Reality is Different: Afterword

The statement seemed to still her, too. A glint of feeling in her hazel eyes, her fingers softly grasping at his shirt - it took until he pushed his way into her bedroom door for her to venture back, "Am I still your little angel, dad?" Her voice pitched high and hopeful, faintly whispered.

And of course, there was but a single answer he could give to that. Only one that she could want, only one that he would wish to speak. "Of course you are, sweetheart." An edge of almost laughter in his quiet voice, reassurance flirting at one side with teasing, and at the other with the husk of bittersweet emotion that still scratched upon his throat. "Always and forever." And it was a joy as well, to see the small and bashful smile that the answer sneaked upon her lips, the glow of pride and pleasure on her cheeks and in her eyes. It only seemed appropriate, as he drew up beside her bed, to lift her up a trifle closer, crane his head down to the side to place a careful little kiss upon her forehead, the way he'd done so many times, too many years ago. Lingering for but a moment as she subtly inhaled, grabbed a little tighter at his shirt, til he again withdrew to lay her gingerly amidst the somewhat scattered covers.

"Um. Thanks." She let a somewhat nervous breath of laughter on her tongue, self-conscious as she pushed herself upright and swung around her slender legs to dangle from the bed. Getting ready, it would seem, from how her fingers traced a moment at the fabric of her jeans before ascending to her waist, working to undo the fly.

"Sure." He turned away before she got that far. Silly, yes. Of course it was. He'd seen her many times before in just her shirt and underwear, both recently and not so recent, too. It shouldn't make a difference to see the stage before, the actual removal. But it still seemed to, somehow. "Guess I'll head back down." A certain stiffness to his posture as he headed for the door.

"No, wait." Her protest halted him before he made it past a single step. Quiet rustling behind him as she struggled with her clothes, to slide them from her hips. "Hang on a sec." He didn't turn to look. But he waited, as she asked, gazing through her bedroom door into the hall. Or to her dresser, standing just inside, old wooden drawers now scratched and somewhat faded, scattered still with stickers whose glue had managed to survive the years since their adornment. Her closet on the other side, its door hung open. She had been ten, perhaps eleven when he installed the mirror there that almost filled its inner surface. It wasn't aimed at her right now, not quite, but it was close enough for him to see one side, one edge, one barely sun-kissed leg escaping from its denim prison. A gaily-colored ankle sock hugged tight around her rather dainty foot. And following that pale path the other way - it was just a slight shift of his head to see a little more, a flash of cotton, blue and white, shadowed in the space between her thighs.

The whisper of her jeans collapsing to the floor was enough to draw him to his senses, his gaze back to the wall. Not that it mattered so much, now - she was already getting into bed, her legs safely ensconced beneath the covers, though she still sat upright against the oaken headboard. As for himself, he took a breath before he turned around again to face her. "What's up?" Pleasantly enough. He hoped it was. Hell, there was no reason not to be - she'd certainly done nothing that should dampen the affection and the warmth for her he'd felt for her just moments prior, putting her to bed.

She dawdled with her answer, too, looking at her hands. One clasped loosely at the other's fragile wrist, atop the knees that she held tented underneath the sheet. And despite his own misgivings, that same tickle of affection did rise up to the fore again inside his chest as he regarded her. Finally she spoke. "I just wondered if we could maybe talk about it." Softly, faintly - it was evident she'd had to force the words to come. They didn't flow as smoothly as they might.

"Talk about what?" He managed to sounded far more casual, plopping down to sit upon the corner of the bed, halfway beside her.

"Dad." It got her to look at him, at least, even if it was to roll her eyes. Her tone a trifle firmer, too, mildly aggrieved. "You know what."

"Yeah." His chuckle to himself was more than slightly rueful. "Yeah, I guess I do." A breath, before the rest. "And yeah. Yes, of course we can. Always say you can talk to me about anything, right? Figure this probably still fits into 'anything.' More or less."

"Probably," she softly echoed, her gaze returning to her hands. Anxious, how they squeezed against each other, marking time before she forced herself to speak again. And even when she did, it was with a certain distance, the murmur of delay, drawing out the matter that truly occupied her mind. "I've had this in my head a while now, you know. I'm not even sure how long. I guess...a couple months, at least, it must have been. Since before my birthday."

"Really." He raised an eyebrow quietly, his voice kept mild and comforting. "I suppose I had the sense that something odd was going on for quite a bit of that time. But I can't say that I quite imagined that it was...what it was, until recently."

"Yeah." It sounded less agreement than a simple filler word, a whispered bridge to build upon. "I mean, it wasn't even...what it was. What it is. Not at first. It was just something I thought about, you know? I didn't really think that it could happen, or that I wanted it to happen. I didn't even think about you, at first, not all the time. Just the idea of it, in general, almost. And some of the specific things I read, and how they made me feel."

"And how did they make you feel?" He spoke carefully beside her - while part of him did wonder if he should ask at all, if it was something she should share with him. A private feeling, surely. Personal, and sexually charged...but he didn't have much guide for what else he could say to her right now. Just playing at the things he thought a therapist might do, echoing her thoughts, barely prodding her for more.

"I don't even know." Her hand came up to loosely clasp upon her mouth, slightly muffling her answer, as if unconsciously to hide it. "Or I mean, I don't know how to describe it. It was...almost frightening to think about it, at first, like I could feel my stomach clenching when I read these things. I didn't know if I believed a lot of them. They were so obviously wrong, something people couldn't really do - but it was exciting, too. Probably because of it. Forbidden fruit, right?" A ghostly smile quirked upon her lips, barely visible between her fingers before it faded once again. "I got angry at myself sometimes for reading them. Especially once I got started on the stories people write, about that kind of thing. They're about a million times as crazy, mostly, and I told myself I had to quit it, before I went crazy too." She sniffed a little, tinged with fairly sheepish humor. "Guess I should have listened better, to myself."

"Sometimes your own advice can be the hardest kind to listen to," he offered.

"No kidding." She swallowed, sighed. "A lot of it was stuff like what we kinda talked about the other day, yesterday. About...control, and discipline, and the girl not even always wanting it to happen, at the start. Until her dad..." She trailed off, embarrassed - while he was brought to mind again unwillingly of what he'd heard outside her door a couple hours prior, her freer tongue when she had thought she was alone. You have to punish me, you have to tame me, daddy. The image conjured all too vivid of those girlish fingers that still touched upon her mouth, turned instead to madly rub and squeeze and slip between her other pair of lips, her legs spread wide and welcoming upon this very bed. Make me your perfect little toy...

He was glad for the distraction when she spoke again. Softer, almost melancholy. "But sometimes, the things that most affected me were the parts that felt just...sweet. Simple. Simpler, anyway. One part that I remember, in one story, at the end - it just talked about her waking up the morning after, in her father's bed. About her being there with him, barely awake, naked against him, and how...how she felt such a perfect sense of love and warmth and safety in his arms. Because he was her daddy, and he loved her more than any other person ever could. And she loves him the same." Her voice had weakened to a whisper - there was a quaver in it when she added more, a little louder, trying to achieve a normal tone again. "Or just, stuff like that, you know. Another one where the dad would help to bathe her, in the tub. Or a part, I think it was the same story, that just talked a little while about her sitting down beside him as he brushed her hair."

It took a little while for him to come up with a response, to reach a tone of reassurance. "Well." Even then, he had to cough to clear his throat. "I imagine we could manage one of those, at least."

Her gaze rose slowly up and to the side to touch with his at this pronouncement, laden down with such a weight of wistful yearning that it seemed to ripple in the blackness of her pupils, that his heartbeat stirred a little faster with discomfiture or sympathy. "Do I get to pick which one?" The question hanging in the air - but at last a tiny fragment of a smile curled at the corner of her lips, put at least the seeming of a joke to what she'd asked. She didn't wait for him to answer. "No, no. I know." A breath. "Really, um. What I thought about today, after you left...it was more those first things that I read. The confession site. Because - I mean, there really weren't that many of them in there that guys had posted, about that kind of thing. Not a whole bunch from the dads. At least, not ones that I believed were true. But the ones that were there..."

Her hand slipped softly down again into her lap, joining with its partner as she set her jaw and stared into the sheets. This was what was on her mind, why she had asked him to remain. If nothing else, it was apparent by the husk which wrestled at her throat, the scratch she struggled to subdue. "A lot of them, or most of them, they said that, like...that their daughter had attracted them somehow, that that was why. That she was just 'too sexy to ignore,' one guy said. Or because she had these giant breasts, and always went around the house in clothes that showed them off. Or one - another one that I remember, he hadn't actually done anything with her, or to her, but he'd been checking on her phone and found some pictures that she'd taken of herself. For her boyfriend. Or that he hoped were for her boyfriend, anyway. And he wanted to get mad at her for it, he said, but seeing pictures of her posing naked, pictures of her playing with herself...he just sent them to himself, instead."

His own brow meanwhile was furrowed, his jaw a trace apart, preparing hesitant to ask where this was going - she answered him before he had the chance. "And I just keep wondering, exactly...why. Why not, I mean. What the reason is, why you don't want this. Why you don't want me." There was a keening in the way she said it, glancing briefly upward with her lips pulled more into a grimace than a smile. Continuing again before he had the chance to answer, or even to protest at how she phrased the question. Why he didn't want her - surely nothing could be further from the truth. In the larger sense of 'want,' at least. "And I know you'll say that it's because you're my dad, that it's impossible for you to feel that way for me at all, and that could be true, the guy I talked to, he said a lot of dads just can't. But then these other girls, they got their dad's attention just by being hot, by having big boobs, all the things that guys normally want from girls anyway. And I just wonder...where I stand. If that's the reason, really."

"I mean, if I weren't your daughter, if I were someone else, a stranger, and you saw me...would you think that I was pretty, then?" Her pupils hovered in the corners of her eyes, barely touched to his. Her voice an anxious and uneven murmur. "If you had, y'know, in your videos, a girl who looked like me, would you - would that be..." She stumbled with the words, failing to find a euphemism for the question that still loomed apparent from her effort. And while he mulled a moment how he could begin to answer, she pressed onward one last time, finished with a certain quiet sadness. "Or am I just not the kind of girl you want. You wouldn't be attracted to me anyway, no matter what."

An awkward question, certainly. He swallowed, frowned professionally at the tenting of her knees beneath the covers, halfway down the bed. He wasn't even sure he knew precisely what the truthful answer was. If there was one. You couldn't just recast her, after all, envision her as someone else. The image of her flowing auburn hair, of deep, expressive eyes, even of her body's gentle curves and valleys in repose - they conjured up the person that she was, first and foremost, the girl so central to his life. So cherished in his heart. The woman who he wouldn't, couldn't, hadn't ever thought about in terms of want and of attraction...at least until she'd forced him to, by springing this affair upon him.

Maybe even more important than the truth, whatever it might be, was how the answer would affect her. And that seemed awful either way. On one hand, abetting these unthinkable desires of hers by telling her he would have had an eye for her, that her body met with his approval...or on the other, telling her it didn't, that she was unattractive to him, unappealing. Unwanted, as she so plainly feared. Neither one was something which he felt that he should say - and so after a little while, he decided to say that instead. More or less. "I don't think it really matters." Trying to maintain his soothing tones, the comfort of an answer confidently given. "You are my daughter, and really can't imagine or pretend what it would be like if you weren't. It's just too far away from what I know. Especially when we're talking about something that we couldn't...that would be impossible."

The answer hardly seemed to satisfy her, if the tiny sigh that she let out was any indication. Or the way that she allowed herself to slouch towards horizontal on the bed. Her features slack and silent, her gaze again upon her hands - it was half a dozen seconds til she muttered back an answer, slightly strained, as though it had been forced up to her tongue. "Fine." Dying down after into an almost whisper, tired and defeated. "I get it."

"No, you don't." He sighed himself, shifted from the corner of the bed to face her more directly. "Sarah, listen. Look at me." She didn't, for a while - but he was willing to be patient, waiting until finally she turned her head a trifle to the side, until her eyes touched hesitant and heavy to his own. Even then, he waited for a moment longer, holding her attention there before he spoke. "You are beautiful."

She seemed to smile at that - but only just, a tight and troubled thing. Maybe more a grimace, dismissive, disbelieving as she scarcely shook her head. "You have to say that."

"...I guess I do. A bit," he granted with a tiny fraction of a grin, sympathetic, one that swiftly settled down into solemnity again. "So it's a good thing that it's true. I'd hate to have to lie." His hand touched gently at her elbow, calloused fingers curling inside. The contact lending credence to his words. "I've always thought that you were. The first thing that made me fall in love with you, before you even learned to stand, I'm pretty sure it was those eyes of yours. How big and bright they always were. The way you looked at me when I would talk to you, watching me like you were listening intently to every word I said, as though you understood." He shook his head. "You didn't smile that much, when you were a baby - but I still took so many pictures, because of how adorable, how curious you looked when you would stare at something, like you were trying to figure it out."

She tried to tug her lips back up again, to show at least a faint appreciation for his effort. But they responded only feebly, a quaver in her voice, a quarrelling of disappointment with her hopes. "That's not really the same."

"No. No, I suppose it's not," he quietly agreed again. A breath for thought, reflection, feeling in his heart an echo of the melancholy heavy in her features. "And then again, it is, in its own way. Your eyes are still distinctive, Sarah. Large, and...luminous, I think, is the word that people like to use. Clear and soft as summer skies - even if the color's rather different. All that eyeliner women buy, the shadow, the stuff you brush into your lashes, it's all to get their eyes to look a bit like yours do. And men - well, we do notice things like that. Unconsciously, if nothing else. It has a power to it. A man can feel like a million bucks just because of how a woman looks at him, when her eyes betray her interest, staring, winking, or whatever." Other thoughts rose to his mind as well. The bit of play that always thrilled him with Elaine, and with the women who had come before. In the midst of lavishing attention on him, when she'd look up with widened eyes, gazing long and worshipful into his own, as though he were the only man in all creation...yes, there were other powerful temptations that a lovely pair of eyes like hers could offer.

Not one that he should think about regarding her, of course. Nor mention, for that matter. There were gentler admirations he could give her - even if it felt now that they sailed in like waters. "I guess that puppy-dog look you have is kind of similar as well, in a way. The one you sometimes use against me when there's something that you want." He made a tiny, rueful moue, stroked a little with his thumb against her skin, just inside her upper arm, thinking as he spoke. "It's a connection. It's...what is it, a sort of supplication, I suppose. An appeal. Probably not a coincidence that we use the word 'appeal' for both of those, for asking, and for - people. Because when you do that kind of thing, when you get up close and pout and try to look at me all woefully, like some concert ticket is your only hope to live another day...it does make you look beautiful. Attractive. Cute, maybe that's what I should say. Making yourself childish and cute, so that the only thing I think about is just how much I want to make my little girl happy. How much more beautiful you would look, if you were smiling."

It seemed this was enough at last to earn this very thing. Faintly, anyway, a flicker of her eyes and lips in his direction, before the wan of doubt resurged. "Still, though." Softly. "Even if that's true, if we're talking about what guys are really looking for, what you would want to see...I mean, when I looked at your videos, there sure weren't any where the titles talked about the girl's eyes."

Lord. A cast of quiet aggravation flashed across his features at the mention once again of how she'd snooped into his private folders, at the thought of what she'd found. Embarrassed and annoyed in roughly equal measure...but it was only counterpoint against the rest of what he felt, the subtle tug of nearness and affection, of the need to reassure her, to protect her. This was the other half of what he'd mentioned, of any time she sulked or simpered, batted eyes to get her way - it drove the urge for him to give her what she wanted, but it also rose up near as strongly an instinctual conviction that he had to keep her close, to keep her safe. That god, she was his little girl, and he would be a fool to ever let her roam too far from home, or even from his sight. He knew exactly what the world could do to her, or turn her into, if he gave it half a chance. They were the fears that kept a father up at night. And the irony was that the kind of beauty that she longed for only brought those dangers closer into focus.