I was driving home from showing a client a listing I had over in the Cookie Canyon subdivision. He hadn't liked the pale blues that the previous owner had painted the place, and I didn't think that he was going to buy it. I really hate losing potential buyers because they don't have enough brains to imagine a house with different color paint.
I was driving along and toying with the idea of trying to use my computer to re-color my pictures of the house so the jerk could see it in (yuck!) beige and maybe I could make another pitch when my cell phone rang.
"Mr. Kent? This is Ms. Richter β the nurse at Lincoln High School?"
Now there are several people that a parent never wants to get a phone call from. Calls from the police probably top the list. But the principal is way high up there and so is the hospital. I don't know exactly where the school nurse falls on the list, but I'm pretty sure she's in the top 10. Maybe the top 5.
"Yes, Ms. Richter?" I vaguely remembered meeting her at a school open house. She was very pretty, but had gone to some pains to hide her good looks from the students by wearing shapeless clothes and pulling her hair into a severe bun. I suppose it just doesn't do to fuel the fantasies of the teenage male population any more than can be helped.
"It's Andrea, Mr. Kent. I need you to come down to the school right away."
"What happened? Is she hurt?" I asked, tightening my grip on the steering wheel. I listened for an answer but all I could hear was a girl's voice sobbing in the background before the sound was dampened by a hand over the mouthpiece.
"Hello? Hello?" I practically yelled into the mouthpiece.
After a moment Ms. Richter's voice came back. "Mr. Kent? You need to come to the school. Right now." Her voice carried a tone of finality, and the phone went dead in my hand before I could ask her again what had happened.
My heart plummeted to my stomach. I learned right then that every parent should fear a phone call from the nurse a lot more than one from the principal. The worst that the principal can do is to expel your kid, but a phone call from the school nurse conjures in your mind emergencies and dire possibilities which are a different matter altogether. And the fact that Andrea was a senior in high school and presumably able to take care of herself did little to alleviate the sudden dread that Ms. Richter's call caused me.
I threw down the phone and turned the car towards the school. Had that been my little girl crying in the background? I began racing towards the school, the parental urge to take care of his child fueling my speed. I had to get to her. I had to find out what had happened to my daughter.
A lump of fear settled into my stomach as all kinds of alarming scenarios ran through my head. Did she fall down the stairs? Fall off a rope and break her leg during gym? Was she hurt in an explosion in the science lab? Each new possibility was wilder and more improbable than the last, and my heart beat faster as I rushed to hold my baby girl. I took a deep breath and tried to reason with myself. If Andie had been really hurt, I wouldn't have gotten a call from the school nurse asking me to go to the school β I would have been told to go to the hospital. Right?
I knew that school nurses weren't allowed to treat anything serious. The whole world's become too afraid of lawsuits. Hell, nurses weren't even allowed to give out aspirin anymore, were they? I'm not even sure they have band-aids to put on boo-boos. So Andrea couldn't be seriously injured. I almost even believed it.
And then the other possibility, one that was actually more likely than Andie being physically hurt occurred to me. My fear meter shot up and a nauseating lump of dread settled into my stomach like a wad of unbaked biscuit dough.
I had suddenly realized that I had a more personal stake in a call from the nurse because I had more to fear than other parents who get such phone calls. I needed to be worrying about the authorities finding out that for the last several months I had been fucking my daughter.
It had started one unforgettable night when I discovered that my quiet, t-shirt and jeans wearing daughter had a secret side, dressing in seductive clothes when she was away from the home and giving blowjobs to the boys who were her dates. The night I caught her she swore to me that she was still a virgin, and I believed her. But after that revelation she didn't stay a virgin long, not even an hour. Andrea begged me to be her first lover, and I had succumbed. I'd tried to resist, like any good father would. But when she was pleading for me to fuck her, standing there in her garter belt and smoky black stockings with her skirt pulled up so that she could show me her tiny shaved pussy, I'd had no chance in hell of resisting.
Andie had never made me feel guilty about what we were doing. In fact, we would often only make love after she'd exacted a promise that I wasn't neglecting my wife, Judy. Judy was getting more sex now than she was before, thanks to her daughter. And Andrea had learned how to please her father in ways that her mother never had. It was some kind of cosmic joke β I had had my daughter so that she could grow up and become my lover.
And now I was going to pay for taking my pleasure with her, I was sure of it. Somehow the officials at the school had found out, and they were bringing me in so that they could confront me. Hell, they had probably even called the police. Didn't they have to if they thought there was abuse going on?
Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit.
I had known that this day was coming. A guy can't live with that kind of behavior hanging over his head without feeling like someday there's going to be a reckoning. But that neither of us wanted to stop. She was so sweet and so willing that I couldn't resist her. Andrea was a vision of teenage lust in nylons, and a perfect lover for any man. I gladly became lost in her.
Resigned to my fate but nourishing the tiny hope that there was some other reason that Ms. Richter had called me I drove towards the school. I was sick to my stomach trying to decide which I wanted least β Andrea being sick or hurt, or our secret being found out. As I drove I began to wonder just how they had learned about us.