Reality is Different Ch. 02

I think about the book still sitting closed upon my pillow, half-read. "Almost."

"'Almost done.'" Amused affection in his smile. "Now that's an answer that I've heard before. Tell you what, when that 'almost' becomes 'completely,' then you can do all the nice things for me that you want. Until then..." He steps around the table towards me, neatly plucks the plate out of my hands. "Well, you've got more important work to do. Okay?"

I have an impulse to protest again, refuse, to insist on playing out the domestic little moment that I first imagined. The lengthy drudgery that my classes have assigned doesn't feel any more important than my attempt to give him a comfortable and pleasant evening, to treat him like the king of his own particular castle. Considerably less, in fact. But I know it means a lot to him that I do well, that I succeed in school. And the words of my earlier fantasy in front of his computer flash briefly through my mind again, somewhat more innocent now in this new context. 'A good girl does what her daddy says.' So instead, I quirk up a little smile again, give him an accommodating nod. "Okay. It's not all due tomorrow or anything, but...I'll try to get it done tonight."

"Excellent." A twinkle in his eye; it's a gentle, familiar gesture how he reaches forth with his right hand to push an errant lock of hair back behind my ear, his sturdy finger brushing at my temple. Close. Intimate, almost, my head tilting just a little towards it to enhance the contact. Still the note of mild humor in his voice. "That's why you're my favorite daughter."

I answer that with just a quiet huff of laughter, a bloom of warmth inside my heart as I move to pull away. Or at least, as I begin to. I might have just ignored the impulse passing through my mind, if I hadn't had the recent reassurance of his touch. Inside, I listen to it, permit my hand to lightly drift across his arm that holds my plate, tracing upwards to the inner corner of his elbow as I navigate around him. Near enough for all my body's senses to feel him there, warm and solid. The subtle prickle on my skin, awareness I would feel even if my eyes were closed, if he had me blindfolded in the dark...I hesitate a little at his side, my ringers gently curled there upon his arm, beneath the bicep. Lap my head down light against his shoulder, my forehead and the bridge of my nose pressed into the dark blue of his shirt. Words upon my tongue. "I love you, dad." Simple. Quiet. True, whatever other dreams and struggles I might have go on inside the lower quarters of my mind. He knows I do already, of course, I know he knows it - but I still feel compelled to say it, to express some fragment of the regard and the affection and the adoration that I have for him. My dad.

"Of course, sweetheart." Maybe there's the faintest tinting of uncertainty to his response, of surprise. Perhaps I spoke those four familiar words a little differently from how I often have before. Deeper, maybe, rougher with the rawness of emotion than in my past farewells or my goodnights. Or more intense, perhaps, plaintive, as though it were some kind of plea. Or it could be that it's just the circumstance in which I've said it...in any case, the words of answer that he gives me are as obvious as they are expected. "I love you, too."

The phrase would be just bland, pedestrian, if it weren't for who he is. If he didn't say it so sincerely, every time, never flattened into formula by the many times he's said as much before...it could be the first time that he's confessed his fatherly affection, for the heartfelt tenor of his voice, for the warmth and the quickening of pulse that it sparks inside me. My plate he passes somewhat awkwardly into his other hand, and then he briefly slips his newly liberated arm back a bit around my waist for a quick and quiet hug, a momentary squeeze against his side that I'm all too eager to accept, to feel my body briefly crushed to his. Even if I'm released again right afterward, left to raise my head up off his shoulder and to stand on my own feet as he smiles soft and crooked at me, tolerantly scolds. "But you've got work to do. Mush, now." And nothing left for me to do but what he says. Step away, out of his reach. Leave him downstairs, behind, so I can tackle what I have assigned, so I can do well in school, so I can transfer to a better one, so I can get a degree, so I can leave home, get a good job of my own...so, so, so, so, so.

---

The words I spoke, the sentiment they carried still echoes in my heart after the hours that it takes for me to trudge through the remainder of my reading, to type up the analysis that I need for class. I love him, yeah. I've always loved him, as long as I can remember. Since I was just a little girl, a child, since the time when 'dad' wasn't a relationship that's replicated a billion times over across the surface of the earth but was a single person, a man with chestnut hair and smiling eyes. A man who played with me, pushed me ever higher on the swings, tossed me up into the air to make me laugh and scream. Whom I would cling to for protection when we traveled into strange and scary places, knowing with a child's certainty that as long as he was there I would be safe. The attachment, the feeling that I had about him then...the term of 'love' is measured to fit it, not the other way around.

Maybe it's inevitable that the strength of that devotion should have to dim a bit. As you get older, as the mind expands. As adolescence brings along its hotter tempers, the confusing ache of hormones kicking into gear, the sense you get of manifest injustice hounding you at every turn. Teenage rebellion, trying to decipher who I was, who I wanted to be, wearing prim and proper dresses to school one week and then dying my hair black the next. We had our share of quarrels, even arguments, as chores that I had done without complaint for years seemed suddenly an undue imposition on my time, as I now decided that his jokes were stupid, that I hated hearing them. But even in my most heated moments, I never said I hated him. I wouldn't have meant it, even if I did. He never me start to feel that kind of bile for him, never gave sufficient reason for even the irrationality of an adolescent temper.

Hell, I say we fought, but really it was just me fighting, yelling. Usually he only stood there, quiet, permitting me to vent my spleen, releasing the frustration that sometimes built up so explosive in me in those years. Left me alone afterwards to recover, or from time to time would pop back into my room with two little cups of ice cream, one for him and one for me. An offering, to make up for whatever grievance I had just yelled at him about - and as I ate it next to him, as I let the cream and sugar soothe my quivering upset, I'd often realize how silly I was being. Though I didn't usually admit it, at the time.

If anything, the divorce was a boost to our relationship, dad's and mine. I was getting older anyway, beginning to outgrow the tears and fury of my teenaged angst. When my mom's affair was suddenly revealed, when accusations flew, when the home I thought was stable, safe was abruptly cracked beneath my feet...all my complaints about the size of my allowance and how late I could stay out on weeknights were instantly forgotten, trivial. Mom was gone, out of the house and moved in with her lover before a full day was ever past, and for the first time in my life I saw my dad genuinely angry, cursing, screaming into the phone when her lawyer called to start the formalities of the divorce. Hurting - I think that was the scariest part of all. Dad had always been invincible, but now I saw him injured, aching, and I didn't know what I should do, or what I even could.

I'd never really been as close to mom as I had to dad; all at once, I hated her for what she'd done to him, for the lies that she had told us both. And my dad - in struggling to ease his pain, I came to better understand just how difficult it really is, how many times he's been there for me himself, how much he's done for me with just a smile and a hug and an endless store of patience. How much I care about him, love him...I guess it some ways it was almost a return to the bond we had when I was little, a dissolution of the barriers put up by time and age and complication.

Which brings me up to now. To the past few weeks, and the fantasies that have taken me of him, the wrinkle added to my feelings for my father that I don't quite know how to deal with. The idea planted by those stories, germinating in my mind, that there could be more to us than just this chaste and simple love we have, that I could be not just a daughter to him, but a woman, too. That I might like it, want it. If he wanted it himself, if he wanted me...that's the trick of it, the question that demands an answer. If he does, if he could, or if I'm just a little girl to him, forever six years old, someone he can love but not desire.

I still don't know, despite my efforts to find out. What I found on his computer - it doesn't prove anything, one way or the other. If I'd found stories like the ones that I've been reading, or pictures of myself in half-undress, that would have been pretty much conclusive that his feelings mirror mine, but failing to find them doesn't have to mean the opposite is true. He could be ashamed of his impulses, the way the fathers in the stories sometimes (briefly) are, the way I often feel myself. He might not want to indulge them, even to the relatively slight extent of finding pornography that caters to them. Or he might just not want to save it on his computer, worried about its discovery - I saw already how he tried to camouflage the folder with his porn. Or he could have saved it elsewhere, somewhere I didn't find. Or he could...he might not even have considered the idea, the way I hadn't thought about it either until that one confession made me aware of what could be. If he were introduced to it as well, if he knew that there were girls out there who dreamt about their daddy's bed, that there are men who sate their lusts upon their daughter's flesh...the notion of it might intrigue him, excite him, just as it did me.

A handful of the stories had that, as part of how the girl would seduce her father, tease him. Besides the tiny skirts and slim bikinis, she would also leave up on their shared computer information for him to see about dads and daughters in relationships with one another, or pornography depicting it, stories like the ones I've read about it. I could even do something like that, if I wanted to. Maybe not on the computer, since we each have our own, but if one evening I just casually told him that we were covering Jung in one of my classes. That I'd read about his theory of the Electra complex, Oedipus' counterpart, where a girl wants to kill her mother, make love to her father. Looking innocently at him across the table as I ask him what he thinks of the idea, if he believes it's real, and he feels a new arousal stirring there inside him as he looks into my eyes...

God, who am I kidding. I glare at myself, turn over face up on my bed. It's a fantasy, no less than all the other ones I've entertained. It couldn't happen. I mean really, say that casually? I'd stammer, stutter in the first two words, I'd be crimson halfway through. The girls in the stories may be perfect actresses, able to wear whatever mask might be required to win their father's lust, but I'm definitely not. And my dad knows me far too well. If I tried anything like that, he'd see through me like I was made of glass, he'd know what I was not-so-subtly suggesting, what it implied about my dreams. And if he didn't feel the same...the feeling of it shudders queasy there inside, the thought again of him standing awkwardly before me, holding back revulsion as he tries to figure out what he can do to fix his sick and broken child. Or even if he did feel that way about me, the reality could be so very different from the fantasies. If I really saw desire, hunger flare up in his gaze, if he really came over to me, grabbed me in the way that I've imagined, kissed me rough and forceful on the lips the way he never has before. If it wasn't in the safety of a daydream...it would be frightening, whatever else I felt. Terrifying.

I don't know. I don't know what I should do, what I even want. How could I? I barely have experience with relationships in general, let alone having them with members of my family. No one's ever talked about it. They didn't cover it in sex ed, what I should do if I start feeling attracted to my dad. I have no idea how common something like this even is, if it's maybe something everybody goes through, a phase they just don't talk about, or if it's only the domain of scattered perverts sharing stories on the web. I don't know how often things like that really happen, between girls and their dads, how many fathers feel any temptation whatsoever in that direction, how likely my dad is to feel anything like that for me. I need advice, information, answers, and I have no idea where to find it.

Dad's normally the first person I ask anything, but he's obviously off-limits for this. I wouldn't dare to bring it up around me friends, either, to inquire if they've ever done anything like that with their fathers, or i they've wanted to. I think the college has some psychological counselors you can talk to, who at least would be discreet...but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be able to help me. They'd just tell me that I should try to resolve the feelings, move past them, forget them. And maybe that's even good advice, if I look at it from a distance, but I don't want to forget about this just like that, I want at least to know first what could happen, what's possible, before I try to toss it all away. If only I had someone who knew, someone I could trust. Someone who had been through this themself, who could tell me something, anything, about what the reality is like.

Wait. The confessions site! How obvious in retrospect, the solution that pops into my mind. I can't believe I didn't think of it before. The thing that started all of this, those clumsily-written accounts of people who had dared to break this powerful taboo, to sleep with members of their family. I mean...I have a feeling that some of them at least were fake, invented. When they specified exactly what each person said in the middle of sex - yeah. But most of them seemed real, seemed plausible enough. If I could just contact one of the authors, or put out a kind of plea for help...I almost feel like someone would be certain to respond. Wouldn't they? The stack of comments that followed each confession of this nature almost always had a few that were congratulatory, encouraging, hinting that they'd been involved in similar relationships themselves. Surely one of them would be willing to tell me what they know. And it all would be online, anonymous, secret. Safe.

There's a little flash of embarrassment in me, once I've hopped on the computer, seeing how few letters I have to enter before my browser's address window suggests the site I want to go to. Too often. Too obvious. Though I guess that's not the one I really need to worry about - after all, most of the confessions there are just stories of humiliation, or of more general misdeeds. It's the 'erotic literature' websites that would really be incriminating. Probably if I typed a single letter 'L,' the whole suggestion box would flood with locations that have 'incest' front and center, a deluge of story titles that leave little to the imagination. Maybe I should start clearing out my history, just in case dad ever borrows my computer. Unless I wanted him to discover it that way. I know some of the stories relied on that for their beginning, a father prying secretly into her daughter's stuff, finding out that she was into the idea of a Daddy as more than just a parent...

Yeesh. Focus, Sarah. Focus. Searching for my favored tags doesn't turn up any new confessions. That's not exactly a surprise; they tend to be distinctly few in number, just a couple dozen over the years that the site apparently has been around. Though the ones that are there do seem to be pretty popular, as far as number of comments go. If one had been posted in the last few days, I might have tried to get in touch somehow with the person behind it, left my email address. Or, well. An address, anyway - don't think I want to use my usual one for this. Without that, though...I'll need to put up a confession of my own. Something to ask whoever reads it for their help, for their advice.

Two clicks suffice to bring me to the submission page. Just a handful of fields to fill in, title, tags, the confession itself, and a thing to prove I'm not a robot; I hesitate a while, fingers resting lightly on the keys, trying to figure out what I should write. It's not my strong suit, really. Phrasing things in an exciting fashion, compelling...particularly when I don't have all that much to say for what I've really done, as opposite to what's just there inside my head. The cursor blinks expectantly from inside the title box until eventually I have to type. Slowly. "In love with my dad."

Jeez. I don't know. Misgiving passes twisty and uncertain through my stomach, looking at the words. 'In love?' That's a strong thing for me to say, very strong. I mean, without a doubt I love him, and 'm feeling something more, too, something physical, romantic, but...it's too much, isn't it? Too definitive, conclusive. If it were true, if I really were in love with him, I'd almost have to try to follow through, couldn't later say that it was just a phase, a passing fancy. It...no. I go back, delete the words, put in 'Attracted to' instead. Better. Safer, more reasonable. If reason has anything to do with any of this.

The body now, the confession itself. Okay, I can just...I'll just write what I've been thinking, I guess. "I know this isn't near as juicy as a lot of the confessions posted here." Kind of an apology, to get things started. "But I need to write it anyway. A month or two ago, I read on here about a woman who started sleeping with her father, and ever since then I've been having sexual thoughts, fantasies about my dad. Masturbating to the thought of him, of us doing things together, him touching me. I don't really even know why I find it so exciting - I just do."

The words flow a little easier as I get into the groove of it. I couldn't say this to anyone in person, but writing it is somehow different. Like a diary. "It's never happened, not for real. Nothing like that between us. He's always been a perfect dad to me, totally above reproach. There's no reason for me to think he's ever wanted to anything like that, either...except for the fact that lately I've been kind of wishing that he would. I've got this wild part of me that wants him to take me like the Daddies that I've read about in stories, to claim me for his own and make me-"

No. Too strong, again. I frown a little at myself, hold down backspace for a while before trying the thought again, somewhat more reserved. "Part of me wants the kind of things with him that I've read about other girls having with their dads, in stories, or in the confessions that I've read here. But I don't know if he wants it, too. And I'm afraid that if I ever tried for anything like that with him, and he didn't want it, it would really screw up the relationship we have. Which is something that I really care about. So I'm stuck."

"That's actually a big part of why I'm posting this, though. Or even the main part." This is the important bit, the plea for help. "It seems like there's a number of people on here who have been in relationships like that, who know what it's really like. I was hoping maybe somebody might be able to give me some advice, let me know if there's any way that I might tell if my dad has any feelings like that for me, without me having to give my own away. Or even just to know for sure if he doesn't, if I should try to forget about all this. Really, any information would be very much appreciated. You could be helping me fulfill some pretty dirty dreams. :)"