As I walked into the theatre, it took a moment for my eyes to become accustomed to the darkness before I scanned the rows of mostly empty seats looking for Rachel. A year earlier she had been one of my students and later my teaching assistant before she moved on. I hadn't seen her since she left school, though we kept in touch. The relationship between Rachel and myself was unique and though we had pushed boundaries with each other before, this would be the first time we ever truly crossed over them.
Rachel was not a typical student. She had lived a rough life and was as street smart as they came. It might have been that she was trying to make a change in her life when I met her, or that I brought something out in her, or maybe it was something else but one way or another for one reason or another she made it clear that she wanted to be submissive to me. And I cared for her in a way that was different than any other student. She was something special to me.
As her teacher I kept things under control by assigning myself the role of being not just her teacher, but I told her that if could ever adopt one of my students, I would adopt her. That role provided both a boundary and a pretext for a unique student teacher relationship. I never crossed any sexual boundaries that a father would cross with their daughter, but at the same time I fulfilled a need that we both seemed to share for me to impose discipline and structure for her.
I never physically punished her as my student and I never tried to make her feel as though she was expected act like a slave. I simply gave her rules to follow, and made her stand in a corner if she failed to follow them. I picked out her clothes, I set curfews and made her introduce me to what ever boys that she wanted to go on dates with. It was confusing to a lot of people because she would call me dad, and tell people that I was her dad even though I was not her real dad.
Despite the pretext of a pretend father/daughter relationship, we frequently had some very frank discussions concerning a wide variety of sexual topics. I think she knew from the first time I ordered her to stand in the corner that I enjoyed having some level of control, and I knew by the way she would fix my coffee, and insist on serving it to me that though she did not seem submissive to those who knew her, it was definitely an element to her personality.
And here we were, a little more than a year, and quite a few conversations later meeting in a theatre in the middle of the day, attending a movie that had been out for weeks that few people were still interested in watching. I found her sitting in a quiet corner, away from the few people who were also in the theatre at the time.
As I sat next to her, Rachel gave me a surprised look and said, "Dad! I can't believe you actually came!"
I could understand her surprise. This was a long time coming, and even before she left school she had hinted at being sexually interested. Back then I mostly responded that I was her dad, and she shouldn't act that way around me. Today was going to be different. As far I was concerned I wanted the pretend father daughter relationship to continue. I enjoyed it and took a strange kind of comfort in it, but I wasn't going to let it get in the way of exploring how far things could go between us.
