This is the story of what happened after that fateful night. If you did not read the first chapter of this story, I recommend you do so. I am telling this story with the benefit of the knowledge I received almost a year later when my wife and I finally opened up to each other and shared our true thoughts and feelings about this period of our lives.
The next morning was extremely awkward to say the least. As usual, I was the first to wake up. I had rolled off my daughter at some point during the night, but she was still sleeping peacefully by my side, snuggled up against my side to keep warm. I had hoped it had all been a bizarre dream, but seeing my naked daughter next to me and looking to the other side of the bed where my son was still sleeping with his head resting on his mother's chest, I had to face the realization that it all really had happened.
We had been forced at gunpoint to do the unthinkable. Those bastards had forced us to do things to each other that no right-minded family would ever consider. I had been forced to have sex with my own daughter, and my wife had been forced to have sex with our son. They had come to rob us of our possessions and ended up robbing us of so much more. Our lives would never be the same. Even then, I knew it. What had been done could never be undone. There was no going back to the way things were before. My heart was broken and I felt sick to my stomach. I rushed out of bed and ran to the bathroom where I threw up as the details of the previous night replayed in my head.
I flushed the toilet and washed my face in the sink. That's when I heard my wife shriek. "Oh my God! Ben, get off of me!"
I shut off the water and rushed back into the bedroom to see my son standing naked beside the bed. My wife had grabbed the sheets and covered herself. My daughter was trying to wake up and figure out what was going on. Everyone looked dazed and confused. "Oh my God. Oh my God," was all my wife could say over and over again. She had a horrified look on her face as the memories of the previous night played through her head. The realization of what had happened was almost too much for her to take.
I told my son and daughter to go to their rooms and get dressed and wait for me to come get them. I asked my wife to do the same while I checked out the house to see what all had been stolen and make sure the house was secure.
To my shock, only our basement TV and computer were gone. The burglars must have just grabbed what they could carry of value and ran off. Otherwise, the house was just as it had been. If only the same could have been said about my family.
I headed back upstairs to my bedroom to see how my wife was doing. Heather had managed to get herself dressed and she seemed to have gotten over the initial shock. I began to tell her about the stolen items, but she cut me off. "Get Ben and Lauren and meet me in the kitchen. We all need to talk." She said with a tone that made it clear that this wasn't to be debated.
I went to my son's room and knocked on the door. "Come in." My son said sheepishly.
I opened the door to find my son sitting on his bed with his face in his hands. He looked up at me with a frightened and lost look in his eyes. "I'm so sorry dad." He started to say. I held up my hand to stop him from saying more. "Your mom wants to have a family meeting in the kitchen. We can talk about all this there. Don't worry son, we will get through this." I said as I tried to comfort him.
I walked to my daughter's door and hesitated as I reached for the door. How was I going to look my daughter in the face? I was so ashamed about what had happened the night before. It wasn't so much what I had been forced to do that I was ashamed about, but rather it was the fact I had allowed myself to enjoy it so thoroughly and completely.
I raised my hand to the door to knock, but it opened before I reached it. My daughter walked by me without even looking at me and said as she walked to the kitchen, "I heard. Family meeting in the kitchen." I felt about 2 feet tall. "My daughter couldn't even stand to look at me," I thought to myself as I headed for the kitchen feeling like the worst father in the world.
My wife was back to her normal self. At least that is how she portrayed herself as she spoke. She said all the right things about how this was a horrible thing that happened to us. How we would get through this and not let this moment define the rest of our lives or our relationships with each other. We all followed her lead and said the politically correct things. We all agreed that we would not let this change us as a family and that our 16 year old daughter, Claire, must never know about what happened. We would keep this a secret and only speak of it during counseling, which we all agreed was absolutely necessary.
We all hugged when the family meeting was over and put on our best faces and tried our hardest to get through the weekend. Unfortunately, none of us really believed in our hearts that we were going to be the same family ever again.
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Nearly three months had passed since that tragic night. It had been a very difficult time for my family. Ben had gone back to college and was seeing a counselor regularly there. Lauren struggled through her last few months of high school. She blamed it on senioritis, but we all knew what was really troubling her. My wife and I were struggling too. Though we were getting along fine in the everyday aspects of our marriage, we had not been able to have sex once during that time. We had tried a few times, but neither of us were able to get into the moment enough to get beyond foreplay. That was a big change from the two or three times a week we normally had sex. We simply could not find a way to connect the way we used to.
We were all seeing counselors on our own as well as a semi-monthly group session. The counseling was helping, but it was a very slow process. Looking back, progress was slowed because we were all lying to ourselves and one another about what happened that night. I know it wasn't until many months later that I finally admitted to my counselor that I had secretly enjoyed having sex with my daughter. The others weren't admitting their true feelings about that night either, at least not in the group sessions.
Things got even more awkward when Ben came home for the summer. It was just one more person in the house regularly that wasn't acting normal. Though Claire still had no idea of what had happened, she was constantly asking us what was wrong with everyone. It was a very painful time for everyone and our family truly had been forever changed.
I was really struggling. I couldn't sleep at all. I was a very light sleeper and any unfamiliar sound at night would get my adrenaline pumping and make it impossible to get back to sleep. The new security system we had installed and the white noise generator were not helping much either. My doctor had prescribed sleeping pills for me. But I hate taking medicine, so I only would use them occasionally when I was too exhausted to function. The pills worked when I took them, but I refused to take them regularly because they completely knocked me out and I was scared we would have another break-in and I wouldn't be able to protect my family. I had become obsessed with protecting my family. I had failed as a father and a protector that night, and I vowed never to let that happen again. I had even gone so far as to buy a handgun which I had hidden under my bed. No one would ever hurt my family again.
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Two weeks after my son came home, things took a turn for the worse for my family.
My kids were all in bed and my wife and I were watching TV in our bed. Heather was worried about how little I was sleeping and urged me nightly to take my sleeping pill so I could sleep. That night was no different.