Chapter 13: There She Is

His name was already in my throat. Dad — the whole plan in one word: say it in my own voice, break the pose, and the fat sad man caught with his pants down would freeze and go red and scurry the way he’d scurried out of the kitchen doorway all summer, and I’d be up off the day bed and gone.

I never got to say it in time.

His hands closed on my shoulder and my hip and rolled me over — off my stomach onto my back, one easy motion, the way you’d flip a mattress. He’d never done that to her. The one in the cradle he took from behind, the face turned away; he’d had months of the back of me. He’d come up the stairs for the front. For the face.

He took me by the hips and hauled me down the bed till my backside was at the edge and my legs fell open off it, and stepped in between them where nothing stood in his way. And the plan died in my hands, because the plan had a standing-up in it, and there was no standing up left.

“Dad.”

Small and cracked and mine. My real voice, out loud where it was never meant to be. It was supposed to freeze him.

He didn’t slow. He looked down the length of me, over my bared belly and my breasts into my face, and his went soft. “There she is,” he said. “I was starting to wonder if you’d ever quit pretending.”

He’d known the whole way down. He’d let me believe I was running it, because believing was exactly what walked me down the stairs on my own feet and through a door that only opened from the outside. There’d never been a plan. Only the walk down.

Then he knelt up straight between my open legs, and I was looking down my own bared body at it, past my breasts and my belly to the thing standing up out of him.

The thing from the window, the thing from the sleeves, the bare weight I’d felt laid against me in the pitch black of the crawl and never once seen — a foot off my spread thighs now with no glass and no dark and no floor in the way, and worse than any of the glimpses had let me guess. Dark and swollen, curving up heavy out of the black hair. Up close the head sat half-hooded in a loose fold of skin, and where the fold had slid back it flared out fat and broad, a blunt shining flange of it wider than the shaft it rode on, dark red and wet at the tip. Packed into the seam of the hood, pale and thick, a smear of the stuff I’d smelled off the used sleeve. The smell reached me a second behind it. Him, concentrated, ripe and warm.

He hooked two fingers into the underwear — the pair I’d made myself put on an hour ago so nothing would be wrong — dragged it off my legs and dropped it, and fit the fat slick head of himself to the closed seam of my pussy.

And watching my face, he pushed.

He was too big. Nothing had ever been in me and the head of him was thick as my wrist and it met me shut and pushed in anyway — the fat dark shine of him forcing me open, a deep blunt burning stretch that kept coming, wider than I went, wider than I could go. “It’s too big —” cracked out of me, my own voice, thin and useless. Still it came.

Then the head of him came up against my hymen.

The last intact bit of me. The thing that had made me a virgin an hour ago, when I still thought I was the one running this. It held. It had held the way it always had — against Owen’s careful fingers on my own bed, against everything I’d never let happen, against the bare head of my own father two days back in the crawlspace dark, where only his own running-out clock had come between it and this. He’d found it there once and left it whole. There was nothing to leave it whole now. He pressed, slow and blunt and not stopping, and it stretched, and it stung, and it tore. A bright hot exact rip. I gasped. Gone. A raw open place where it had been, and he pushed on through it.

“Feel that go?” he breathed into my face. “Knew nobody’d had it. Keeping it nice for your daddy, weren’t you.” And he seated the rest of himself in one long shove — and he got thicker the deeper he went, the fat root of him I’d been staring down at driving in last and widest, forcing my opening wider at the end than the head had split it at the start, till it jammed something deep that had never been touched and there was no more of me to give. Buried in his own daughter, stuffed full past full and stretched widest where he was thickest, he held there, breathing out long and shaking — the breath from through the floor, the one he made into her every night.

My father. In me. My first.

It came apart before it could finish — no room in me for a whole thought, only the pieces of one, the fat reeking man whose blood I carried, my own father, seated inside me, first, and no way to make it not be true.

Then he came down. All his weight at once, no easing — the belly first, hot and slick and enormous over my stomach, shoving the air out of me, then the chest, then the arms coming down to cage my head, till there was nothing left to see but the wet slack of his face an inch off mine. His mouth went to my throat, open and dragging, down to my collarbone, and his tongue came out flat and hot over one bare breast and then the other. “Been watching these come in on you all year,” he mumbled into my chest. “My own girl.” And my nipple drew up tight under his tongue against every order I’d have given it, and he caught me at it and lifted his wet face, delighted.