Chapter 1

Life throws you curve balls now and then and you do the best you can to get through it.

Bob Gordon knew that, and when problems arose he gave it his best shot. Sometimes he felt like it went well and sometimes ... well ... he just had to hope he’d done the right thing.

Everything had seemed to go pretty well for the first twenty years of his life. He’d gotten through childhood without any major injuries and then negotiated his teens in reasonable fashion. Education had always come easy for him and college did too. Of course some of that was due to the fact that his parents lived thirty miles from town on what, a few decades earlier, would have been called a commune. Except it was just them, instead of a whole group of people. In those decades past they would have been called hippies, too. They played at farming, with a huge garden and a few stock animals that kept them in meat. Bob’s father - and Bob, when he got old enough - kept the place in good repair. The neighbors, who really were farmers, didn’t think “those Gordon people” were odd, but maybe that’s because almost all of them were Amish. Bob’s dad - and Bob - were always willing to lend a hand in times of need, such as harvest, or when a new barn was going up. There were things the Gordons could do that helped out a lot. The Gordons had electricity and while the Amish didn’t want that for themselves, they didn’t see any problem with benefiting from others using it.

More of his good education came from home schooling, which his parents worked harder at than he did.

In any case, college seemed easy to Bob, though it opened his eyes to a whole new world. He’d studied that world, but not seen much of it up to that point.

The only real bump in the road was that because of the way he was raised, he didn’t have much access to girls his own age as he was growing up. College changed that drastically and he went a little girl crazy. He was confident, reasonably handsome, and smart, which made him attractive to lots of girls. But that lack of previous experience was what hurt him.

Basically, he chose the wrong one to fall in love with.

Sherry was happy, at first, but like many women she thought she could mold Bob into the man she wanted, instead of accepting him for the man he was.

Two years and one daughter later, she realized that wasn’t going to happen and gave up on the marriage. Along with figuring out Bob wasn’t the man she wanted after all, she also realized motherhood wasn’t what she’d expected it to be and that she didn’t want to be tied down with a child. Part of that was because, in her subconscious, she knew she wasn’t good parent material. She wouldn’t have admitted that out loud, but she knew it. She also knew Bob was a good parent. Part of the problem, in her mind, was that she felt like Bob loved their year-old little girl more than he loved her.

It wasn’t true, of course, but that’s how she interpreted his behavior.

And so, being a geologist, she went off to work for an oil company in South America and left the tatters of her married life behind. She did well, but that’s not really part of the story.

This story is about how Bob coped with being a single parent and raised Cindy.

He raised her much like he was raised. That’s normal. We all parent as we were parented. It’s all most new parents know how to do, after all. In Bob’s case that meant there was a lot of nudity. Nudity had been pretty normal when he was growing up. His parents hadn’t been shy about showing each other affection, either. Bob had known what porn looked like long before he saw any of it on the internet. Except the “porn” he saw wasn’t acted out in front of a camera crew, by people who didn’t love each other and just wanted to get through the scenes so they could go home to the people they really wanted to be around.

Another aspect of Bob and Cindy’s life that was similar to his own upbringing was that he owned his own business and worked from home. His exposure to computers, prior to college, was an old PC that still ran Windows XP and still had a dial-up internet connection. In the modern computing world his internet access had been limited, primarily by the speed of the connection. When he found out how much more things had advanced, his curiosity caused an insatiable hunger to know everything about the “new” technology. His major changed to computer science and his degree led to a computer repair business that let him do what he loved to do and paid the bills to boot.

Where things diverged a bit was that Bob didn’t keep Cindy out of the public school system. He wanted her to have what he had missed - exposure to kids her own age. He wanted her to have friends, playmates, social equals.

That said, he augmented her education, going more deeply into her school subjects than her teachers could.

And he coped with his child’s needs by being her father ... and doing what he thought her mother would do, were she still there.

This included such things as teaching her personal hygiene. He’d always done her hair for her. He got her her first bra and showed her how to wear it.

He got her dressed for her dance recitals.

He helped her shop for clothes.

When her menses arrived he started her on pads and then, later, when she asked for tampons, researched that with her and bought her first box. She wanted help with that first tampon, so he helped her.

He helped her shave her bikini-cut when that became necessary.

Eventually, he critiqued her attire and appearance when she got ready for a date.

And ... he taught her how to masturbate ... so she could deal with the feelings and emotions that resulted from those dates.

He was up front about all these very personal things. Cindy knew that most fathers didn’t see their daughters stark naked on a regular basis, not to mention shaving their most personal areas for them. She knew that most girls had no idea what their father’s penis looked like - either soft or hard. She’d learned at an early age that when daddy’s penis got hard, he massaged it to make it feel better. Later she learned more about that, but part of that education was that it was normal to have the feelings associated with being horny and normal to want to do something about it. What that “something” was was important, because doing the wrong thing could cause real problems. Pregnancy was fine for later in life, but not when Cindy was in her teens.

So masturbation was something she was both familiar with, and comfortable with as well.

Both when he did it ... and when she did.

He didn’t flaunt it. If he was naked and got erect (which, truth be known, as often as not was because she was naked, too) then he said something like, “Be back in a bit,” and went to his room. When he emerged he was soft again. She did basically the same thing, though when she got horny it was usually because she was thinking about a boy at school.

She didn’t have to wonder about that. As stated before, he was up front with her about everything. The first time she showed any curiosity about the fact that his penis got long and hard sometimes, he explained it to her. She knew that a lot of her father’s erections were because he thought she was beautiful, naked or not.

And that didn’t bother her a bit. She didn’t think about it, but a lot of her unconcern with the fact that her father lusted after her sometimes was based on the fact that he’d never touched her in a blatantly sexual manner.

Well ... other than the time he taught her about her clitoris, and how to rub it.

But other than that, he’d never touched her in any of the ways her girlfriends at school talked about their boyfriends touching them.

In short, she knew her daddy thought she was beautiful and sexy and desirable. That’s something all girls want to believe. Sadly, many of them don’t get to honestly feel that way until well after their teens.

So Cindy was happy with her home life, even though she knew it was different than that of her friends.

She teased him about it a little bit, once in a while. She was careful of how she dressed outside the home. She wanted to fit in with the other girls. But at home she was as relaxed as possible. That meant wearing as little as the weather allowed. As she grew older his response to her nudity, or partial nudity, made her giggle sometimes. She especially liked coming straight from the shower, naked, and hugging him good night before she went to bed. She knew he’d get a boner and go to his room to rub it soft again.

She wasn’t mean about it. She knew he didn’t mind.

For them ... it was normal.

Then something changed that impacted their lives in ways they wouldn’t realize for almost a year.

She got a boyfriend.

His name was Rick and he was her first mad crush.

Bob recognized the emotions she displayed.

And, since her hymen had already been lost to tampons, he took her to the doctor to get her fitted for her first diaphragm. He didn’t trust the pill, didn’t like the idea of pharmaceuticals altering her body chemistry, so he did the best he could, otherwise.

As with everything else they’d done as he raised her, they both researched this new thing in their lives ... and, after the doctor educated her about its use, they practiced installing and removing the device until both were sure they understood the process completely. She was sure she wouldn’t need it. Not until she was in her twenties.

He hoped she was right.

Dating had proceeded, during which Cindy was honest with her father about what feelings Rick brought out in her. She didn’t mind admitting to making out and petting, because Bob didn’t get angry about that. He just counseled her on how to manage the feelings.

Rick went and a boy named David took his place. Then there was Aaron, and Thomas, and three others before Josh, who lasted much longer than any of the others had.

It was Josh who asked her to prom.

She was sixteen, young for a junior and of course she was excited beyond anything Bob had ever observed in her.

So he decided to go all out for this one.

They went shopping for a dress. The one she fell in love with had no back. She couldn’t wear a bra with it, but he said he had something in mind to deal with that. She went braless a lot anyway so she wasn’t worried. He suggested she’d feel sexier in thigh-high hose, held up by a garter belt. That was exciting. It made her feel more grown up.

On the big night, he helped her get dressed. He hadn’t done that in a while, but she didn’t mind. It was exciting to be naked with him and see his eyes as she put on the hose and he adjusted the garter belt. He held her panties for her as she stepped into them and pulled them up, tugging and getting them snug against her pussy.

He produced two adhesive strips, commonly called Band-aids.

“What are those for?” she asked.

“Watch,” he said.

He reached for her left nipple and tweaked it.

“Daddy!” she giggled. “That tickles. What are you doing?”

“Just watch,” he said, rolling the nipple between his thumb and first two fingers. Her nipples were well-formed, fat nubbins that sat on coral-colored areolas.

“That feels... “ She blushed. Some of her dates had done this to her - when she let them - which wasn’t often. Her nipples were sensitive and she knew it was dangerous to let a boy play with them too much. Only one boy had sucked a nipple and she’d made him stop almost instantly as danger signals flared in her mind.

“I know,” he said. He removed his fingers. “That one is erect,” he said, needlessly.

“Well duh,” she said.

He peeled the backing off a Band-aid and stuck it across the nipple he hadn’t abused.

“Put your dress on now,” he said. “Hurry.”

She did and he arranged her in front of the mirror.

“Oh,” she said, laughing. The hard nipple poked through the dress. The other one was nice and smooth. “You’re so smart!”

“Think you can manage the other one?” he asked, handing her the second Band-aid. “I need to go to my room.”

“Awww,” she said, taking the plastic strip. “Is Daddy horny?”

“Daddy is more worried about you getting horny than how horny he is,” he said.

“I’m already horny,” said Cindy, grinning.

“Greeaat,” sighed Bob.

“Don’t worry,” she giggled. “I know how to handle Josh.”