When my eldest daughter was in grade twelve one of her best friends came to live with us. Carla had a shitty home life; it had been bad as long as I known her. When Kate, my daughter, met Carla they were twelve and even then Carla was withdraw, shy and tense.
Things escalated to the point where, when Kate asked us if Carla could move in, my wife, other daughter Julia, and I all agreed that it was the best thing to do, for Carla. We loved her as a member of the family by then, and wanted her happiness.
Shelley, my wife and I, had spoken many times, speculating what had been going on in Carla's house, but nothing prepared us for the girl's night terrors. The first night she stayed with us, her screams from the basement drew the whole family down to her room.
Kate held Carla while she cried, and soothed her while the rest of us watched from the doorway. Shelley and I exchanged looks, realizing our worst thoughts were likely not dark enough. Something awful had happened to Carla.
For the rest of the week the screams happened every night, and I admit to regretting bringing her into the house a little. But we were committed to being a family for her now.
I worked nights three days a week at that point. I was a musician, with a regular gig playing piano at a very popular nightclub. It was a sweet gig and I loved it, but it meant I got home late on weekends. On the first Saturday after Carla moved in I got home at 2:30 a.m. and was having a glass of water in the kitchen when the screams began.
I quickly went to Carla, hoping to get to her before anyone else woke up. She was huddled in her bed in what was formerly the guest room. Carla was squeezed into the corner where the bed met two walls and she was blindly staring at the door.
I entered, but didn't go to her right away, not sure what that might do to her. I turned on the light and she woke up. Immediately she looked at me, flinched, her eyes wide, her breathing shallow and fast. Then she began to cry. I'm a father, I went to her, crawled onto the bed and pulled her gently to me and held her.
My heart bled for her.
I held Carla for a time, murmuring stupid things about her being alright now, and that kind of thing. Soft, soothing sounds that meant nothing specifically. I held her tiny frame in my arms and felt her shaking.
Carla was, and still is a tiny woman. At this point she was fragile. She didn't eat much and had only turned eighteen a month or so before, so she was still very thin and had yet to fill out. To me she felt like a child in my arms, so I didn't have any sexual thoughts. She was scared and needed me.
The next morning however...
Sundays around our house are pretty relaxed. Late mornings, the occasional group breakfast, but really we are a busy family with lots of extra-curricular activities. Naturally I got up late, having been up late. When I came downstairs in my pajama pants and a t-shirt I didn't expect anyone else to be there.
Carla was reading something on her phone, sipping coffee or tea, looking, as I did, like she had just gotten up.
Carla and Kate's friends, this group of girls that always spent time together and called themselves the Traveling Sisterhood or something, had spent the night many, many times. I was completely used to a house full of girls, what with having two daughters and all, but I was not used to them being half naked.
I had been avoiding the yard for years whenever they used the pool or sunbathed. It seemed prudent to make myself scarce when teenaged girls wore bikinis. Self-preservation probably, but it had long been my policy.
This morning Carla was wearing a large, loose men's tank top. It plunged so far down around the arm holes that I could see the side of her small breasts peeking out. In the front, her minimal cleavage was on full display where the front plunged deep between her breasts.
On her bottom she wore tight yoga pants that clung to her legs like a second skin. This was not what she had been wearing to bed last night.
Carla glanced up from her phone when I entered and looked at me with haunted, sleep deprived eyes. Her hair was tussled from sleep and she looked sad.
"Morning Mr. C." she said.
"Hey Carla."
I quickly prepared myself a bowl of cereal, trying not to notice that Carla was a pretty young woman now. She had long auburn hair and green eyes, pale skin, and a beautiful smile when she used it. I'd guess she was five foot three, maybe a hundred and ten pounds, but perhaps less.
Carla was petite, sleight even. Her body had muscle, but she was lithe and ethereal looking. There was a magical, elfin quality to her that for some reason today seemed more overtly sexual than ever before. I busied myself with my breakfast and did what I'd been doing for years, I ignored temptation. Again.
As a married musician I had become very good at deflecting female attention.
I took my cereal to the music room. Down in the basement we had a room that had been there when we moved in two years before. It was a small ten by ten room with windows on all four walls. The house was built on a hill, so the back of the basement was above ground while the front was below.
The whole family played multiple instruments and we sound-proofed the room somewhat so the kids and I could record music. I went in and ate while listening to some tracks I'd been working on for fun.
I was lost in the music a while later when I noticed Carla come down and go into her room. Moments later she came back out with a yoga mat and set it up in the middle of the living room area. As I tried not to look, Carla began doing yoga in her very tight pants and very loose shirt.
The moment she bent over, her butt aimed to my left, I saw her breasts exposed as her loose shirt fell over her head. Most of her torso was exposed for a second, and when she stood up again to adjust it, I peered at my monitor looking for anything that wasn't a half-naked eighteen year old.
I worked on my laptop studiously for several moments, painfully aware of the exposed flesh just outside the room. I could see her moving up and down as she stretched, but I didn't so much as glance her way until I saw her disappear below my sight for a long time.
Curiosity got the better of me, and I sat up higher in my office chair hoping to get a look. Carla was on her back in a twisted position, her knees pointed toward me, both on one side of her body, her shoulders flat on the ground her head turned the other way.
Carla had tucked the shirt into her waistband, but that had pulled the shirt down low. I saw immediately that her left breast had slipped out of her shirt as she twisted. I watched her breathing deeply, her soft breast flat against her ribs, the nipple hard and pointing straight up invitingly.
The pale pink nipple was small and tight, like a little candy begging to be sucked. Feeling not like a man in his forties with two teenaged daughters, but like a kid who never got to see bared breasts, I gaped at her small mound, enraptured.
I saw her legs twitch and intuited that she was changing position so I settled down into my chair and looked at my screen for a few more minutes trying to calm myself. I didn't know if she'd seen me looking, but I once again pretended to focus on my work, an aching erection in the wrong position in my loose pajama pants.
Disappointed in myself,-why was I getting all hot and bothered over a kid I'd known for years?- I adjusted my annoying erection and took my cereal bowl up to the kitchen. As I left the music room Carla looked up at me from the floor.
Now Carla was doing the splits while leaning her torso over one leg. She smiled an innocent, distracted smile at me. Her wide-spread legs exposed the way her yoga pants rode up into her sex, revealing the puffy thick lips of her vulva to my overly excited eyes. Her right breast was falling out of her tank-top now, her breast firm and rounded as she leaned forward to her left.
I smiled back, feeling ill, and practically ran upstairs.
Having a shower, I ran it slightly colder than usual at first, adamantly refusing to jack-off over one of my daughters friends.
If the circumstances had been different I might have found this thrilling. Carla was very pretty, in a waifish, vulnerable way. But it was that very vulnerability that scared me. There was something about her that felt dangerous to me.
Carla, in general, was the quietest of Kate's three best friends. Courtney and Kate seemed to be the leaders and Tiffany was the most overtly sexy, in my opinion, but suddenly Carla seemed alluring in a way I'd never truly noticed before.
I suppose seeing a woman's breasts might suddenly make her seem more of a sexual being to a person, but really only if you find that breast sexually attractive. Normally I liked a fuller breast than what Carla's were, so simply seeing her breast shouldn't have been able to inciting me this much. It was more than simple exposure, it was her.
Every instinct I had told me to avoid her as much as possible. But she lived in my house.
When I was dressed and feeling more like an adult again I ventured out of my room. I realized I was hiding, taking much longer to dress and make myself presentable than usual. I was trying to make my middle-aged-self look appealing to a girl hardly older than my eldest daughter. I was fairly ashamed of my behavior.
I was even more ashamed when I felt disappointed that I didn't find Carla in the house when I emerged from hiding. I made myself a coffee and took it to the studio room. As I went inside I looked out the window into the back yard and there was Carla, in a black bikini, sunbathing in a lounge chair.
Staring at her smooth, pale skin, shining with lotion, I admired her lean legs. The muscles of her calves and thighs were enticingly exposed, the soft skin calling to me. Carla had positioned the chair angled to expose her to the sun, but the angle also left her fully exposed to my window. Coincidence?
