The fresh white clotted cream, her dad's, was flowing downhill, riding the shower water like horses, and circling the drain clockwise before reaching silver cover's perforations where, after pausing there, clinging, as if so many stubborn drowners, passing through them, the holes, into a dark, permanent oblivion.
Megan was still bent over, and radically so, clutching thick ankles, reminding her dad all the while of her mom when she was Megan's age, naked and in the shower with him. Happier days. He had backed away, stumbled back under shower head's warm rain, after pulling out of his daughter, after coming, after producing vagina's thick, clotted freefall, wondering, worrying, hoping, praying, it was safe. Not all of his fatherly sperm would disappear down the drain, after all.
Megan was looking back at him now, over her mother's rounded, rain-spotted left shoulder, apprehensively through the steam, giving him the benefit of the doubt. "Did you cum in me, daddy?"
He nodded—as if his daughter could see from her contortionist's position. Megan rose up, turned, came forward, their bodies colliding under the torrent, pairs of arms circling rubber-like bodies.
"Oh, daddy."
"Baby..."
"That was wonderful!" Megan said.
"No it wasn't."
Megan's water-darkened hair was in her eyes. She freed a hand and pushed it back, away. It was like trying to herd mud. "Why do you say that?" she asked. "After all these years? It's been an eternity."
It had been too long a time, Megan's absence. The prodigal daughter. That much was true. But it had not been, in years, anything approaching eternity. Then again when you're 24, three-plus years represents nearly a seventh of your precious life. It's all relative, these things. Theories of time. As a father, a teacher, a role model, a lover, a former professor...you had to respect these things, these discrepancies in age. Life's perspectives.
"I couldn't help myself," Megan's dad said. His daughter, left hand returning, patted his lower back.
"It's fine, daddy. You were fine. It was so wonderful to be intimate with you again, after all these years. It was special."
Her father let out breath. As if, a surfacing drowner, he'd been holding it in all this time. "It was special, yes. I can't explain it. How it happened."
"There's nothing to explain. I joined you in the shower. We made love. We were intimate. Again, finally."
Despite his protests, his uncertainty, his conflicted guilt, Megan's father's hands, in tandem, had slid down to his daughter's wide buttocks. Like wet rubber they were so full, so firm, inflated. He squeezed them, gently. Kneaded the flesh. Megan's mother's name had been—was, if she was still alive—prosaically, Beth. Beth.
Downstairs, on a side table in front of a blacked-out window was a waterless vase full of colorful flowers. Plastic. The real thing, florists' arrangements being in short supply, and expensive. Most of them went to the widows, the war widows. And widowers. Flowers were like condoms, birth control pills. If you were lucky, very lucky, and rich—those fucks, you might come by some on the black market. A shady guy in the mall parking lot. Though whether they were fake or not, the cyclical pills in a plastic carousel, that was another story.
Megan's father had a theory of threes. Thirds, excuse me. He'd written papers, unpublished. He believed that in any significant peer group, and not necessarily a large one, a neighborhood, a school, a litter of stray cats for christsake, only six, six being more than enough, shit, the food, the sweetest of the females, black and white, christened Megan...that in any such group his never-published, though controversial, theory applied. He was a professor of philosophy—or had been, before the university was bombed. And before the government banned speculative thinking—unless it applied to weaponry, its application that is, as if it—thought—were a female contraceptive...
At any rate there was this windowless vase full of flowers downstairs...
Megan giggled. She was 24, after all. She was entitled. Megan's father, now, in the shower, as the water began to turn tepid, less, wanted to part his daughter's broad cheeks, wanted to breach them, penetrate, his middle finger. Soap. Wanted to lick it before and after.
Her nipples, still erect, hard, pressed against his midbody, below the pecs. He did not want to brag but he took care of himself. Ate right. Canned vegetables. He did not want to brag about his latent potency...might be drafted. They were taking anyone these fucking days.
"I worry...," Megan's dad said.
"About what?"
