Mary just smiled idly, then turned to Becca. "Yo, roomie! Unless you want to go first, I'm going to go take a long shower and get ready for dinner tonight." Becca waved her hand idly in reply. She had not gotten the sun that the others had that day because of the trip with me, and was soaking up rays still, even though the sun was going down fast. "You are eating with us tonight for once, right Mister Howard?" Mary added to me.
Before I could answer, all four of them, even my daughter chorused that I most definitely was. "You haven't found a Cruise Girlfriend yet, Dad," Becca said firmly. "So you are just going to have to put up with eating with us."
Yeah, that comment did nothing to raise my comfort level, but I was apparently going to have dinner with my crew. Let the sugar daddy speculation renew among our fellow passengers...
It did not help that all four girls dressed like mature adult women that evening. It should have, but it didn't. I realized that had they dressed like teenagers, in Pokemon shirts or whatever, I would look like what I was supposed to be, a long-suffering dad wrangling his rambunctious charges. But with these four poised, grown-up looking women, I looked like what I was most emphatically not supposed to be, an idiot with a far-too-young harem of sugar babies.
At least they were all dressed fairly demurely. Only Mary, out of all of them, so much as displayed some cleavage. Of course it had to be Mary... My diseased mind had caved to two disastrous opportunities, it did not need incitement to think about actively considering a third!
As for the 'demure' outfits, I had zero hope that the four girls would keep them on and not change clothes later. They had all fallen in love with the ship's disco just from the website, and had brought what they called 'club wear', and I privately called stripper outfits. Since we had first gotten on board, I had constantly low-level worried about that place, and what they might get up to there. Now, particularly in Anne and Carol's case, I was almost desperate for them to go find some studly young bucks to go be unwise with, getting their minds off me.
Mary... Yancey would probably kill me if his daughter went off and had a cruise fling on my watch. However, considering the expanse of really high quality cleavage she was flaunting here at dinner, I did not want to think about how she would dress for the disco. Whatever. She would at least be out of my sight, and my wandering eyes could behave themselves.
After dinner, Becca did not fly off with her buddies to change, but instead steered me firmly toward the Singles Meet & Greet which had reared its ugly head again that evening. Worse, she actually went in with me, dragging me in toward the bar in the middle.
"What are you doing?" I demanded. "You know I'm not going to buy you a drink when we aren't at home."
"Stand down, Guard Daddy," Becca chirped like a little girl. Then she got all serious on me. "I'm just making sure you actually get a drink so you won't run away as soon as I turn my back. You got game in you somewhere, Dad. Use it."
I dutifully bought my cocktail.
And my daughter then vanished like smoke, probably to go off and change into something slutty that she would never let me see and go dancing with all manner of...
She was twenty. Almost twenty-one. In college. She could make choices, and at some point I had to trust that her mother and I had taught her well enough to make less-disastrous ones than I was lately.
I actually gave it a try that evening. I did use to have game, right? Unfortunately, I had the yips or something, because to be blunt, nothing worked. Honestly, I never encountered anyone who made me want to give a full, much less my best, effort.
I'll admit, there were very few targets who actually appealed to me. And not because they paled in comparison to the two nubile young nymphs I had so guiltily enjoyed the prior days... though they did. Most of the single women on the cruise just did not measure up in absolute terms to what I was looking for.
When I was young, I had done well enough to be picky about who I dated. When I married, I married hot. Very hot, for all the good it had ended up doing for me. I wasn't totally shallow, though. In my younger days, I had dated several girls who were less than knockouts, but whose intelligence and humor had given them that inner light of sexiness for me.
I went in there with a very open mind about who I might like to socialize with, or more, but it was not to be. Most women there were not pushing my buttons at all. Of those that did, there were few who were genuinely single and there without a date of some kind. The few truly single ones were covered in guys like flies on shit.
I did have a nice conversation with one attractive woman, only a few years younger than me. We laughed and joked, and traded tales of our children. Hers were younger than mine, and I darkly muttered that I was jealous.
I was just about to make some kind of move... or suggestion... or something, when Francie brightened and looked past me. "There you are!" she exclaimed brightly to her friend approaching from behind me.
Great. She had an unofficial date, too. Why did people go to the singles thing when they were on the cruise with someone?
Her date was better looking than Francie was. And only a few years younger, I guessed.
Francie introduced us. She made no mention of being 'with' Leanne, but their body language made no secret of it. I'd spent half an hour chatting up a lesbian.
On the other hand, after another five minutes, I noticed that I had not been dismissed, either. My over-sexed, hyper-erotically aware brain found itself going... well... There. I let myself make a dirty joke, just to test the waters, if you will. It went over well. I perked up.
The prospect of a semi-anonymous hookup with a pair of attractive, hopefully bi-sexual lesbians was suddenly, unreasonably attractive to me.
No, really.
I mean sure, the prospect of a semi-anonymous hookup with a pair of attractive, hopefully bi-sexual lesbians is going to get any guy's motor running, but the fact that the scenario felt like it would be a return to vanilla, appropriate behavior compared to the last forty-eight hours was the unreasonable part.
Alas, after my second dirty joke, it became all too clear that Francie was, um, not bisexual. She excused them from my company shortly thereafter. I almost put my head through one of the support pillars in the room in frustration.
I had been this close. And by this close, I mean I had been in the same state as a threesome opportunity. To a guy, that counts. And I might have been in the same zip code, really. Francie might not have been interested in me as more than pleasant conversation, but I was pretty sure I had caught Leanne giving me the eye once or twice.
The rest of the evening was not auspicious.
I finally went to bed, having given it all the college tries, and tossed and turned. Somehow, despite my sexual drought having been flooded out by spectacular sex with two amazing, appallingly young women, I was more hard up that night than I had been before.
Karma is a violent, vengeful bitch.
*
The next day was our last port of call on the cruise, thank goodness. I had early on agreed to a morning shore excursion snorkeling with the full compliment of my monstrous regiment of women. At least with all four of them there, I could relax and not worry about any potential follow-up entanglements.
Unfortunately, Becca's three friends were now a mine field of potential popup boner incidents. The prior night at dinner, I had gone all Pappy McGramps and advised them that this was supposed to be an active swim, and they ought to choose suits that they wouldn't have to worry about. The next day, it became apparent that all three had interpreted my advice as, the less suit there was, the less there was to worry about. Instead of nice, stable one-pieces, I was surrounded by the briefest of their arsenal of bikinis. There were none I had not seen before, in my own backyard. Only now...
Anne and Carol, I could tell, had each come up with the idea to do it intentionally, and on their own, as they both were giving me the side eye, especially right after we all met up. Smug little wenches both knew how hot they were, and how they were now affecting me.
Mary must have taken her lead from them, or maybe she just wanted to squeeze in all the sun she could get on what was left of her vacation. In the little stringy green number she was sporting, she was going to get a sunburn just from all the guys' eyes that were checking her out. As I said, Mary has not the conventionally sexy body that her friends sport, but she has always been irresistibly cute. And now that my broken brain could not avoid it, I was realizing that her cuteness had a deep, deep layer of physical allure.
No girl that tiny should have tits that big, dammit!
The snorkeling itself was fine. When in the water, the hardest thing to see was my fellow swimmers, other than their heads when we stopped to talk with the guide while treading water. The morning would have been great fun if the reefs we were diving had not been basically devastated by tourists like us over fifty years. Or tourists before us. I think we personally did a pretty good job of leaving alone what little survived to be looked at.
