It was Friday afternoon – the beginning of my first official college break – and Daddy was late picking me up as usual. Back when I was in high school – hell, even in elementary school – I could count on my mom being 10 minutes early and Daddy being 10 minutes or more late. Not that I could complain about it. I take after him completely. We share the same deep brown eyes, dimpled chin, aristocratic nose with a slight upturn at the end, pale skin and freckled shoulders. He got lucky and got the black, curly hair that I always envied. I ended up with golden brown, straight hair, cut now to the chin. I lucked out, too, and inherited the large, round breasts and full hips from his side of the family, too. My mom was tall and thin, with no breasts and no hips. If I were taller, my tits would look average-size, but 36Cs on a 5-foot frame draw the attention. At least, it has so far on campus.
I was lost in a daydream when Dad zoomed up to the front of the dorm in his BMW. He'd been living the life of a playboy ever since Mom and the baby left him (and me) a couple of years ago. She said she was jealous of our relationship, and if he wanted me so bad, then he could just take care of me by himself. That suited Dad and me just fine. But now I was jealous, even though I didn't know why. Just the thought of Dad and other women made me upset.
He popped out of the car and grinned from ear to adorable ear when he saw me. He pulled off his sunglasses and yelled, "There's my girl."
Just like when I was a kid.
I jumped up and ran to him, smothering him with hugs and kisses.
"Hi, Daddy! I've missed you!" And I did, too.
"Miss you, too, pumpkin," he said, holding me tight.
I'd been to enough dances to know when a guy has a boner, and Dad definitely had a boner. Maybe it was my outfit: button-down white blouse, undone at the top, plaid red, white and green schoolgirl skirt, knee high socks and Mary Janes. It was part of a bet between my girlfriends and me. My friend Jama said that she had worn a similar outfit the first time she went home and her dad couldn't even look at her. She caught him masturbating in the bathroom later. I said there was no way my dad would do that. I was wrong.
"What's with the outfit?" he asked me as we broke our embrace.
"Oh, it's for drama class," I said. "We're practicing a play that requires this ridiculous outfit."
"Don't you think the skirt's kinda short?" His eyebrow shot up as he gazed at my thighs.
"Well, maybe a little," I said, grinning.
Just then, a group of guys who lived in my dorm walked behind me and threw out cat calls.
"Nice ass, Beth. Why don't you show it to me after break?" one of the guys yelled.
Dad's face reddened.
"That's my little girl you're talking to, asshole," he said. "Watch yourself."
Then he turned to me, "Get in the car while I get your stuff."
I climbed in the car while Dad collected my bags from the front step. Mike, the guy who said something to me outside, walked up to my dad and started talking to him.
I couldn't hear anything they were saying, but Dad turned to look at me a few times, his expression somewhere between confusion and disapproval. He shook Mike's hand and waved good-bye to him, then gathered my things.
He got in the car without saying a word, and turned on the ignition. I tried talking to him, about classes, about my friends, about work, but he didn't respond to anything I said. Finally, about a half-hour into the trip, he said, "Mike said you were quite the cocktease."
"What?" I couldn't believe it. "What do you mean?"
"This little outfit you're wearing, for instance. Your friends and you wear stuff like that to parties, don't you?"
I sighed. "Yeah."
"And you flirt with guys. A lot."
"Yeah."
He sat quietly, his eyes on the road, his knuckles gone white gripping the wheel.
"I didn't send you up here to get knocked up, Elizabeth."
"But, Daddy, I've never … I mean, I'm not …" How could I explain that I hadn't had sex yet. That I couldn't have sex with anyone because I always saw his face after a guy kissed me for the first time?
"You're not what?"
"I don't have sex, Daddy. I can't," I said, finally.
"What do you mean, you can't?" he asked.
"I know you'd be mad at me if I did," I said. That was as close as I could come to describing what held me back.
"But dressing like that … it could get you in trouble. Guys see a beautiful girl like you, and they want to …"
He took a deep breath. "They want to fuck you. Not make love to you, not have sex with you, but fuck you."
We'd pulled up to a stoplight by this point, so he was able to take off his sunglasses and look at me with those dark brown eyes of his. "Do you understand what I mean by that?"
I really didn't and the way he was looking at me made me cry.
"… Nnnnooo …" I was really scared now.
"Oh, pumpkin, don't cry," he said. He put his hand on mine and patted it in between gearshifts. "Here. We'll talk about it when we get home."
My sobbing calmed down, and for the next hour we talked about everything I'd tried to talk about when he was upset. Classes were great, my friends wanted to meet him, and so on. I hadn't even realized we'd made it home until Dad put the car in neutral and put on the emergency brake.
"Well, are we going to sit here all day, or are we going to go inside?" he asked.
We grabbed the stuff from the trunk and ran up the steps to the front door. Our house was gorgeous: Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired windows and simple clean lines, natural woods, muted walls and space like you wouldn't believe. I wanted to live here forever and never leave.
My dog Kaiser greeted the both of us with joyous yips and barks that sounded so funny coming from a German Shepard. Even Moll, the old, cantankerous cat, came down to see me. But no Mom.
It felt so empty and weird, even though she'd been gone for two years. I asked Dad if he'd heard anything from her, but he shook his head. She wasn't the same woman that he married, so it was easy for him not to care. She'd turned mean as I got older, never wanting to leave me with Dad, always hounding me about school, even though I got straight A's. Dad told me that she had always been jealous of me and the way he loved me. From the minute I was born, Daddy made me his world. Mom just didn't understand. To make matters worse, she and Daddy had a baby boy when I turned 15: his and her kids. Once he was born, she had no use for me. It was good then that she left and took the baby with her. I had my daddy and the baby had his mommy.
Dad and I took my bags up to my room. I had forgotten to take down all the posters and the teddy bears that lined my walls and shelves. I looked around and got teary-eyed again.
Dad gave me a sad smile.
"I'll leave you to yourself for awhile," he said, and headed downstairs.
I saw myself in the full-length mirror in my room. At the dorm, I thought I looked sexy. Very Brittney Spears. But here, I looked cheap. Not daddy's girl at all. So, I changed into a pair of khaki pants and sandals and headed back downstairs.
I think it was the sandals that tripped me up. I got halfway down the wood and steel stairs when my foot slipped out from underneath me and I stumbled, down, down, down, tearing the shit out of my knee as I fell.
I know I screamed as I tumbled, letting out a howl when I finally landed. Daddy came running and saw me in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairs. He scooped me up, carried me upstairs and deposited me on the bed.
My right knee was bloody and hurt like hell.
"I need to look at it," he said, trying to push my pant leg above my knee. I let out a hiss of pain.
"I hate to say this, Dad, but I'm going to have to take them off," I said.
I laid back and unbuttoned the pants and gingerly raised my hips off the bed. Dad pulled them off from the pant cuffs, taking extra care as he pulled them over my knee.
He clucked his tongue as soon as he saw the knee – all puffy and crusted in blood.
"I'll get the peroxide," he said. "Sit here."
He ducked into his bathroom and emerged with the familiar brown bottle and a couple of Q-tips. He knelt before me and unscrewed the cap, and as he did so, his gaze wandered up to the patch of pink silk thongs that I was now beginning to soak despite my injury. A familiar aroma filled the air and he looked up at me with those brown eyes again. There was something new this time: lust.