me out physically, but sparked my creativity at the keyboard. It was easy to avoid my real life while inventing Brett Highland's.

I wondered if Callie's dirty talk was just that and only that, or if Rose really was inclined to have me be her first. Inclined? Leaning toward? Hungry for? It felt wrong, but if her secret desires were anything like mine...the conflict in her must be troubling for her. I was sympathetic, but I couldn't imagine how we'd even talk about it. Callie was stage-managing something that might mostly be her own fantasy. Seducing me would be enough for most young women, you'd think, but did Callie honestly want to see my daughter make love to me, too?

It was unusual for Aurora to come to the house alone and when I saw her on the Ring camera I knew it must be important. Standing there in my writing gear of sweats and t-shirt, I felt unprepared for the confrontation over my night with Callie.

"Is this true, Doug?" Hands on hips, her Portuguese accent sharp, Aurora eyed me up and down. She was in her one-piece tennis kit, presumably on her way to the courts. It made the best of her short, firm legs and hugged her otherwise curvy body. It was the most revealing outfit I ever saw her in. Normally she'd be in conservative slacks and buttoned up loose blouses. I hadn't allowed myself to entertain sexual thoughts about this woman either. Besides being married, she was, practically, Rose's aunt. We had a kind of business-like partnership as swim-parents, getting our daughters launched. And she'd been Rose's female confidant for issues a father would have been too awkward to share with, for which I was deeply grateful. I had no desire to complicate that.

"Well, yes, it's true." I couldn't say it was all Callie's fault, as insistent as she'd been. "We're both adults. She wanted 'training'."

"That girl," sighed Aurora, "she's been testing me." She looked discouraged. "I won't be telling Larry."

"When's he coming back from...where is he this time? Hungary?"

"Yes, March," she was thoughtful, "Callie won't tell him, you know. And he wouldn't ask, of course. He hardly knows her."

And I knew Callie biblically. I felt the small spark of guilty pleasure that I thought I would. But I hadn't expected Callie to share it with her stepmom, which was scary. Or her stepmom to be so semi-cool about it, which was unexpected. I might as well speak frankly

"Aurora, Callie made a very convincing case for why I was a good man to give her a sexual education. Should we have run it past you first?"

Surprisingly, the woman laughed. She looked at me calculatingly. "Doug, you're a man who's too good for his own good."

"What do you mean?"

"You're the most eligible man on the coast. You've got an author's cachet, the looks of a romance novel model and the awareness of a rock. We all want you to give us a sexual "education".

"All who?"

"Oh, the women at the club, the women at the book store, the women in my own damned house." She crossed her arms and my eyes struggled to stay on hers, as much out of a sudden vulnerability as anything. She sounded a little exasperated, "Doug, I might as well say it out loud. 'Run it past me?' You could have run it through me years ago."

I'd never noticed a whiff of flirting from her, let alone heard her say a raunchy word since we'd met. She looked at me expectantly. This was an entirely new Aurora here in my foyer.

"But...but, Larry...," I said, stating what I thought was the obvious.

"You know we have a, shall we say, special marriage," she made a fake smile, "Don't you wonder how we manage with him away most of the time? Why I'm even here?"

"None of my business. That's your private stuff."

"Well, now you're fucking our daughter. I think that makes it your business." I didn't quite make that connection, but she seemed to need to unload it on me. "You know the basics. Larry and I met in Lisbon ten years ago. Before his wife died."

"Oh, right, he told me," I said, "He hinted you were...?"

"Yes, we were lovers then. I was just twenty-two." She looked far away. "He takes a lover wherever he's posted."

"That must hurt." Clearly she had some resentment, whatever arrangements she'd accepted. And this confirmed my low opinion of her husband.

"I got used to it. When he was widowed it was very expedient for him to marry so he could get EU citizenship and an english-speaking woman to care for Callie, who he didn't really want, especially after her mom died. And a good lay whenever he was home."

"Eight years seems like a long time...."

"You remember, Doug, that I was pretty naive when I first came to the US. But I run up to Atlanta every couple of months and pick up a guy or two at the clubs. And that's getting old."

My concept of Aurora shattered and lay broken on the floor. I struggled to recognize the pieces. I had put her in a compartment in my mind. She was just a swim-mom, competent and reliable. Maybe I'd taken her for granted as much as Larry did.

We were both quiet for a minute and I realized I should offer a drink or something. An urge to normalize the conversation. "I've got iced tea," I said, walking to the kitchen.

Aurora followed and sat at the island counter opposite me, just where her stepdaughter had nursed her hangover.

Handing her a glass I said, "But you learned fast and fit right in with the other moms here."

"Portuguese is a good kind of exotic to americans. Both men and women."

"You're shocking me with every word, Aurora." There was a calculating woman under the swim-mom facade.

"I'm telling you this because I've decided to be completely truthful." She took a deep breath. "First of all, as far as sex education, I've given Callie and Rose some, uh, pointers."

"Pointers?"

"A couple of days after her birthday Rose asked me why it was so hard for a woman to orgasm."

"Is this something I should know?" My firewall was still charred and rebuilding it in my head was taking time. I didn't want to be thinking about Rose and sex.

"Of course I sympathized. I listened to her troubles and saw that this fit in with her 'not good enough' issues."

"Not good enough?" I was puzzled, "She's a state record-holder in the butterfly and an A-student."

"That's because she doesn't think she's good enough. So she excels because that record will fall and every time she beats her best time the goalposts move."

"Why don't I know this?"

"She's trying to please you, Doug."

"Why do you know this?" I felt guilty that Rose didn't think she could talk to me.

"You know, that little bit of grief counseling after their mothers died didn't do much but get them through the worst of it. Trying to help them grow up I've had to become a bit of a therapist myself."

"I feel like I've missed a lot."

"You've done your fatherly job very well, Doug. I had to bring the feminine wisdom - it's not something you could have done. To make it worse, or so I've read, when kids lose a parent it's hard for them not to imagine the parent left because the child wasn't valuable to them, wasn't good enough."

My heart sank. Rose had accomplished so much, but for heartbreaking reasons. We'd celebrated her successes, but happiness and confidence receded from her.

"You know, Doug, Callie and Rose handle these things differently. Callie takes out her anger over her abandonment on me, the surrogate mother, and Rose, who's more introverted, channels her feelings into excelling at things."

"You're telling me all of this now, why? Because I've had sex with Callie?"

"Because I've been pretending to be a simple suburban mom for too long. And I need help with this, uhh, situation. Just for a start you and I need to be completely open with each other, especially now that you're Callie's lover."

"Callie would have been much worse off without you, Aurora. You've been a good stepmom to her. And with Rose for that matter, for which I'm deeply grateful. Callie could have been experimenting with strange and less sensitive boys and I bet your counsel helped steer her in my direction."

"Salt in the wound, Doug. Sometimes I'm a nanny, sometimes a therapist and sometimes a big sister to those girls, really." She looked troubled. "Callie was never going to accept me as her mother. You make family with what you've got, I guess. I've cared for her since I met her and we've been in this strange relationship that's about to...well, maybe end, I guess."

I saw that Aurora was hurting, too, and afraid of the changes coming to our families.

"So you've been able to give them some pointers, though?" I thought I'd keep focus on the positive.

She looked thoughtful and cleared her throat, laced her fingers together on the counter. "We were talking about the female orgasm and I referred her to some good books, but Callie had some more, shall we say, interactive, ideas."

"I bet."

"Yeah, she brought up some erotic writing and began reading. She said I should give a more hands-on lesson. Your daughter may seem the quiet one, but when she has a goal she takes the steps needed to get there."

I watched Aurora fidget with the memory.

"Your daughter asked me to demonstrate how to masturbate for her. She said she'd follow along..."

Now my head filled with images of these two women with their hands in their pubes, fiddling. I felt the blood warm my own groin. I stiffened.

"Of course I told her that women are different and asked her what worked for her. She said she could get worked up to a point, but usually something stopped her from climaxing."

OK, so I was imagining my daughter perhaps lying back on some pillows piled on a bed, with Aurora beside her. It was easy to picture the tennis dress pulled up and some white panties set neatly aside. Rose was just in her sleep shirt and her fingers were delicately exploring her crinkled, sticky labia. I imagined her shaved nearly bare. Aurora had a fuller bush in my vision.

"Callie found a story about a girl seducing her ''daddy' and I couldn't persuade her to choose anything else." Aurora looked at me with a mix of amusement and wanting that made my cock stir. At the moment I was glad to have the island between us. I was commando under the sweats.

"The story was as explicit as you can imagine, Doug. And honestly, it made me wet, too."

I wasn't used to an Aurora who would say these things to me. Looking in her eyes I saw a raw and more worldly woman than I had known.

"Anyway, Rose told me that ''the guy' in her fantasies was always very caring and gentle with her. That they loved each other and that she could get close by thinking of him touching her pussy. She liked him to perform cunnilingus. Rose said that the way Callie ate her was teaching her a lot."

God, now I had her friend eyebrow deep in her delta with Aurora playing with herself beside them. The tops had to come off... And yeah, I pictured the darker woman's heavy breasts with deep crimson nipples that she pinched as she fingered her clit lightly. Rose's bee-sting tits were hard little spikes and she had her hands in Callie's hair as she whimpered.

"But when it came to fantasizing about the guy putting his erection in her she stumbled. She said she couldn't imagine that it wouldn't hurt. And she'd be embarrassed because she's a virgin."

"Does she manage to get off at all?" It would be sad to think my daughter didn't experience the best of her body's pleasures.

"Not often, but she says she's OK with that."

"Oh..."

"She likes making Callie climax, though. She's a sensible girl, Doug, accepting of what she's got while curious to make it better."

I just let all that information find a place in my head and tried to excise the dirty pictures for now. Aurora finished her iced tea.

"I'm going to tell you something in the strictest confidence, Doug." She looked at me with a vulnerable half smile. "I've filed for divorce from Larry."

"From what you've told me I guess that makes sense." Still, it was another surprising piece of news. I drank from my second glass of tea and let my gaze wander over the sparkling blue pool out the sliding doors. I remembered the girls frolicing there over the years. Those were good memories. I seemed to be looking at them from the threshold to a new world.

"Callie's on fire to be a grown up, as you've discovered, and my unspoken understanding with Larry is that he would support me here as long as I was a good mom, while I let him live the bachelor life around the world."

I realized that Aurora's life was about to be upturned like mine was, like all of ours were. She'd always been a steady presence and a trusted partner in raising the girls. Now her nest was going to be empty, too. I hadn't considered what the girls leaving home would mean to her. I guess I was as aware as a rock.

"So, will you return to Portugal?" I asked.

"No, I'll visit maybe, but I think I'll find a single man and try to find out what love is like." She looked at me with an intensity and openness that was unfamiliar. She reached across the counter and took my hand. Her eyes welled up. "Doug, you can send me away if you like, but, well, I've been kind of in love with you for a long time."

I couldn't find words. It took me a whole afternoon to write a page of Brett Highland's witty and incisive dialogue; I couldn't be expected to get my own thoughts straight or formed into words on the spot. This attractive thirty-year-old had been in love with me? And I couldn't tell? This was another seismic shift in my world that left me unsteady on my feet. Looked like there was a needy woman under the swim-mom facade, too.

"I know," she said, "that you've been devoted to Rose and I wouldn't dream of complicating that. In fact, she's confided in me her fears about you maybe replacing her mom and I didn't want to be that woman. At least while she still lived at home."

"I thought you'd be angrier about Callie and I."

"I'm mad about it, but because she got to you before I did...I was waiting for them to go to college." She looked sad and vulnerable, pressing her knuckle to her eye to catch a tear. I grabbed a paper towel and lamely offered it.

"It just seemed like I might have a chance with you after they're gone."

"I need a minute to catch up with you, Aurora. This is a lot." I usually make my own plots, direct my characters where I want them to go, make them do what I want them to do. Lately, it felt like I was in someone else's novel.

It looked like Callie's seduction had forced Aurora's hand. The curvy woman stood and came to my side of the island.

"Consider that you and I know each other very well. I know what kind of dessert you like, what books you read, why you take the scenic route to matches."

"You mean we're good friends and...

"But the best lovers are good friends, don't you think? We've got 80 percent of dating behind us and now there's a chance to know each other, well, completely."

"You mean physically?"

"Yes, but I mean emotionally, too, Doug."

"But I had sex with your daughter. Isn't that a complication?"

"There's something else..." she looked troubled again. "I know about Callie and Rose's fantasies about you."

I stood very still. I felt a little sick. This was worse than consensual sex with your neighbor's daughter. "I think that's mostly Callie's fantasy. I'm not blaming, understand, but she told me some things that just don't sound like Rose to me."

"Here's the real kicker, though, Doug. I know Rose is as eager as Callie to be in your bed."

"They told you?"

"Well, I overheard them and I scolded them, basically, which did no good for Callie of course. She just wanted it more. She's testing me, like I said. But for Rose it made her more fearful that you'd reject her."

"Which I did..." I felt trapped. In order to be a good parent I had to crush my daughter's dream.

"I think if the guy in her fantasies is you she's also freezing up because she's afraid she'd disappoint you in bed. I told her I'd help," whispered Aurora, squeezing my hand.

"Help? How..."

"By being with her when you two make love." My adrenaline pushed me into passout territory just then and I had to put my head on the cool marble counter. Aurora put a hand on my shoulder and rubbed. We were both silent for a while. I sweated. My lungs trembled. Sideways, I listened for the woodcock calls. I watched the electric green sunlight burn through the palmetto fronds at the edge of the marsh.

"How could you do that?" I said, unable to look her in the eye.

"You americans..." she sighed, "those Puritans really screwed you up."

I raised up again and thought about taking umbrage. But, as much as I tried to create a worldly detective, I myself had been outside the US twice, and one of those was Cancun, which hardly counts. "I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around all this, Aurora. I'll admit that I've had some fantasies lately about Rose, too. I haven't told anyone, even them. Even when Callie tried to make the proposal for Rose I avoided answering directly. Honestly, bedding Callie seemed like the lesser of evils..."

"Doug, incest between consenting adults is legal in Spain, Portugal, France, other places in Europe. Look it up." She held my hand and rubbed her palm across my shoulders. "There are some ancient traditions in old hilltowns around the mediterranean. This is the land where all the myths began, remember. You could say they've been keeping it real for four thousand years."

"You're saying you'd be OK with it? And you want to be there?"

"Together we can help her feel good enough." She placed a hand on each side of my face and held my beard, stroking lightly.

"I'm struggling with this, Aurora."

"You may say this is crazy, but I think this is a phase that we can help Rose through. It'll create a bond between you and I, too. Rose can go off into her own adult life and we can have each other. I think we can love each other."

I took ten deep breaths and let her wait. She kept her hands on me. Just like on Saturday my notion of how the world worked shifted. I had come to understand that my daughter and her friend were sexual beings, liberated from the compartment in my mind that kept them off limits even for fantasy. Then, my body awoke to their attractions and, impetuously, I did what comes naturally with Callie.

Today, Aurora set off a grenade in her compartment and Rose's, too. Could my body imagine being with them both, feel the silk and the simmer of a sexual 'lesson' with them? My thickening organ said so. I looked at Aurora with as much composure as I could muster.

"How in the hell would this work?" I asked and she smiled broadly. Her hand dropped and squeezed my bicep and that made my cock twitch.

"I think we practice with each other first, you know, sort of game out how to, well, deflower, Rose."

"Oh, gosh, I haven't got my calendar handy." I tried to make a joke of it.

"Oh, I mean right now." And she reached for the lump in my sweats and gave it a familiar squeeze. "Maybe we start in the pool and see where it goes?"