Welcome to my latest series, mashing up a few more tropes. This one turned out to be a crazy ride, so get ready for something that ends quite unlike it begins.
One thing you can be sure of, even though this is Literotica, and this story could easy veer off into... THERE, it does not in fact, go THERE. So either don't fear, or don't get your hopes up, whichever your preference.
Lastly, as always, I am not going for deep truths or gritty realism. The aim for me is a plausibly ridiculous course of events.
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Guilty Pleasures - Four
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To say that the end of the cruise was weird was underselling it. It was almost entirely surreal. Dinner together that last night had been terribly uncomfortable for everyone, as far as I could tell. Not one word was spoken about what had happened. My eyes even managed to behave themselves for the first time since Anne had walked into my stateroom.
But there was this almost hysterical edge to the evening, with every joke, every funny story getting gales of borderline desperate laughter.
I sat with Becca on the flight back. Anne and Mary's parents had used miles to get them to Ft. Lauderdale and back, and were on another airline. Carol sat a row ahead and on the other side. Becca and I had a tranquil ride, mostly reading our books. We did spend about a half hour talking about her classes for the Fall, and the internship she had on campus for the summer. It meant that she was staying on campus, instead of coming home. Neither of us commented on why that might be a little more... tranquil.
Lots of Becca's friends were staying in the Chapel Hill area for the summer. Some were taking classes, others were working. Becca pointedly did not say anything about our fellow cruisers' summer plans, but I already knew that they were going to be staying around.
When we finally got home, Becca did not stay at home overnight, which I took to be an editorial decision. She was rooming with Mary over the summer, and that meant she was choosing to go spend her time with her friend. The father in me found that comforting. I would not have wanted to mess up any friendships.
I figured that if I made it to lunch the next day without a call from a homicide detective about either Mary's or Becca's corpse, I could go back to just worrying about my own relationship with my daughter.
*
The next Saturday dawned clear, sunny, and warm but not scalding hot. It was a perfect day for a pool hangout, and I wondered apprehensively if those marvelous days of enjoying my daughter's company were no more. Becca never called ahead, or asked permission. My house was hers as well, and I had always made that clear to her, along with the fact that she never needed to give me a heads up. I just was always prepared.
As usual Becca arrived with a crowd of hangers on. I relaxed a little as kids streamed in.
But conspicuous in their absence were the trinity...
As I was setting up the grill for later work, Becca brought two new faces, both young, attractive, and male, to introduce to me. Carl and Benny were in Becca's dorm for the summer. It was not hard to surmise from their nervousness about me, their slightly adversarial nature with each other, and most alarmingly from Becca's pointedly defiant attitude toward me, that one or the other (please God, not both) were going to be a worry for me in coming weeks.
She shooed them off after the introductions, but remained with me. She was giving me the chance to issue some fatherly words of caution as was my usual procedure when she introduced me to new boys. I was not about to fucking take that bait that afternoon, though. Not given recent events. I could not tell if Becca was disappointed I hadn't stepped into the trap, or pleased that I was sufficiently cowed.
I wasn't that cowed. If I detected signs of growing closeness, I'd take the hit and dispense the fatherly advice. I always did. I had fucked up, but I had not abdicated my responsibilities.
But I did ask idly about Anne, Carol, and Mary.
"They all were busy today, Dad," came the flat reply.
Hoo boy.
Carol occasionally had team things to take care of, but Anne and Mary had never in history been too busy for a pool hang. I sensed I was not the only one receiving a not so gentle message that day.
*
But the next weekend, another pool hang went off without a hitch, and Carol, Anne, and Mary were all in attendance, as if nothing had ever happened. My eyes were not quite so well-behaved as they had been in the immediate aftermath of getting caught, but no one made an issue of it. I tried to ogle Stephanie instead, and succeeded for the most part.
I was sure that all three of my... problems were aware I could not entirely keep my eyes off them, and I was quite sure that none of them minded. I found myself with foreboding feelings about that.
Carl and Benny were around to infest the festivities again, but neither seemed to have closed any kind of deal with my daughter, in any way. In fact, a third new face had come along, James, or Jim, or something like that, to further complicate matters. I was glad my daughter was not leaping into a new relationship just to piss me off, but I did not like feeling that she was at the center of an impending feeding frenzy either.
Regardless, I felt like I was fully back in my daughter's life, if not quite back in her good graces. The party was fun, even if I did have to leave for a few minutes to buy more eggplant for vegetarians and five beers disappeared from my fridge while I was gone.
I made no mention of the fact.
*
Work was... work. We had a critical component we needed to complete a production design for. My team's prototype was twice as big as it needed to be. Most of the work was supposed to have been done in my absence on the cruise, but I had to throw out much of my team's efforts when I got a good look at them. They were on the right track, and had done some good work, but the most brilliant circuit layout in the world is useless if the component is two inches too large to fit in the fucking box.
I came home that afternoon, glad we were in a heat wave. I changed immediately into my trunks. (My backyard is pretty private, but with a daughter, I had never gotten into the naturalist thing back there, even when I lived alone.)
Ten minutes after closing the garage door, I was lying back, listening to Bon Jovi, and cracking open a beer.
I heard a knock at the side gate. I looked over to see Mary first peeking around the wooden gate, then coming entirely into the yard and closing it behind her.
Alone.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
At least she wasn't in a bikini, but what she had on instead was not really much better. She had pink cotton duck shorts with a high, tight waist that were cut very high in back, high enough that when she turned to close the gate I could clearly see a good thumb's-breadth of soft ass peeking out. Up top she had on a pale, pastel-colored plaid button-down shirt with short sleeves and the tails knotted below her breasts, leaving a wide expanse of bare belly.
Mary usually dressed in a fairly body-positive manner that showed off her positive body, but this was a bit extravagant, even for her.
