The Savannah Situation Pt. 01

She said if she were going to do it, I had to go, too, so I could hear direct from the therapist what their take was on it all, so that's how I ended up sitting in the corner of a couch in a therapist's office. Wedged into it, honestly, while Savannah lounged on the other end, facing Dr. Zhai, an older Chinese American woman with a terrific smile. It was bad manners but I kept my ball cap on and pulled it low so it was easier not to look directly at either of them.

"So, Savannah. You made this appointment. You brought your father along with you. What's on your mind?" Dr. Zhai said. She was sitting in a rolling chair she'd rolled from behind her desk to in front of the couch, but more toward Savannah than me.

"I've been in love with him for ten years," Savannah said, and I nearly choked.

"Hang on-" I started.

"Nothing's ever happened. I only actually told him that a little while ago and he demanded I see a therapist, so here we are."

Dr. Zhai, to her credit, had an amazing poker face. Or, fuck, maybe it was more common than I imagined and it wasn't shocking at all to her. She looked from Savannah, relaxed into the couch, and then to me, who couldn't face any of it so I had buried my face in my hands and was rubbing my eyes like I was tired. "What was it like, growing up? Were you close when you were a little girl, Savannah?"

She told her how I wasn't a part of her daily life but I'd been at every birthday party and always went to see her whenever she asked. That she always felt like I never knew what to do because I'd just do what she asked. She told her that most of the time when she was a child, she didn't really understand what it meant that I was her father or what that should look like, and she never felt about me the way she felt about her grandpa or, later, her stepdad. It was always different with me was what she told Dr. Zhai. Then Savannah told her about hearing me and Tamara and I had to interrupt.

"Look, Dr. Zhai, I had no idea she was awake. I hadn't even planned on being with Tamara that night, it just happened and she left afterward and I didn't even know Savannah had been awake or or that she'd known at all that Tamara stayed like that after she'd gone to bed."

"Many children witness a parent engaged in intercourse, Chris. It's a normal human act and it's bound to happen. You didn't do anything wrong," Dr. Zhai said, which was nice of her because I was so uncomfortable my armpits were too hot.

"But she's in love with me," I said. I didn't notice at the time that I didn't say, 'but she thinks she's in love with me.' "She overheard me and Tamara and goes from being my daughter to wanting to be with me sexually? No way. That doesn't happen."

"Chris, I'd like to emphasize that that's how Savannah said she felt. It's important she can say these things without rebuke or shaming for thoughts and feelings she has."

"I wasn't trying to-" I sighed, frustrated. "Never mind. Sorry, Sav."

"Chris, how do you feel about Savannah saying she's in love with you? What comes up for you?"

"I'm fucking terrified that I fucked her up so bad she thinks she's in love with her own dad and I don't know what to fucking do. I feel like I should just leave. I fucked her up throughout her childhood because I was a shitty father who wasn't there, and now she's in love with me and I love her but I feel like being around her can't be healthy and I have no fucking idea how not to make this even worse," I said.

"'Leave'?" Savannah said. It was the first time I'd seen a crack in her composure, heard uncontrolled emotion in her voice.

"Honey, I didn't-"

"You did mean it," she said, and it was like I could hear her throat tightening up. "You want to cut me out of your life."

"I don't want to-"

"Okay, let's pause for a moment. Chris, what I heard was your anxiety and fear and panic about your daughter's well-being, and you said you felt like you should leave. Savannah asked you about it, and it sounded like you were about to say that's not what you meant. Is that what you were going to say?"

This appointment was becoming about me and I was perturbed. "Yeah."

"That sounds very confusing for Savannah. What did you mean, when you said 'I feel like I should just leave'?"

"I just meant, I don't know what to do, and I'm afraid to mess her up even more because I don't know what I'm doing."

"Savannah? Do you want to respond to that?" She shook her head, and I could see that something was different in her face. This quality of self-assurance she had was gone. "Savannah, how did you feel about your childhood and the degree of involvement your father had in it?"

"I was never dissatisfied. I never felt like he wasn't with me because he didn't want to be."

"What did you feel like?"

She was silent for a long beat. "I didn't think about it much at all. When I think of what our culture tells us is paternal, I think of my grandpa. So when I think of that definition of 'dad,' I think 'Grandpa.' But it's not that articulated in my head. It's a feeling. And when I think of Chris, I know he's my dad, but he doesn't feel like my dad."

"So what I'm hearing is that when it came to the word 'dad,' you knew Chris was yours, but it didn't mean the same thing to you that it did to other children with dads." Savannah nodded. "And why do you think you're in love with your dad now?"

She looked up. "Because I've got a genius-level intellect and I've never felt like a child. I've always felt like a woman waiting for her body to catch up. In the 10 years I've been in love with him, it's never wavered, not really. I've had relationships, even long-term ones, and even when I really liked the person, it felt like Chris was deep inside me, waiting and immovable, and all I was doing was denying he was there."

I guess it was that first appointment that I accepted as a gesture of good faith. I'd done it, I'd gotten her to the doc. It didn't matter that it was just one appointment and she'd scheduled another and that Dr. Zhai hadn't said anything remotely approaching, 'No, your daughter is totally fine in the head and this is all real, so have at it.' It was like I was doing the scientific method for the questions that were going to come later: I took all these steps, and this was the outcome anyway, and I challenge anyone to test my method and reach any other conclusion.

Savannah didn't talk to me on our way out of the building or when we got in the car. She didn't talk the whole way to her townhouse, which is where we'd met and I'd left my truck dripping oil on her driveway.

I followed her inside and shut the door behind us. "Savannah, talk to me, honey."

"If you want to leave, then leave." She kicked off her shoes and left me in the entry, stalking to the kitchen where she opened the freezer, pulled out a bottle of Stolichnaya, and took a quick drink before digging up a glass tumbler.

"Savannah," I said. I waited until she looked at me. "I don't want to leave."

She hesitated, then took another tumbler and made us vodka tonics. There were stools on the other side of the kitchen island and she slid onto one and rested her forehead against her hand. "It never crossed my mind you might end our relationship over this. Fuck. What the fuck was I talking about, 'genius level intellect'? Fuck me, what a joke."

"I'm sorry I said that. I just don't know what to do here. I'd never end our relationship, Sav. I'm always going to love you."

"What do you want to do here, Chris?" she said, looking at her drink. "If you're going to love me no matter what..."

"Who would I be if I did this? Like I haven't failed you enough already?"

Savannah spun her glass in the ring of condensation beneath it on the marble counter. "You know, for as long as I can remember, I've felt like you were kinda formal with me."

"Like even when you were four?"

"I mean, I didn't have the word for it. But over the years I watched you and I realized that although I never felt neglected or unloved, you didn't treat me that much differently than anyone else, not at a level that was intimate or vulnerable for you personally."

"I'm sorry, Sav. I didn't know how to act around a little girl. But my love for you has always felt like an exposed nerve. I don't think anything has made me more vulnerable than loving you as much as I do."

"You're still beating yourself up for being an absentee father but it's not like you weren't there. When I was old enough to realize I loved you romantically, I kept you where I wanted you because I knew if I could ever realistically have a chance and getting you to fall in love with me, you couldn't be my dad. Especially not as I went into puberty and grew up. I knew I had to come back to you as my own woman. Capable, grown up, doesn't need you. If I weren't those things, if there were even a whiff that I needed you, you would never go for this."

"You started coming to these conclusions when you were, what, 12? How on earth, Savannah?"

She shrugged. "My roommate wasn't the only genius in that dorm. So I went to boarding school and the main reason was so that you would barely ever see me. And then I went to UW so you would barely ever see me. And then when you finally did see me, I was a grown woman who you barely even knew. Not your daughter."

"You're always going to be my daughter. I'm never not gonna be your dad."

"I know that. But neither of us really knows what it means to be a dad, do we?"

Maybe at one point I might've disagreed, but by then, I wasn't sure at all. "Yeah, maybe not."

I don't know what kind of light bulbs were in the pendants hanging over the kitchen island, but the glow they bathed her in was about the most flattering thing I'd ever seen on a person, bringing out the gold in her hair and making her tanned shoulders gleam and her lower lip had never been as perfect. I surprised myself and Savannah when I pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and let my fingertips trail along the sensitive underside of her jawline.

"You're so beautiful, Sav," I said softly.

She looked surprised by that, too. "Thank you." She took my hand after it dropped away from her chin and pressed it between hers. "Do you really think I'm just really fucked up? Because if you did, and you did what you've already done anyway, that's really disturbing."

"It's not that I think it. It doesn't feel like that. But I'm terrified that's what's happening here."

"You really can't believe I could just be in love with you and still be okay?'

"Could you? If it were your child? Maybe you have to have one to know how wrong this sounds."

She stared at me skeptically. "I'm a girl in love with her father and I fantasize about how he tastes. Trust me, I know how wrong this seems. I've known for 10 years. You have no idea how badly I want this."

It took me an eight count to respond. Her words had gone straight to my core and I hoped my poker face was half as good as Dr. Zhai's. I wondered if she could feel my pulse in my hand, because it was racing now. What I wanted to say was 'What do you mean, 'taste' me?', but I said instead, "Sav, have you thought about what it would feel like to know your own father would do that to you?"

"Do what to me?"

I didn't want to say it and give her ideas about what came to mind when she said the things she did, but this one really did seem like a legitimate hurdle to put in front of her. So I answered. "Be with you. Romantically. Sexually. To kiss you like that. What would you think of a dad who could do that?"

"I think of Grandpa doing that and I'm repulsed, and it's not because he's in his 60s." I had to move a step closer to her because she was pulling my hand up to her face and pressing it against her cheek. "Do you want to know what I think of when I think of you kissing me?"

Savannah turned her head a little and pressed her lips to my palm. It was like my palm was an extension of my cock because boy, did I feel it. "Sav..."

"Do you want to know, Chris?"

"Yeah, all right."

She smiled and it pressed against my hand. "It's not a thought. It's a feeling. I feel like I might burst with how much it fills my chest and I feel it everywhere. Everywhere. It's reached mythic proportions in my mind and I don't know what could match it now. But I feel a little like that every time you touch me. Everywhere." She was breathing a little hard when she finished, and I realized I'd slid my hand from her cheek to her hair and had buried my fingers in it at the back of her head. The locks slipped over and between my fingers and it felt like silk. "GSA, abandonment issues, false idol worship...it's none of that. I tried for years to figure out what was wrong with me. And there's nothing wrong with me. I just want you."

I really wanted to kiss her. And I just couldn't. On the road to not coming back from something, that felt like the one way sign. I gingerly extracted my hand from her hair. "I need to go, Sav. But I'm not leaving you, you understand me? I just need to go."

She looked disappointed but didn't fight me on it. "Okay. I understand." She walked me to the door and gave me that hug with her arms around my neck, and when I returned it, I let my hands spread out over her back and my fingers contour to her waist and rib cage and held her to my chest. I wanted to feel her body pressed against me like she was a woman who wasn't my daughter.

When I let her go, it was only with one arm. I kept the other around her back while I cupped her cheek and we stared at each other. It was like I was looking at her and I knew intellectually she was my daughter but fuck if she didn't feel like it. "Can I try something, honey?" I said softly.

I called her honey when I had protective fatherly instincts and this was assuredly not a scenario where how I felt about what I had in mind and those instincts complemented each other. But like she said. Maybe I didn't know what it means to be a dad and that's why that delineation was starting to dissolve.

"Please."

I held her gaze a moment longer, looking for fear or reluctance or anything besides the love and devotion that was always there. But it was still just them, and maybe desire, too. So I pressed my lips against her cheek, closed my eyes, and inhaled her. Her skin smelled faintly of her make up or moisturizer or something, it wasn't anything that really had a name, and her cheek was warm and smooth under my lips. For a split second, she tensed, but before I could even react her weight was settling into my arm and I had to shore her up closer to me.

The whole thing lasted maybe three seconds. It's weird to kiss someone's cheek for long. When I stopped, I let my hand fall from her face and my arm from around her back so she wouldn't feel like I expected her to stay right up on me like she was. "You all right about that, Sav?"

She nodded, biting her lip. "I loved it."

"Yeah. All right. Goodnight. I love you." She told me she loved me and I left, my heart pounding against the wall of my chest like it was trying to break through, it felt like.

In the truck, driving to Marcus's, I hit the steering wheel over and over and over again, until my palm was bruised and tender. I was furious this was happening in me, how much I'd wanted to stay and why I'd wanted to stay. I wanted to hit all of that out of me, but brutalizing the steering wheel wasn't having much effect. And I was panicked, too, and at Marcus's I took a beer from the refrigerator, cracked it open and took a drink, and then set it aside and brought out the Jack.

When Marcus got home, it was six o'clock and I was wasted. I'd moved to the kitchen floor with the Jack and a shot glass, which sounds super pathetic and melodramatic, but I wanted Marsh on my lap so I could pet him while I got drunk. I don't know why I didn't just take it into the living room and sit on the couch.

"Bruh. My dude. Get it together," Marcus said when he walked into the kitchen.

"Look, I just wanted Marsh to pet, okay? That's why I'm on the floor, all right?"

Marcus turned a chair from the kitchen table around and sat in it and put his elbows on his knees. I felt like I was seeing a really cool high school guidance counselor. "What happened?"

"Nothing," I said. Nothing I was about to tell him. I looked at the shot glass in my hand and the bottle of Jack in the other and took a sip from the bottle.

"That better be your Jack you're drinking straight out the bottle."

"It is, I wouldn't do you like that."

"This about the Savannah situation?"

It had a name now, this whole thing. I nodded. "But I'm fine, I just needed to forget about it for a second."

"Chris, I've never seen you like this. So what, you're just extra stressed out about it today? Or did something happen?"

"I took PTO so I could go with Savannah to a therapist."

Marcus let out a low whistle. "It went that bad, huh?"

I looked at the label and picked at it instead of meeting his eyes. "Yeah, it's pretty bad."

I was blowing her off. I skipped out on the next therapy session and the one after that. I couldn't even lie to her that I didn't have the PTO. I just texted her and told her I wasn't going to be at therapy. We were texting over two weeks and I knew she was waiting for me to call her and I just couldn't.

But when she called me, I couldn't not answer. Not Savannah.

"Hi, honey."

"Dr. Zhai is displeased with you and so am I."

She sure sounded like it. I sighed and took a minute to answer. "I'm sorry, Sav."

"That's it? You're 'sorry'? You know, in the annals of shitty fatherhood, you being a fucking flake and not being here for me sure fits the bill."

It made me laugh, in a dark, bitter way. "I think this whole thing has been a goddamn beacon in shitty fatherhood, Savannah. Do you want me to be your father or do you want me to be Chris?"

She was silent for a long moment. "I expect more of Chris than I do of my dad."

I don't know if she was wrong, but it hurt so much either way I got angry. "You don't fucking mean that."

"You always talk about what a shitty father you were."

"You said I wasn't. So how do you really feel, Savannah? Because right now I feel shitty all the fucking way around."

She exhaled and we sat without saying anything for a stretch. I wanted an answer. I was waiting for one. "I'm sorry. I know this is hard. I never thought you were a bad father. Why aren't you coming to the appointments?"

Because if I did, it was going to come out that there was an ever-expanding part of me (no pun intended) that wanted it, too. "I can't-" I started, stopped, sighed. "Because I put my fucking finger in your mouth and there's no way that's not gonna come out."

"I liked it. But these appointments were your idea. And having you there is as much so you can hear what I have to say as it is what Dr. Zhai has to say."

I had to think about how to respond, what could sum it all up in the fewest words while admitting as little as possible. I was putting off the inevitable by avoiding Savannah and I knew it. I knew I was going to keep seeing how it all felt until it stopped feeling so good. "She's not going to understand."

"No, she isn't," Savannah said. A silence she waited for me to fill, but I didn't. "Do you want to come over tonight?'

"For what?"

"Come over at 10."

Savannah wanted me to come over at 10 at night. When I agreed, that's when I really admitted to myself that something was going to happen, ultimately. Me agreeing at all meant I was allowing for the possibility. And if I allowed for the possibility, Savannah was going to find it, and unless she changed her mind about how she felt, we were going to fuck.

The thought she might change her mind was what held me back the most by then, because if she did, then she'd just be a girl with daddy issues, while I'd be a father ready to fuck his own daughter. If she were wrong about this, I couldn't be around her anymore. You can't come back from being a father who would fuck his own daughter. So there was a lot on the line but I was as good as balls deep in her when I responded to her text with, "I'll see you at ten, Savannah."