Bob didn't know exactly when he began to look at Mandy and see a woman, rather than his little girl. It happened slowly, over a period of time, kind of like when you lose a pound or two a week and three or four months (and thirty pounds) later somebody says "You lost some weight lately?"

Mandy was still a little girl when her mother just didn't come home one night. Hours later he was frantic, of course. Any husband would be.

He did all the normal things. He called their friends, ("Bob, do you have ANY idea of what time it is?") and then called the Police. And they were, as are most public servants, bureaucratic in the extreme.

"I'm sorry Mr. Templeton, we really can't take a missing persons report until someone's been gone at least twenty-four hours. If you still haven't heard from her tomorrow night, give us a call."

He had all the normal visions of her lying in her mangled car, dying, calling out for him.

The Police called the next day, wanting Bob to come pick up his car from where she'd abandoned it. There was a note in the car, which, of course, they'd read ... and probably chuckled over (Can you believe it, the guy thought she was a missing person!").

It was short and to the point. "Bob, I've left you. Don't try to find me."

Turned out that a guy she worked with went "missing" the same day. Everybody knew about their relationship except him. And Mandy, of course.

Anyway, Mandy was ten at the time, and being abandoned by her mother was a blow he was afraid she might never get over. He spent a lot more time with her after that, and not just because he had to be both mother and father. They needed each other. A psychologist might have said they were doing the normal thing, trying to give each other the love they were missing from the woman they thought had loved them. It's complicated when somebody just walks out of your life.

But, in a few years, they had adapted to the point that, if she had come back, they would have probably told her to sit on a parking meter and spin. They didn't need her any more. She was a little like the old family dog that bit the kids ... and then died. They missed her, in a purely historical way, but weren't all that sad that she was gone.

When you're a single man there are lots of things about raising a girl that make life interesting. You have to deal with all her "girly" needs, but you have to be a big, tough guy too. I don't think it works that way for a single woman. Nobody expects her to be a man, or do man things. She may do those things, but nobody EXPECTS her to. A single dad, on the other hand, is expected to be sensitive to his daughter's feminine needs, and "be there for her," (whatever the fuck that means.)

And think about it. I mean think about a single mom raising a son. What does she have to teach him? How and why to wear a jock strap? Probably not. The gym teacher will cover that. What kind of underwear to get? No way. She buys him what she thinks he needs and he gets it for Christmas. She doesn't teach him how to sit on a couch while he's wearing a skirt, because he doesn't wear a skirt and nobody cares how he sits on a couch or crosses his legs. She doesn't have to teach him how to wear a pad, or insert a tampon. She doesn't have to teach him to be cognizant of when he's fertile. If anything, all she has to teach him is to keep it in his pants unless he's ready to marry the girl. She doesn't have to teach him what to do if he gets horny. Since ALL boys are horny, and everyone EXPECTS them to be horny, all she has to do is teach him to wash his little penis really well when he's young and everything else will take care of itself years later ... while he's washing his no-longer-little penis.

But a single dad, raising a beautiful young girl. Now THERE'S a situation that is absolutely packed with the potential for disaster. He has to teach her everything her mother would teach her. How to fit a bra, what kind of feminine hygiene products to get and why, tampons versus pads, Midol, or the myriad of other products that handle that problem, how to walk, how NOT to walk, what to do if you feel this way or that way, how to apply makeup, PMS, why everyone else has breasts except her or, conversely, why her breasts are so huge and everyone else hardly has any ... the list can go on and on.

So, when you find out what happened between Mandy and her father, and you think back on how many times I used the word "normal" in the telling, I want you to think about raising a girl all by yourself. Then you can decide whether what happened was "normal" or not.

As I said, he didn't know exactly when he noticed it, but at some point he looked at Mandy and thought "woman".

He knew it wasn't when Janet first left them. Mandy was only ten and, after the shock of it wore off, she exploded into becoming "little miss domestic goddess", taking on the duties of laundry, and house cleaning, and even cooking, though he was a far better cook. It was like she was trying to make up for the fact that the woman of the house was gone. But after a while that evened out and they shared the work pretty much equally, and with pretty good communication.

And it wasn't when she was almost twelve and had her first period. He had warned her about that in a six week long educational process about her body that was so drawn out and dry that there was no sex left in it, even though what they were talking about was, in one sense, pure sex.

I mean what are periods for, except to remind a young woman that she has failed? Her womb is empty, and all that nourishing blood is now going to waste. The system designed specifically to bear a child and propagate the species did not fulfill it's destiny, and all that blood and pain is a clear and present reminder to the young woman to find a man and get it right before next month gets there.

Of course that's not exactly how he explained things to her. The point is that, at the time he was explaining what made her a woman, she didn't either look or act like a woman.

It probably wasn't even when she was thirteen and started growing breasts that ended up being nice double handfuls. He avoided the how-to-fit-a-bra problem by the simple expedient of telling her she didn't have to wear one. She got all upset because she thought wearing a bra would be such a rite of passage, so he took her to the store and looked at tools while she pretended to know what she was looking for. And, of course, she bought a lacy sexy thing that didn't fit and hurt, and it ended up in the back of the closet and she never asked to wear one again.

They did a lot of things together. They shopped at the grocery store together, planning menus as they went down the aisles. He took her to ball games. She dragged him to the skating rink. They liked the same kinds of movies, and could spend hours at the library together.

When he told me about all this, he finally remembered one incident that I think might be the prime contender for when he began to have sexual thoughts about his daughter.

They had been outside raking leaves and pulling weeds and splitting firewood to get ready for winter. It was still hot out and they were both hot and sweaty when they went inside. She went and took a shower, and, about the time he was going toward the kitchen to get something to drink, she came out of the bathroom drying her hair with a towel. She was naked as usual. Neither of them wore much around the house, and never had. They were both hot blooded, meaning they had a fan going most of the time and almost never got chilled.

He noticed that her breasts were full, and that her nipples had developed to the point that she had both areolas and nipples. She had a cute little patch of auburn hair on her mound. Her hips had widened, and her legs looked longer than he'd remembered them for some reason.

His cock was half hard before he even realized it. She breezed past him with a "Hi Daddy" and he realized she smelled really good. Yes, as he thought about it later, that was the time he began to be aware of his daughter as a woman.

She was every bit of fifteen that summer.

After that, as he sat, reading in the living room, he'd look over at her, doing her homework or whatever. She liked to wear his old T shirts, but she always cut the sleeves off, taking more of the side than just the sleeve. In other words, you could see through the large arm hole. If she bent over, her lovely tits were there for all the world to see. Along with those T shirts she favored gym shorts. She had her favorites, which were from her three years as a cheerleader at her Junior High School. Naturally, they were mostly three or four years old, and who knows how many sizes too small. They fit her like a second skin and made a very visible and identifiable camel toe in her crotch.

They had also let her hair grow since her mother left. That was probably because her mother had cut her hair, rather than taking her to the beauty parlor. At any rate, five years growth of her hair had resulted in a thick mane of brown with red and blond highlights that flowed down her back like a cape. She had a button nose, and high cheekbones. As he looked at her he thought about what a sixteen or seventeen year old boy would think ... and he knew he was in trouble.

Mandy and her father had never talked about dating, because they spent so much time together that she had little time to date. That changed the school year following when he noticed he was living with a stone fox sex goddess. She had given up on the cheerleader thing, not liking the political popularity contest that went with it but, ironically, she was still quite popular. She learned makeup from her girlfriends at sleepovers, and heard about dates there too. Then one night she asked if she could go to a movie with a boy.

Now, Bob thought he was a pretty savvy Dad. He knew that the best way to get her to do something was to forbid her from doing it. And, conversely, the best way to get her NOT to do something, was to be excited about it, and to display a great desire to "help" with whatever it was.

"I think that would be GREAT!" he bubbled. "In fact I'd be happy to take you guys to the movie and then pick you up." he offered helpfully. It didn't work out quite like he'd expected.

"That's OK" she said sweetly. "It's close enough we're just going to walk."

He went on reading the paper and peeked at her. She looked all happy.

She was actually home by eight-thirty. Things had not gone all that well. The boy wouldn't talk. He was nervous and not very good company. Bob was thrilled to the core when she closed the door and plopped down on the couch and said, "This dating stuff isn't nearly as much fun as I thought it would be."

She did go out a few more times, but it evolved into group dating, where there were two or three girls, and two or three guys, and people weren't really paired off.

She grew more beautiful, and even sexier. They spent less time together - she spent more time with her friends. But they made sure to spend some time doing things with each other every week. And she developed a strong independent streak too. She wasn't afraid of much of anything, and big new concepts didn't give her pause.

So he shouldn't have been surprised when she asked if she could go to Paris.

He came home from work one day and she was already home from school. It was only a month until school ended and she'd been doing very well with her grades. They'd gotten into a little game where he rewarded her for that. Sometimes it was buying her a new outfit, or her own computer (so she could study more efficiently, of course). She had been hinting about a car, but he was a little leery of that. She had only just turned sixteen.

Well, when he got home that day and she was dressed like it was already full summer. She had on a spandex halter top that it must have taken her hours to get on. Then he saw there was a hidden zipper right between her breasts. Still, she had to pull like crazy, stretching the fabric, to get that zipper started. Bob never could figure out why women wore things like that, because it just had to hurt to put on. But it cradled her luscious titties like they were some precious piece of art. It also telegraphed the state of her nipples, which showed through as if she wasn't wearing anything at all. As for the rest of her, she was wearing high rise panties, and was barefoot. She had just made something and put it in the oven. He could smell it, but couldn't tell what it was. There was a smudge of flour on her cheek.

Bob had a secretary who was married and who didn't fool around. But she loved to tease him and she's one of the finest examples of a M.I.L.F. you could ever want to gaze upon. So he was usually fired up every night when he got home. In fact he usually repaired to the bathroom to shower and paint the walls of the shower stall with his semen. Seeing Mandy like that didn't help things at all, and his balls rumbled.

"HI daddy!!!" she said, very excited, "How was work today?"

"Just another day," he answered, putting the mail on the counter.

Mandy took a deep breath, straining that spandex. She bit her lip just a little.

"Daddy?"

"Yes baby?" he answered.

"I need to ask you something but I'm not sure how you'll answer," she said, almost in a whisper as she twirled a long strand of her silky auburn hair around her finger.

"You can ask me anything baby, you know that," he said, giving her his complete attention.

"Denise and Barbara want me to go to Paris with them for the summer, can I go?"

Now it must be remembered that all Dads assume and believe with whole hearted enthusiasm that their daughters are virgins ... quite often even after they're married and return from the honeymoon. And, if you're a father yourself, particularly of a teenage girl, then you already know what went through his mind. Within seconds of her question, he had this mental image of some slicky-boy Frenchman plying his little girl with wine and an accent, and then rolling over on top of her and going where no man had gone before.

It was not the image he wanted to take into the shower with him tonight.

"Absolutely not," he answered immediately.

"Why daddy?" she said, pouting.

"Lots of reasons" he answered in true adult fashion. "For one thing you're only sixteen. For another you don't speak French."

"Well that's true" she admitted, "But Barbara took French this year and she got an "A" in it, and don't you want me to be happy? Of course you do Daddy" she said. "That's why you're going to say 'Yes' ... because you love me and want me to be happy."

This was a standard ploy of hers. If he loved her and wanted her to be happy, he'd let her do whatever it was she was asking to do, at that moment. It very often worked, but not for the reasons she thought it was working.

"Mandy, I said no."

She walked over to the large over stuffed chair that sat beside the fireplace and plopped down, pouting as she threw one leg over the arm. Her panties were cupping her pussy lips and they were screaming at him silently to come and wash them with his tongue.

"I'll take you to Paris when you graduate." he tried.

Mandy sat there, silent, a beautiful pout on her face. She had no idea how gorgeous she was, and how she affected men.

"Not going to talk to me, huh?" he asked.

She shook her head, looking down at the floor.

"Baby don't be mad, I just think that 16 is too young to run off to a foreign country when you can't even speak the language," I said. "Besides, you're so beautiful you wouldn't even be able to enjoy yourself. While you were there, every man in France would be doing nothing but trying to get your panties off."

He hadn't actually meant to say that last part, but it was how he felt. HE even wanted to get her panties off and he was her own father!

Mandy flushed right along with him. Her eyes went to the front of his slacks. There was a tent there, thanks to his secretary and his daughter. And there wasn't anything he could do about it right now.

"Well, I know how to handle men," she said, as if she were twenty five instead of just barely driving age.

"Is that a fact?" he asked. He began to imagine her in various situations "handling" men. His cock got even harder. He walked toward her, towering over her as she lifted her sweet face to look at him. He knew that his hard cock was right there in front of her face. He was flaunting it, like she was flaunting her nipples and pussy. But she wanted to be all grown up and, to his mind, that meant dealing with situations like this one.

"Just how do you handle a man, Mandy?"

Now, though he didn't know it at that time, Mandy thought she might actually have a chance. She had been on several dates with boys who tried all kinds of things with her, and she had fended off all their hands and antics. She'd done what her girlfriends had taught her to do in those situations. She'd even jacked one boy off, thinking correctly that once he had squirted he'd be a lot easier to handle. And he had been, but she made sure she never got alone with him again. There was something about seeing all that hot white fluid spurting everywhere that made her pussy hot and itchy. Thinking of that made her think of the stiff cock an inch away from her and she looked up at it. There it was, and it was quite a bulge. She licked her lips.

"Well, you give them just a little of what they want and then you..." She trailed off as she realized there was no way she could say to her father 'You jerk them off and they go away happy.' Instead she said "You make them happy and they're a lot easier to handle."

Her dad leaned down. "And just what is it you do that 'makes them happy' Mandy?"

Mandy's heart was thumping. She smelled the after shave her father liked. She liked it too. Her father smelled so ... good. He was so close! Suddenly she felt that hot itch in her pussy again.

"Well, you know ... you ... well, you kiss them." On a wild impulse she stood up, pursed her sweet lips up and kissed her father's lips. Her heart thumped in her chest. This wasn't like kissing those boys!