In the world outside, the COVID-19 virus raged. The death toll rose every day, and my fearful fellow citizens, heeding government authorities, took shelter in their homes with loved ones, hoping to ride out the pandemic safely.
I sat in my home office, bored. My daughter Lila and I had been cooped up in the house for over a month, and I'd long since grown restless. Lila had been in the middle of the second semester of her junior year of college when the virus struck, and the college sent her and all her classmates home. Now she took classes online. I guessed she was at her computer in her room on the other side of the house at that moment, watching one of her professors drone on about some subject or another.
It was early afternoon, and I wasn't working. I was looking at porn on the Internet, on my computer. The masturbatory pleasures of Internet porn offered a brief respite from my constant boredom. But after two weeks I'd begun to tire of porn and masturbating. I wanted more. I wanted the company of a real woman.
I had been divorced for five years, and actively dating for four. But two months earlier Brenda, a lovely and lean flight attendant I'd met online, had broken up with me. The lockdown prevented me from meeting anyone new. I was horny and frustrated, and jerking off to pictures on my computer screen went only so far to alleviate my frustration.
The ring of the phone on my desk interrupted the tedium.
"Jerry Meers," I said when I picked up the phone. I almost barked the introduction. I wondered if my social skills had grown rusty with my isolation.
"Jerry, it's Todd." Todd was a long-time client, owner and president of a company that manufactured window frames.
"Todd, it's great to hear from you," I said. "How are holding up in quarantine?"
"The family and I are fine," he said. "But business isn't so good. Nobody's buying windows. No money coming in. I have to hold off on that consultation we talked about. Sorry about that."
Darn. That's what I'd feared. I was an independent business consultant, and the refrain from nearly all my clients, mostly small to medium-sized businesses, was the same: business was slow . . . so, they didn't need my services. Not until things opened up and customers started calling again, anyway.
I told Todd I understood and then we exchanged comforting pleasantries about our families and their health. After I hung up, I sat in my chair for a minute, staring at the computer screen, bored of porn and discouraged about the state of my business.
I got up, at last, to give myself something else to do. The ergonomic chair on which I sat was wobbling strangely, and I figured I'd fix it to give my mind something constructive to dwell on. I walked to the garage.
The wrench I was looking for wasn't on the work bench, where I thought I'd left it. That was odd. I was usually careful about where I left things. I walked back into the house, wondering if I'd used it for another project but forgotten about it.
Walking down the hallway, I heard a blast of music coming from behind the closed door of Lila's bedroom. I wondered if she'd seen the wrench. I knocked on the door but there was no answer. I figured she couldn't hear because of the music, so I opened the door and walked in.
Not three feet inside the room, I froze in place, my feet rooted to the ground. My mouth gaped open.
My daughter reclined on the floor, back to me, legs sprawled open, facing an open laptop computer. She was completely naked.
She held the wrench - the one I was looking for - by its head, in her hand. It moved up and down rapidly. The other end of the wrench, the smooth, shiny tip, encased in a red rubber grip, was buried inside her vagina.
I saw the thin lips of my daughter's bare vulva cling to the rubber-encased shaft as it moved in and out of her.
The face of a young man filled most of the laptop screen. I could tell he and Lila were engaged in a Zoom conference. I couldn't see his face clearly, but I could see enough to see his eyes bug out and his hands wave. Obviously, he had seen me enter the room behind Lila, and he was trying to get her attention.
I didn't move. I don't know why. Lila moved first.
Getting the hint, finally, from the young man on the screen, she turned around and saw me.
"Dad!" she screamed. I don't know which of us jumped more. Lila curled her body into a ball and enfolded herself in her arms. The wrench clattered to the floor.
"What are you doing?" she cried.
"Sorry!" I said. "Sorry!" I couldn't think of what to say at first. "I knocked but you didn't answer." My hands flew wildly around me, as though their frantic movement would explain my being in her room.
"Sorry," I said again, and this time I backed out of the room. Without being fully conscious of doing it I took a last look at Lila, naked on the floor, before I turned and left, closing the door behind me.
I retreated to my office, closed the door, and paced the floor, back and forth, forth and back.
The image of my daughter, naked and spread on the floor, burned in my mind. Try as I might, I couldn't erase it. Guilt and shame coursed through me. I battered my confused brain with accusatory questions: Why did I enter Lila's room without permission? Why didn't I leave the room immediately? Why did I stare at her naked body? What was wrong with me?
I worried about Lila, too. Who was that young man? Why was she showing herself to him naked? Did she do that often?
I realized with dismay that there was a lot about my daughter that I hadn't known.
I tried to distract myself with work projects and Internet surfing, but I didn't succeed. I couldn't stop thinking about what I'd seen - about what I wasn't supposed to see.
After about two hours, I heard a soft knock on the office door.
"Come in," I said, my voice shaky. I knew what was to come but I didn't know if I was ready for it.
Lila entered. She wore tight-fitting baby blue gym shorts and a white t-shirt that showed off some of the taut skin of her belly. Under the circumstances, I wished she'd dressed more conservatively, but this was how Lila dressed most of the time, and I'd already noticed in the past week that as the weather had grown warmer her outfits had become skimpier.
"Hey, Dad," she said.
"Hey," I said back, gesturing to her to take a seat in a chair a few feet away from me. She sat and we both shifted in our seats for a few moments, not saying anything. Finally, I broke the silence.
"Listen, Lila, I'm very sorry about . . . that. I knocked and there was no answer and I figured you were just listening to loud music and -"
"It's OK, Dad," she said, interrupting. "I know it must have been a shock for you to see me . . . like that."
She squirmed in her chair, and I noticed the points of her nipples pushing conspicuously against the thin fabric of her shirt. She wore no bra; that was obvious. Her unfettered breasts jiggled with every movement of her body. My discomfort, high already, flew off the charts.
"Lila, I don't know what to say. I shouldn't have been there. And I should have left right away. I shouldn't have seen you that way."
"It's all right, Dad," she said. "You did see me. There's nothing we can do about that now. You got a good look at me, huh?" She said it with a wan smile.
"Yeah, I did," I said, the words coming out with struggle. "I wish I hadn't. I shouldn't have been in your room and when I saw you like that I should have left right away."
