Nikki whispered in a low voice, "So that's what all this is about."
I said, "Yes."
Dr. Chivago said, "You mean like a threesome?"
Rachel said, "No, not exactly," and laughed mirthlessly. "You are not a very good listener after all, Dr. Chivago. I don't want to have a threesome with them - I really don't fancy my daughter sexually, and I am pretty sure she doesn't either." Nikki nodded her head, as if agreeing. For some reason, I felt relieved - do not ask me why. If I knew why, I would not have said, 'For some reason' now, would I? The hypocrisy of my reaction never occurred to me until much later, when I would laugh at it. I gave Rachel my full attention, even though I was certainly sensitive to anything Nikki did at the same time.
"Then is it like a time-share? You know, you get him for four days and Nicole gets him for three?"
"Not unless she wants to share him," Rachel said, a statement that I felt would have been ludicrous on any other day. Today, though, it just seemed so appropriate. "No, I don't want to step in between them like that. When I was young, about the time I lost my father, there was a period when I was quite depressed. A time when I started to fantasize about all those extremes, you know. Bondage. Submission. Being forced to do something. I think the whole point of it was giving somebody else the power to abuse you as they pleased, and it appealed to me." She paused for a beat before clarifying, "I want to give them the power to do with me as they please. Live out their darkest fantasies through me, things they might not want to impose on each other."
"Wow," he said, sounding suitably stunned. It was the first time in my life that I had come across a speechless psychiatrist - except for the one who had killed himself by jumping in front of a truck - but I could understand where he had come from. I had lived with her for close to two decades and I was finding out an entirely new side of my wife I had never even had a fucking clue about. Nikki turned towards me at that moment and mouthed, "Did you know about this?" I am sure my face was flushed when I shook my head. Nope, no fucking clue.
The rest of the conversation was a bit anticlimactic after that, with the doctor asking her exactly when she had started feeling that way and my wife replying that it was something that had jumped out at her when she had read about it in a book. There were no more earth-shattering revelations after that. Dr. Chivago segued into her attitude towards us - rather than her fantasies - but all his efforts were in vain. Towards the end of the tape, she reiterated that Nikki and I were sleeping together and that all she wanted Dr. Chivago's help for was to a) ensure that Nikki was okay with my 'advances,' as she called it and b) find out if Nikki and I were sympathetic to her involvement in our relationship. As I said, given the build-up, it was anti-climactic.
The tape ended with Dr. Chivago's promise that he would set up an appointment with Nikki for the next day, and with me the day after. She thanked him for his time and left.
Shortly after that, Nikki and I were back home. Nikki offered to make dinner and ordered me to bed for an hour's nap. I went along because she was a good cook and more so because I wanted to make my own research into solving this mess. Everything seemed different now from the way it had been before; every time I looked at her, I was no longer able to visualize her lithe, young body as somebody else's, such as Britney Spears or Demi Moore. I was looking at the same body, but it was no longer a sexy figure that had my daughter's face - it was a sexy figure that belonged to my daughter, period.
I was ashamed of the sudden change in my feelings for her, despite her admission earlier in the day, and resolved to find a solution to everything before my life, as I lived it now, changed forever. I told myself it was the responsible thing inasmuch as I was still her father and not her lover. Yet. I fired up my desktop and started looking.
The obvious place to try, I thought, would be one of those story sites where surely, among their hundred-odd stories, there would be at least one plot that I could associate with my own situation. Do not laugh - I would like to believe Sherlock's statement that there were no new crimes, 'only old ones committed by new criminals,' applied to other aspects of life too. I typed in a few keywords into Google, and presto! I had a list of sites just like that.
As anyone who is familiar with the Internet will tell you, searching is never the problem - it is the sorting where lies the devil. For the better part of five minutes, I followed click after click after click into sites that ostensibly catered to requirements such as mine only to find myself, at some point, facing a page that asked for my credit card details. I never subscribed to any of them. As Martin of the Vice Squad used to say, the only thing free these days is porn on the 'Net if you know where to look. I kept looking.
Finally, I short-listed about five sites that seemed promising and professional. One of them was a pay-site that looked as if it really did offer the contents it advertised, tempting me with a library that boasted over seven hundred stories. I signed up and started reading everything that suggested it had the father-daughter-incest theme thrown into it, with the occasional one involving the mother as well. Or another relative. Or a friend. Or a gang. Or the family pet.
You might probably dismiss this as the most verbose excuse anyone has ever given for perusing porn, but I was really serious - and hopeful - about finding an inspiration among all those literary works written by people who hid themselves behind a pseudonym. Until.
The problem, I soon discovered, was not that there was a lack of imagination, although it did seem as if certain plots - 'daughter caught masturbating fucks daddy' and 'drunk daughter fucks daddy' - were actually downloadable stuff that you customized by changing the names of the participants and submitted. It was the kind of mass-produced literature that made you wonder why people even bothered with the effort of writing and submitting it.
Or there would be guys - I assume most of these kind of authors are guys - who would actually hinge their whole stories on their characters falling unconvincingly in love with each other - "Oh, Dad... I just realized that I loved you. And the fact that your dick is eight inches long really helps." or "When her 32D boobs winked at me, I knew I had fallen for my own daughter" - and then live happily ever after. I mean, come on - if daughters and fathers jumped into bed just like that, they would have legalized incest a long time ago.
There was this particular author who seemed to end every single one of his stories with the daughter getting knocked up by her own father. It was so repetitive that after the fourth story, all I had to read was the blurb to understand the entire line of bullshit that passed of as his - I confirmed from his profile that it was indeed a person of the masculine persuasion - work. And as if this were not enough, another wise guy even had the temerity to have his character declare, a la Caesar, "I came, I saw, I cum-covered."
How do people even read this stuff? Why would they even want to?
As I said, simple hypocrisies - like the fact that I was browsing them myself - usually escape me.
Finally, after about half an hour of searching, I gave up. I was almost convinced that I should whip out my erection - did I mention that I sported one? - and wait for Nikki to walk through that door and swoon at the sight of her daddy's lightning saber. (I made that one up myself, although I would not be too surprised to find it mentioned in one of the stories sometime in the near future.) That would really bring everything to a head, I suppose. I was almost convinced that we would have sex anyway because I had seen her naked, and when a father sees his grown-up daughter naked, it is a given that they will start fucking like jackrabbits before his wife - if she is not blessedly dead because of a drunk driver - comes home to join them. I was almost convinced that if I went downstairs right now, I would find Nikki wearing an old shirt of mine, sans panties, and stretching for that one ingredient that is just out of her reach.
Leaving my desk, I picked up my phone and rang Dr. Chivago. He picked it up on the second ring fading into the third. "Mr. Kane?" he inquired instead of the universal 'Hello.'
"This is he," I said and immediately wondered whether it was grammatically correct. Screw it, I thought to myself, I was talking to a shrink, not my high school teacher. "Can we talk, or do you need me to come down there for another session?" I did not intend for my question to come across as threatening, but apparently, it was intimidating enough for him to agree, quite readily, that we could chat over the phone. "I assume you've listened to the entire tape," he said when I failed to respond.
