My father had got used to the idea: his daughter (that is, me), had REALLY "that" problem.
But he was keeping acting with me the same way as before. As if I was always his little child. Bearing in mind the fact that I was not a child anymore.
When I was really a little child there was my mother with us. And my father loved her, the same way as he loved me. Or thereabouts...
When I asked him why I could not stay away alone late in the evening he told me why, and very clear.
"Because you are Red Riding Hood, And there are lots of wolves, out there."
"What wolves? There are no wolves, there are people only, out there." I answered, thinking that he was treating me as If I was younger and sillier than I was.
"People are wolves, sometimes. Especially MEN are wolves."
"And what do you are? Are you not a man?"
"Yes, I am a wolf too. But a wolf who have found someone who has domesticated him. You can't domesticate anyone yet..."
It was clear WHO had domesticated him. My mother. And when I grew old a bit, I understood HOW he shad domesticated him. Giving him bit by bit what the "wolves" out there would have tried to take from me all at once... her body... the sex...
And I had heard and seen how my mother kept "domesticating" him. That morning when I heard my mother laugh and shout.
"Oh, no, come on, quit! We will wake up Crimi!"
"Crimi" was me. "Crimilde", or "Kriemhild", as the Wagnerian heroine, "Crimi" for my friends. My father liked Wagner, and the name was quite original, but that night his mind was very far from classical music. He was trying to "submitted" my mother "to his lechery". Maybe I should have understood that my mother was not totally averse to get "submitted", listening to how much she was laughing. But when I got into my parents' room, I just saw them as if they were caught in a brawl, under the blankets, and my father was over her. Help! Alert! Beat quarter!
I jumped on the bed, climbed on my father's back and started beating it with my little fists, as if I wanted to stab him with non-existing daggers. He started laughing.
"Leave my mom alone!" I shouted. As a largely pre-adolescent girl could "shout", of course.
"Hey, we have a real warrior princess!" he said, cheerfully. He took me by a hand, before I could fall from the bed, and careful rolled on his side. "You are brave! That's good! But I was not hurting your mom! Isn't it right, dear?"
Even my mother was laughing, a bit embarrassed by the situation. She was blushing, her nice adult body scarcely covered by the unbuttoned padjamas. Her breasts were swollen, her nipples erected. And she was looking at his man with shy but shining eyes. Clearly he had not mistreated her...
"But I heard you saying "no"!" I said.
"Oh! It was a play! You dad wanted to play!" my mother laughed. "I just did not want to wake you up too soon! It's Sunday! You could sleep!"
"What kind of "play"?" I asked.
"Well..." my mother said. She looked at my father, but he did not help her to answer me: he just looked at her and smiled.
"Do we tell her, now?" he asked her. "It's the right moment..."
So that was the day I knew the facts of life. That thing about the birds and the bees, you know. And how I came to the world. I was not upset at all. It seemed to me a nice thing. I even asked to see WITH WHAT my father and my mother had "made" me... Especially, with what my father had took part in the process. But my mother adamantly forbade him to show me that. And my father had to go along...
It seemed to me impossible, then, that all that love between my father and my mother could come to an end. But it came.
Yes, I thought it would have happened, someday in the distant future, a sad day at the hospital, and then, at the graveyard. "Till death do us apart", "ashes to ashes, dust to dust"... But I was wrong. It was worse. My mother fell in love with another man.
Yes, for me it was very worse. When someone dies, it's sorrowful, but it's natural, it happens to anyone, no one is to blame, there are the good memories... But that way!
They divorced, of course, and the judge gave me to my father, and I was happy. I hated my mother, then. For me, she was worse than dead. What that other man had, more than my dad? Why she had left him? Why she had hurted him? Why?
"Don't take it bad." my father told me. We were at our house. He had put some comedy in the DVD reader, to distract me, but I was crying. Crying with rage, and with sorrow for him. He had cooked good things, for both. He was able to do that too. How many men could do it? And my mother had left him all the same. Why?
"Because", he said. "We have talked about it. I prefer she has gone, if she really loved that man, If she would have remained with us, only out of sense of duty, it would have been worse. Always recriminating, thinking she had sacrificed herself, her new love, her freedom, her life... Unbearable. I am sure she had thought about it, very well. It has been her choice, she had the right to take it. So let her go, don't think about it too much..."
"And you? You are alone..." I said. He sighed, shrugging.
"Stories come to an end. Life goes on."
And life went on. My father looked for another woman that could "domesticate" him, and after a few, he found her. She was a work colleague. I think she was waiting for nothing else. She surely liked that man, first, loyal to his wife, and then free, and able to suffer with dignity. My father had serious intentions towards her, so he let us meet each other. I had a good impression of her. She was beautiful, quite tall, in his thirties. The body of a mare, wide hips, big breasts, nice face, calm and reassuring. I felt she was really able to love, not only in the sexual sense, maybe. "Loving" as "taking care". She was the kind of woman my father needs. She had noticeable eyes too. Eyes of a she-wolf. But she looked at my father not as if he was a prey. She looked at him as at a pack leader. Her own pack leader.
After a while, my father and his new woman started to sleep together. He preferred to "do it" at her house, for not to "embarrass" me. He did not tell me exactly what he went to do, when he ordered a pizza for me (he still did not trust my cooking skills so much). But I was not a children anymore. I knew what sex was already, from that famous morning. And I knew that sex is a normal fact, between a man and a woman, married or not. And my father was a man.
