Chapter 2

The next morning, Jamie came to breakfast still wearing my old t-shirt that she likes to sleep in. I guess she’s grown a lot since she first appropriated it. It used to hang flat on her body and to come down to just above her knees. It wasn’t that way now.

“Good morning, honey,” I said cheerfully.

“Morning,” she mumbled as she began to munch on a piece of toast.

Normally, Jamie was full of sunshine and energy in the mornings, talking like mad. Today, she was quiet and withdrawn.

“Are you okay this morning, honey?” I asked. “You’re awfully quiet.”

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she put her toast down and said, “Girls do it too, right?”

“Do what?” I asked.

“Masturbate.”

Oh, fuck, here we go again. “Yes, they do, honey.”

“Why?”

“To make themselves feel good.”

“What do they do?

“Um, well, they rub themselves, you know, down there.”

“How?”

I could feel myself sweating a little. This was something I simply never considered having to talk about with my daughter. It didn’t help that I could see the shape of her nipples under that well-worn old shirt. “Well, they use their fingers and rub around the vaginal opening,” I answered.

“I tried that last night when I went to bed,” she said. “It felt good, but it wasn’t great or anything. I texted Melody and Kiersten and they made fun of me. They said I mustn’t have done it right and didn’t have an orgasm. They said I’d know it if I had. How am I supposed to know what that feels like? And what did you mean last night about other things going in there?”

She was obviously upset, which made me feel guilty as hell. Why didn’t I think about explaining this to her earlier, so she would have been prepared? Thank God it was a Saturday. I could spend as much time as necessary with her today. We needed to have a serious talk. A part of me wanted to get out of my chair to give her one of the cure-all hugs that worked so well when she was younger, but my guardian angel reminded me that I was suddenly halfway hard.

I stayed seated at the table. “Honey, look at me,” I said. “I want to help you through this. Let me think for a minute about how to explain it all.”

“I just have so many questions, so much I don’t understand,” she said quietly, looking down at her plate. “Sometimes I think I know so little that I don’t even know what to ask.”

“All right. Do you have anything you have to do today? Going to the mall or a game with the girls, or something?” I asked.

“No.”

“Well, neither do I. We’re going to spend the whole day together, my best girl and me, and we’re going to figure out those questions and answer them. Okay?”

Jamie smiled at me, the first smile I had seen on her normally bright face today. “Okay.”

We chatted about mindless things as we ate, and then Jamie and I washed the dishes together. She managed to splash a fair amount of water on her shirt. For some reason, I hadn’t registered how well-shaped her breasts had become. Sure, I had caught glimpses of her in the tub or getting dressed over the years, but I had never really LOOKED at her. This time, I was.

The task at hand, discussing who knows what questions about human sexual response with my beautiful, shapely young daughter, suddenly seemed like it could be hard. Very hard. Holding-a-throw-pillow-in-my-lap hard.

“Snap out of it, asshole!” my conscience yelled at me, as it delivered an imaginary swift kick to my ass. “That’s your daughter! Pull yourself together and deal with it like the good father you are.”

Sound advice. Yes, I can do this. I’ve potty-trained this kid. I’ve explained love and loss, happiness and sadness, success and failure. I’ve done everything all the parenting books tell you to do when it comes to teaching an adolescent, and I think I’ve done it better than the public school system could ever hope to. Now she wants to know more. Well, better to discuss it with her old man than with a couple of possibly ignorant teenage girls.