Chapter 3

The other incident that changed things much more, happened in late October. Or rather, it was more a final episode, included a few incidents strung together.

We’d just tried on Halloween costumes for them. In both cases, they seemed to have chosen the costumes with a mind to the whole commando thing - both costumes involved wearing mid-length skirts. They’d each put together several possibilities, and were doing almost a kind of fashion show to have me help them choose which ones. Of course, each change of costume entailed a quick inspection (not the double extreme kind) which involved them lifting their skirts as they modeled them. I couldn’t help but imagine some befuddled old neighbor getting a very unexpected ‘treat’ on Halloween night, though I was pretty confident my girls didn’t take this little game of theirs outside the house, except to the extent of just being commando under what they wore. They approached it pretty rationally.

Anyway, we’d tried a few costumes, had a few quick inspections, and were sitting around, now that they’d put on their nightshirts. Suddenly, Julia asked me what I was going to have as a costume.

“I don’t do costumes,” I pointed out.

“You need a costume,” she insisted.

“Not gonna happen,” I averred.

“How about a secret costume?” she suggested, giggling.

“What is a secret costume?” I asked, failing to guess what she was about to suggest.

“Well, we’ve been having this contest for a long time,” she said. “So maybe for Halloween, you could join the contest. Like the way Angie did when she visited. It would be a like a secret costume, you being pantiless.”

I laughed. “I can’t be pantiless. Men don’t wear panties.”

Elena sighed in exasperation, and joined the conversation. “Man-pantiless, then. You wear man-panties.”

“Um, no.” I insisted.

Perhaps deliberately misunderstanding the scope of my ‘no,’ Elena said, “Well, boxerless, then.” As if I’d said ‘no’ only to the concept of man-panties.

I decided not to argue. But I didn’t respond, either. I suppose I was waiting to see just how serious the girls were. They interpreted my silence more-or-less correctly.

So Elena said, “If you do it, we promise we’ll do all our homework.”

Julia quickly agreed, nodding vigorously. “Just think! That’s a bargain, dad. You trade just a few inspections a day for no more calls from our teachers.” She was ever the junior sales associate, my sweet Julia.

Where in the parenting manual does it say you might be able to get your kids to promise to do homework if only you will go commando with them?

In the end, after a bit more talk, I ended up committed to staying commando through Halloween. But then the girls raised the issue of inspection.

“Obviously we can’t trust you,” Elena observed.

“What in the world?” I objected.

“We have to judge if you’re keeping the promise. So you have to be part of inspections now.”

“But aren’t I the judge? Seems like I could do my own inspection.”

“That doesn’t make sense, dad. It has to be some other person.”

“Wasn’t the point, originally, that you guys wanted a specific judge person - namely me? That it couldn’t just be some other person? If that was the case, you could have inspected each other and left me out of it from the very beginning.” Even as I said it, I was aware that it wasn’t really a very coherent argument. I was just resisting where I sensed things were going.

I think Elena did perhaps see a bit of contradiction there, but she pressed ahead, introducing a completely new rationalization. “The thing is that it’s supposed to be like a opposite sex person doing the inspection. That’s why we had to get you.”

Julia looked sidelong at her older sister with an approving glance, and ran with this idea. “Yeah, otherwise the inspection isn’t like anything interesting. It’s just like you’re changing clothes in front of someone or something. Like the PE locker room at school.”

Elena nodded at her sister’s addition.

I decided I wasn’t going to try to argue that this was completely new and not fair. Making that kind of argument would have been what a 12 year old boy might have said, in such circumstances, to get out of having to be ‘inspected.’

Instead, I once again decided to just roll with it. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed, exactly. Not at all. More likely, I sensed that this was a kind of escalation and that it was a little bit dangerous. Certainly it crossed a new taboo line.

So, finally, I just shrugged. “Alright. So how will this work?”

Elena grinned, triumphantly. “Like, after you inspect us, we will inspect you. It’s simple.”

“I guess so.”

I will admit that I was really only feigning most of my reluctance, out of some loyalty to the notion of trying to be a good parent who doesn’t do perverted things with his kids. Perhaps this was true at many points in the evolution of this ‘inspection’ game. I felt I needed to pay a kind of lip service to reluctance, because otherwise my enthusiasm for it might unfairly influence my daughters’ interest in it. I genuinely wanted them to feel they were in control of it, I guess. Somehow that assuaged by guilt, although I know that’s not really a valid rationalization. I don’t claim to be anything but human. I have weaknesses.

The girls made me go ‘change’ right away - though changing really just meant going into my bedroom, removing the boxers from under my sweats, and coming back out. Then they made me do a first inspection - I’d already inspected them earlier, in this instance - in fact, I’d done so repeatedly because of the costume try-ons.

It was pretty uneventful, as major events go. I stood in front of the girls, following their instruction, and pulled down the waist of my sweats to the upper mid point of my thighs. I was feeling proud of myself for not popping a boner, actually, and thus at least remaining somewhat in control. It wasn’t shrunken into itself, either, but rather, in that semi-turgid downward dangling position that comes after a recently departed erection (which was essentially what it was, right?).

It was a bit humorous as the girls reacted to their first ‘live’ adult male penis. Elena commented on the amount of hair. Julia made a somewhat incongruous declaration, by saying, “Oh! It’s CUTE.”

I wasn’t sure what that could mean, but I supposed that for a girl that age, the domain of ‘cute’ was pretty wide. And ‘cute’ was certainly better than ‘gross’, which, frankly, was what I would have considered a more normal reaction from two more “normal” girls. But I was learning that Elena and Julia weren’t completely conventional. How they got that way is beyond me.

For the first 24 hours of this new situation, I felt like the girls were happy to just have the whole ‘inspection’ thing be about keeping things equal, as opposed to there being any specific interest in seeing their dad’s schlong. That perception changed, however, on the following evening. The morning inspection, and the one after dinner when they’d changed and we were settling in for them to get their homework done, were both quite perfunctory, and except for the fact I was included, these inspections had the same routinized feel that had developed in my day-to-day inspections of the girls.

In line with their promise, they had in fact become quite diligent about getting their school work done. Julia even proudly showed me a very neatly completed set of worksheets, which were far beyond her normal level of effort. So I was in a fairly voluble mood, and perhaps inappropriately congratulating myself for having found a way to motivate them. I was doing some cleaning up in the kitchen while they messed with their phones and talked about who knows what for a while. I didn’t hear what they were talking about, but there were some giggles.

I came back out into the living room and they complained there was nothing that they wanted to watch on TV, and that they were bored.

I plonked myself down into my standard spot in the recliner, and said, “Normally, you guys say you’re bored when you’re grounded off your phones.”

Elena laughed. She looked down at her always present phone, reflexively. Julia shrugged, but had a bright smile.

Out of the blue, they exchanged glances, and then Elena cleared her throat. “Dad, we think you’re cheating.” This was an echo of the formula they’d developed with each other, during their many squabbles that devolved into tit-for-tat calls for double extreme inspections.

My heart sunk. It was immediately obvious what this was about, and what they intended. And there was plenty to suggest they’d discussed it ahead of time. Nevertheless, I was still caught a bit off guard, having just earlier convinced myself that their inspecting me was only about making the game ‘equal.’ Definitely I’d accepted there was some prurience in the other direction - there was no doubt in my mind that they enjoyed showing off, but I had naively decided it was not about any actual prurient interest on their part in seeing me.

This request made that evidently untrue. The double extreme inspection was all about getting a close look.

“Uh. Are you guys kidding me?” I finally said, but with a rather fatalistic tone.

They just shook their heads no, and retaining their mischievous smiles.

Julia said, “So we need to have a double extreme inspection.” She couldn’t resist almost giggling as she said it. “Of course for fairness you can inspect us too. So we can get that out of the way first.”