Edited by Isaac Newton

I stood in shock in the open doorway of the kitchen with two arms full of brown-bagged groceries for my family.

There, on the couch in the living room, mere meters away from me, sat Lori Johanson, my daughter's long-time best friend, with her pleated, navy blue, school skirt up about her waist and her bare heels shoved into the cushions. My daughter was kneeling on the carpet before her, wearing white lace thigh-high stockings and a black leather studded collar about her throat. There was a leather leash attached to the collar and Lori held it wrapped about her hand. My daughter was leaning into the spread thighs of her teenage friend with her face pressed right into the dark curves there. Lori's free hand held my daughter's face against her loins. My daughter had her wrists bound behind her with what looked like another stocking.

"Get your tongue up there, you fucking skank!" Lori was shoving my daughter's face forcibly down into her groin, and I had little doubt what that meant, what Jessica was doing with her lips and her tongue.

The first reaction I had was that my daughter Jessica was getting raped, that this scene was a monstrous crime against my own flesh and blood happening right in my own house! But then I quickly remembered the strange phone calls from Lori. They would come at all hours, and Jessica would just pick up and run out of our home to meet her friend. No, this had to be consensual, regardless of the leash and the forcing of the top of my daughter's head.

'Perhaps she's been coerced, ' I prayed. She had always been a sweet, introverted girl that was as perfect a daughter as any parent could ask for. I dreaded when she started to date boys, worrying that her calm polite demeanour would be taken advantage of by some of the bastards that roamed our neighbourhood. I never considered that it would be her 'cool' friend Lori that I should have worried about instead.

Lori was shoving her slim hips into my daughter's wiggling face and grunting like some disgusting animal. The words came out of me as a forceful screech, "Release my daughter, Lori!" The bags of groceries dropped from my arms to the carpet below with a loud bang; I just wasn't concerned about breakage at a time like this.

Lori's face changed from one of sneering lust to surprise and horror. Her head tilted towards me, staring directly into my furious gaze. Her thin thighs were still spread, and my daughters face still lay between them. Jessica could not draw more than a few centimetres away from the loins before her due to the leash being so tight, but she was able to turn her head enough to look at me out the corner of her eyes, over the her best friend's thin teenage thigh.

I stomped into my own living room and wildly swung my arm, my hand trying to slap Lori. Only the tip of my fingers grazed her face, but she jerked her head as if she had received the full force of the blow. I heard a muffled 'Mom... no... ' as I forcefully reached down to the hand holding the leash attached to my daughters throat and violently ripped it from Lori's grip. Lori sat dumbly, her face still pale and stricken.

As I let the tail end of the leash fall to the floor at my feet, I looked down to see my daughter lifting her face from between those thin shapely thighs, her face coated with clear thick juices. Seeing the pink wetness of Lori's loins as well my daughter's stricken, soaked face told me that all my suspicious had been correct.

"Go to your room, Jessica!"

My daughter sat back on her heels and screamed up at me, showing anger for the first time since my appearance.

"No, mom!"

She had never seen me this enraged, and I do not think I had ever heard her scream out like that before. It was a day of firsts for us, and I wished it had never come.

Looking once again at Lori, I realized that her pink wetness was now completely exposed since my daughter had vacated her earlier position. I roughly kicked one of her knees; she closed it in reaction to my unbalanced swing.

"Get out of my house, you slut!"

Lori's eyes were wide as they stayed glued to mine; she sat frozen in horror. Although it was not until a long time later that I came to realize it, there were even tears starting in her eyes.

"Please, mom... !"

I grabbed Lori's long straight hair and used it to yank her off the couch. She screamed and clawed at my fist-full of hair, unsuccessfully. It had to have been very painful and quite humiliating. But it was nothing compared to what I wanted to do to this teenage temptress! Jessica screamed from behind me, but I was well-trained in ignoring her.

When I let go of Lori's hair, she fell to the carpeted floor on her knees staring up at me in shock and terror. A second later, she seemed to recover, scrambled up to her feet, and practically ran for the door.

"Lori! No, mom... please... !"

Lori opened it and was through before I reached the same doorway, slamming it shut on the comical sight of her running, as fast as her bare feet could carry her, down our lane.

I turned about and strode back into the living room to confront my near-nude daughter, who was still kneeling where I had left her, her eyes over-flowing with tears.

"Jessica... ?"

My anger was finally ebbing away from me, leaving shock and uncertainty. My body trembled with barely-contained grief. I sat on the couch, the same place that Lori had perched, and bent over to untie my daughter's wrists. Jessica pulled away before I could finish and awkwardly climbed to her feet.

"You bitch... I hate you!"

My daughter ran deeper into our home, most likely into her room - every teenage girl's sanctuary.

Finally, I was able to sit in silence with the very recent memory of what I had just witnessed flowing through my consciousness. My breathing was coming fast and with difficulty. I consciously told my heart to slow down and my breathing with it. The trembling of my body subsided and my reasoning returned.

'My god - what had happened here? I mean, more than the obvious. Jessica had been bound, forced to use her mouth on that... slut!'

Before this day, these very last moments, lesbianism never entered into my life. I knew no homosexuals, and I never considered other women as sexual partners. Of course I knew it existed, and I knew others, possibly even people I knew, practiced it, but I had never been exposed to such sexual practices.

At least, not until today.

I then thanked god that my husband Dan had not come home instead of me, that he had not been a witness to his daughter's debauchery and filth. I shuddered to consider how he might have handled it with his near- violent temper. Yes, as badly as I handled it, it was much better than if Jessica's father had arrived instead.

And I had handled it incorrectly. What if Jessica was a lesbian; shouldn't I support her in that decision? Is it a decision or just misguided sexual delusion?

And what about the vile words that Lori had spouted, the collar and leash? I knew enough to know that lesbians did those acts, probably as commonly as heterosexuals. Or as rarely, as the case may be. In my marriage, we never acted that way; we made love, whenever Dan felt like it, but with no leather leashes attached to my neck and no one calling me vile names.

It was an unthinkable and humiliating way to act.

Thinking about my own love-life sparked my anger anew, and I had to fight away the familiar emotions evoked by those thoughts. Dan did not feel like making love to his wife, me, anymore - only once in the last six months. That was hard for a woman, for me, to take: the lack of interest from the man I loved. Given those circumstances, what woman would not question her sexuality, her appeal to the man to whom she was bound by vows for her whole life? The situation was made even more difficult by the feelings of passion that I was enduring now that I was into my 'sexual peak, ' as the books I'd read liked to call it. My fantasies would have made a ten dollar whore blush, I was sure.

There on the floor was a white cotton panty, obviously hastily discarded. I leaned over and picked it up in one hand wondering to whom it belonged, my daughter or Lori?

Yes, I could have handled this differently. What if I had retreated at the initial sight in my living room and then come back into my home as soon as I guessed they were finished? What if I had waited until later, when I was alone with my daughter, and then spoken to her as only her mother can? I would have gotten replies then, not my daughter screaming at me and telling me she hated me.

I sighed at the realization that I had to go up to my daughter's room to finish what I had abruptly started. Besides, Jessica's hands might still be bound behind her back and I needed to release her.

Normally, I would have left my daughter to calm herself over a period of time and then confronted her rationally and calmly. That was the only formula that I had found to work with my teenage daughter. I knew my emotions were not fully in check yet, but I had little choice. Dan was due home in ninety minutes, and a daughter, bound and wearing stockings, would be a little more than he, or I to be honest, could bear right then.

I strode up to my daughter's closed bedroom door and knocked lightly.

"Jessica, may I come in?î My voice was nothing if not calm and polite - a ruse, mind you, but a necessary one.

Nothing.

"Please, honey. I'm not mad anymore." Which was not completely true, but I told myself that I had to calm down if I was to get through the next few minutes without scarring my relationship with my daughter forever. My voice, this time, held a little desperation that I recognized too late.

I heard a sniffle behind the door and turned the knob, half expecting to find it locked. But it wasn't, and I opened the door a crack. I could see the back of my daughter's lace-covered calves as she lay facing away from the door on her bed.

"Honey?"

"Come in, mom." Jessica's voice sounded cold, distant.

Perhaps I had lost her already.

I came in and sat down by my daughter's feet, facing the doorway. The alternative was to sit facing her nudity, and that was nothing less than disrespectful, especially after what had transpired minutes ago between us.

No sound came from either of us for several seconds before I broke the awkward silence and asked, "I found some panties on the living room floor... ?"

"They are Lori's."

I dropped them from my hand, as if they were on fire, to the messy floor about my daughter's bed. This was another nail in the coffin, proof that my daughter may, indeed, be a lesbian.

"Jessica, honey... ?"

She blurted out, understanding me without my needing to say a word, showing that she knew me better than I knew her, "I'm not a lesbian, Mom."

My first reaction was to release the tension and let out a ragged breath of thankfulness. Then I realized that what I had intruded upon might have been something more sinister. Had my daughter been taken by force after all?

I turned to look at her prostrate form for the first time since entering the room. She was as naked as when she had left me. She was wearing white lace stockings with nothing else, except that other stocking still bound over one wrist. Evidently, I had loosened it enough earlier for her to escape her binding. The long thin body looked very feminine lying there on its side; the sleek, teenage female curves covered with her tight, youthful, perfect skin was a sight to entice any man that still breathed.

Not for the first time, I felt jealousy seep into my heart; not towards my daughter, mind you, but towards time. My daughter only reminded me of what I once had, what I would never have again.

"Please sit up, honey?"

Jessica looked at me over her shoulder as if deliberating the risk in doing as I asked, then slickly rolled up into a sitting position with her knees together and her heels beneath her bottom, on the opposite side of the bed from me.

"Can you tell me about what I saw?"

She shrugged but stayed silent, her eyes no longer daring to look at me. Perhaps she was fearful of my reading her, as she so easily seems to do with me?

"Please, Jessica?" I let out the pleading sound in my voice on purpose this time.

"You wouldn't understand, mom." It was spoken calmly, as if we were talking about the latest teenage fashions.

I tried to laugh bravely but it only came out as a short grunt, "I have been married for more years than you have been alive young lady; there is nothing that you can say that would surprise me." I was not so sure.

"Lori loves me, mom... !"

I interrupted, "I'm sure she does!" My anger was obvious in that short response.

Jessica shook her head negatively, "Not like that, mom." My daughter swallowed thickly and then crawled lithely upon her bed to kneel directly next to me - her arms coming around my shoulders for a firm hug. My hands came up and wrapped around her thin bare torso, pulling her possessively towards me; my emotions threatened to overwhelm me.

This was my darling daughter, for god's sake! No matter what she may have done.

With her cheek upon my shoulder, she whispered, "Have you ever felt something that you know most people would never understand?"

I had no idea what my daughter was talking about. "Like what, honey?"

Having her in my arms was rejuvenating my spirit, giving me hope for a resolution to this disastrous afternoon.

"Sexual things."

It was strange hearing her say those two words in a whispered little- girl voice; it caused goose-bumps to appear upon my arms.

Through the last few years of my marriage, I had had fantasies, both when alone and, more frequently as of late, when I was mentally idle. Some of those fantasies were very erotic, and I would never have revealed them to another human being alive. The vividness of my imagination was shocking, even to myself. Though I really did not understand her question, I answered affirmatively with a reluctant nod of my head.

"And have you ever feared that if you told someone of your desires, they would use them against you?" I could feel my daughter's head turning to look at me from my shoulder, possibly trying to read me.

I understood that this moment was pivotal in our continued relationship together, and I resolved to control my anger, to calmly face anything my daughter revealed.

I thought back. Once, a few years before, I had successfully suggested to Dan that we have intercourse with me on my knees facing away from him. We both enjoyed it very much. I became overconfident about our relationship, and during one later love-making session in that position, I had begged him to spank me, another of my fantasies. He was surprised, but he struck my wide, round ass until I orgasmed mightily. Afterwards, we lay sated and, pleased with myself, I suggested to Dan that he could do whatever he wanted with my 'ass'. He had asked what I meant, and I shyly revealed another fantasy ñ that I would love to be buggered like a teenage boy. My husband was shocked and stormed from our bed. Since then, we have never ever coupled in that position again.

You see, I had taken a chance and revealed something that could change the way my husband thought about me. It was unsuccessful, and I was nothing less than humiliated and embarrassed. Since that moment in our marriage, I had never again revealed the dark fantasies within my mind and heart, to my husband or anyone else alive.

So, I could answer more honestly this time, "Yes. I know what that feels like, honey."

My daughter silently mulled my answers for a brief moment before her arms hugged my heavy-set form more firmly. She seemed to have come to some conclusion about me in our confrontation, but I was no less confused and a little nervous.

"If I tell you something, mom, will you promise that it stays between us?"

What answer could any mother give? "Of course, honey."

"Lori was helping me, mom. She..."

"Helping you?" I could not keep the surprised shriek from my voice. Lori had been getting oral sex from my daughter; if anything, I would have thought that it was Jessica that had been helping Lori.

My daughter continued over my outburst: "... knows my secret. And she knows what could happen if my secret is ever let out."

The mystery of the conversation was building, and I had no idea what the climax would entail. I forced myself to stay silent. What could this secret of Jessica's be? I had to sit silently and endure until my beautiful, darling daughter took me completely into her confidence.

"I am...", this was it; this would be the key to this strange afternoon. I held my breath as Jessica paused, steeling her courage, "... a submissive, mom."

A what? "'Submissive'?"

"Now you must understand what guys, and some gals, my age would do if they found out my secret?"

I did not understand. I had no idea what she meant by 'submissive' or why it could not be told to others.

Jessica pulled her head back so that our faces were a breath away from each other as she looked deeply into my eyes. She saw my confusion, my uncertainty, and she looked a little saddened by the fact.

"I find pleasure in being used, mother; it doesn't matter if it's a girl, a guy or an object. I can't help how strongly it affects me."

A light went off in my head, and I started to understand.

"I told Lori years ago, and she was sympathetic but distant; until she saw how I seemed to be uncontrollable around some of the biggest jerks at school. How I was unable to deny their demands and was being used and passed around by them."

I felt a stone in my stomach threaten to bring up my lunch and had to swallow thickly to still my nausea. My little girl... used in that way!

"Lori took me under her control, and I was never so happy, mother. I cried with joy that she knew what I needed. Suddenly I could not be used by others, as I was owned my someone that understood me and that loved me."

I felt like crying and throwing up at the same time. This little story was nothing less than tragic, and it made my own story of sexual neglect in my marriage pale in comparison. I felt as if, somewhere, I had failed. A mother is supposed to protect her daughter from the evils of the world. But what would I have done if my daughter had come to me years ago, explaining her inability to deny the lusts of others? I barely understood what she was telling me now, after seeing it with my own eyes earlier in the living room.

And what had she meant by 'owned'?

I saw that there were tears in Jessica's eyes, a stream was running down both cheeks. "Lori told me months ago that it would kill her if anyone found out about our relationship, about what we did." My daughter laughed suddenly and then went silent before continuing, "She told me that being with me was better than using her own hand, but that she often had to pretend I was a guy when we were together." My daughter seemed embarrassed by this revelation.

That statement, more than anything else that I had heard since starting this odd conversation with my daughter, explained to me what I had witnessed earlier in the living room. Neither Lori nor Jessica were lesbians, but loved each other as only long-standing friends could. Imagine doing something that you disliked for the love of another? I realized with a cold shiver that this was not so unlike my own marriage bed!

"She will not be able to continue now that you have caught us, mother." Jessica's disappointment was obvious in her admission.

That short statement took me by surprise. But I was even more surprised when I felt my daughter's thin fingers upon my bare thigh, under my skirt! I was struggling to understand all the implications of what was being said and what was happening.

"I know her too well. I will be lucky if she is ever alone with me again. She dreads our relationship becoming public."

As I listened to her calm but strangely pleading voice, I looked down to witness what was going on in my lap. I saw my daughter's other hand, the stocking still bound about its wrist, toying with the top button of my blouse. As I watched, it seemed to pop open and my daughter's long thin fingers moved lower down to the next button.

A fist clenched my guts, and I felt my face flush. I had no idea how to react or feel. "Jessica... ?"

My daughter ignored me and barked another short laugh, "If you were malicious, mother, I am sure Lori would do anything you wanted to keep the secret quiet." This statement sounded strangely like an offer: if I ever desired my daughter's best friend, this could be the means to such an end. It was a disgusting thought!

My blouse was open almost to my navel and my large white brassiere was exposed; my daughter's hand slipped beneath my blouse and cupped a large, heavy, bound breast. The hand in my lap had slipped higher up my thigh and was within easy reach of the junction at the top of my legs.

Again the dual stimuli of word and touch served to keep me off balance. I breathed a continuation of my previous attempt to stay in control: "... please... !"

"Me, I am damned to be used by anyone that realizes I am helpless to their every request. Can you imagine what it's like mother: to be kneeling on the dirty floor of the guys' washroom as five younger boys stand around me while I suck each one of their little peckers off?"

Her question and admission shocked me as much as the touch of her hands.

Jessica leaned forwards so that our noses were nearly touching as she continued, "Or how old Mrs. Simpson used to keep me after class to spank me until I cried, and then shoved my head up her skirt until she finished."

'Forcing her to lick her like she had done with Lori, ' I thought. Mrs. Simpson was her English teacher from junior high school, and was older than I!

My god - my poor daughter!

Jessica's lips touched my own, so lightly that I almost missed it. Suddenly, I became highly aware of my daughters nudity - of how the stockings seemed to enhance her coltish frame and made her seem younger; of how her small pointy nipples were swollen but seemed to draw my eyes; of how her full red lips were filled with promise and lust; and of how the leash was still about her throat, the other end hanging within easy reach of my clenched hand.