When I Turned Eighteen, He Loved Me More #3
He loves her more than he loves me.
I heard Kane come in downstairs. The front door closing. The deadbolt turning. His footsteps on the hardwood—the kitchen, the fridge opening and closing, a glass being filled. Then silence. Then his footsteps again, moving through the house, climbing the stairs, stopping outside the attic door.
I checked my phone.
“The door’s open.”
He came up the narrow stairs. He had to duck at the top—six-two in a house built for shorter men. He stood at the edge of the attic, suit jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbows, a glass of water in his hand. The single bulb threw his shadow across the boxes and the rafters.
“What are you doing up here?”
“Waiting.”
“For what?”
I held up the journal.
“For you to stop pretending you don’t know what this means.”
He looked at the journal. At me. At the dress he’d bought me, dusty now at the hem from the attic floor. At my bare feet. At my face.
“I know what it says, Nora.”
“Then you know she was right. And you know why she left. And you know that the thing she was jealous of—the thing she destroyed our family over—wasn’t wrong.
It was love. The purest love I’ve ever been given.
And I’m sitting in this attic with my mother’s journal in my lap, and in—” I looked at my phone—“forty-five seconds, I’m going to be eighteen years old, and I am asking you to stop apologizing for it. ”
“I have never apologized for loving you.”
“You apologize every day. Every time you keep your hands at the small of my back and not an inch lower. Every time you call me kiddo when I can see in your face that the word doesn’t fit anymore.
Every time you look at me the way you looked at me in the hallway tonight and then blink it away like it never happened. ”
“I saw it, Dad. In the hallway. When I came downstairs in the dress. You looked at me, and for one second, you didn’t see your daughter. You saw a woman. And it scared you, and you put it away, and I’m asking you—I am asking you, on the last night I will ever be a child—to stop putting it away.”
He set the glass of water on a box. His hands were trembling. The architect’s hands, the lullaby hands, the hands that had never once been anywhere they shouldn’t be.
My phone buzzed.
Midnight.
“Happy birthday, Nora.”
I stood up. The journal fell from my lap onto the floor, and I let it fall, because it had done its work and I didn’t need it anymore.
I crossed the attic in three steps—bare feet on old wood, the dress moving against my thighs, the single bulb throwing my shadow over his—and I put my hands on his face.
I felt his jaw under my palms. The stubble coming in at the end of a long day. The warmth of his skin, the faint smell of his cologne mixed with wine and the June night air that had come in through the car window.
His eyes were looking down at me, and in them the thing he’d been hiding since the hallway.
Since before the hallway. Since the morning my mother packed her suitcase and left, the two of us stood in the kitchen and looked at each other across the counter, and neither of us said what we were both thinking—that the house felt lighter without her in it.
“Dad.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m eighteen now.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to kiss you. And it’s not going to be the way a daughter kisses her father. It’s my first real kiss—no pressure.”
His eyes were on fire, and his hands came up. I felt them hover at my waist—the hesitation, the last checkpoint, the engineer’s final survey before the load is committed. Then his fingers settled onto my hips, and his grip tightened, and the checkpoint was passed.
I kissed him.
His mouth was warm from the wine, and his lips were softer than I’d imagined, and I had imagined—not for six months, longer, years maybe, in the part of my mind where I kept the things I didn’t examine because examining them would have meant my mother was right, and I wasn’t ready for my mother to be right.
I was ready now.
His mouth opened against mine, and I tasted the Chablis and the coffee from dessert and underneath those, just him—just Kane—the taste of a man I had known my entire life and never once tasted, and the sensation of discovering something that had always been there was so overwhelming that my knees buckled and his arms caught me—had always caught me—were built to catch me—and he held me against his chest while my mouth found his again.
I pulled back. A thread of spit connected us and broke, and I watched it catch the light from the single bulb.
“Take me downstairs and fuck me, Daddy.”
“Nora—”
“Take me to your bedroom and fuck me. Not mine. Yours.”
He carried me. Down the narrow attic stairs, down the hallway, past my bedroom door with the garment bag still hanging from the hook, into his room.
The bed was made—my mother and father’s bed was always made, hospital corners, the military precision of a man who believed that how you start the day determines how you meet it.
I kissed him all the way, tasting his lips, his neck, my arms wrapped around his neck.
“I want to be yours, Daddy. My first cock. I wanted it for so long.”
“Nora, I can’t—”
“And yet you are doing it. If I am to shape my cunt to any cock, I want it to be yours.”
He stared at me.
“Where is this coming from?”
“Surely I don’t need to teach you about female biology. Shall I show you the stain in my panties?”
Dad set me down on the edge of the mattress, and I looked up at him, and he looked down at me, and the distance between us was twelve inches and seventeen years.
My mother’s voice was in my head saying why not fuck her instead of me along with every lullaby he’d ever sung me and every bath and every bedtime story and the night he carried me into the ER with blood on my shin and his voice completely steady.
“Are you sure, Nora?”
“I’ve been sure since she left. I just wasn’t old enough to say it.”
“What are you saying now?”
“This romance of ours has gone on long enough, Dad. I want to taste your cock, soak it with my lips and tongue, and then I want you to break me in.”
“Jesus.”
I reached for his belt.
My fingers found the buckle—warm from his body, the leather smooth from years of use.
I pulled the tongue free and the belt opened, and the sound of it—metal against leather, the specific mechanical sound of a man’s belt being undone—traveled through my hands and into my stomach and settled between my legs.
I unzipped my stepfather. The sound was quieter, more intimate—the teeth of the zipper parting one by one, and behind them, the heat of his body radiating through the fabric of his shorts.
I hooked my fingers into my father’s waistband and pulled everything down—pants and shorts together—and his cock came free.
I gasped.
“That’s really big, Dad.”
“Thank you.”
“I want to take it all. I want to be stretched inside.”
“Are you—”
I looked up and nodded.
“Since I was sixteen. You can cum inside me safely.”
His cock was hard. Already rock hard.
His cock stood at an angle from his body—thick, the head flushed dark and smooth, a bead of clear fluid sitting in the slit. The vein on the underside pulsed visibly. I could smell his cock—musk, salt, clean skin, the concentrated warmth of a man’s arousal at close range.
I wrapped my hand around the base and squeezed.
My fingers didn’t meet my thumb.
The heat hit me first. His skin was smooth and taut over the rigid shaft, the veins pressing against my palm. I could feel his heartbeat through my fingers—fast, hard, the pulse of a man who had waited seventeen years for this and had never, not once, allowed himself to want it.
But he’d wanted it. Dad’s cock was in my hand, and it was the proof his mouth would never give me.
I leaned forward and pressed my lips to the head of his cock.
The taste was immediate. Salt, clean skin, and underneath, the sharp mineral bite of his precum spreading across my lower lip. My mouth flooded. I opened wider, let my jaw stretch, and took the head past my lips.
My father’s cock filled my mouth.
His head was wide, and my lips thinned and stung at the corners as they stretched around his rim. My jaw ached at the hinge, and the weight of him inside me was dense and hot, and the slit pulsed against the flat of my tongue as I settled my mouth around him.
I sealed my lips and sucked.
Gently—a pull, an experiment. His cock throbbed, the head swelling against the roof of my mouth, and more fluid leaked from the slit—thicker, slicker, salty, pooling behind my lower lip. I swallowed around him and felt the muscles of my throat close against his crown.
Kane’s hand came down and rested on my head.
The same hand as always. The same gesture—the fatherly hand on his daughter’s head, familiar from a thousand bedtimes and a hundred kitchen-table conversations and the night he sat with me through the fever. But his fingers were trembling.
“Nora.”
I pulled my lips back. A string of spit connected my lower lip to his head and broke, falling onto the black fabric of the dress he’d bought me. I licked my lips. The taste was stronger now—his precum and my spit mixing on my tongue—and I wanted more.
“That tastes so fucking good.”
“I’ve been leaking.”
“So have I, Dad. You’ll see how much in a minute.”
I went back down on his cock.
I took it deeper this time, my tongue pressed flat against the underside of his shaft, dragging along the ridge where the crown met the solid meat. The skin there was different—smoother, thinner—and when my tongue crossed the spot where his frenulum sat, his whole body went rigid.
His thighs clenched.
His stomach muscles locked.
The sound that came out of him was quiet and wrecked, and it was the most honest sound I’d ever heard him make. More honest than the lullabies. More honest than the night he told me why my mother had left. This was the sound of Kane with every wall down, and I had put him there with my mouth.