A Father's Love

Mack knew the address, although he'd only been there once before when helping his daughter, Susie, and her then new husband Jerry move in. That had been three years ago, and even though he hadn't been back since, Mack had the location burned into his memory for a couple of reasons, none of which were why he was there now.

Susie had called the night before. She'd been crying. All he remembered hearing her say was that Jerry had beaten her. It was all he'd needed to hear. He'd driven all night, a loaded shotgun rattling ominously behind the bench seat, and now by early morning light he pulled his battered Ford pickup to a halt at the curb and shut off the struggling engine. It was an old farm truck and it wasn't used to highway driving. He wasn't sure if it would make it back, but he'd have to deal with that when and if the time came. All he knew was, his daughter needed him and that truck was the only reliable vehicle he had beside his John Deere, and while that tractor might have been up to the journey at top speed he'd be two days on the road. When he heard his daughter crying on the phone he knew time was of the essence, in case the bastard decided to do it again. If he could have climbed through the fucking phone wire and been there instantly he would have done it.

On the way he'd wondered about what might have happened, and why. No father ever likes the man his daughter chooses to marry. Jerry wouldn't have been his first pick for his only daughter, but it wasn't his choice to make. He'd let her know his misgivings about the boy and then accepted her decision. She was the one that had to live with him, not Mack.

But, he'd never figured Jerry for an abuser. He didn't think he had the balls, for one thing. Jerry just didn't seem the type, but God knows what makes men do the things they do these days.

Or women, for that matter.

In all probability, Susie had something to do with whatever happened. She was a strong-willed girl -- like her mother had been until cancer robbed her of her strength, her vitality, her dignity, and then her life -- and most men can't handle strong-willed women. Still, no matter what she might have done or said there was never a good reason for a man to hit a woman. If it had ever come to that between Mack and Corry, Mack knew he'd have just walked away.

He'd come close a few times. Corry had had a way of getting under Mack's skin when she wanted to, and she didn't want to often but when that itch to start a fight became more than she could resist she knew just what to say and how to say it to get him riled up. He knew Susie had inherited at least that much from her mother. Both women had the ability to drive men to the line that separates reason from madness.

Jerry, evidently, had crossed the line. Now, he'd have Mack to deal with.

The unassuming colonial on a quiet suburban street was dark and still as Mack hit the front porch. The only car in the driveway was the little two-door import he had bought Susie when she graduated high school. He had hoped it would take her to college, but instead she married Jerry and became a suburban house-frau. The last Mack knew Jerry drove a Jeep. The sedan was the only car around.

Just as well. If he saw Jerry he'd beat the crap out of him, maybe use that shotgun on him if the little bastard was even the least bit recalcitrant, and then he'd have to get himself out of jail before he could do his daughter any good. This way he could just scoop her up and take her home and then deal with her husband when the time came.

The door opened before he knocked. Susie stood on the other side and walked away when she saw the look on her father's face. Mack let himself in.

"You okay?" he asked, closing and locking the door behind himself.

Susie walked away from him, toward the kitchen.

"I'm okay," she said. "Coffee's on."

He followed her, and studied the way she walked. Fatigued, but not limping. That was good. Her bathrobe didn't reveal much skin, so he couldn't see any bruises, and her face had been obscured by a screen door when he came in so he couldn't have seen what damage there was and wouldn't until she stopped walking and turned around.

Susie grabbed two mugs and poured coffee, and handed one to her father.

Her face was fine. Not a mark on it. Maybe her idea of a beating was different from his.

Mack took the mug. "Where is he?"

Susie shrugged. "Who knows," she said. "Truth is I tossed the bastard out almost a month ago."

And he'd come back and done whatever because, why? Because she'd been shacked up with somebody else? Once Susie had figured out -- at the ripe old age of fourteen, no less -- what her body could do she couldn't stand to go more than a few days without using it to its full potential. Being without a husband, even a useless one like Jerry, to warm her sheets at night would have driven her to the first pick-up bar she could find. Still, infidelity wasn't an excuse for physical violence, but Mack felt his own anger begin to subside the more he realized Jerry might have been pushed over the line instead of just crossing it.

"D'you call the cops?"

Susie smiled, and then laughed, and something in her eyes told Mack she had something up her pink chenille sleeve.

"Actually," she said, "I haven't seen him in weeks."

Mack's neck tensed up. He stared at her, barely breathing. "You lied?" he said, not so much a question as a confirmation.

Susie met his stare. "I wanted to see you," she said. "And I knew if I told you why you'd never come."

The part of his brain that did most of the thinking told him to put the mug down, turn around, and nurse that old pickup back home before she said another word. Unfortunately, that wasn't the dominant cerebral patch at the moment, so he sipped the coffee and waited for her to explain herself.

"He never laid a hand on me," she said, and turned her face to see out the window at the sunrise over the back yard. "Maybe if he had he'd still be here," she added, and then looked back at Mack. "You were right about him," she said. "Right from the start. He was never gonna be what I wanted in a man."

As far as Mack could tell, there were only two things his daughter ever wanted from a man: a paycheck and a stiff dick. Either Jerry had joined the chronically unemployed or he'd lost his interest in her, and Mack couldn't see the latter happening because any man would have to be dead not to get aroused looking at Susie.

Susie sipped her coffee and turned completely to look out the window. "They say girls look for father figures when they go hunting for a husband," she said. "A substitute, you know? I always thought it was bullshit, but after three years with Jerry I became convinced how right it was. And, you know what?"

She turned to lock eyes with him again.

"No man will ever be able to take your place," she said.

He should have been flattered. He was too pissed off to accept a compliment.

"I drove like a wildman," he said, "all night." He thought it best not to mention the shotgun. "I could'a killed m'self and God knows how many other people trying to get here because you said he'd beaten you."

She didn't even try to weasel her way out or offer any excuses, other than asking him, "Would you have come otherwise?"

They both knew he wouldn't have.

"It was all I could think of."

"What if I'd seen him on the street before I got here?" he bellowed. "I'd have killed the bastard for nothing."

She put her cup down, walked over to him, cradled his scratchy face in her soft slender hands, and kissed him tenderly on the lips.

He let her.

He felt his dick shift in his jeans as it grew. Damn, she was good! Too good. His hands went to her waist, and as soon as he touched her she seemed to melt into him.

"I want us to be together again," she whispered to him, momentarily breaking the kiss. "Momma's gone now, we can be together like we always wanted."

Her lips pressed to his and crushed them arduously before he could answer, "Like you always wanted." But he knew that wasn't the whole truth. He'd wanted her, too, every waking day for the past eight years. It was a want he had to suppress for so long, a want he'd enjoyed once, and wanted so desperately to enjoy again.

Her hands left his face and traveled down his shoulders to his back, drawing him in closer. She pushed her pelvis against him and felt his lust pulsing into her belly, and behind the kiss she smiled.

Mack pushed away and peeled her off him, and held her at arms length until he was sure she'd stay there.

"This isn't right," he said.

She stopped struggling and he released her.

"It wasn't right the first time," she said. "It's no worse now."

As far as he was concerned, it was never right at any time. It never had been. The memories of that afternoon drove him crazy, because he hated himself for what he'd done and because he hated the fact that ever since he had wanted to do it again.

And he hated that they'd been caught, because that did more to take the fight out of Corry than the cancer alone ever could have.

Susie opened her robe before he could stop her. She was naked underneath it. She held the sides open like big pink wings.

"You gonna tell me you don't want this?" she said, and her eyes went to the front of his jeans. "I know better," she said. "You've been wanting this since I started growing tits. But you were too damn scared to do anything about it until I made the first move."

She'd been just eighteen, a high-school graduate, undecided about college, about to agree to marry Jerry, and with a mother that had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. It was one of the hottest days in summer and Mack came in off the fields to rest a bit and have some lunch when Susie met him in the side yard wearing tight cutoff jean shorts and a tight white knit pullover top. She'd been watering the garden and had managed to douse herself as well, supposedly as defense to the heat. The water made the shorts cling to every fold of her ripe body, and had turned her shirt transparent.

She wore no bra beneath the shirt, and no panties under the shorts. Mack knew she wouldn't be dressed like that if her Mom was around. But his wife was in town having more tests done. He'd offered to go with her but she knew the farm needed tending more than she did. The cancer hadn't yet started to work its wonders on her. It would soon, and when it did the farm would still be there, needing attention that would do her no good.

Mack forced his eyes to leave his daughter's chest and he headed for the kitchen. "Want lunch?" he asked her.

She followed him inside.

Mack grabbed bread and some cold-cuts out of the refrigerator and stood at the counter to make sandwiches. Susie came up behind him and settled against his back. She felt cool and soft and at the same time she felt like fire against him. He couldn't get the image of her dark nipples stark against the transparent white of her shirt out of his mind.

"You wanna get the mayonnaise?" he asked her. He hated the damned stuff but couldn't think of another excuse to get her off him.

She didn't move. "Daddy," she said, "I think it's time you and I had a talk," she said.

He busied himself making the sandwiches. ""Bout what?"

"About us," she said.

"What about us?"

She forced him to turn around and look at her. "Daddy, I know what you want, and it isn't that goddamned sandwich."

He knew it, too, but he'd be damned before he'd say it.

"I know the way you look at me," she said. "Mom knows, too. You notice how the past few years she's always made it so you and I are never together alone for very long? 'Cept for now because she hasn't got a choice."

"Your mother's a very sick woman," he said, knowing that wasn't the point. It was more to remind himself.

"But she isn't blind," Susie had said. "And she isn't stupid. She knows what you want, and so do I."

He wanted to say all he wanted was a sandwich. He already knew what bullshit that was.

Susie moved against him that day pretty much the same way she had approached him that morning three years later in the kitchen of her own house. She'd kissed him, then, and taken his hands which hung slack at his sides and placed them on her body. It proved to be more temptation than he could resist.

The sandwiches never did get made.

They spent a marvelous two hours upstairs in her four-poster bed. She let him do to her all the things he'd always wanted to, some of which Corry never had allowed him to even try. Mack never once questioned where his daughter had learned to please a man so completely, he just took everything she had to offer.

Corry had come home early and heard a commotion from upstairs. She followed the sound to Susie's bedroom where the door lay wide open and her husband lay entangled with their daughter on the bed. They were both naked, laughing, tickling each other. Corry stood in silence for a long while and then walked away.

Mack had seen her shadow pass the doorway and he knew.

He and Susie had never been together again since. She went off and married Jerry two months later and they moved to another town across the state line and bought a house. Mack helped them move in. It was the last he'd seen of either of them other than Christmas and Easter until he buried Corry.

His wife had never mentioned that afternoon, but he knew she'd seen everything. He wanted to bring it up a thousand times but could never find the right moment. Then it was too late for talk about much of anything.

And now, there he was, back with his daughter, alone. It felt like that afternoon all over again.

Mack came to her and slipped his arms beneath the sides of the opened robe. His rough huge hands settled on her waist, just where her hips swelled, and he pulled her in close and kissed her hard. She dropped her arms and the robe slid to the floor, and then she wrapped those arms around his neck and kissed him back.

She was right. Nobody would ever love her the way he did.

He'd started noticing her 'that way' when she was newly teenaged but he always shrugged off the desires as fruit of an idle mind. As she got older he found her tougher to resist, and would always find excuses for touching her casually, for being close enough he could smell her, fell the heat pour off her skin. The urges he suppressed made him wild inside, and although Corry received the business end of his desires every time he vigorously fucked his wife in his mind he was with their daughter.

Looking back, he realized Susie had known what was going on inside his head all the time, and had taken to tempting him as much as possible. The bathroom doors left opened when she was getting into the shower were no mistake, not any more than the towels that mysteriously unwrapped themselves from around her as she walked past him on her way back to her room..

The older she got the bolder she got, and after a while he came to believe she felt teasing him was some sort of game.

And then Corry got sick, and he lost his outlet for all the lust building up inside him. On that day when he finally expressed his needs to Susie and she welcomed him, he thought his problems were all solved. They were really just beginning.

His life became a conundrum. If Corry hadn't been sick she would have left him after catching him in bed with their daughter, but then again if Corry hadn't been sick he probably wouldn't have gone to Susie in the first place. Was she sparing him her wrath because she knew that soon he'd be the only family Susie had left, or was she saving herself the embarrassment of knowing her husband was so dissatisfied with her that he went to their daughter for release?

He and Corry had never talked about it, and with her gone he'd never know.

So, Susie was right again. With Corry and Jerry both gone their respective ways she and her father could be free to enjoy the love they had denied each other for three years. As he took her in his arms, then, he had no problem turning that page, but still he wondered how much they could get away with before either one of them turned away or a third party became aware of what was happening. When he took her to her bed he recognized the fact that their affair would, at some point, have to be terminated, but drunk as he was with lust for her he couldn't afford to care about that.

Mack lay her down and kissed her again, and then kissed her shoulders and chest, her arms and belly, her thighs, the soft bare mound of her sex, and then undressed watching her touch each place his lips had burned her as if her own fingers could soothe the ache he produced in her. Naked, he descended on her, and she welcomed him with open arms and legs raised and spread, making herself a funnel to draw him directly to her center. Later they could take time to enjoy and explore each other's bodies, but right then they both had an urgent need that had to be satisfied.

He slid inside her easily and lifted his torso up on stiff arms while her legs wrapped about his waist. They instantly found a concurrent rhythm and their thrusts into each other quickened immediately. Susie lost all control and grabbed his shoulders with sharp nails, and she cried out, "Yes! Yes!" as Mack plunged into her again and again. Her face twisted in that agony that is so splendid, and seeing her that way brought Mack to the edge of his own ecstasy. He didn't try to hold back but embraced the release, and they climaxed in concert, hot, sweaty bodies locked together, both reveling in the steaming seed he poured into her.

Exhausted, they fell apart, panting, their bodies cooling. Not completely disconnected, their fingertips grazed each others sides and arms.

Mack started to laugh.

Susie rolled over on her side facing him and lifted up on one elbow. "Was it that bad?" she asked playfully.

Mack continued to smile after the laughter subsided. "You have no idea how long it's been since I felt this good," he said. "Your mother tried to be with me as much as possible but I could never really let go with her, she was always in such pain. Then, the last six months or so, it just wasn't worth what it put her through. I became very familiar with my hand."

Susie took his hand in hers and guided it to her belly, where she laid it flat on her warm skin. "No more," she said.

He let that hand wander up to her chest where it brushed the underside of her breasts, and then trailed it downward again to settle over her pulsating crotch.

"I'm no fool," he said. His smile lessened by degrees. "Some day another young man will come along and take you from me," he told her, still laying back and staring at the ceiling. "And that's as it should be, I guess."

Leaning over him, Susie shook her head slowly. Her auburn tresses brushed his chest. "I told you before," she said, "nobody will ever love me like you do."

Now Mack leaned up and turned slightly to face her. "You want children some day, don't you?"

She didn't even hesitate. "It's not essential," she said.

He knew she was being kind. Even if she hadn't considered motherhood a possibility she couldn't know what the next day would bring, much less what waited for her in an open-ended future.

"I can't stay here," he said. "Will you come back to the farm with me?"

She managed to capture his eyes with her own intense gaze. "To the ends of the earth," she said, and leaned in and kissed him.

They fell into each other again and their passions rapidly crested. This time, however, they were in no rush to be done. Mack explored her body slowly, tasting her everywhere, discovering what places and what pressures drew from her the most satisfied moans. He wound up beneath her with his face ground into her pussy, his tongue like a muscle of fire plunged inside her. Her hands massaged his cock and balls, and then she bent down and took him in her mouth, sucking him down as far as he could possibly go, and she constricted her throat rather than draw him out and in again, so that he felt as if a warm wet hand were squeezing his shaft.