I rolled up to the house around nine o’clock. I hadn’t been home since fall break, making this the longest stretch away from my home, my mother, and my stepfather in my life. My first semester of my freshman year was now behind my belt and I breathed a sigh of relief. I was reasonably sure I’d pull the Dean’s List, so I felt light and happy.
It hadn’t been snowing at school but it was snowing here. I pulled up in the drive and shut off the car, got out, and pulled up my hood. I ducked under the shoulder straps and put on two bags criss-cross and pulled my heavy wheeled suitcase out of the car, and dragged them all up the driveway. I resisted the urge to catch a snowflake on my tongue, but just barely.
The drive home took an hour longer than expected, making it almost five hours. I had to pee. Once I’d yanked all my bags into the porch I dropped them where they lay, unlocked the back door and rushed up the stairs, and straight into the bathroom.
I skidded to a stop, wobbly on my snow-wet boots. The bathroom door had been open but it was full of steam. My stepfather was toweling himself off from his shower. He was toweling off his head.
People usually don’t wear clothes in the shower.
I tried not to look but I did anyway. For a man in his early fifties he was shockingly lithe and muscular, without any ounce of fat anywhere on his streamlined frame. His broad swimmer’s chest was coated in fine gray hairs that matched the thatch between his legs where the biggest dick I had ever seen swung like a pendulum. My eyes locked on it.
He lowered the towel, which had been covering his face as he dried his hair.
He screamed.
I screamed.
I bolted out of the bathroom and into my bedroom, chest heaving.
“Erica?”
A shudder flowed through me. My voice came out high and squeaky. “Daddy? I’m sorry. I have to pee.”
“It’s okay, hon. It’s all yours.”
I crept out of my room. He was in the hall, comfortably swathed in his bathrobe. He was shaking, or at least his hands were. He stuck one in his robe pocket and scratched the back of his head with the other.
We looked at each other for a second. I darted into the bathroom and slammed the door shut. I shoved my pants down and dropped onto the toilet, and sighed in sweet relief, but the image of his gloriously sculpted naked body wouldn’t leave me alone.
I’ve never considered myself a size queen. The truth is, I was a virgin. I had a vibe but I never, you know, put anything in there. Just my finger. The thought of something like that inside me gave me the shivers. I started to wonder if he would like it if I licked it.
Then I realized I was sitting on the toilet thinking about my father’s penis and freaked out again. I forced myself to calm down before I left the bathroom. I shimmied back into my pants (why did I have to pick the yoga pants today?) and leaned on the sink and stared at myself in the vanity for a while, until the pink left my cheeks.
When I looked mostly composed, I headed out. I stripped off my scarf and my coat and tucked my arms under my armpits. I went downstairs that way, sheepishly folded up and trying to hide as I went to retrieve my bags. Dad was in the kitchen, in his pajamas. He looked up when I came in.
“Erica,” he said.
I froze. “I’m sorry, Daddy, I-”
“No, I’m sorry,” he said, turning . “While you were away your mother and I got in the habit of not closing the door. It’s my fault. Let’s not worry about it anymore, okay?”
I smiled. “Okay, Daddy.”
Easy for him to say. He was hung like a walrus and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The image of his manhood had etched itself in my mind and the harder I tried to dismiss it the more tenaciously it clung to the tip of my brain.
Once my bags were properly dragged up into my bedroom, I closed the door and locked it. I turned the lock in a slow, secret motion, gripping it until the tips of my fingers went white from the pressure to stop my hand from shaking.
I sat on the bed and looked around. My bedroom had become an alien landscape. I was a refugee on planet pink, at the mercy of the plushie people. I had to unpack but it was a five hour drive and I was tired. My yoga pants came off and coiled up at the end of my bed like a used snakeskin and I stripped down to my t-shirt and curled up. I went to sleep hoping that the memory would fade. It was four in the afternoon.
When I woke up my hand was between my legs. New sweat beaded and prickled on my forehead, between my breasts and along the inward curve of my back from my rump to my shoulder blades. My hand was in my panties and my fingers were on my clit, and I was already in a dull haze.
So I kept going. I tightened up, heat building, my legs drawing up and squeezing together. A dull smile spread on my face and my eyes drifted half-shut. I was in that hazy place between asleep and awake and my pussy was throbbing.