Chapter 11

"What's going to happen now?" asked Amanda.

They were pretty much all talked out. The kids finally got it, but it was the classic situation of closing the barn door after the horses were already gone.

"We don't know, yet," said Bob, looking at Karen. She nodded in agreement.

"Do we get to still see each other?" she asked. It was clear she was scared of what the answer might be.

"Not to have sex," said Karen, immediately.

"We know that," said Mandy. "But if we can still see each other, we just won't do that."

"Replay the last two hours, Sweetheart," said Bob, tiredly. "Once you start having sex, you want to keep having sex. It's just nature's way."

"Oh," said the girl, disappointment in her voice.

"You could chaperone us," said Jack, hopefully.

"As it turns out, we're not very good chaperones," said Bob.

Karen was the one who put everything on hold.

"Bob and I need to talk about this. For now, it's better if you don't see each other."

"How long will that last?" asked Jack.

"I don't know yet. We're going to try to figure out what to do and if it's possible, we'll try not to separate you two completely. That's all I can tell you right now. I want you to promise us you won't skip school and sneak off somewhere to be alone."

"I promise," said Jack.

"Me too," said Amanda, sounding depressed.

"It's late," said Karen. "Jack and I need to go."

She stood and Jack got up too.

"Go to the car," she told him. "I need to talk to Bob for a second."

"Okay," he said, and did as she had instructed him to.

He did not kiss Mandy good night.

"I have a feeling it's going to take some time to talk this all out," said Karen, standing close to Bob. "If we try to work this out tomorrow night, we might not have enough time before we're too tired to think clearly. I think we should wait and talk about everything Saturday, when we'll have more time."

"So what do we do tomorrow night?" he asked.

"I'll keep Jack at my house, and you keep Mandy here," she said.

"That means we don't get to see each other, either," he said.

"It's just one night, Bob."

"To me, that's like saying, 'You only have to go without water for a month, Bob. What's the big deal?'"

"Don't be so dramatic," she said, pushing his shoulder. "Kiss me good night."

He did.

"See you Saturday," she said.

The car ride home started out in silence. They were almost halfway home when somebody finally spoke.

"I'm sorry," said Jack.

Karen stared straight ahead, as if she were angry, but her voice didn't convey anger.

"I'm so frustrated with you," she said. "Part of me wants to scream at you and lock you in your room. But part of me knows that it wasn't your fault."

"Mandy didn't make me do anything," he said.

"I didn't mean it was Mandy's fault. What the two of you did was normal. What frustrates me is that I don't want you to be normal. Not in that way. But I know that's not right either. I should have paid closer attention. Bob was right. We were miserable chaperones, and because of that, things you couldn't control got out of hand. We should have controlled them for you, and we didn't, because we were doing exactly the same thing you were ... falling in love."

"How could you have controlled it?" asked Jack.

"By making sure you didn't do anything more than a simple, non-sexual good night kiss," she said. "And by not doing things in front of you that you later wanted to experiment with."

"That's the funny part," said Jack.

"What?"

"I would never have admitted it to you before this, but I've seen all that stuff before, on the internet."

"Great! Now my son is addicted to porn," groaned Karen.

"I'm not addicted. I've just seen stuff now and then. You know, like when some cute girl says hi in the halls and you get a boner that won't go away, so maybe you surf around for a picture and look at it while you jack off. That kind of thing. I'm not surfing porn every night, Mom."

"You shouldn't surf porn at all," she grumbled.

"What I'm talking about is that I've seen guys sucking on women's nipples before. And it felt exciting to watch. But it wasn't anything like what I felt when I saw Bob sucking on your nipples. That's why I wanted to do it to Mandy so much." He sighed. "And that was before I saw him on top of you ... like that."

"I'm sorry you saw that," she said. "I thought he closed the door."

"The door was closed, but when I touched it, it just came open somehow."

"Why did you touch it?" she asked.

"Because it sounded like you were dying in there," he said.

"As you can see, I didn't die."

"Yes, but that's why I think I ended up finding out why you were making those sounds about fifteen minutes later."

Now she looked over at him.

"Did you 'slip' on purpose, Jack? Did you take Mandy's virginity without asking her if you could?"

"No!" he said instantly. "It really was an accident. But once I felt it, I don't think I could have stopped if she'd begged me to. I mean I did stop, for a few seconds, but then I knew I wasn't taking it out until I was finished. And then it was clear she didn't want me to stop and I just went a little crazy. It scared me, Mom, and yet it was the best thing that ever happened to me."

"I understand," she said. "That's why we have to keep you apart now. If we don't, you're going to want to do that again and again."

"Do you feel that way about Bob?"

"It's one reason I want to marry him," she said.

He went silent then, and stayed that way until they pulled into the driveway. She sensed something was bothering him.

"We have to keep you apart, Baby," she said. "I know that hurts, but we have to. At least for now."

"I can live with that," he said, gruffly.

"Then what's wrong?"

"I can't get it out of my mind," he said.

"You and Mandy?" she asked, sympathetically.

"No."

He looked over at her helplessly.

"Bob ... on top of you."

"Oh," she said, faintly.

"I don't understand," he moaned.

"I love him," she said, helplessly.

"No, that's not that I mean."

"Then what?"

"I can't understand why thinking about that gives me a boner," he said.

"Daddy?"

Mandy's voice was hesitant. She was standing in the doorway to his bathroom, something she'd done hundreds of times before. He was putting lotion on his beard, to soften it and keep it from drying out and itching. Both were ready for bed, Bob in his PJ bottoms and she in her panties and T shirt.

"What?" he asked, a little truculently. He was still thinking about the forced separation from Karen. And who had caused it.

"Does this mean you won't give me a goodnight hug anymore?"

He turned to look at her.

"What? Of course not. Where did you get that idea?"

"You just seemed so mad," she said. "It's like you hate me all of a sudden."

He wiped his hands on a towel, feeling like a beast. He put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her to him.

"I don't hate you, Baby," he said, sliding his arms around and across her back.

She snuggled up against him.

"I'm just frustrated, that's all."

"I'm sorry," she said, beginning to cry. Some of that emotion was relief at learning her father didn't hate her. She pushed back, as all teenagers do in a parental relationship. But some of that push-back was the same kind of resistance, or perhaps assertion, that a wife does with her husband. They were in a symbiotic relationship, but neither of them had spent any time thinking about that. They just fed off of each other, in a mildly parasitic manner, and when the other did something to disturb the flow of "nutrition" being exchanged, it created conflict.

"It's not your fault," he sighed. "I knew this could happen to you and I did a miserable job of making sure it didn't."

"I love you so much," she cried, burrowing her face into his pectoral muscle. Her hands settled in the small of his back and she hugged him with significant force.

His hands just naturally slid around on her back, comforting her.

That was when his hands detected she wasn't wearing a bra, which led to him feeling her hard, cone-shaped breasts pressing into his ribs. They were hot. Her hair smelled good. His reactions were primal, and he felt blood rushing to his cock. But he couldn't just push her away. He understood how kids jump to black and white conclusions, and think their parents don't love them anymore, when in fact all that's happening is normal parental disappointment, or censure for the teen's behavior. If he pushed her away now, she might interpret that as non-love. This kind of hug, a comforting hug, was supposed to go on for a while.

The problem was that his comforting hug was morphing into another kind of hug. Synapses sparked and the way his mind tried to deal with that was to make him remember a movie he'd seen, where a man was bitten by his wife, who was a zombie, and then turned into a zombie himself.

Mandy felt the pressure as it grew against her. Her squeeze had brought their lower bodies firmly together. She was the one who ended the hug, to push back and look down at the front of his PJ bottoms.

"That wasn't like that when I came in here," she noted.

"Now I'm the one who has to apologize," he said.

"No you don't. If you'll recall, the last time that happened I was sitting on your lap and I had a very good time."

"It's not supposed to happen," he groaned.

"Maybe, but it sure makes me feel better," she said.

"Why?"

"Because it means you really aren't mad at me," she said.

"Dads aren't supposed to get that way because of their daughters," he said.

"I don't care what other people think. One of the things Jack told me was that while his mom is jerking him off, he feels like nobody could love him more. That's while I was jacking him off at the sleepover."

The image of her doing that made Bob's cock lurch and finish the job of becoming ready for sex.

"I think that's one of the reasons I want you to help me, like Karen helps Jack. I love you so much that I want to be that close to you."

"Sweetheart," he said. "Remember what I said before? About how if we did things I might want more? Well, this is an expression of that phenomenon."

"I know what a boner means, Daddy," she said, dismissively. "It doesn't bother me. I've had dreams, sometimes. There's this one dream where we have a hot tub and you and I are in it, naked, and everything is fine. I mean in the dream it's normal for us to be that way. And I sit on your lap and kiss you."

"Why didn't you tell me this before?" he asked, feeling his cock try to get harder.

"I'm not stupid," she snorted. "Girls don't just go to their dads and say, 'Sometimes I get really horny for you, Daddy.' It just isn't done."