Linda realized that her parents' divorce had hurt her father more than her mother. The affair that ended their marriage had something to do with it. That her mother was now married to the object of that affair didn't help.
But her father was just sad, she thought.
Thanksgiving would be tough, but Linda had made her choice. She'd spend it with her father, even though his family was all gone and it would be just her back from her first few months in college and him knocking around the house.
Linda would look up some high-school friends if things got too lonely. Seeing her mother was out of the question, as she and her new husband were in France. They'd offered to fly Linda over as a combined Thanksgiving-and-extra-birthday gift. Linda had just turned 18 two weeks before Thanksgiving, but being on a different coast, she'd celebrated with new friends and talked to both her parents on the phone.
Her father's phone call then had been a bit too forced to be believably cheery, but she could understand that. Hell, she found dating a pain, and she wasn't 45 and newly divorced. He'd perked up when she told him she wanted to spend Thanksgiving with him. The ticket would go on the credit card she had on his account. The rest of her present was another $500 off that card to buy what she wanted.
She saw her father waiting in the spot in the terminal where he'd said he would be and waved. He smiled and waved back. At 45, he was pretty good-looking, though she assumed he dyed his hair, which was brown and thick. He had an agreeable face -- kind without looking weak. And he dwarfed her, 6'4" and 240 pounds to her 5'0" and 100. He'd joked every once in awhile about having helped make something so improbably small, and they'd all laughed. But that was when they were still a family.
Linda had her mother's blonde hair and slight frame. She hadn't inherited her mother's breasts -- 34Ds -- but had instead been somewhat disappointed during her maturation that she tended toward her father's female relatives on that count. 30B was as large as she got, and there had been an embarrassing conversation with her mother when Linda was 16 and her mother tried to gently enquire if Linda wanted breast implants.
The conversation had been strange and uncomfortable, but it had also cemented something in Linda that wanted to like her own body. And so she did, and she had found lots of boys who found neither her breasts nor her slim hips a turn-off.
Linda snapped back to the present as her father said "Hi, honey" and engulfed her in his embrace. Ridiculously, comfortably, he still smelled like Old Spice. She hugged him back. As they broke the hug, he took her larger bag away from her and slung it across his shoulder.
"Good to see you, " he said.
"Good to see you, too."
"Tired? The bags under your eyes would seem to suggest so."
She laughed. "Yeah, I mainly feel like crashing, but I wouldn't mind eating."
"It's only 3 p.m. here, honey. You can even nap and go out to eat."
She slapped her forehead with a hand in a ritualized bit of 'what an idiot I am.' "Right. That would be good."
"Late night?"
"No night. By the time I was ready to get to sleep, it was time to get ready to wake up."
"Poor baby."
They reached the car and drove home, making small talk all the way. The exterior of the house was as she remembered it -- cleaner and better kept, actually. Maybe her father had more time to devote to lawn care now that her mother was gone. Or more reason to.
The interior was pretty much the same as well, with a difference it took her awhile to figure out. All the framed family photos in which her mother had appeared had vanished. Now only pictures of Linda or of Linda and her father remained on the walls, interspersed with the same paintings of rural settings that her father had preferred and her mother had barely tolerated.
She dropped the bag she was carrying on the floor of her room. Her father placed the other on her bed. The room was as she'd left it -- same posters, same frilly pink bedspread, same books on the shelves, same clothes left in the closet. Her father had given her a quick kiss on the cheek and told her to get a couple of hours sleep before he gently closed the door behind him as he left. The same alarm clock glowed red beside her bed. No need to unpack the one she'd brought with her, Linda realized.
Linda grinned. Same personal bathroom with shower too, of course. After three months of shared bathroom accommodations, that would be nice.
Having unpacked and stored the clothes that could be stored and set aside those that would need to be ironed, Linda stowed her bags in the closet and sprawled full-out on the bed, kicking off her shoes as she did so. They made a satisfying 'clump' sound as they hit the floor. Realizing that she was in danger of drifting off now, she quickly set the alarm for 5:30. Dad had said reservations were for 7 p.m., so she'd have plenty of time for a shower if she drifted off now. Then she sighed and sat up so as to take her stockings off and the panties beneath. She tossed both at the desk chair and both landed and stuck their landings. Linda's blouse, skirt and bra soon joined them and she lay back down. The room was warm. No need to burrow beneath the covers.
As Linda started to drift off on top of the covers, she realized that something was a bit odd. The pillow and the covers smelled like her father, cologne and everything else. No, she realized, that must be just a sense memory.
She awoke to the light touch of someone's breath across her forehead. Its anomalous presence didn't disturb her at first, and so she continued to lie there, eyes shut, trying to decide whether to wake up or doze off. The alarm hadn't gone off.
Someone's breath, she realized.
Linda opened her eyes to find herself staring directly into her father's eyes barely six inches away.
Startled, she started to say "Daddy?" but his large left hand covered her mouth and much of her face besides.
"Shh, kitten." He hadn't called her by that nickname since she'd reached adolescence, she thought.
Her widened eyes took in the rest of the scene as she looked around the room. The clock said 4:58. Enough light streamed into the room between the partially open curtains to show her one thing she knew and another she didn't expect. She was naked and on top of the covers. Bending over her, Linda's father was naked as well. She glanced down. His cock was in proportion to the rest of him, jutting out nearly as long and thick as her forearm -- or so it seemed, and what it seemed was indeed very close to what it was -- from a tangled salt-and-pepper patch of pubic hair.
Two absurd thoughts flickered across Linda's mind as she looked at her father's penis for the first time. The first was the realization that he needed both a trim and some hair dye. The second was the crude surprise that her mother had left anyone with a cock like that.
Her father's breath hitched a bit, as if he had meant to say something and then paused when he realized Linda was looking at his cock. It stood up hard and straight against his stomach, a bit of precum glistening on its circumcised tip.
A third absurd thought flickered across Linda's mind. God, she thought, he should be able to get a date. She continued to look at it for what seemed like hours until she realized that she had to do something harder. She had to meet his eyes again.