6. Chapter 6
Her phone rings at seven Sunday morning and it sounds like the warning bell I knew would come sooner or later.
It’s been days of fucking bliss. Fucking, sucking, working, playing, sleeping, eating, but I knew this moment would come. The world is coming for what we have, but I’m fucking ready.
Wren is facedown in my bed, bare except for a little pink tank top that says ‘Brat’ across her tits that I bought her out shopping the other day.
It’s bunched at her ribs. Dark hair wrecked against my pillow, bangs smashed sideways.
The kind of imperfect composition I'd kill to shoot but can’t tear my eyes from long enough to get my camera.
I've been awake for an hour. Hard since I opened my eyes. Hard the way I've been hard for her since I got the first lick of her pussy.
She kicked the covers off sometime around four and I've had an unobstructed view of her bare ass.
I want to spread her open right now, drag my tongue through her while she's still half-asleep, feel the exact moment her body registers what's happening before her brain catches up.
Christ. I'm an old fucking man and I'm lying here throbbing like a teenager because this girl breathes in her sleep and her lips part and all I can think about is sliding my cock between them.
I want her to know me as her father, her protector, and the man that teaches her what it means to be a perfect, good, dirty girl for me and me only.
Wren jerks awake. Goes white. She's already reaching.
"Don't answer it."
She does with a bleary, sex sated voice. Of course she does. "Mom?"
Linda's voice seeps through into my happiness stabbing it with a rusty blade.
Wren sits up, crossing her legs, swiping hair from her eyes, shoulders slumped. "What do you mean, Dylan called you?"
I only get Wren's half, but I don't need the rest. I've spent enough years inside Linda's darkroom to reconstruct the negative from memory. Dylan called. Played wounded.
"He cheated on me. I told you that in my text."
Whatever Linda says makes Wren flinch like she's been slapped through the phone.
"Sure, Mom. I'll think about it."
She hangs up. Stares at the far wall. The loose, unhurried woman I've spent days coaxing into the light starts to fade. Armored up again, shoulders climbing toward her ears, jaw wired shut.
"What did she say?"
"That I'm dramatic. That every couple has rough patches." Her voice splinters. "She said I pushed him to it. That if I'd been more open. He wouldn't have needed to look elsewhere."
Copper floods the back of my mouth. My molars creak.
"Your mother told you it's your fault he cheated because you wouldn't do what he wanted?"
Linda’s expectations for Wren were always off, but this? Fuck this.
"Maybe she's right. Maybe if I hadn't been so —"
"Wren." Whatever she hears in my voice stops her dead. Her eyes snap to mine. "She’s wrong."
She presses both hands over her face and sobs.
I pull her into my lap. She resists for just a second before her weight gives, and she's against my chest, crying until my skin is wet. She’s not crying about Dylan.
She’s crying because her mother has never taken the time to understand her. To look into her as a whole person who owes nothing to anyone when it comes to who she wants to be in this life.
Linda was always so full of expectations, killing her daughter’s spirit, making her think at every turn she was some level of disappointment. It cuts especially deep when it’s dressed up with smiles and ‘I love you’s’ and ‘I just want what’s best for you’.
It’s love as a weapon, and I’ve had fucking enough.
"Nothing is wrong with you. Not the way you look, not the way you fuck.
All you needed was the space to decide for yourself.
" My mouth finds the part of her hair. "You want to be held down? Want to come on Daddy’s cock?
That's who you are. You weren't ashamed with me, you were free, calling me Daddy, admitting what you want, what your soul needs. Don't let them take that from you."
"What if they're right?"
"They're not." I catch her face. Thumbs on her jaw, tilting her into the light the way I would a subject I needed to see without obstruction. "I've spent my whole career reading faces. I know what performance looks like. I know what honesty looks like, too. Whether it’s in my studio, in my bed, padding around my kitchen in my boxers, my cock in your mouth, my tongue lapping at my daughter’s pussy... it’s all fucking perfect, and you're the most honest person I've ever had in front of my lens or behind it. "
A tear tracks down her cheek. I catch it with my thumb and bring it to my lips to lick it clean.
"Grant." She flattens both palms against my chest, right over the heartbeat I can't get under control. "I've had a crush on you since before I should admit. Then it wasn't a crush anymore. It was the reason even kissing Dylan felt wrong. Because it wasn't you. Is that wrong?"
I shake my head and hold her tight.
"I need to know this isn't just protective. Or you scratching an itch." Her voice goes thin. "Because if that's what this is—"
I kiss her. Kiss the doubt out of her mouth. When I pull back, it's just far enough to focus.
"When you came here that night, I told you I wanted you.
That was the easy part." I land my forehead on hers. "I’ve loved you for so long. The hard part was when I started to be in love with you, baby. I stayed with your mother, then, only because the idea of not being with you every day was impossible. Until being with you every day was impossible. After that night in your bed, I lost myself, and came in your room, and left your panties full of my cum while I thought you were asleep...”
She climbs into my lap. Straddling me, the sheets pushing up my legs. I'm bare beneath the covers. Haven’t worn a thing to bed since she started sleeping in it.
Her pussy lands hot and slick against the underside of my cock, every fold dragging wet along the length, and I seize her hips on pure reflex.
She reaches between us. No hesitation, no fumbling, just her fingers wrapping around my cock and feeding into her body with the quiet competence of a woman who knows exactly what she wants. The blunt press of my head against her opening locks my jaw so hard I hear the click.
She sinks down onto me, going slow and deliberate. She takes me in silence, her body stretching around me, her breath snagging on each inch, going faster, deeper.
"Daddy."
“Daughter,” I whisper back.
She bottoms out, and we both go still. Her forehead drops to the side of my neck. Breath shaking against my throat. She's so tight around me, it borders on cruelty, an exquisite, impossible grip that drags my balls up tight and turns my hands to fists on her hips.
I feel her heartbeat through my cock. Every pulse squeezing me, releasing, squeezing again. The rhythm of something alive and unhurried and so certain of its right to be here that it puts twenty years of my caution to shame.
She starts to move. Rolling her hips in a slow grind that drags me along the front wall of her pussy, and my hands spasm hard enough on her waist to leave signs of the pressure tomorrow. Good. Let the bruises develop. I love seeing her marked with me.
She rides me slow, lifting her hips until only my head stays inside her before dropping back in one fluid sink that punches the air from both of us. Again. Again. Building a rhythm that isn't fucking so much as the two of us finally telling the truth at the same speed.
Morning light catches her collarbone, and I think, stupidly, golden hour. The warm band cuts across her skin at exactly the angle I'd position a reflector if I had one. Her face right now is perfect, flushed and open and wrecked with pleasure.
She tightens around me on the upstroke. It’s a deliberate, knowing clench that says I know exactly what I'm doing to you. I grip her ass in both hands, spreading her, pulling her flush against me, so my cock buries to the root and her clit grinds against my pelvis.
The sound she makes isn't a moan. It sits lower, somewhere deep in her chest, the kind of noise that escapes a person when something they've wanted for years finally arrives, and they don't have language for it yet.
My gaze drifts to where our bodies join, my cock disappearing into her, slick and thick, the base smeared with how wet she is. I drag my eyes back up, and she's right there, dark and steady and completely unguarded.
Her mouth falls open, her head tipping back, and the tendons in her neck stand taut. I press my mouth there. Just my lips against soft flesh, feeling her pulse hammer as I hold her while she rides me.
"I love you, Daddy..."
I cup the back of her neck and pull her mouth to mine.
Kiss her deep and unhurried while I plant my feet on the mattress and thrust up.
Giving her every inch on a long, rolling drive that makes her whimper against my teeth.
I swallow the sound. I want every noise this woman makes, and I don't want to share them with the room.
"I love you too, baby girl. My beautiful daughter."
She pulls back so I see tears on her lashes, hips still grinding that slow, devastating circle. "I love you," she says again. "I love you."
Her body tightens. She's close. I can feel it in the way her thighs tremble against my hips, the way her rhythm gets jerky. I hold her steady. Keep the pace slow, even though every nerve in my body is screaming to flip her onto her back and drive into her until the headboard splits the drywall.
I press my forehead to hers. "I love you, Wren."
She comes with a shudder that starts in her belly and rolls through her in waves, her pussy gripping me in rhythmic pulses so tight they drag my own orgasm up from the base of my spine by force. Her mouth falls open against mine, breathing my air.
I empty into her in long, shuddering pulses. My breath comes ragged and wrecked against her collarbone.
She doesn't climb off. She stays in my lap, with me softening inside her, face buried in my neck, breath hot and jagged against my skin. The mess of my cum leaking warm around the base of my cock, slicking us both, but neither of us moves. It’s like we both understand that the second we separate, we’ll have to face the real world.
She holds on. I hold on tighter.
The world is going to have opinions about a man my age and a girl hers, about a stepfather and stepdaughter, and every last one of those opinions will arrive eventually.
But right now, she’s breathing against my throat, her heartbeat syncing to mine, and I cannot bring myself to be afraid of a single goddamn thing.