“No… fucking… way!” I screamed to myself, running out of my room without doing the usual morning ministrations.
I took each step two at a time, and could hear the distant voices of my step-dad Damien and some other guy, probably a friend of his, talking. Sweeping past the dining room, I called a quick “Good morning!” and ran outside without even looking to see who he was with.
“Happy Birthday, sweetheart!” I heard my step-dad call.
“Yeah, Happy Birthday, Mikaela!” I heard his friend say. I recognized the voice. It was his good friend Charlie Mason, a real brute of a man, over six feet and just packed to the brim with muscle.
I almost stuck my ear out, listening for Mum to call ‘Happy Birthday’, but when she didn’t, I shook my head, remembering that she had to go on a trip and wouldn’t be getting back home until later tonight.
I grabbed the handle to the front door, and twisted it, and pulled. But the door didn’t budge. It rattled in its frame, and I looked up and saw that the key was missing from its keyhole.
“Hey, what the hell!” I cried, looking over my shoulder. In the hallway were Damien and Charlie, both standing shoulder to shoulder, and grinning at me. “Come on, guys,” I said, breathlessly. “Open the door.”
“No,” Damien said. His grin grew even more. “You’re not allowed to go out there yet.”
“What?” I asked. “Why not?”
“Because,” Charlie Mason said, stepping forward a little. “We three need to have a little chat.”
I stared at the two men, unsure of what was going on.
“A little chat?” I echoed.
“Yes,” Damien said. “You’re eighteen now. You’re an adult. So it’s time we had an adult conversation about some things I’ve been noticing over the past few weeks.”
I gulped. What the hell was he talking about? I widened my eyes at him, aware that I must look a mess having just woken up, not even having been to the bathroom. “Come on, Daddy,” I cooed at him. “Just let me look at the car.”
Damien glanced at Charlie. “See, that’s what I mean.”
“I know what you mean now,” Charlie said. I noticed that his arms flexed for a moment, and they seemed to balloon in size. Even though Damien, my step-dad, wasn’t a skinny man – he had a really nice lean body – Charlie absolutely dwarfed him. The guy was a monster.
Still unsure of what they were talking about, I pressed the issue. “Come on, Daddy. Just let me look at the car. Then I’ll talk with you about whatever it is you want to talk about.”
“Well,” Damien said. “For starters, why don’t you go and get dressed Wear something nice, because we’re going to go for a ride later.”
I nearly squealed in delight. “Okay!” I said, nodding my head quickly. I bounded up the steps, flinging myself around the bend, and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I couldn’t wait to test drive my new car. I was going to take it for a long, long ride.
* * *
“Hi, Damien!” I chirped. I had put on a bright yellow tank and a snug denim skirt. I was going to wear flats, too, rather than flip-flops. I wanted to be comfortable and confident while driving. That was what the driving instructor had always said.
“Come in here,” he said, and he led the way into the living room. Charlie was seated comfortably on the green sofa, and at a right angle to it, Damien took a seat on the red. “Sit down,” he said, gesturing at the seat next to him.
“What is it?” I asked, sitting beside him. I looked at him, and then at Charlie. The two polar opposites, with my step-dad being a more lean and slender man, with pretty features to his face, and with Charlie being a real mast of a man, thick and with a gruff handsomeness, were both looking at me, smirks tugging at the corners of their mouths.
Truth be told, I’d always found both of them pretty hot, and in totally different ways. It was thoughts I knew I shouldn’t have, but I figured that I couldn’t control what I liked and what I didn’t, and so I didn’t really bother to try.
“What’s up?” I asked, and Damien leaned forward on the sofa.
“Sweetheart, Mikaela,” he began, and he clasped his fingers together. The veins in his muscular forearm wriggled with the movement.
“Yeah?”
“Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a change in your behavior.”
Shit, I thought to myself. I had started smoking pot pretty regularly. “Y-yeah?” I stammered, looking at him. His sea-green eyes seemed to drill into my depths.
“Specifically, I’ve noticed that you’ve been calling me ‘Daddy’ a lot more.”
“Oh,” I breathed, relieved. “Really?” I had been. It had been part of my plan to soften him up so I could get a nice birthday present. I shrugged mentally. It seemed to have worked.
“Yes.” He looked at me intently, before speaking slowly. “Why?”
“Um,” I sounded, drawing out the syllable. Did he want me to admit that I’d been trying to be ‘his sweet little girl’ in order to get a good present? I mean, doesn’t every girl still living at home do that? “I don’t know what you mean, Damien,” I said, my words sticky.
“He means,” Charlie said, cutting in. I looked at him, and he had his elbows rested on his knees, and in his square jaw and deep-set sparkling eyes was a look of anticipation I couldn’t quite place. “That maybe there is another reason you’ve been calling him ‘Daddy’, and in such a nice voice, too.”
I looked between them again, and this time my heart started to beat faster. I’d put away those thoughts a long time ago. They were inappropriate, and besides, they were wrong. That was not why I had been calling Damien ‘Daddy’.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, feeling a sting of shame in the recesses of my mind. My mother remarried when I was young. For all intents and purposes, he may as well have been my true father. Even though we weren’t blood-related, he’d been there for as long as I could remember.
Once upon a time I had told myself that, over and over, hoping to inoculate myself against those rogue and racy thoughts that were so wrong, that I wasn’t allowed to think. I told myself it was just hormones, just being a teenager. I had told myself that no, I didn’t fancy Damien. I had told myself that no, I wasn’t slowly falling in love with him. And then I had realized I was wrong about the last bit. It wasn’t that I was slowly falling in love, it was that I was slowly realizing I was in love.
“No,” I said, shaking my head when neither of them spoke. “I don’t want to go there.”
“It’s okay, Mikaela,” Damien said.
“It’s wrong!” I felt out of my depth now. Why were they talking about this with me? Did they just want to humiliate me? Yeah, so I had a huge crush on my step-father. So what? I had tried to forget about it for so long.
“No,” I repeated. “I don’t want to talk about that.” I felt like I was being outed, getting in trouble for something I couldn’t help.
“Baby, Mikaela,” he said, his voice soft. I looked at him, feeling panic inside me. I didn’t want him to know. It would totally ruin the relationship our family had. It was totally make everything awkward.
“I’m sorry, Damien,” I said. I couldn’t help it. My eyes were getting wet. Oh, how so much had changed in just a lone, solitary hour. Where I had once felt excitement, I now felt shame. Where I had once been happy, I was now scared.
“No, no, no,” he said, and he put his hand on mine. The touch was electric. “Listen, Mikaela. I wanted to tell you that it’s okay. That you can feel that way. That you shouldn’t be ashamed.”
“What?” I murmured, looking at him. Then I looked to Charlie.
“You know Charlie, right? You’ve met him a hundred times before.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You know he’s a stand-up guy, right?”
I nodded. Charlie had always seemed like a decent bloke. He was kind, generous, and I always felt safe around him if he came along on camping trips like he sometimes did. The guy could wres
tle a bear and beat it.
“So he’s here to make sure that you don’t do anything you don’t want to,” Damien said.
I blinked. I didn’t understand.
“He’d kick my ass, you know.”
I laughed. “Really?”
“Yeah. We’re best buds, but he would kick my ass.”
“I would,” Charlie said. “And your step-dad knows it.”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” I said, even though I was starting to get an inkling.
“Okay, well, um, how do I say this?” Damien looked at me, then looked away. He was fidgeting with his thumbs. “The truth is, Mikaela, I have some inappropriate feelings for you, too.”
I looked at him. My first instinct was to say demand why he had said ‘too’ – but I realized that I’d already been outed. There was no point in denying it anymore. “Really?”
“Yes. I started to realize it this past year. You’ve always been my baby girl.” He smiled at me. “But now that you’re all grown up… well, frankly, I can’t lie to myself anymore and say I don’t feel something for you, wanting that I shouldn’t have.”
“How come you never said anything?” I asked.
He blanched a little. “Come on, Mikaela. You’re under eighteen, you’re my step-daughter. How would it look?”
“It would look fine to me,” I said. The words had just kind of slipped out of my mouth, like when people tell you to say the first word that comes to your mind when they hold up a picture or a color or whatever. I hadn’t meant to say it, but by the time I had said ‘fine’ I knew I was too far into the sentence to stop.
“I suspected,” he said. “And I spoke to Charlie and asked what I should do. He told me to be straight with you. If there is no honesty within a family, then it’s a broken family.”
“It is,” Charlie said. I looked at him briefly, watched him fold his gigantic arms over his huge chest. I looked back at Damien, my step-dad, lean, less thick, but he also had wide shoulders. I definitely preferred the kind of body Damien had, but in the back of my mind I often wondered what it would be like to be with such a muscular man as Charlie.
“The truth is, Daddy,” I said, and I bit my lip nervously. I was trying it on for size, seeing how he would react.
“That’s okay, baby. Call me what you like.”
“I have been calling you it more because I wanted to, you know, soften you up and get a nice birthday present.”
“You were always going to get a nice one,” he said.
“But if I think about it,” and I made a face and shrugged. “I liked calling you that. It makes me feel more secure, safer. I like that. It doesn’t contradict with my, uh-” I faltered.
“Say it, it’s fine.”
“My crush on you,” I continued. “I found that kind of weird at first, but not so much anymore.” I smiled at him, and our eyes met, and I felt a jolt in my insides, similar to when he had touched my hand. I realized then that I was breathing quickly, that my heart was pounding, and that I was even sweating a little with nervousness.
A silence settled over us, and I couldn’t really think of anything else to say. For maybe a minute we all just sat there, and then Damien cleared his throat.
“So, with that out of the way, want to take your new car out for a spin?”
“Yes!” I said, grinning at him.
* * *
“See you, Charlie!” I said, waving at the huge man as he walked away.
“Drive safe.”
I climbed into the new and super cute car and started the engine. “Come on, Daddy!” I yelled. “Get in!”
He did, grinning, and then looked at me. “Well, go on then!”
And I did. I drove. I drove first around the block. Then I went around three blocks. Then I went down to the mall, pulled in to the parking garage, and then pulled out.
I went to the football field then, around the stadium, and then drove down by the waterfront. It all took about two hours. There was barely any traffic. I couldn’t have asked for it to go any better.
And the car handled beautifully, too. I wasn’t looking for power, and so didn’t care that it didn’t have that, but I was looking for good steering and a soft ride, and it definitely had that. Corners were easy, the back never felt heavy, and the brakes were super responsive.
And the thrill of driving my new car, of being in this vehicle that was totally mine, it made me forget all about the conversation I’d just had with Damien. Even though I was calling him ‘Daddy’ now, I wasn’t sure what to make of it all still. I guess I actively avoided thinking about it.
But when it came time to go home, we got caught up in some traffic. It was the lunch time rush, and people were driving every which way. Ahead of us there was a truck that had stopped for whatever reason at an intersection, and that meant that Damien and I were stuck in the car, not moving, and with nothing to do but talk.
And that’s when I started thinking about it again. That’s when I started to replay the conversation in my mind. Now that it was out there, out in the open, and some time had passed while I had driven around, things seemed to be a bit more comfortable. In fact, it was as though nothing had really changed. We had still chatted occasionally. I hadn’t felt really uncomfortable, or anything like that.
When I thought about that, I asked myself what really had changed. Nothing, other than the fact we had told each other the truth, right? No, and I knew I was lying to myself. Something had changed inside me, anyway. Whereas before, the notion of being with Damien, being with my step-father, was so ridiculous and wrong, I had shut it away, filed it under ‘Nothing-But-Silly-Girl-Fantasies!’ – The NBSGF file. There were plenty of other entries in that file.
But now that he had told me that he had feelings for me, too, it all suddenly became a possibility. I looked at him then, noticing his sharp side profile. He was a handsome man, and his pretty face was saved from the boy-band-look by the shadow he wore, like someone took a thumb to a charcoal sketch, and also a scar stretching up from his neck to his cheekbone. He’d never talked about that scar.
“Daddy,” I said, my voice scratchy.
“Yeah, sweetheart.”
“When you said you had inappropriate feelings?”
“Yeah?” He turned to look at me.
“How inappropriate?”
He made a face, like he was thinking about the most diplomatic way to answer that. Then he seemed to go ‘fuck it’ and he just flat out told me. “I’m attracted to you, and, to be honest with you, I’ve been in love with you for a long time. It wasn’t always like this, of course,” he said quickly, putting up his hands. “I’m not like that. But the love has changed as you have grown up. I don’t know. I feel bad. I feel bad for your Mum, I feel bad for you. This has got to be so confusing.”
“Don’t feel bad, Daddy,” I said.
“Yeah, babe.”
We drove the rest of the way home in silence. The truck unstuck itself. All that was in my mind now was that he said he was falling in love with me. I had no reason not to believe it. The truth was, I think that I was with him… all over again.
I looked at the clock. We wouldn’t be home until nearly two. I didn’t know when Mum would be coming back home, but I knew that time was limited, anyway.
I made up my mind. I knew what I was going to do.
* * *
We walked through the front door, and I whirled on Damien, pushing him up against if after he had closed it.
“Daddy,” I breathed into him, searching his eyes for his own wanting. I found it. Just the act of me forcing myself onto him like this, my hand on his hard stomach, and he was already ready to go.
“What is it?” he asked quietly, hope lingering in the back of his voice.
I sucked in a breath of air, and readied myself. I was going to say it. I was.
I look him in the eye. “I want you to make love to me.”
There was the briefest pause, something less than half a second, but in that time I
saw the cogs winding in his mind, heard them click into place.
And then he picked me up, and I yelped in surprise as he hoisted me off the ground, cradled in his arms, and carried me into the living room. He set me down on the sofa, the one we’d been talking on just this morning, and he leaned into me, but paused before we made contact, as though checking with me. I nodded at him and he kissed me, and it was electric, and it was a kiss of urgency that made me break out in goose bumps.
All lips at first, soon our tongues touched, and it was like he was slowly baring my lust to him. I felt it grow inside me, felt it well in my belly, in my chest, and even I was surprised at how much I wanted him to take me, to ravish me.
Had I been suppressing these urges so well? How could they feel so alien to me? But it didn’t matter. In the heat of the moment, all I could do was devour his body with my hands as he did mine. All I could do was mash my mouth into his, feel his warm breath washing over me, feel the soft stubble of his afternoon shadow, and relish in his urgency to have me, to need me.
He pulled my tank top over my head, and I reached behind my back to unclasp my bra, my movements rushed. And then my breasts feel free, and he had my one nipple in his mouth, and the other in between his fingers, and he was plucking from me even more yearning, even more longing, even more desire.
“Oh, Daddy,” I breathed into the top of his head, holding it with one hand, and holding him tighter against my chest. He gave my nipple a small bite, and I jolted on the sofa, laughing at the brief flash of sting. “Don’t do that,” I said. “It hurts.”
He looked up at me then, his eyes conveying so much at once. Love, lust, care, worry… words could not describe the way he looked at me.
“Don’t worry, baby,” he said to me. He touched my face. “I won’t hurt you.”
“I trust you, Daddy.”
We looked at each other for a moment, and then his mouth was back around my nipple, and I arched my back like a cat stretching languidly in the sun. His hands went down my sides, over my hips, until they were at my thighs. He rubbed the insides of my thighs, getting so close to my sex, my center, but never actually touching it.
Too Taboo! 2: A Forbidden Fun Taboo Bundle Page 8