When you're in your late 40's, sharing a house with a college student can nearly wear you out. And when that college student is your former stepdaughter, it can get downright strenuous. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.
But truth be told, she was an engineering major for a reason. Not just because of her grades, which are outstanding. It was because she's outstanding at engineering all kinds of situations. It's a good thing, because clearly the oil business needs people who can engineer people too.
It was a Monday night. I'd spent the evening working at my home office, putting together the paperwork on a new subdivision that I knew would be big. The market sucked nationwide, but in the Metroplex things were still pretty good and my agency was still pulling in the bucks.
When I wrapped things up for the evening, I stuck my head into Randi's room to see how she was doing. She had been nervous for a couple of days. In fact, she'd traded off her Hooter's waitressing shifts all weekend to get ready for her big midterm in System Dynamics.
She was wearing her oversized green department of engineering t-shirt, kind of curled up in her desk chair. The chair wasn't oversized -- Randi's just a little thing, five-one if you're feeling generous, so she had plenty of room. She was giving full concentration to her notes, her medium-length red hair obscuring her face, chewing on the end of her pen and making more notations in her spiral notebook. She was a throwback in that way, telling me that she retained things better when she wrote them longhand and then re-transcribed them on her laptop. It was working, since she was carrying a GPA in the high 3.8's.
I cleared my throat, and she jumped. "Holy shit, Hugh! You scared me half to death," Randi said.
"Sorry, kiddo," I said. "I just wanted to check up on you to see if you need anything because I'm about to call it a night."
She shook her head. "No, I'm okay here. I'm going to give it another half hour or so, and then go to bed myself."
"Well, don't overdo it. You work yourself up too much sometimes."
She snorted. "Tell me all about it. Don't worry, I'll give it a rest pretty soon. G'night, Hugh." She bent back to her task.
I walked to my room, undressed and got into bed after grabbing a novel. After working with numbers and trying to develop a sales pitch for houses I needed something to relax, and reading was my second favorite way of doing that before going to sleep. About 15 minutes later, I saw her light wink out and heard her mattress creak as she got into bed. I went back to my reading. Every few minutes, I heard another creak. It was pretty clear she was tossing and turning, having trouble getting to sleep since her mind was still racing with all that studying and all those pre-midterm jitters.
I was still awake and reading around 11 o'clock when she appeared in my doorway. "I can't sleep, Daddy," she said. "Can I climb in bed with you so you can tell me one of your good bedtime stories?"
Daddy, huh? That put a different spin on things. "Sure, baby. Crawl in with Daddy. I'll keep you warm." As she walked to the bed, I put my book down and lifted the covers. She slid in next to me on my right side and snuggled up to me, putting her head on my chest.
I kissed the top of her head and asked, "Did you take your car in to get it looked at yet?"
"No, Daddy. I haven't had the time with school and work and all."
"Baby, that's not good," I scolded. "You have to make time to maintain what is yours, especially your car. Without it, you're walking and campus is too far away for that."
"I'm sorry, Daddy."
As I idly stroked her lower back, I said, "That brings up a good story for you. It's about a young coed who didn't take her car in to get it checked out when it started having problems, and paid a big price for it."
She looked up at me and licked her lips. "Okay, Daddy. Tell me about this college girl and her car troubles."
"Sure. It was a dark and stormy night...." She snorted laughter, and I gave her a swat on her ass. "Listen young lady. I'm the one telling the story. No criticisms from the peanut gallery, hear?"
"Yes, Daddy."
"It WAS a dark and stormy night. It was a Friday, and she was going to a party she'd been invited to. It was off in a rural area a few miles from the college. The reason she was going was she'd broken up with her boyfriend a while back, and she was on the hunt for a new one. Well, the directions her friend gave her were shit. Having it rain didn't help. She took a right turn onto a Farm-to-Market road, deserted like only rural Texas can be. That's when her car started making some funny noises."
"Um. That doesn't sound good for her."
"Oh, it wasn't. And it got worse. About a mile and a half down the road, it made a strange grinding noise and the whole thing seized up and stopped moving, just as the rain turned into a downpour. When she pulled out her cell phone, she got the No Service indicator. She was lucky in one way, though. The car broke down close to the only house she'd seen on the road, and it had its lights on, which meant someone was home. She did the only thing she could do. She got out of the car and walked up to the front door and knocked."
"She must have gotten wet."
"Soaked. She didn't have a raincoat, so she hurried as fast as she could to get under the awning in the front, but it was a long walk because the house was set back from the road a bit. So there she was, a little bitty thing like you, dripping wet from the rain. The door opened, and there he was, the owner of the house."
"What did he look like?"
"Well, he was about my size, with gray hair, in his late 40's. You know, kind of old looking to a 22-year old college girl."
"Daddy, you're not old. And that gray hair just makes you look like you've been around long enough to know exactly what you're doing."
"Baby, that's not the way most girls your age look at things. They see 'Daddy,' not someone they'd be attracted to. Of course, that's not how he saw her. When he saw the wet and bedraggled girl on his front porch, what he saw was a little hottie that looked a lot like you. She had shoulder-length red hair like yours, only it was plastered to her skull from the heavy rain. She had a great little body like yours, including the big tits. And what really got him going was it looked like she had been in, not a wet t-shirt contest, but a wet everything contest."
"Oooh."
"Yeah. She realized he was checking her out, but she didn't have a whole lot of choice. She explained that her car broke down and she needed help, a phone so she could call for a tow truck or something. When he saw where her car was, he suggested that they push the car into the driveway for safety, just in case someone came down the road. Odds of that happening were slim, but why take a chance, right?
"He went back into his house and grabbed a raincoat, and the two of them walked to her car in the downpour. He had her put it into neutral and get behind the wheel so she could steer. She was surprised when he was able to push the car up a small hill by himself with apparent ease. He was a lot stronger than he looked. He kept pushing and got the car up the long driveway and put it in a wide parking area behind the house where his truck was parked.
"It was still raining in buckets, and he got thoroughly soaked as well. They went into the house through the back door. That's when there was a flash of lightning, a crash of thunder. She squealed and jumped, almost slipped on the wet linoleum of the kitchen floor, and he caught her as she fell.
"'It's okay,' he said. 'I gotcha, darlin'. You okay?'
"She said she was, but she was still obviously shaken by the loud noise. They were both dripping wet, and he told her that they needed to get of those rain-drenched clothes, sending her to the bathroom while he got her something to wear."
"Wasn't she nervous about that, Daddy? You know, getting naked in a house with a strange man living alone? I would be."
"Of course she was, baby. But what choice did she have? She really was soaked to the bone. She undressed and began drying off with one of the towels hanging in the bathroom. She was drying her hair when he opened the door without knocking. She froze without making a sound.
"There she was, bare-ass naked with her arms over her head. He was wearing a red silk robe, carrying what looked like a white silk robe in his left hand. He froze too. They just looked at each other. After a few seconds, his face broke out into a slow smile. She was still frozen, looked like a deer in the headlights. He tossed the white robe aside, slipped his own robe off and said to her, 'I don't think we'll be needin' these right now, darlin',' took the towel off her head, and led her out of the bathroom. "
Randi hung on tight and squirmed a little in my arms. "Oh my gosh, Daddy. What was she thinking, being naked in front of this man she didn't know?"
"Baby, she was doing the calculus in her head. Not the kind you do in college engineering classes, the other kind. Girl-calculus. Like, he's a lot bigger than me, I'm trapped in this room, it's pouring rain outside and running away isn't an option, and I'm naked and vulnerable, and what do I do now? You know, all the things that would run through your mind if you were in that situation. Here she was, as bare as you and I are right now, looking at this naked man knowing he could take her and make her do whatever he wanted to her without any interference, even if she didn't want to do it, and do it all night long."
She shivered a little as she idly ran her fingers through the hair on my chest. "Getting naked with a man like that can be scary, Daddy. I like being naked with you because I know you'd never make me do anything I didn't want to do."
"That's right baby," I said as I began caressing her ass. "I would never force you to do anything you really didn't want to do." As she looked up, I gave her a kiss on the lips. "And I never will."
"Yes, Daddy." She paused. "How long had it been since she'd broken up with her boyfriend?"
"It had been about three months."
"Three months! Oh my god! That's a long time. That poor girl! I get bitchy after about three days, much less three months."
"Daddy tries to make sure you don't get to that three-days-bitchy point, baby."
She let out a low purr, almost like a cat. "And I appreciate that. You forgot about the other parts of the girl-calculus."
"What are those?"
