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“This is ridiculous.” Henry Carter can fill an entire room with his presence but today he’s making do with a somber gray sofa in a somber gray room made from somber gray light that gives no one the gentle refuge of shadows.

The problem is he’s not alone on it. The girl next to him is made for refuge in dark places curled up against her bedroom wall. She’s made for her oversized black sweatshirt’s overlong sleeves pulled half-around her palms while she buries her face in a copy of William Burroughs. She’s turned invisibility into a genius.

Sometimes she can vanish into a crowd of one. It has nothing to do with the way she looks. If you stole her soul in a flash of light and printed it on a page you’d see what her father does.

Her name is Ariadne but everyone just calls her Ari. She’s wrapped in her sweatshirt right now. The room is only chilly because of her eyes. It’s midsummer and he doesn’t understand how she can do it.

Not that it overmuch matters right now.

No.

The therapist is court-mandated. It’s bullshit. Henry knows that. So his daughter has sometimes strong opinions she expresses with menial acts of pyrotechnic enthusiasm. At least some deference has been made to another name Henry holds

Jack Keeler

it’s a sickening feeling, some kind of parasocial schizophrenia to see the garish posters and their four-color heroism splattered over walls, his name on marquees but the wrong one with the wrong vision

the hopes thwarted by tank-gun biceps and a granite-cutting jaw and the naivete not to see his second agent’s arrant superhero horn.

He’s supposed to be Henry Carter.

He went to Juilliard, dammit!

His name belonged to reviews for a high school production of Death of A Salesman sincerely questioning if maybe they got a ringer from one of the local repertories.

He was pronounced number three in a top-ten black book list of up-and-comers

and then there was that goddamned Rise of The Galaxy Crushers.

His last agent dumped him for springing for an art film that turned out to be directed by an incognito Woody Allen

not good with the whole stepdaughter thing, you understand, right?

and then there was Tina.

He should’ve known there was something wrong with her when he saw her office and the world was made from bold cartoon shades wrapped in glass on almost every wall and a bigass life-size pinup of Batman bulging in places half-remembered anatomy class lessons told him didn’t really have muscle.

Her suit was sharp. Slim. Black. She was a nepobaby but try finding an agent in that Gomorrah that isn’t. And then her first act was to ask him how thick his biceps were.

Her big doe eyes flared, grew huge. She was the kind of girl whose irises had a spooky blue coldness that looked almost like cataracts but they were fast and insightful. Her black Irish hair was bright and close-trimmed around her chin. A few tiny beauty marks peppered her cheeks and gave a manic exaggeration to tense little tics.

There was kind of a queasy feeling in his gut like he was about to get put on the casting couch by his own agent in her high-speed-low-drag Swedish minimalist office. It sat in a frosted glass cube and looked like that frothy white-out moment when your life flashes before your eyes.

It felt like a fever.

He still noticed in the stuffy shut-in atmosphere all the headshots were guys that looked

well

like him.

Strong jaws and young Harrison Ford roguishness in the eye-to-eyebrow relationship.

She graced him with her philosophy of face-selection one night while they lay under a thoroughly ruined silk sheet in her million-five house’s cavernous glass bedroom overlooking some lesser hill made from ladders of rumpled green and pale rock.

The sun was a dead match in the sky and her fingers followed the shadows over his rough stubble. She steered her fuck-drowsy voice around the words when she told him when he hit forty he’d have to wear his cheeks with stubble twenty-four-seven like someone

hehehe

just put coffee grounds on with Elmer’s.

He loved the way her shoulders looked in the chisel-point plum shadows. The way the reds and lavenders and pinks were soft and mushed together to paint her pale white skin.

The eye-to-eyebrow relationship

it’s the tool her dad taught her

beauty is found in geometry.

The old man started as a draftsman. Flunked most of his classes because the profs were petty and he didn’t give a shit about worshiping at the altar of some new department trend. His gift was life-drawing and Henry saw some of the guy’s work in her office, also.

Some were superheroes

Tina almost vibrated like she was telling him her dad was really Josef Stalin’s clone, don’t tell anybody, when she said her dad was Sal Roberts

that Sal Roberts

Henry just nodded, exercised some of the and for such a young talent, Henry Carter rises far above his unprepossessing name that speaks of country simplicity and delivers an emotional richness nobody expects from a pretty face anymore in portraying the disturbed young sniper come home to tragedy in Helena Black’s wrenching Birdwatcher.

He spilled passion

learned she was talking about a comic book artist which he’d guessed but more importantly he wrote these stupid characters

now they anchored a multibillion somethingverse

The Galaxy Crushers.

But Tina wanted to get him a part. There’s some nothing character, practically a walk-on, don’t worry about it, daddy never can say no to me and, I mean, it’s just between those indie films like Birdwatcher.

Which won an Academy Award or three.

He didn’t.

But that was the year Will Smith played Frederick Douglass.

He needed the visibility.

Especially with the new name she told him was what he needed.

He could tolerate the idiotic costume. It was army-green powered armor and the designers had the novel idea it should expose both of his arms as often as possible because that’s exactly what you should do with a combat suit designed for deep space.

He staggered through a gray mist of dehydration and whey powder and steamed chicken and broccoli and rice a few times a week for the way it wrapped his skin a size smaller than his muscle. He was dead-lifting four-seventy and benching three-fifty easy.

He knew when it happened.

He lies in a standing pool of his sweat. He’s sprawled in the trailer’s air-conditioned darkness punctured by a few threads of daylight coming through the drawn curtains. Tina pours herself over him.

She shows him the Variety with his face

the way there already is Buzz

she pulls up her skirt and pushes aside her panties and he sees his cock stand stiff upright looking like a cucumber in the dark and vanishing into that dark place

she swallows him with a sticky wet sound

he can see the smug smile in the light

she murmurs about how she hopes everything is as strong and virile as he played Johnny Wilder to be.

Johnny Wilder.

That fucking name.

That nothing character was not a nothing. He was some Chosen One torn traumatically off of Earth 9731 and its space civil war and away from his gorgeous young wife who had a surprising number of nude scenes for so little screen time. The film adds an adorable daughter. Marketing. Vicarious daddy issues for the little girls, she says. It sounds confessional. There’s some kind of love triangle with the aloof bitchy red-haired Agent 56 who’s incidentally the same damn actress as his wife.

Now he’s in his forties and he’s been that goddamned Johnny Wilder for seventeen years.

And now Ariadne knows that, too.

Namely because she’s been listening to him pour out more fuckin’ trust issues than the CIA every time her dad erupts into another poor-me monologue.

Most guys who bank eight figures to play-pretend as comic book heroes when kids pay twenty-nine-ninety-nine at the local Walmart for the privilege- they don’t usually get this wounded about it. And it’s not like her mom even expected alimony after the divorce.

Granted, Ariadne did not need to learn one of the conditions was, er, access to his Superhero Seed as needed until she got remarried. At least that happened fast enough she doesn’t have any brothers or sisters with Tina’s name.

Ariadne just wraps herself tighter in the sweatshirts she loves. She only has fifty or sixty of them. They’re pretty much the same but all of them have their own poetical differences, she thinks. They’re black.

Everything has to be black for her.

Her hair’s like her mom’s, shiny and pin-straight and so black it looks colorless even under the light. She wears it long in a thick tail she clips tight with a silver barrette sparkly with mother-of-pearl. It’s a gift from her grandma.

Not Tina’s mother.

Her dad’s. The woman isn’t a shrill narcissistic nutjob like Grandma Barbara. That old bat’s a tornado of recrimination and well, maybe if you smiled more, you wouldn’t be alone advice and she spent a few years locking Ariadne in a closet whenever Grandma Barbara was unhappy with her performance as the babysittee. That probably gave velocity to the divorce when she finally told her dad.

Jeanie is wry Midwestern smiles and arms warm around her shoulders and a pretty and youthful face not looking nipped-and-tucked into an inhuman mask like Grandma Barbara but just wearing her creases like parenthetical commentary on a full life.

She never wants anything from her dad. Just telephone calls and for him to be around for Ariadne.

You know.

Your daughter.

Ariadne feels her heart wedged in her throat every time she hears Jeanie like that. She’s her caregiver now and it doesn’t feel like some group home or whatever but there’s kind of a sad and desolate nineteenth-century cliche.

She’s the orphan living with her grandmother and grandfather. They’re both kindly. Handsome. Her granddad looks pretty much like his son except rail-thin with the leathery hard look of a man who’s earned and used his muscle in his time and with the biggest hands Ariadne’s ever seen. Howard used to be a piano tuner; he looks like a retired soldier.

He’s quiet.

Not gruff but just careful with the words he carves into the air with a four-pack-a-day voice from the habit Ariadne cheered him through giving up for the last time.

Their house is in the suburbs where her dad grew up.

They’re leafy and serene. The winters are cold and pitiless frost in the windows until they’re almost opaque and the summers announce themselves like a hammer on the back of the neck when the sun screams huge in the sky.

It’s one of those summers now.

It was one of those summers two months ago when she was finishing her four miles, four easy loops around the long circuit, huffing uphill, lulled into a false sense of security by the downslope. It takes her alongside a forest crowded close to some Huck Finn river filling the air with a shrilling of mosquitoes and a smell of mud and silt and shelled crayfish made prey for wily-eyed raccoons on the gluey banks betraying a fossil record of their mundane lives.

She ran with sweat.

One of the few times she wouldn’t have her sweatshirt on. Her skin was like her mom’s: Stubbornly pale. She freckled a little. That was it. Her dad and Howard and Grandma Jeanie all took on this rich chestnut color when they were under the sun for five minutes and dad obviously had been under for ten when she trotted up the ragged old poured-concrete driveway bordered by an indifferently shaggy lawn.

It was a neighborhood filled with oldsters and it set them apart from all the dismal golf course homogeneity. Their trees were bigger, too, huge maples that caught fire in the autumn and cottonwoods ruining all the pinch-faced old baggisons’ grass when they shed the equivalent of at least three sheep a day.

Sweat deflated her hair and made it lank. It streamed over her face and when she caught herself in the glass she knew she was looking more and more like her mom every day.

Except tall.

Not at least.

Ariadne’s personality was made for a tiny girl. It wasn’t timid exactly. Just a mouse’s. She was comfortable studying the world from a safe place. No exposure to the pain in knowing you still can be invisible when you try to be seen.

Once was enough.

At least no one knew she was Jack Keelor’s daughter. Once she’d thought about telling her sixth grade friend, Linda, until she heard Linda start to gush about what she’d do to Jack Keeler

if

like

he was right here

I’d totally go down on him.

It made everything a little awkward.

Her legs were firm and made of long strong muscle from her runs. Her arms were compact and slim from the calisthenics she huffed and grunted her way through with Howard every morning.

She needed two sports bras.

They still bounced but at least they didn’t look like they were two very large bunnies trying to make a prison break.

The first time she needed to go bra shopping it was Jeanie who took her.

Dad was in Zurich for some shoot and Tina

please

there were less futile things involving Creflo Dollar.

She was ten.

Growth spurts turned into the making of new continents.

She was still insecure about the jagged stretch marks looped over her skin.

Her baggy white tee-shirt was glued with sweat to her neck and between her shoulders and at the small of her back.

She heard Jeanie’s voice through the screened-in storm door standing brown against a checkerboard cake of chocolate and caramel-colored bricks. The windows were big and open and for once Howard’s piano music wasn’t crashing in a rolling symphony through the screens.

“You know, your daughter?” Ariadne’s gut already was in her pelvis. When Jeanie sounded like that on the phone with her dad something bad was about to happen.

“Well, what am I supposed to do? Just call up the director and say, Sorry, Martin, but I can’t do your next gangster epic, I have to talk to a jumped-up principal?” That was her dad’s voice.

She loved it.

And hated it.

It was like a plate of chocolate cake crusted with too much icing and heaped with ice cream Howard and Jeanie had made for her birthday every year since she was seven

you craved it

every hour of every day

and then when someone set it in front of you all you could do was think: I’ll have to wait another three-hundred-sixty-four days and change before I’ll get this privilege again. The anticipation sometimes felt like it was worth more than the real thing.

He wasn’t there only once a year.

But it felt like it.

Sometimes she forgot what he looked like without that idiotic armored suit. Sometimes he was just a blur of Teen Vogue and Seventeen lust spots knowing he collected the hungers of girls between the ages of five and dead and he belonged to them more than he ever would to her.

He was just an unattainable televisual ghost in IMAX for twelve-bucks-a-ticket. One of her teachers, god, she was beautiful

and married

Missus Andy Telfer gushed about Jack Keeler every day

isn’t it adorable

oh, if only he’d show up for a parent-teacher conference

yeah

she was pretty sure her dad was never sleazy enough to break up some goofy sixth-grade English teacher’s marriage to a sturdy and nice-looking accountant who was home at five-thirty every day.

He filled tee-shirts the way Jayne Mansfield did sweaters: Like they were made for it and she knew that wasn’t a coincidence. He was pure beef all the time. Tall. Six-five. Her dad looked like a thirst trap caricature from Daddy Issues Quarterly.

She knew that.

She didn’t want to hear about that from anybody, either.

Today it was black and trim on his body’s hard planes. Wore snug-looking jeans and was in his stockinged feet. She knew his comfortable dusty old leather boots would be close by. He looked tired like he’d just flown in and he probably had. His battered gray luggage still was piled in the wooden entryway looking gloomy next to polarized white sheeting out of the pastel sky. A matched set of a wheeled case and a carry-on

Dad traveled light.

He never expected to stay long anywhere.

A white glow made his skin burn dark.

He moved his arms and hands wide when he talked, expressive. Everyone said it made him look Italian.

His hair was grown out from the short-cropped Johnny Wilder like always, sandy and worn in waves, and she didn’t even know if that’s the way it was supposed to look. His face was made from hard sure lines but his eyes had a sensitive greenish warmth.

His mom’s eyes were blue; his dad’s were gray.

So of course Ariadne had big black eyes like they belonged to another fate entirely.

They looked nothing alike. Maybe it was a blessing. No one ever just pointed and said: Ohmygawd. She looks just like Jack Keeler!

She didn’t know what the point was in being subtle. She just pulled at the door and tried to pretend it was like any other day

that she was a normal daughter and he wasn’t an absentee.

She hoped maybe if she did like some act of impersonation like the dead still at the table it would bring another world to life.

“Hi, daddy.” She saw him turn like he only half-remembered her voice. His face was still the way she remembered.

Cleanshaven.

Probably a touch of botox but not enough to paralyze the warmth in his face.

“Hi, honey.” She loved the way he still sounded like this was some rare spark of happiness in his life. She loved the way he’d wrap her in his huge arms and it would be stepping back to six or seven where the absences felt more like destiny than just his own selfishness and she could believe he had some heroic necessary quality and everyone else needed it too.

He was altruistic for doing it.

She’d convinced herself of it. She wasn’t one of those dingbat kids who believed their dad was Batman or anything. It was more hearing the way Jeanie cradled the words in gooey-sweet accusation she knew now was so sarcastic she must’ve been willfully opaque not to get it.

I know you’re important to everyone else, Henry, but

You really are the whole world to those people, aren’t you

So no one can live without you for a whole month for vacation

He always smelled scrubbed and clean and when he sweated there was a bright smell like cool crisp spring air.

This time it was different.

This time she’d

uh

done a little experiment to find out just how flammable a made-in-China school mascot she’d fairly bought and paid for really was

it was about the public interest

except she did it at the senior pep rally and it turned into a Technicolor pyre fifteen feet tall

and may have given the cheer squad emphysema

and at least he laughed when he first heard it.

Because it was hilarious. But then he got up from the glass table in the middle of Jeanie’s kitchen with its white walls and ceilings and Pergo floor and granite counters and bigass fridge.

He was supposed to be asking about her

about how she’d never really forgotten how much she loved meeting one of his now-ex-girlfriends a few months ago and she was a dancer, tall, lean, gorgeous

how she taught Ariadne ballroom and she still wanted lessons

how she’d read books about the Crusades and the Manhattan Project and Hell in a Very Small Place and so many others and she was waiting for him to coax little lectures out of her until she was speaking without trying to wall herself back behind her hair.

Instead he was just

hard

“We’re going to have to go to therapy together.” Ariadne hated the idea.

Dad wasn’t too passionate about it, either.

And Dr. Stanwell is, well, kind of weird. She had the same Amway Glow in her eyes they all do when they walked in. It wasn’t that. It was more how she looked at her dad.

And at her.

And gushed about how she’d read and signed the NDA, don’t worry, but this is

just

so

exciting.

Dr. Stanwell is beautiful. She looks like a caricature of a head-shrinker. Fast watery and neurotic brown eyes, big and expressive of a little too much. A strong nose. Soft lips painted tan and subdued like all her makeup. Always smooth auburn hair.

Her voice is so perfectly measured to be unthreatening it’s almost disgusting instead.

She asks about the time they spend together.

There are awkward silences.

Dad starts to insult everyone’s intelligence with, Well, it’s not the quantity

and Ariadne can’t smooth down all the rumples when she just says, Less than six months every year, usually.

Clinical and legalistic.

No resentment.

None.

It’s just a fact cemented in hard truth.

Her dad’s eyes get evasive.

Ariadne watches him on the sofa with her long legs hidden in a long black skirt and tights with knees pulled up against her chest the one time the no shoes on furniture law is suspended for her white Chuck Taylors.

She wears makeup.

Some light foundation to hide the little imperfections.

Brightens her lips a little redder.

Teases out her lashes.

It’s not like anybody really notices but she notices.

She wishes at least someone would say something sometimes.

Even Jeanie and Howard.

She’s heard ten billion accolades about a short story or a good grade for the humanities catechism of standardized testing

it’s not like she’s ugly

she’s pretty sure

she sees her mother’s face in the mirror sometimes. Ariadne’s nose is a little stronger, her jaw a bit sharper, but it just gives her shape and structure. There’s still a kiss of babyfat.

There’s a long quiet. The room is burned by hard-cut squares of white light that tunnel through high casement windows. It’s cool from the air-conditioning. Both Ariadne and her dad wish they could open the windows but Dr. Stanwell

call me Karen, heehee

in all her inscrutable goofiness decreed she couldn’t afford to be too careful

celebrity snoopers and stuff.

They sit across from Karen on a sofa that’s usually enough for at least three people and her dad monopolizes most of it like always. His big hot hands have creased her ankle seven times.

Made her jolt.

She’s never really been able to put into words

or at least words that make sense and can fit into reality

just why she follows her dad’s rock-crushing hands around the room

why when he’d fold a palm on her shoulder it wouldn’t feel

well

language always deserted her

there wasn’t the automatic familiar closeness there was supposed to be. The way she saw it on even Claudia Bailey’s face when her dad hugged her.

Ariadne could see the unexamined warmth in it.

The way it felt like the most natural thing in the world and Claudia could expect that any time she wanted and the snap of rarity didn’t thrill through her chest when it happened.

Dad’s hand is heavy

big

not as huge as Howard’s but still powerful and decorated with barbell calluses

scuffed and scraped from some of his own pointless stunts

“I don’t know if it’s really ridiculous.” Ariadne doesn’t really know if that’s her voice or not.

It’s even softer than usual.

Hers is

well

she sang choir for awhile and they said she had a natural talent but

it just didn’t work out.

The words sigh from deep in the couch.

Her glasses are an even better fortress even if she barely needs them unless she has to stare at a screen for more than about an hour. They’re pretty, fine-framed, delicate wire rims. The lenses are thin.

But it’s enough of a remove she feels glassed in from the world.

Feelings are a little less suffocating.

“I just- role-playing?” Dad’s hand bites a little into Ariadne’s ankle.

It feels

a little odd

warm

but too close

she feels her heart a little too much in her chest.

“Yes, that’s right.” Karen’s wearing a shorter skirt than usual and keeps plucking at the hem. Her hosiery is sheer and the color of chalk and her heels match everything else: Gray.

But she’s wearing more makeup today. Instead of subdued touches her lips are bold and her eyes are gigantic with a cat’s-eye look shadowed black.

Her hair is a little longer and brushes her shoulders and it’s been curled and molded like she stepped out of the salon fifteen minutes ago.

“But why? I mean- what traumatic moments between us? The worst trauma she’s ever given me is saying she wants to live with her mother.”

She remembers exactly the day.

It’s kind of a shock he does, too.

It’s a few days after her birthday two years ago.

He’s splurged in time and money even if the latter doesn’t mean a damn thing to her and now they sit together on a curb outside the TastETwistE watching cheap soft serve ice cream defy the sun for just a few seconds. Dad can hide in plain sight decently. Drives his mom’s old Honda Accord with creased pitted gray leather seats polished by approximately a million iterations of the same butts through the years.

It’s still a fraught thing like Witness Protection.

He always grows out his hair before he leaves, wears a cap on the flight, and tries to disappear in an airport bathroom.

It’s set crisp with hairspray in little waves over his brow and stubble darkens his cheeks and he’s laughing about something she can’t remember.

It’s a perfect idyllic instant like a droplet of a dream crystallized.

Warm.

Heat shimmers tango on the tarry dance floor of a cracked crumbling parking lot punctured with scraggly green weeds.

On Rapids Drive cars and bigass SUVs whisper under the flat drone of engines across the four lanes.

And she looks over and feels her heart tear open.

She wants him there.

He isn’t when she needs it.

When she needs his hand on her knee and now it sparks with something off and weird and wrong. She doesn’t hate it.

That’s what she hates about it.

The way it’s jealous and wants to pull his hand on her thigh right at that second and instead she hears come out the only thing she knows she could ever say to hurt him.

“Did you ever think about why I said it?” Ariadne can barely hear her voice. He does.

“I- I don’t know. Because you were sick of Michigan-”

“Do you think that’s why?” Karen’s tried to look objective during everything but more and more she’s twisting a fork in his words and watching them fray.

“No.” Her dad’s chin slides a little closer to his shoulders. “Can we just get it over with that I’m a bad father?”

“Dad, it’s- it’s not what I mean-”

Her dad

if he’s just acting to shut this up she’ll never forgive him because his eyes look aggrieved and fall to the bulky scuffed leather boots he always wears.

Even in shorts baring legs that’re still polished smooth like his arms.

She saw there was only the smallest amount of hair creeping back into his chest when they went swimming. It was early and they drove out to Lake Michigan when the sun was still slouched low in the saddle of rumpled blue Upper Peninsula hills and low windswept trees with scraggly half-torn leaves.

His parents have a cabin

rustic

a patchwork of decrepit old wings and a new piano studio her dad had built for Howard that catches the dusky light from the lake and comes to life.

Her dad knows how to play even if no role’s ever let him use it. His fingers are fast and sure and inventive chiseling knockoff Beethoven and twisting Chopin to sound like Thelonius Monk’s dreadful death jangle Lulu’s Back in Town.

She’s always lain on her belly on one of the big carpets and watched from the floor.

He’s always preened for her.

But not lately. He’s always keeping this awkward distance from her and then that manicured wall will fall a little and it will be like being a seven-year-old girl and

and not

and there will be some weird flash when he’ll pull his big warm hand back off her ankle.

They drove a little farther down the shoreline to an empty stretch of beach surrounded by nothing but more cream-colored sand and ragged bowers looking blue-green under the developing sun.

It was early when they got there.

Really early.

Oh-dark-thirty early and before they waded out in the water they both sat in the cold blue-black watching the lake’s phosphorescent chop and listening to wind start to ripple in their ears and tear at the shorts and the MSU sweatshirt her dad wore and her black MCR with a modicum of irony, maybe, sometimes. She chose a one-piece.

It didn’t fit the way she remembered it from last year.

Too tight in the chest.

A little too high-cut.

Black and shiny.

She pulled her knees against her chest and huddled against her dad’s and watched the shadows form from darkness lifting, watched the sun climbing the sky behind them start to bring color’s blush and the first licks of detail to the blank and empty world.

She could feel something queasy deep in her belly and she didn’t want it to go away.

Didn’t really want it to get hot and her dad to pull himself up on his feet and whip off his sweatshirt and tee-shirt like some kind of practiced muscle memory, the same way every time, the signature that has girls getting out their spare panties and having no shame about writing about it in every gossip rag and ostensibly serious review on planet earth.

Sand squeaked like corduroy.

Ariadne hated when he showed off like that. When she could see there wasn’t just Dad wrapped in rags and distance but flesh and square pectorals and abs that maybe weren’t chiseled cheese-graters like when he’s cut and ripped for a shirtless scene but

but definitely there.

The olive green flash of veins through his arms.

He’s pulling her off the beach. Her sweatshirt comes away and that’s always the second she feels and sees something gives a little and his smile isn’t so sure anymore.

Only the water washes things right again

and it still feels wrong. It’s only the absence of that knife so hot it’s cold twisting in her belly because nothing really rights it anymore. Not even teal waters still looking dark close to the shore with the bottom dropping out suddenly and violently after the sandbar she knows by reflex.

It’s animal routine.

After muscles are hot enough and they crash long enough through the water and she rises and falls like a dolphin, after he shows training with the Navy SEALs has done a lot for his technique, after a half-hour bobbing and swaying in the water, there’s laughter back.

Her hair is plastered to her back and neck because she won’t wear a swimming cap and loves to feel herself wound in those long threads.

His eyes are bright when they both surface together and she smiles back at him and feels the sun turning to broken diamond on her wet skin.

There always are storms on the horizon in the UP. Gray clouds scud and Ariadne and her dad shiver out of the rain back up to the house.

She’s still wearing her one-piece when she whips off her sweatshirt before stepping into the bathroom to shed it and burn off the memory of cold water with hot.

He gives her a look she can’t place and that makes her aware of how strongly she can feel her pulse in her tongue.

“I know I’m a bad father. I’m not just saying it. You don’t think I feel like a bastard?” Ariadne’s begging him not to say something dumb.

Not to half-ass this.

Not to say, I’ve learned my lesson, or something.

His voice can get deep and it is right now. It’s thick in his throat.

“Do you know how damn dumb I feel talking about how unfair life’s been to me? I just- I don’t know what I want to say.” Her dad’s eyes switchblade off the floor and meet Ariadne for a second.

“Well, you could start by saying how you really feel, Henry.” Karen says.

“I love you and I feel like I’m an unbearable disappointment and I’ve never been able to love you the right way. Like I’m- I’m the worst guy in the world for you. Like I’ve put everything first but you. And- I’ve never told you that no matter how you were brought into my life, I love you.

“You’re not to blame for your mom being the way she is. You’re not to blame for me being the way I am. I keep- keep raking over this BS I want to say. But I was just a kid when you were born. But I- y’know what? No.

“Just no. I- I have to think a lot, okay? Can- can we just cut the session early? I’m really sorry.” Her dad bolts out of the seat and he’s out the door with his voice thick.

She thinks she sees his eyes shine.

But she’s seen Johnny Wilder cry before, too.

The drive home is worse than awkward. His face is like looking at a baked dun brick. His lips are pinched in a thin seam that for anyone else would look prissy. He’s wearing that stupid black baseball cap and he’s slipped into a shapeless khaki shirt that makes him look like he’s wearing a tent.

She meets him in the parking lot. He’s just sitting there massaging white in and out of his knuckles on the steering wheel.

When she slides into the passenger seat he greets her and then looks away, guns the engine and swings with quick practiced caution into traffic’s flow.

She lies in her bedroom tossing Karen’s last words around in her head like a quarter, wondering every time if it’ll be heads.

She wants the next session.

She should insist on it if it’s really meaningful.

Karen supports her.

I promise you that you’ll be happy.

Just dress nicely.

Like we talked about.

Her dad doesn’t usually play the piano roughly unless there’s something wrong. And today he’s pounding notes through the floor.

Ariadne folds herself back against her wall and lets the vibrations tremble up through her back. It’s decorated with the words she’s scrawled in different shades of chalk, all fine sharp strokes on the slate.

It was her ninth birthday gift.

Something to make this place more of a home.

And it is her house now. She knows the schools and the neighborhoods and the way the streets flow under her bicycle tires when it’s steaming hot and white light burns strong off the pavement and she closes her eyes

just for a second

feels the rhythmic thud-thud-thud

knows when and how sharply to steer

she knows how the stage feels

never spilling her soul on it except reciting a short story and listening to the quiet in the air made from ambivalence and incomprehension and even outright loathing

it’s a black thing

but that’s the point

it’s supposed to fall gasping and stagger into the stands and die haggard and shambolic with wet ruin gushing out of its broken sinus cavities

it’s supposed to be violent and shocking and horrible

instead no one says a thing but she still stands there and picks out carefully and with secondhand theater from dad all the words in The Unexpurgated Vinyl Recording of a Man’s Death for $21.50 Plus Tax.

Her English teacher gives her a hard look when she walks off stage, pinchmouthed old biddy looking like she wears a cured leather bag on her head with lips sewn in like a chicken’s asshole.

Her only proponent is the depressive fortysomething divorcee who runs the local community college’s creative writing class she’s dual-enrolled in.

She’s pretty and wears her disappointments deep in her face sometimes so heavy they make her bones burn black.

She has eleven novels published.

Three Times bestsellers.

She came home one day and remembered she was missing something important and spent the next seven months in the crazy place relearning how to face the morning without trying to claw out her eyes.

Katherine Donohue almost looks like her after thirty more years’ disappointment and sometimes Ariadne is afraid that disappointment is something foreordained for her.

It spells itself in absence the way she sees the presence of something ill-fated and badly-starred in Katherine’s eyes.

Sometimes Ariadne feels the room so strongly she no longer knows where she is.

She floats in the light given legs and teeth. It eats reality’s boundaries and she can put herself wherever she wants and that wherever is the big Out There made from limitless potential and none of the word no.

Where it’s a world of yes.

Her room is modest for a girl who probably can expect never to have to work all her life if she wants it

she wants to see

it isn’t Nobels because those are the death of prose.

It isn’t even debased coinage in the Pulitzer or Booker or whatever.

She wants eyes. She wants souls. She wants hearts.

Yeah, she wants scalps, too.

She wants blood and the gnashing of teeth and she wants people feeling for the raw ragged edges of things ripped out of their bodies.

It makes her smile.

It makes her ache and that’s what brings the smiles. She tried cutting herself once and it was just

cliche

it hurt and it was a futile spark in wet grass and that was all

it was her body and her body wasn’t what ached with a feeling like an infected finger no matter how much she punished it with sweat and sunlight and burning breath in her lungs.

Her words are what bring her that.

Sometimes there are disgusting diseased things she knows even the internet won’t want to read and she keeps them for herself.

But what she really holds close to her breast are the words spelling a future she wants and can’t hold in her hands. It’s pining for food that is not made, plants that have never seen the sun, continents that don’t exist.

The music stops and she keeps writing.

“Wow.” Her dad isn’t expecting to see her when he walks into the office.

Karen suggested they come separately.

It’s part of the role-playing she wants them to do.

It’s a weird thing to ask. Oh, god, it is. But one of Ariadne’s worst traumas is when he doesn’t show up for a fifth-grade dance.

It’s thoroughly meaningless. Some daddy-daughter dance.

But it isn’t meaningless. The other girls whine and when the day comes they’re happy and their moms help them with goofy too-bright makeup and there’s music and punch in the cavernous gym reeking of old mats and stale sweat and the wooden smells of risers shoved back and away and the thick-varnished floor squeaks and there’s the sound of sappy sentimental music.

She sits and waits in a nicer black dress than most of the other girls have or even could wear when she’s five-three already and every joint aches from suddenly defying gravity and finally one of the teachers takes pity on her and leads her through the big gray metal double doors and to the dimly-lit library.

She’s wearing a black dress. This one she bought herself. It’s

hard to find anything in her size that doesn’t look exquisite.

The neckline is basically modest but that doesn’t mean a lot when her chest is still a heavy soft shelf. It’s not just a cheap prom dress.

She thought about it but this is better. More beautiful. Slim on her belly with a bright gleam. The skirt ripples at mid-thigh and instead of the usual tights it’s black hosiery. Patent leather heels.

She sees herself in the mirror before she drives herself to the office.

Her makeup is tasteful. Smooth foundation gives her even tone and a kiss of warmth in her cheeks and darkens her eyes. Her lips are ruby.

Her hair is loose, still a little misty from the shower, polished and controlled with gel. It’s naked of the barrette she always wears. No light breaks the black.

Her dad comes in a suit. A nice white shirt and black jacket and trousers and shoes and the red tie she remembers from a Christmas. She drifted for what feels like hours in the sniffly December torpor of bright brittle light and shadowless department stores and nice-looking women moving like high-heeled wraiths around her cooing about how cute it is, she wants to get a tie for her dad. It had to be perfect. It is.

She wasn’t expecting full wardrobe and makeup and she’s happy for once she sees him dressed nicer than jeans and a tee where he’s not a red carpet cartoon. The suit is flattering and cut well around his body.

His hair’s combed.

Perfect.

Perfect the way a guy in front of a mirror looks instead of someone realized in four eyes of dawn makeup.

“You’re so pretty, Ariadne.” The way he looks at her is strange.

For a half-second she’s worried he sees her mom.

She does in the mirror.

And then for the rest of that second there’s a fugitive and scary hope she feels like sparks on her palms. It hollows out her wrists and elbows.

She’s wearing her glasses.

They feel different. Less like they make her invisible and more just that she can see and he can, too. The room is darkened and Karen sits there wearing way too much makeup to be normal. Her suit’s black instead of gray and the skirt’s still as short as it’s been before. Her hair is flawless the same way.

She looks like an especially smug fox today and Ariadne doesn’t know why.

Her eyes are a little sharper.

The room is bright with a pinkish candyfloss perfume.

It’s cheap.

Sweet.

“You look- you look great, daddy.” Ariadne’s breath hitches a little in her throat.

He’s not wearing the cologne he does when he works.

Not the designer brand that’s dull spice because he auctioned a piece of his soul to some feudal French house made of old money and clinking skeletons.

It’s his smell.

It’s just dad.

His shampoo.

Bergamot soap.

Just a touch of his sweat and that springtime smell.

“So, tell me, do you remember what song you would’ve danced to?” Karen looks over at Ariadne with a weird crooked smile.

Ariadne just shakes her head.

“Well, what was your favorite song then?”

“Uh, A Night in Tunisia?” Ariadne’s smile is a shy little quirk. “Dad and Howard taught me about jazz really young.”

“Well, what about now?”

“Um, anything.”

“You’re such unhelpful patients.” Karen’s still fast with a little remote on her lap. Music washes through the office.

It’s every received schmaltz scene from every piece of real unreality ever.

It’s slow strings and indifferent melody and a kiss of brass.

“Well, if you two can’t decide-”

“I think it’s perfect.” Ariadne just gives her a little laugh. “Um. What- what are we supposed to do?”

“Just pretend you can reel back time. That you two are in that gym and it’s fifth grade.”

“I’d say the future came early.” Ariadne’s eyes flick down her chest.

“Well- it’s part of the visualization exercise. Some, um, suspension of disbelief.”

“I can do that.” Her dad’s voice is soft and thick. “I have a little experience-”

“I don’t want you to act, Henry.” Karen almost sounds sharp like she means to cut some easy tether that’s keeping a fantasy aloft. “I want you to be totally honest with your daughter. I want her to be totally honest with you.”

The room is heady with that syrupy smell.

The more Ariadne breathes it the fuller the bright feeling in her chest grows.

She smiles up at her dad.

“Do you want to dance, daddy?” The words feel weird and sluggish on her tongue. The whole world moves a little too slow in these hitching intervals.

“I would be honored.” She’s tall; he’s still taller than she is. Ariadne is pushing six-even and he’s still a giant next to her.

His hands dwarf hers, big rough fingers still sensitive and warm and quick.

The first few movements are silly

too far apart

too self-conscious

it isn’t supposed to be a joke and dad’s eyes don’t quite meet hers right away.

Her breath is shallow and deliberate.

“Daddy-”

“I’m sorry.”

“I think you have some intimacy problems, Henry. She’s your daughter. If you can’t be comfortable with her, who can you feel comfortable with?” Karen’s voice is a little thicker than Ariadne thinks she’s heard it.

“You’re right. I- I’m sorry, Ariadne.” It’s usually Ari.

Honey.

A few times it was Princess but it didn’t really fit for a girl who’s never had a tea party her whole life.

That odd feeling she’s had so many times in her chest is fuller than it’s been for awhile.

They both know how to dance.

She feels the rhythm pulse in her hips, her shoulders. His chest is still warm through the fabric against her chin when she sinks close.

The notes flow and Ariadne’s not even really listening to the music anymore.

She’s only felt this once and it was dancing with her friend, Jennifer. Drinking the soft smells of her sweat and closeness and listening to their breath in the air under the big gibbous moon’s silver glow.

It was the closest she’d come to kissing a girl

kissing anyone

knowing it would be easy to reach out to her

but nothing happened because there were teeth snapping deep in her head

a command

a hope

a wish

they move faster and follow the rhythm

the guitar’s electric saw

harder percussion

dad really knows how to dance and Ariadne knows Jennifer wasn’t just humoring her, either.

She knows how to swing her hips, twist her body, keep her head level and eyes eating his from under her big feathery lashes.

His breath is controlled

he’s an athlete

but he doesn’t rein it in the way he should be able to do and it’s hot and sweet with mint toothpaste and it washes over her face in a hard gasp once when her chest pushes just a little too tight against his.

It’s one of those moments you just explain away to yourself.

Shallow shocks skimming down your body are just reflex.

The way her lips part a little around her teeth, perfect finally after three years of braces and a last few corrections.

The way he sees her tongue’s tip touched just a little against them.

Pink and white.

She sees it in his face.

The world is too pink. Too sugary.

“Don’t you think you two should be totally honest with each other? After all, your daughter isn’t only ten. Shouldn’t you tell your daddy how you really feel, without fear and trepidation, Ariadne?”

The words march single file through Ariadne’s head. They’re too loud. Too urgent. Usually she just tunes out what Karen’s saying

or at least a lot of the time

but these feel more like they’re rearranging her head and giving her brain a weird swimmy feeling. The air turns grainy and pricks with texture.

Ariadne can see it’s all reflected in her dad’s face.

The way it looks more open than she’s seen

well

ever.

The way his breathing is a little heavier now.

The way there’s heat in his cheeks.

“I- it’s- it’s hard-”

“That’s why I’m here to be your mediator.” Karen’s voice feels like it’s coming from behind Ariadne’s eyes. “You told me something in confidence. A fear you have. A hope. I think now is the time to talk about it.”

The world spins faster on its axis.

Everything might break.

She knows this.

The looks never will be the same.

“You must tell him.”

“I love you.” She’s said the words ten million times.

To his cheek.

To his back.

To a vision of the man on the other end of a telephone.

To a fantasy she holds in her head.

It’s only when she’s alone she lets the words sound like this.

“Everything, Ariadne.”

“I love you in a way I can’t even- it makes my head and heart feel all funny. I’m supposed to be the one with the words and I can’t- it’s so hard, daddy.” Ariadne’s voice is thicker than she’s ever heard except for the times she’s gotten drunk and lain there wrapped in his oversized dress shirt feeling it close to her skin and still rich with his body. When Jeanie and Howard are out of the house and she can fold herself into his bed they keep unmade for a few days or a few weeks after he leaves and she thinks sometimes they must see her like a pathetic puppy needing to be weaned off a familiar scent.

Except they don’t know what she does knotted in the blankets or her body twisted and running with sweat in the shut-up room’s stagnant white heat streaming through his big windows. The way she can sleep better than in her own bed until the ache fades but when she can be alone there, when it’s late or when they’re gone and she isn’t afraid of interruption she can have her shorts and panties crumpled on the floor and sliding her fingers between thighs pinched tight around her wrists.

The way she touches herself to visions of things sweet and dripping and sometimes rough and violent.

The way she folds a palm on her mouth and nose even when she’s alone to push back the little whimpers and moans threatening to tell the fates what she’s doing.

They’ve never been kind.

She wants to laugh.

It would be so easy to try to laugh this off.

To take the uneasy looks for a month

a year

even a lifetime give or take a few weeks off her sentence for good behavior.

But she doesn’t. Her eyes reach out for his and find them. He stares back and she can’t decipher the meaning in the puzzle those twisting green facets form.

He swallows.

Someone else is animating her body. She’s a passenger pushed tight against her eyes when she watches his face grow larger.

His breath tingles her nose.

His lips are firm but soft and dry and he’s kissed her before

her cheek

her forehead

even her lips once by stumbly mistake and they laughed

geeze, daddy

except she held onto the memory for three and a half weeks before time finally wore it through like the cheap paint on a favorite trinket.

She leans close and she knows there’s no laughter to get rid of the pain if he pushes her away or crushes her under cold eyes.

But they’re warm and confused and his fingers bunch in the fabric at the small of her back, scald her shoulder.

She pushes.

He doesn’t pull away.

She feels her head tilt. His moves with her. Soft, slow, her lips a little tacky with color against his. She feels them plump softer before they part with a sticky sweet sound. She pulls in a slow roll of breath.

“Daddy.” His fingers tighten on her skin.

“Ariadne. I-”

“Kiss me.” He does.

There is no hesitation when he moves

he is suspended between two people and neither of them in that instant. There are the two archetypes and he is a failure at both.

He cannot be a man for her, the kind of unpolluted unspoiled unknown, an anonymous wrapped gift for an uncertain occasion

he might be life-giving

soul-taking

but instead something is short-circuited and she knows him, and there is love’s raw thready unreason in her head, the need for the contents of the man given shape that belongs only to her

she has seen this moment ten thousand times and every time it’s filled with the bitter celluloid remoteness of a borrowed memory, all the tight-lensed moments of soaring melody and exact timing, all the frames she’s tasted the natural infidelity in his lips on some other woman’s mouth.

She can repeat these torments ten million times if she wants and try to pour herself into the actress who looks more or less like her and it is no different than pornography’s hollow imitation. At best it’s the pang of the vicarious helplessness in it all.

There is no consolation in those.

They die when she can feel his lips and they’re full growing softer and wetter when they move together, when the moment is his large hand between her shoulder blades, when all she knows is his face in her eyes and the only frame is her glasses. She’s never really seen him from so close. There could be embarrassing Harlequin thoughts but instead there’s the way his arm’s muscles tent some part of his shirt and bulge through others

that there’s a tension in his big fingers on her cheek

that his lips aren’t arrogant like she expects they have to be because she’s lived in all the fantasies where it’s a little too rough, too sure, the way the man

it’s never a boy

it’s a man and he knows too much and his palms will move according to a script over which she has no control.

A man will push her. Know how to touch her.

She feels his palm and fingers fold her cheek. He doesn’t kiss her roughly. It isn’t taking. She’s doing the pushing and he’s not restrained but doesn’t crush her with his shadow. He waits and is a hot-breathing press against her mouth. When her lips open just a little his follow.

Her body trembles a little. Adrenaline fuzzes her head.

She can hear breath shake in her throat.

A father isn’t someone who does this. It doesn’t have the same feeling. It’s what belongs to him in her eyes, the way it’s not the paranoid pop in her head like a little firecracker sometimes asking if it’s just some daddy issues cliche.

If he weren’t her father it wouldn’t feel any different.

She’s sure of it.

She loves the way she can tell he shaved just a bit before this, the way the skin’s still a little slippery with the peppermint-scented lotion he uses, the white lather still sometimes sticking in the stainless steel bowl he carries around with him for a ragged old badger-hair brush.

She kisses him again. There’s more confidence. The first kiss moves naturally, too fast, shivery only after it happens. The second, the third, they deserve to be remembered, too.

But she will remember all of it anyway. The way her teeth scrape his lip

the way his hand flows under her hair’s curtain moving the trapped heat up her nape and tingling on the silky baby hairs there

the way she feels the breath tighten in his throat.

They don’t pull apart. There’s a mutual accord and they don’t stop for breath because the movements have been too soft, tingled too much, had the easy grace of a browsing fawn. Ariadne feels her lips and cheeks climb in the fullest smile she’s ever felt in her life. Shivery silk threads link her mouth to her heart and her belly and the world rises and sun shines brighter when it happens.

She’s never seen his smile like this before. Maybe he’s not the best actor with a woman. Johnny Wilder is a hard-boned war-tested cardboard standee of a man and he’s never soft in the face. He never fills up with delicate feelings the way her dad is now.

The way his face stays tilted.

There’s vulnerability in his eyes. She doesn’t believe it until it happens but she sees herself, two little symmetrical echos of a girl.

It isn’t through his eyes but she sees what’s in them and these converge. He kisses her this time because she stands and her lids get just a little weightier. Everything gets heavy in her body. She doesn’t know it will be like this.

Muscle is water and the act of standing is too hard. The world tumbles.

She knows how silly her smile is. She knows how childish it makes her look. She doesn’t care. His mouth is the same.

All the romance novels are wrong. This isn’t the time for some glib line about this being unusual to say the least for the daddy-daughter dance. He’s not some hard-boned mercenary with an economy of words and expression whose will burns by some unspoken knowledge through a young girl’s body. It wasn’t made by its gentlewoman sculptor to be a receptive and soft thing yielding in the right places with an intuition that does not admit vulgar instinct.

All there is itching at her calves and biceps and in her middle and tightening her jaw is a craving for vague things

for contact

heat

pressure.

She knows there is something thick and powerful and filled with divine experience so powerful it only can be spoken of in euphemism.

She knows there never has been a good sex scene ever filmed or written.

She knows that has to be a lie because her mind can supply what’s maybe not normal but what tightens her ankles and makes her heels slippery with sweat when she drives them into the mattress and watches something slick and translucent curl over her fingers afterwards.

She knows every scene is the same.

There will be the requisite amount of kissing.

There will be clothing artistically shed.

There will be something that no matter how simple the language is still an act of magic and cannot be spoken of frankly.

But all she wants is him.

Ariadne doesn’t want an order.

“Ariadne.” His voice is a chop added to her unsteady thoughts. They’re sometimes too loud

sometimes so quiet she barely can find them and has to quest deep in her head and miss patches of reality to hold them in her hands.

Her smile really is ridiculous.

Ariadne is such a fucking romance novel name.

“Daddy.” She wants to reach for intimacy’s marker.

Call him Henry.

But the name doesn’t belong to him. She’s the only girl that’s ever called him daddy.

It probably isn’t true.

She’s been the only girl who’s had the right.

She wants to be the only girl who has the right.

Ariadne’s thumbs feel out the hard corner of a jawbone.

Brush his lips’ edge.

“Don’t mind me. Just think of me as an empty chair.” Karen’s voice

Ariadne stops caring. It’s odd how she vanishes.

Without a thought. But everything is so much closer. There’s a feverish itch in her chest. It’s a feeling like listening to a slow-running faucet, a weird silvery susurration.

When it’s leaves stirring in a calm breeze it’s bliss.

When it’s the mechanical consistency of water it’s insanity.

It’s like being unable to untie a knot when you’re bent double and going crazy.

They’ve spent more time together in the last five weeks than they have in the last three years.

The Upper Peninsula’s beach sand is an intimate friend now.

They’ve crouched on the thick-knuckled knoll furred with dirt forming a Neanderthal brow at its crest and watched big-bodied deer crackle through the close-ordered barriers of woods they navigate by reflex and into ferns bleeding together in a whispering ocean from faraway.

They’ve slapped off mosquitoes and dreaded black flies’ malignant crush on their skin.

They’ve diligently peeled off a big orb weaver web still flashing wet with dew. Her dad isn’t aloof when panic soars in his chest and he asks her to please help him get this damn thing off his neck! And is there a spider still on it?

It looks like bubblegum but there isn’t one of the fat bustling bodies glowing like wax.

After her shower one evening the air is so wet and hot it flattens her to the guest bed in one of the spare rooms haunted by a spirit of loneliness. It’s Victorian wist, a wedge of brown hardwood and close walls painted in thick and sturdy layers that probably would taste sweet if you plucked off brittle flakes like hard-set royal icing. There is a small bed capped by an oversized headboard made from twisted bronze pipes looking like gold in the orange light.

Outside there is green grass and a proud old tree with crabbed bark and patchy leaves. The horizon falls and becomes Lake Michigan’s fathomless blue. The windows are closed and stuffy air smelling like dead forests and old print opens flowers in her blood. She’s only wearing a loose white tee-shirt and shapeless black shorts. She knows the hem rides over her belly and it’s nice because there’s more wet space for the heat to smother her.

When she wakes up she isn’t alone. Her dad’s collapsed there on his shoulder at the bed’s edge with an old Emerson collection lying dead on the floor. It’s that kind of seven-in-the-evening light like dark brass that steals the edges and definition from the world.

His breath is even and slow and untroubled. He’s snoring and she’s on the opposite side of the bed but he is still close enough she feels his large body’s vibrations. The bedsprings are a treacherous creak.

She doesn’t want him to wake up.

He’s always been a light sleeper. But this time he’s exhausted enough

that kind of perfect spiritual emptiness that belongs to worthy labors and sunlight

he can sleep, actually sleep for once. His breathing is steady enough Ariadne sinks back on an outstretched arm looking at the nape of his neck. She studies the way muscle tenses in two thin cords and relaxes at regular intervals.

She eats the brawny shapes looking dark from the sun through his thin white tee-shirt. She follows his shoulders’ slope over a bulky chest looking big and flaring powerful from behind and tapering down his lean waist.

She watches his back’s big muscular pillars strain.

Every twitch takes ten thousand years.

She cannot stop herself from watching.

In the delirious place between sleep and wakefulness sparks of images attack her behind eyes slapping closed and springing open again.

They’re strongest at those moments.

His thumb brushed on her neck.

His mouth is soft and hungry.

She’s riding his shoulders and sees herself from the outside instead of through her own eyes and the girl is beautiful and bold and fitfully twists fingers in his hair.

Ariadne sees the smile.

Her shirt is getting misty with sweat and she’s sure she hears the tee-shirt’s fibers groan over her belly when she can’t help knotting her hand in it. She knows her breathing will get too hard and wake him.

She feels her body too close like her bones are gone and skin grinds on skin.

She knows something sickeningly sweet runs out of her and muddles the sweat on her right hip when she pushes her thighs together. The movement is made from emptiness and absence. Something clenches deep inside her and it mourns knowing nothing will happen and gropes ahead anyway, blind and deaf and stupid and committed.

She remembers the dream she has because it comes chopped to shreds and swirled with pieces of reality when her dad starts to move. When he swings on his left shoulder and it wakes her up and he’s still dead to everything.

Except it’s a weird cozy night terror where what is real and what cannot be real lose their hard borders and melt together in the dripping light starting to strop itself red and purple.

His hand reaches out and traces a refuge.

It fits her fingers perfectly. Their colors turn almost indistinguishable in the light.

When her eyes open his hand is gone

When she falls back to sleep he’s gone, too, but that’s only because he becomes a displacement behind her. The bedsprings squeak because his body is enormous. A boy asks her once to a dance and she’s afraid.

Afraid because there must be some ulterior motive.

Afraid because he’s dishonest-looking, too wiry, paradoxically too menacing in the unthreatening way he holds himself.

All men are made in her father’s image and if they don’t meet the shape they are hiding something.

She wants this shadow to blanket her body.

In the dream his breath colonizes her lungs. She’s already drowning in the smell of his clean sweat and bright citrus-tinged soap and the empty scent from his laundry detergent ruffled up in the fabric.

There’s another smell.

Pent-up and intoxicating.

The door isn’t closed.

In the dream it is.

She sees the impenetrable white wall instead of muzzy shadows. His hand is gigantic when it traces the smooth curve of her hip.

He doesn’t just paw at her butt. It’s an act of grace, his fingers brushed across the naked skin at the small of her back. The big tips glide under her waistband and make her feel the sunburn she doesn’t have.

Her eyes open at the wrong time and he’s getting up to punish her for the transgression. The lids are so heavy and she makes her breathing so regular he doesn’t say a word. He looks. Just for a second but the sun obliterates the color from his eyes and she can’t stare too hard.

Now she can look without fear.

“Please.” There is an entire world teetering on its edge in that word.

Something inside her tells Ariadne to leave it to him. To let him

no

make him be the one to choose because she already has made her choice.

His forehead is so much bigger.

His eyebrows are soft when they graze her skin.

His skin isn’t rough the way it’s supposed to be in all the books. He isn’t made craggy and coarsened by the outdoors. He isn’t even cured like some Marlboro Man. Like her grandfather. There’s just a kiss of life in the way there are faint creases, the way he inhabits more than just celluloid hallucinations she guiltily takes in when she can’t sleep and she knows his familiar shape will burn its way into her head and do something.

A special sweet secret something she wraps in her sweatshirts.

“Please.” The word sits between them. It’s filled with something she never has felt like this.

It’s an ache somewhere deep and it’s not just the relentless itch that has her testing the limits of what she can call restraint digging her hands between her thighs and pushing and pulling and striping one finger over her clit.

She’s tried on the technical verbiage.

Clitoris.

Romance novel landscapes flower full of beads and pearls and there are all kinds of shy sidelong glances she gives it when she thinks about that wrapped in its pink hood.

But most of the time it is a full flushed feeling and it’s her clit turning electric under her fingertip with knees drawn up to her chest consciously crushed into a wall’s shocking cold corner turning clammy under her naked skin.

“Please.” His thumb shakes just a bit.

The skin is smooth and dry and warm when Ariadne brushes a long kiss at the pad. Draws just the tip between her lips and sucks with a sudden sharp pressure she sees reflected in his eyes.

These are the passages they always sneer at.

People aren’t supposed to belong to the cultures that make them. How many times has she already seen herself as the dark-eyed and pink-cheeked coquette who knows exactly what little quirk of her eyes will drop his heart in his stomach and send his mouth on hers. How she should kiss. The perfect way to draw his finger in her mouth except it’s all just

hollow next to this. What feels good for her is dragging his thumb against her tight-pinched teeth and shocking him with a stiff suction.

“Daddy.” His eyes flare big and his face becomes an honest portrait like he can’t quite keep his grasp on holding back that simple childlike honesty that shouts in the presence of crashing waves and yelps at spiders and even rocks along with her to some bands that are supposed to sound like rusty claws on a chalkboard to him. She pulls his thumb between her lips, her jaws looser, guiding it against her cheek.

Just a second. Just long enough to flare his big chest with dead breath when it grazes that wet skin.

Her kisses are warm and wet on his knuckles.

Her teeth give him a little shock worrying at the skin.

“Ariadne.” She smiles. “Is this really okay?” It isn’t any character he’s ever played. Even for her. “I’m kind of just floating in space here.”

“I am, too, daddy.” She wants to make lifetime study of the way the word tightens his cheeks. The way he lifts her hands up to his lips and rains little kisses over the fingertips. The way the movement feels like nothing else in her life’s pantheon of moments she’s clung to like a memory of water in a drought.

Even if it’s predictable it’s no less cruel to know everything once made full and sweet is powder in your hands.

“You’re so sweet, Ariadne.” He looks like he can follow the way the words make her think the barometer should be bottoming out and a storm floating through the windows.

“More. Please.” Jennifer never makes her feel like this. Her voice is sweet but it isn’t this. Her dad’s shadow has weight and it’s heavy and delirious. His lips are more insistent on her fingertips. “Please. Daddy.” Every time she says it now in that bright voice still sounding brittle like cracked crystal he kisses her again. “Daddy.”

Her brain burns in her head. Her breath does the same in her chest.

“Daddy.” Another kiss. She doesn’t even need to see his lips to know he’s smiling. There are anxious and ambivalent thoughts.

Is this what he’s like when he’s with another woman?

When did the word another get there?

Her mother

how else would she exist? He should have been created for her and she for him with a destiny made to crescendo like this.

“Daddy.” A little bite squeezes a yip out of her lips. His arms are faster than she thinks is possible. Stronger than makes any sense when he bears her off her feet. The world swings; perspective tumbles like the world’s sitting on oiled bearings.

The way he holds her is sure. There’s no tremor in steel-braid muscles. She floats. She still wraps her arms around his neck and shoulders. She wants to see herself from the outside. She wants to know the way this is more than just a lucid dream that will drag bitter tears big as white pearls out of her eyes when she opens them to the day.

There are fitful thoughts.

If this is a dream, maybe she could stand being held this way for the rest of her life.

Ariadne doesn’t care about how much his skin smudges her glasses when she lets herself inhale the scents she’s rationed for herself. There’s just

the words fail her

it’s something masculine. No girl ever could smell like that. Not foul and animal and words like powerful said more about the texture than the weight behind it.

He burns quick pecking kisses at her neck, fast enough and slow enough the tingle doesn’t flash into a tickle. His tongue accents some; his teeth once or twice like he can’t help myself. She’s never felt her body so full before. She knows from how long her legs are hanging from his arms, how her feet just dangle limp off her ankles, how she can let herself sag and she’ll feel body stretch.

She will not only be a little girl under his shadow.

“You’re beautiful.” The words are a sharper shock than when she lay there and held Jennifer’s hand and asked her not to tell her when the piercing gun was going to fire.

“You have earrings.” His mouth finds her ear. “They’re pretty. I forgot to tell you.”

“Yeah. I- I guess you didn’t know. Just- ah,” every time he breathes electricity webs her scalp like fingers run down her nape. Every time he presses a kiss turned a little dewy just under her ear. “A few months ago.”

“You deserve to know how pretty you are.” She’s worried he’ll ruin it with something. That something will give. He’ll tell her he’s not the one

he can’t be the one.

“Daddy-”

“I love when you dress beautifully but you’re always the prettiest girl I see.” She can’t get enough of the words. “It’s hard to look away sometimes.” She knows. Her breathing gets ragged when he tightens his right hand around her knee. “You don’t know how it feels to touch you like this.”

His left arm is tight against her spine. His mouth finds the bright silver earring tipped with one little emerald, decorates it with a kiss. His voice gets darker.

“I need you to tell me.”

“W-what?” There’s hope. Unease, too.

“What you want from me, honey.” Oh.

Fuck.

His breath is steam on her neck and he turns the word into an open-mouthed kiss. Her body bends in his arms. Her jaw shudders open.

His mouth scalds her throat.

He tastes her pulse.

“Sweet.”

His voice shocks up and down her neck and makes something cold curdle in her tummy.

She knows there’s the world in front of her.

She knows it won’t feel full enough to merit getting up in the morning without him.

“So sweet.” Not without the way his voice cuts indelible tears in some fabric she’s kept tight around her heart because numbness is better than feeling the absence. “So beautiful.”

“I want you to touch me.” Now his arms shake. Now his smile is big and apprehensive.

“Ari.”

“I love... Love when you say my name.” He moves. Eases her down on the couch. She’s sat there more than a few times now.

Every time there’s been regret.

His hands enfold her shoulders. Glide down her arms.

Her bones are half-melted.

His voice does the rest.

“I can’t believe how soft you are. You’re such a beautiful woman.” The word makes her nerves feel like they’re misfiring.

Woman.

Not girl.

Woman.

She’s starting her life.

Whatever that means.

His fingers ring her waist.

He doesn’t just grope at her tits.

Doesn’t make her feel the way boys and girls do when they leer at her with obvious naked designs.

Even her friend, Jennifer.

Even the nice boy at the library who still sees the generous shapes when it’s too stuffy and hot even for her and she eases off her sweatshirt and skin is tight and her body is without sharp edges.

“Ariadne.”

“I love when you call me that.” She does. Loves tasting more of the ache she’s known from seven years of feeling her body grow sweet and heavy in the places she’s studied with fascination in the mirror.

Never like this.

Ir couldn’t be like that. Not with the remove from her hands. Not with the spontaneity in knowing it’s his hands and his mind and his will behind them instead of following the scripts she scribbles with shaky hitching gulps of air on his bed.

“It’s a beautiful name.” He’s on his knees in front of her and he still looks like the tall one while she half-reclines into the sofa. The cushioning is too soft; it isn’t his arms, his chest. It’s by reflex she pulls her knees up to her chest.

She feels small.

Loves it.

Loves when his hand rounds her calf.

Traces up under her knee.

“I want you, too.”

It isn’t an explosion of movement but it feels like it. His mouth is wet heat on her shin, her knee, eating, nipping, chasing little dove sounds out of her lips.

“Daddy.” His palms are a soft pressure on her knees. He pushes.

Pulls.

She doesn’t resist and doesn’t do it for him, either. She wants the press of her dad’s big strong fingers on her body.

She regrets wearing the hosiery. It’s a size tighter than her skin and it glistens and it’s beautiful and it dulls and enriches every touch at the same time. She wants him to tear it off of her. She wants to order him to be one of his on-screen heroes.

Just rip it away.

Instead his hands draw sparks down her thighs.

Disappear into her dress’ hot darkness.

Skirt those delicious places.

His thumb almost touches that aching swell between her legs and instead skims her inner thighs.

“I love your legs.”

Down down down.

“Daddy.”

So close to her ass’ full curve.

“Your eyes.”

A long squeeze grows tight.

Bites.

Her heels spike the sofa.

“Daddy.”

“Every part of you. I think about this all the time. It drives me insane. Smelling you in my bed.”

“D-daddy-”

“I know you do it, Ariadne. Every time I’m out of the house.” It’s true.

It’s true.

“You’re not very subtle.”

“I don’t mean to be.” It’s a little bratty and it earns her his fingers’ bite in her thighs. “Do you like the wet spot?”

“It’s your sweat.”

Oh.

The way he says it. The way it’s ripe with something she knows without really knowing.

“You smell so sweet. I’ll lie there in it, too, just wondering.” Her skirt lifts so easily up her hips.

“Tell me-”

“Daddy?”

“Tell me what you want.”

“You to make me feel good.” Her smile comes with lead lids and the movement of her tongue over her palate. A hitching little voice.

His fingers slide under her waistband. A wordless question. She doesn’t even need to nod. All it takes is her hips lifting a little.

“My beautiful little girl.” The words are a red ring drawn around just how empty it is inside. It’s her belly swimming and little tassels reaching up to tease her solar plexus.

It’s feeling every breath reflected inside her.

Her hosiery comes down. She glows through the fabric and looks like raw sunlight when the nylon slides off. The sound is mundane and it shares no meaning with what she does almost every afternoon before a run and every night before she sleeps.

There are hopes.

She sees this moment ten thousand times, every one a little different, always the same

always his hands the truth shows strong and gentle

sometimes rough, tearing the tights off her body

sometimes he grasps, bruises, pulls, turns her on her belly or back or hands and knees and makes her feel like a little doll

sometimes he’s so patient she tips over on her bed standing frozen in the fantasy and losing her balance in the television snow glazing her eyes.

Her skin is the most sensitive it’s ever been. His thumbs trail down just a flicker of a butterfly’s heartbeat behind his knuckles.

She wants to preserve this second for eternity.

The one time she might want a camera in the room

another pair of eyes

ha ha ha

her eyes fuzz at their corners and she’s sure she sees someone.

For just a half-second she’s absolutely sure she hears the rasp of a skirt.

She thinks she sees a flash of movement.

Hot eyes like the paranoid suspicion the moon beaming through the window sees you and can speak rumors of what you’re doing on daddy’s bed praying that he’s there and watching.

A gasp.

His thumbs brush her ankles and nothing else matters. He’s framed by her bare knees.

The shapes are elegant. She loves the smoothness that comes from supple muscle at rest.

When he lifts away her heels and they come off with the last of the fabric he lets them drop.

Their weight is muffled on the carpet.

The sofa is cold against her bare skin.

“Ariadne.” He sees. She knows he does.

She’s been pleading for it.

The revelation.

The frightening exposure.

The way the seconds distend. Everything is too cold and too hot like a deadly wonderful fever she remembers him holding her through. There are times when she doesn’t know for sure in the memories if it isn’t only the hope sickness turned to hallucination the way sometimes in dreams your wishes come true by will alone and you wake up with the dying echo of a feeling like the last note from a song you can’t find your way back through ever again.

It’s so hot and hurts so much inside her it’s unbearable sometimes. She knows relief doesn’t come from dreams and wishes because when you wake up the impressions are empty.

Because his arms are big and his chest is the right kind of close and warm for the light and her flannel nightclothes are sickening and scratchy against her skin at four in the afternoon and it’s a summer sickness and it’s gotten awful and all she wants is his lips on her forehead.

She wills it and it happens.

And all she wants now is for him to see.

See the dark place she pushes into the light.

“Daddy. Do you see? It’s...”

“You.” There’s a white flash behind her eyes when she hears the way he says it.

The way it says there’s nothing that will be close.

The way it’s possessed of sunsets where you catch the rare green flash at the nexus of earth and sky.

The way you walk out of a restaurant and the meal has been perfect, the conversation and impressions vibrating with pure bliss in your belly.

A first kiss.

An epiphany.

He watches.

She’s studied every angle. She knows the texture. She’s obsessed over the the pinkish lips. The way they swell and grow puffy when she slides her fingers down her abdomen’s lean round, when they reach the slope of her mound she keeps polished bright and hairless, when they take their time marching to the inevitable. She loves the nights and afternoons alone when she knows she can take her time and maybe she can let out a few of those little whimpers when she feels close to what she thinks it should be.

She knows it never has been close.

“Is it-”

“You’re perfect. So perfect.” She doesn’t know what he’ll do. Doesn’t expect him to throw her on his hips. Doesn’t expect to feel the hot hard shape in his pants. Doesn’t expect it will be that big. It juts brazen through crisp fabric feeling rough against her. She sees the way she grinds against it dull his eyes for just a half-second.

She wants it again.

Rains teasing little kisses on the corners of his mouth. Left. Right. Left. Right.

It’s torment. The little pecks twist her belly like a balloon animal. Every kiss that never happens, every time her soft lips graze close to him she hears the sound from his chest. It sharpens a knife in her belly.

“Bad girl.” His hands burn through Ariadne’s dress. Tighten around her hips and belly. Reach. Search. His scent’s getting thicker in the air when sweat beads on his hairline.

“Daddy.”

“Bad girl.”

“I don’t want to be bad.” She does. Maybe. But those are the words right now. Not when her voice thrums around his lips.

“Of course not. You’re daddy’s good girl.”

That

Oh

God

Ariadne’s hoping he feels the air shake with electricity with those words.

She needs him to know it splays her toes and curls them again and twists her right foot in the sofa and has her kicking her left leg out straight and sharp.

His jacket’s too bulky.

She gropes at the buttons, black metal pearls cut through with convoluted curlicue stitches. She makes a production of it. Slides her fingers down his lapels with a race of sound. She fumbles. Her breath barely comes. Gets out one, a second, a third is too stubborn and all she wants is to yank it open and instead one of his big hands gather both of her wrists.

She’s seen how strong they are.

Watched him scoop a barbell weighed down with almost four of her and jerk it off the floor. Listened to his grip creak on the old Honda’s rumpled leather steering wheel and seen white flood into his knuckles.

The pressure is gentle.

Firm.

It’s almost dainty the way he bites them with his fingers.

How he unfastens the last button and lets his jacket stand open. How he torments her with his hand’s own movement.

The tie comes away.

“Daaaddy.” She barely recognizes how her voice peaks in a little whine. His breath is unsteady and rough at the edges. His tie dangles like a dead serpent. “Please.”

“I can’t deny you a thing.”

“I don’t really ask.” There’s no resentment in her heart. Not when his mouth yields. When she makes the kiss rough and he makes it deep. He folds her tight until the air’s being ironed out of her lungs. She’s never really thought about kissing like this before.

Never imaged a time when her fingers bunch in someone’s shirt and her wrists turn limp in a man’s this man’s rock-crushing hands pinching them with just enough pressure to thread red crazed strands through her eyes and her shoulders melt into her hips.

His tongue asks and she demands and pulls it writhing the way her hips do on top of his cock’s stiff jutting heat

oh

god

that’s exactly what she feels through his pants

her skirt is still up over her hips and it’s stayed knotted around her legs and his belt’s creased leather paints little ripples of texture on her right thigh.

Her pussy

the word belongs to too many pink profane pornographic hangovers

guilty televisual gratification that sends her reeling away with bitterness like sour ashes on her tongue

like a bad dream

there are cocks, pussies, bodies constructed only for someone else’s hungers

but the words are beautiful to her

she’s grappled with it

what belongs to the moment?

His cock is hot through the fabric, nudges against the syrupy place between her thighs.

Her eyes roll back in her head.

He pulls.

Creases her tongue with a barely-there touch of his teeth.

Squeezes her so tight against him she’s sure he’ll just tunnel through the fabric. Not that she minds. Not that she thinks anyone could mind. Not when that smooth blunt shape is a perfect ridge between her lips. Her juices are slick and well up and over him and give a dark luster on his pants.

Her breaths come too shallow to take.

Thin whimpers become yelps and yips like a little fox in his arms. He makes her feel like a little girl

just the image is grinning vandalism in her head, ripping precious statues off their plinths, tossing fine crystal at a brick wall, stomping a Faberge egg under a combat boot.

She loves it.

Those things she never needed anyway.

His heat prods her clit and something rolls inside her

scary

something no amount of imagination can tame.

It’s knowing this is real and knowing she can back away and being sure she doesn’t want that.

“Daddy.”

“God, you feel incredible.” His voice is almost a snarl. She wants more of it. He’s about to say more when it falters a little. He swallows words she knows are coarse like granite.

“Please. Please, tell me-”

“You’re so wet.”

“Daddy-”

“Such a good little girl to get like this for me. Do you know how it feels to make someone as beautiful as you feel like this?” She does now.

When she kisses.

Squirms.

It’s so close.

It’s when she strains her hips like a wild animal at the sheets trying to grind herself off just with that friction and it’s always so close and always too faraway, always missing what she needs.

“Not working?” He has no right to sound so smug when she feels his pulse’s halting thud through a cock like a cucumber trapped under her.

She rides him.

He lets her do it, frees her hands so he can hold her closer, fingers sometimes tightening and relaxing on her hips. He lets her move fruitlessly, crush her weak trembling knees into the sofa cushion and try and try and the contact still isn’t enough. Not even when he immerses himself in her hair, lets it muffle the little murmurs that are only for her ears, rubs his smooth skin and hard bones like an animal against her neck.

“Pretty”

“little”

“girl”

“cute”

“sweet”

“so lovely”

every time it’s another fitful shiver through her pussy, it’s feeling texture she knows without really knowing work itself into knots inside her

he burns kisses behind her left ear

gentle bites on her neck

rolls his tongue along her collarbone

“Daddy! Dad. Daddy. It’s- god- I’m-” she’s craving more, digs her close-trimmed nails into his shoulders and pulls herself tight up against his chest. She loses herself in the size, in the way he covers her against the world.

The way his body isn’t a marble statue but still filled with softness and warmth and becomes a worthy canvas for her breasts to push and squeeze and paint too-dim expressionism inside her head. Her nipples are tight and spark electric through the dress.

It’s too thick.

She knows it was a mistake. His pants’ fabric is either too rough or not enough and her dress is too dense and it won’t matter because not feeling his skin thwarts her every time until he scrapes open-mouthed kisses up her throat and wraps his lips around her neck and sucks

hard

her arms almost drop off her shoulders

a bite brings pain and he licks it like a beast and sends her head sinking too heavy for her neck to hold

he feeds his voice to her ear

“I want you to come for me.”

“D-dad-”

“I want you to show me all the ways you were in my room when you’re not supposed to be. Alone in my bed. I want you to be a good girl.”

The words ball up in her head and flash like staring at the snow when the day has been a little warm and ice glares while the sun sinks down the horizon and the last rays skip so hot you’re sure it’s summer.

She wants to scream. It just catches in her throat because he’s taken her hips and twisted her around him, just the smallest pressure but it’s enough, driven down on his cock.

It’s his big hands biting into her hips.

It’s feeling like a puppy, some small creature safe in his big shadow.

It’s his voice.

“My pretty little girl.” It’s juicy and wet under her clit and everything melts in her center and a velvet light burns inside her. She pinches her thighs tight and slickness runs out of her and her knees shake and she wants to bury her face in his shoulder the way she’s seen so many times but he won’t let her do it and chars kiss after kiss after kiss into her chin and cheek and down her neck.

Her breathing is fast and hiccuping, wet fingers on glass.

Something shakes up and down inside of her and paints pinkish trails behind it.

The only way her eyes can move is up. They roll back in their sockets and the ceiling blurs at its edges and her voice is a chorus of a million years in the presence of her own despair and denial.

Pressure wrings Ariadne’s scream up and out of her throat, so bright and brittle it breaks into a shriek when he squeezes her clit just right against his cock.

She pours.

The walls sway like cheap theater sets coming down.

“I love my good little girl.” Another little movement frees an oily flood from inside her to soak into his pants’ fabric. It’s thick and gooey, droops between his fingers when he reaches between them just close enough to scoop up a few little strings.

She watches.

It’s her body.

A scent of fresh clean seawater and ripe fruit.

When he flares his nostrils and pulls in the smell like a hungry animal the sound and sight and the movement of breath make anarchic spirals down her spine.

When he slides his strong fingers between his lips and pulls off her slick like sweet cream she barely can keep her eyes open.

“You really are my sweet little girl.” Ariadne’s smile is a ripple of shaking lips.

“Daddy.” She watches.

“So sweet.” She watches the words take shape in the air like needlepoint. She cannot tear her eyes away from his lips.

He’s kissed her with these lips.

Just a moment ago.

When she wants it

like a dream

she wills it and her desires are made real.

She kisses him again. She’s licked away the juice from between her thighs before and it’s never tasted the way it does on his mouth. It’s never had that greasy fullness, never had that sticky-sweet burn on her tongue.

She’s pure syrup.

Her knees are meltwater and her spine sags. Her fingers flow over his cheeks and when she kisses him there’s a taffy-boned softness she’s only felt a few times in her life

and she knows all of these have belonged to him

huddled in his arms and feeling like she teetered on a balance between life and death with a hundred-something-degree fever

his hands feeling slippery with lotion soon to start burning cold-hot from the menthol on her skin but for those moments when time is suspended when he touches her

they run

far

fast

he’s just finished his endurance training with the SEALs for some role

he stands there magnificent in a pair of shorts and tee-shirt too tight for his strength-swollen body in the entryway and laughs off such a fine waste of taxpayer funds

there are silly words that should be hers

should be floated like a paper airplane on sweet perfume across the five or six feet between them

even his mom’s eyes are a little off

her smile is a mischievous quirk

“Don’t give all the ladies ideas. Maybe you should wear the burqa from that movie, too.”

He laughs.

Yeah, maybe.

Ariadne is fourteen and Jeanie snorts about her being able to keep the Goodwill bra department in business

don’t get too attached to a cup size, dear

Ariadne just hides her redfaced laughter behind the long hair that’s been a lot more useful for the acne making every glance at the mirror as fun as Prometheus watching the eagles circle

her muscles and bones throb from growth and her breasts are now G-cups and her refuge is The Black Parade and her words and distance running where she races far and fast away from a shadow she can’t quite slip

she still thinks it might happen every time she pulls on her shoes and the tee-shirt and shorts destined to grow another fifteen pounds of sweat beneath a withering sun the color of yellowed dead grass she crunches underfoot and stamps her shoes’ impression like sand

she’s already exhausted but it melts off her shoulders because her daddy stands in the entryway and his face is dark from the sun and he gives a roguish goofy look that belongs on a twentysomething

she knows how he could stand sometimes in the supermarket checkout with her, just testing, wondering, holding a copy of People with his face made Photoshopped idolatry that for him is more like iconoclasm because they always airbrush away what makes him more than just an empty canvas for women’s Sexiest Man Alive fantasies

once he bought one and Ariadne still feels the queasy jealous wanting to strangle the cute nineteen-year-old college girl cashier in an ugly rough-textured shirt she made look too enticing and her adorable underbite shyly hidden but not too much looking up at him under her lashes

the cashier giggled and bounced a little and then her dad’s arm dropped its salving weight around her shoulders and said, This is my little girl, Ari.

Ariadne didn’t get it then.

She knows it now.

How do you tell a girl with total gentleness you’re a look-but-don’t-touch proposition?

Ariadne wants that to have more meaning than just not wanting someone to notice the way the sun sits like studio lighting on his crags and glass-cutting jawline.

She wants there to be destiny in that.

He says he’s just going out for a run, does she want to come with him?

Sure. She just warmed up.

Four miles.

Sure.

Just a warm-up.

Even an old baggison in a shocking-white pantsuit reflective like a parachute pulling along her yappy little dog turns and follows his butt down the street.

She’s glad she’s just a little slower but he keeps changing the pace to meet her. Sun falls and she’s hobbling back from a stumble. Every muscle yowls.

He’s gallant. Swings a body that’s felt ugly and ungainly into his arms like she’s weightless grace and in that instant her shadow contracts into his and she doesn’t feel drowned out or obliterated but instead like everything has been put in the right order.

Her legs are long and slide on sweat around his forearm. His palm mashes the heat too close to take into her skin and she wouldn’t give it up for anything.

She’s close to his lips. Smells his breath sharp with exercise’s tang.

She remembers his eyes looking a little drowsy

it fills her with hopes she knows don’t belong to reality

there’s excitement in the deep sunset color shading his cheeks and forehead

“I’ll carry you upstairs, Ari. Don’t hurt yourself.” She’ll twist her ankle every afternoon if that’s what it takes. She wants to kiss him. She catches them in a long oval mirror bordered by thickly white-painted wood cut in scalloped patterns.

She’s a girl.

But she sees how Jeanie’s been describing her to friends

they are not baggisons. Jeanie is too young and vital for that and they’re rock-climbing twentysomethings and a beautiful thirtysomething Indian woman who looks a little too long at Ariadne when she glides into the airy dining room dominated by a giant banquet table that’s empty too many times and she’s pretty sure she doesn’t mind the eyes.

She thinks she sees it.

Blossoming.

Such a beautiful girl.

She’ll break hearts just getting off the bus.

The way her thighs have filled and her calves are soft with her legs dangling off his arm and her breasts are big and her face is like her mom’s

she’s getting pretty

her mouth is awkward and the foundations already have been lain for braces after dodging them with too many ever less optimistic forecasts from her orthodontist

she smiles and wants to kiss him. She gets his cheek and he tastes bittersweet of sweat.

Ariadne is being carried through her bedroom’s threshold. Everything comes as delusion. She lets herself live it the way she does with a palm clasped on the shower drowning out the moans she can’t quite swallow with all the novel feelings spilling through her after this.

She is older.

This is a bed made sacred by more than her newly-laundered gray sheets.

He tips her delicately on her belly. She has had a feed on other people’s stolen fantasies of this moment. Her feet are still wrapped in socks feeling wet and disgusting and heavy after the way her legs have channeled sweat down their collars. They brush his arm and he’s getting up

she listens for every step

it is waiting for a lover to be back with a blindfold

she wants a sharp intake of breath ripe with him when he pulls her wrists together and her arms behind her back but instead it’s a closet’s rumply sounds, his voice subdued, hey, mom, do you and dad still have that mentholated sadism lotion?

Well, I don’t know what it’s called.

Thanks.

The smell cuts her lungs.

This is going to suck.

She doesn’t care. Her brain goes fuzzy when she chances a look in her dresser’s mirror over her shoulder through hair deflated by sweat and what she wants most is to see naked skin and wonders if he’ll say something if she works her body in a way she doesn’t quite know how to do but it involves the fluid roll of hips and pouring through reality’s porous fabric when she peels off her shirt.

She wants to see her shoulders’ round caps and her hair scoop into the steep vee between them.

She wants to see him rear into a natural silver-screen frame.

She wants it to be the NC-17 version at least but not a pornographic slap in the face. She wants to know the touch, the kind of heat that turns the breath in your chest to dead atoms and pinches your nails in your palms until you’re sure they should be bleeding.

He does move into the glass. He even looks over at them in the mirror with a smile that isn’t his rehearsed red carpet signature, the one that could launch a thousand ships easy and if just invading a country was enough to get him into bed the world would be an even more violent place.

Except it looks fake to her because it’s the same performance every time. This is spontaneous and a little sardonic.

“Are you ready?” There’s an older-brother edge in it.

“This is gonna hurt, isn’t it?”

“Well, you know, pain is improving. I read that somewhere.” It isn’t fair. Isn’t fair.

She kicks a little at him, just a tease. He snatches at her socks. She dodges every time ‘til his huge fingers bite into an ankle, peel off the waterlogged pennant by the toes and then repeat the process with the other.

They make a wet slapping sound on the floor. His fingers make her wet someplace else. It already aches that special and impossible way that promises a place inside her is destined to stay hollow and unadorned like a perfect smile with one chipped tooth.

No matter what else happens

it isn’t fair.

At other times there’s a fiberglass itch under her skin when she bemoans it and stares at her mirror and asks herself what her problem is, why can’t she just fix this, why

and bleeds fever because the answer presents itself every time

it’s his voice teasing with easy intimacy

it’s promises of agony she wants

it’s his fingers on her back urging her down on her belly

it’s his hands big and made slimy with the lotion he’s working into her muscle

it’s pain

closeness

fingers pushing into her body, rising by instinct and momentum just a little too high and not seeming to notice.

She notices.

Feels the heat smear her panties because he needs to nudge her thighs apart just a bit.

She has a reason to bury her face in the pillow. To feel and see the impossible flooding dark places behind her eyes starting to strobe red and white.

His massages are

well

he’s a method actor and even practiced that for some twisted role as a masseur who’s coerced into becoming a rich woman’s gigolo against his will in a movie she was forbidden to see

she moans, long and deep and rising to a shrill whine in her chest because it does hurt, both the way he hears and the way she really means it. She pours out her breath and lets her body convulse and kicks her free leg and scratches deep fleeting furrows in the bedding.

In the shower an hour after that when he’s left her to rest a little after torturing her half-to-death

she wants to laugh in his face when he says it and just shakes her head and gives him a studied sweetness

it feels really good

just hurts

she remembers the way she pinches her bottom lip between imperfect teeth and feels her pulse in her nose and looks up at him turning

he doesn’t close her door

the lotion sets her body on fire and it’s only the second most urgent heat and she can’t get up, can’t wash her hands and get some stingy smudges off her fingers, can’t do anything but just lie there with her body coming apart at the seams because she can’t

can’t

can’t

even indulging her hips with shallow little pushes at the mattress isn’t enough.

She drives her heels into the shower’s porcelain still clinging to a kiss of cold before the water really heats it. She floats in steam. It hurts. The water feels like a flurry of razors finer than rose petals flaying her legs and she still can’t help herself.

The water is soft on her skin and inside her it’s different. Slippery. It pulses out over her fingers and all she feels is the need to twist this second into another moment.

She wants his hand there. In the shower she sees herself being bold enough to pluck that lotion out of his hands and tell him she needs a massage somewhere else.

Now she sits on his lap.

Now he wraps her in his scent and his eyes look open and honest and shadowed with something a lot sweeter than ambivalence.

“Daddy.” Ariadne knows how to roll her hips. And does it. It makes her feel like she’ll never stop gushing over him. It feels like it lathers between them, turning lighter and burning with his reflected heat. Hers. Theirs.

“You- you’re driving me crazy, doing that.”

“Uh-huh.” Her clit sparks on that thick swollen thing’s borders.

“You’re-”

“Touch me. Please. Please touch me.”

He does.

He’s rough. Not by romance novel convention but the way he feels his way over her body. The way he already knows how his hands on her skin turn her eyes to glass. She loves when he bundles her wrists between one of his hands and lifts them over her head.

She stretches. Her smile follows the movement. She’s conscious of every muscle in her lean arms. Aware of how his eyes eat the shape of her neck.

His mouth burns her skin. He eats the moans pinching her eyes closed. He licks, sucks, tastes and savors every inch. His chin radiates heat, casts it so close to her breasts she can’t stand not being able to guide his lips.

“That’s not fair!”

“I know.”

“H-hey-”

“I love the way it makes you sound.” She knows he can see almost everything. His lips sink just for a second into the marshmallowy softness.

“Daddy-”

Dips another kiss onto her wide cleavage.

“Dad. Daddy.” His tongue feels like a wet paintbrush’s tip stippling her breasts, just a few little points of dampness. Never enough.

“Yes, honey?” She loves it.

Loves the way it’s not an act for her.

“I- I-” this is serious.

She’s happy. There’s only happiness there. She doesn’t know until it happens because she can’t know

she doesn’t know if something will lurch inside her and a fear will be made real and she’ll just ask him to stop, say something out of all the easy cliches that are supposed to guide life on rails and never touch the flesh, this is wrong, we shouldn’t do this, but

why?

There is no reason someone else hasn’t built for doubts she doesn’t have.

“Please.” She needs to touch. Instead she keeps her arms over her head and leans back into the sofa cushions when he has to let go. His kisses trace out fragile places ripe with sensitive feeling. Ribs. Her sides. Her belly. A hip. His lips push, tease warmth into skin she’s sure is already about to melt.

He hears only her. Ariadne’s voice is the guide and every sigh and shivering gulp of breath and every time her knee jolts and her words get slurred and lost he moves lower. Lower.

“Dad.” She wants to touch. She’s ravenous for the way she already knows his neck feels banded with muscle.

She needs to twist her hands through his hair.

She needs to let her fingers catch on his skin and skirt his ears and pull a little at his cheeks.

She doesn’t.

She looks.

Expecting her not to stare down at him with eyes about to dry out without a blink is insanity a lot worse than anything a snug sweater is going to fix.

And he looks back up at her under his lids and strong brows. She knows beauty doesn’t only belong to women but this is the moment that tells her it’s true. His chin is too close to something sweet when he kisses her navel.

“Daddy.”

“I want to kiss you.” Ariadne can’t help weighing the words. She doesn’t know if she’s always wanted to hear it rough and commanding, God, I’m gonna eat your pussy. If it’s just supposed to happen.

“Please. I want- I want to see.” His hands shove her skirt up her thighs without waiting. There’s no pageantry now. She can see the way he wants to linger, wants to stretch every moment until it lasts forever, but they both know instead they careen together in car-crash collision, a sparkling entropy where one dead second kicks the next to life and they follow the arc of the inevitable.

The skirt bunches. He can’t wait to take off her dress. Can’t wait to unfasten and unzip and she doesn’t care anyway. She doesn’t complain. It’s pinned nicely under her and she bows her body to see herself and him in the same wedge of life.

His heat is there.

He looks up and she’s glad her pussy’s polished bare. She loves the look. Hates the hair. The lips are nicely smooth too and there’s nothing but a peachy canvas for kisses he slants on her.

“Daddy. Daddy.” He’s not even ordering her to keep her hands up. She just doesn’t want to break this moment off its natural path and folds them fingers-on-wrists around the back of her neck.

He rolls his thumbs down her inner thighs, makes little dimples in the skin so soft against his she’s sure it can’t be human. His big fingers make a mockery of size and proportion. She loves seeing them round her leg and disappear under her, graze where her leg becomes her ass’ bubble.

“Daddy.”

He braces her on the sofa like he means to maul her.

Everything tenses.

He looks up

his smile cracks the earth’s axis

his kiss is a bright spark in a dark room.

“Daddy.” It’s just a little peck at her mound. He doesn’t even touch her yet. She still feels like she’s been teasing herself for three hours when she barely can stand it anymore, when any reprieve is too long and more than a few seconds will force her to roll on her face and scream into the pillow with her right hand wedged between her thighs.

It’s a stringy red web constricting her chest.

It’s a yelp she doesn’t need to hold back.

“That feels so good.” She hears her voice in the air like a twisting feather.

“I’m glad. You’re such a beautiful girl.” It feels like awe, as if every time he sees her is the first.

His kisses become little islands of sensation down the curve of her mound.

He’s moving faster. Not little pecks. He presses his lips tight and wet against her and finally reaches her clit.

“Oh. God. Oh. God.” He lets it linger there. Pushes a firmer kiss on her for just a second. “Oh. God. God. God.” Her belly tightens; her shoulders sink. His lips are wrapped around her clit and cradling it like a pearl and this time the word’s not a cringe of cliche.

It’s how it feels.

It’s too hard when he sucks a little, prods it with his tongue, and before it’s too much he’s shrinking away.

She wants it to be too much. She decides this the second she maybe just wants a second one of him when he drags his tongue over her lips, squeezes her thighs even harder.

He pulls her apart.

Every kiss drips with her juices. He’s getting messier and wetter. She loves it. This is what it’s supposed to be.

This instant above every other instant except the one that will follow. This is what his touch is supposed to be, hands kneading skin made so sensitive it aches like a sharp urgent bruise and his tongue swiped up her pussy’s lips.

He peels her body, dips inside of her.

She hears the sound. It’s wet, syrupy.

She tastes it in the air.

It’s potent. Sweeter than even the room’s weird cotton candy smells. He licks, stripes, strokes, darts and brushes and rolls his tongue faster and faster, harder, sharper, surer, until he’s dragging it up the slippery place between the lips.

It’s watery inside her, hot and bubbling. It turns white and tension pinches her muscles and threatens to slam her legs closed but instead he swings them over his shoulders.

“Daddy. Oh. Oh, god.” Ariadne’s voice is meaningless babble. She can’t help herself from saying it anyway.

“You taste so good.” She wants to watch. Wants to see everything. Instead she smudges sweat’s first little mist over his back and hooks her ankles together between his shoulder blades. She pulls. Can’t help herself and he doesn’t want her to. He’ll sometimes gulp breath filled with her, lick the spit and her body off his chin, bury himself deeper with words that come deep and hot in his chest.

“Sweet.”

“Little.”

“Girl.”

He eats. Spreads her with his fingers. The sound is

god

her brain falls on that word

silly

it feels good

naughty

naughty is a word you can get your tongue around

naughty is a word that’s ten thousand pounds massaging you into limestone

naughty is a word that belongs on his lips

sticky and dripping

peeling her open and swiping his tongue quicker and quicker around her clit and only sometimes after a few strokes touching it to her and then just as soon depriving her of more.

But the touches get longer. Her ribs feel like they’re about to buckle and her pussy clenches on nothing because nothing but his body could be deep enough.

She’s almost out of her head listening to the little whines and gasps she pours into the air.

“Daddy. God. I’m-”

“I want you.”

“Da-.” She can’t get the word out before it crumples in her throat and she swallows it.

He’s slipping just a finger inside of her. It feels like two of hers. It’s too much. Not enough. He reaches a shallow place in her body and curls and twists. She feels how she bites back against him. “A-a-ah- I’m gonna- I’m- dad- I’m- god- I’m gonna- gonna- gonna.”

She does.

Everything’s been gelling there in her belly and then instead of an explosion it’s a fantastic and unbelievable slow-motion crawl. Inch by inch in a place outside of time Ariadne feels her whole body come alive

her fingertips pinch her skin

her toes curl

her ankles and wrists twist

her knees shake, elbows bend, spine bows, neck falls, jaw sinks open and tongue presses up against her teeth in a scream that never comes

white falls down her brain and red and pink feelings pinball electric in her joints

she squeezes

her pussy sucks at his finger and it reaches deeper inside

she hears a surprised sound half-trapped between her legs. All he does is keep licking, kissing, gathers his mouth around her clit and kinks her body tight with a long suction before she just collapses shaking back on the cushions.

Her legs slacken and he pushes them gently off his shoulders, lowers them down to the floor.

“Ari.”

“C-call me Ariadne. Please.”

“Honey.” His hands tell her no sorcery has broken. They feel like candy turned to sugary stains on your fingers when you eat yourself sick. He doesn’t smear it on her skin. Every touch just dabbles a little on her because he’s running with it.

They soothe aches that aren’t there on her thighs. He curls his fingers away when he reaches up to cup her cheeks and there’s still the scent so powerful she’s sure this is what will blank out her head.

She lunges to kiss him. It’s eager. She eats her body on his mouth.

She’s sweet.

She is.

She feels like an animal lapping her juice off the corner of his mouth, sucks it from his chin.

“Daddy, I- I really- I wanna go.”

“Yeah. I guess the dance is over.” She’s scared.

She is.

“I want to go up north with you again. I mean- right now.”

She wants him to drag her back home or to a hotel but

she gets it.

Ariadne just gives him a shaky little nod.

He just pockets her pantyhose, helps her back into her heels with fairy tale grace, first one, and then the other.

Her feet feel almost glassy-smooth for all her running when he wraps his big warm hands around them.

Squeezes.

She wants to pass out there.

Instead her legs are too light and she’s sure she bounces on rubber knees when he leads her out of the room.

“W-wait! Hey! You- you still have- but your appointment.” Karen’s sitting there in a puddle of

well

it isn’t disappointment.

Her skirt is hiked up over her hips and her fingers drip slick between her pussy’s lips. There’s the poisonous sweet smell of lust in the air.

“That was still awesome.” She says it to herself because there’s no one else to hear.

Too bad. Even if she was dumb enough to tell anyone about this, no one would believe her.

There is no spell to break.

Ariadne’s sat there in the kitchen wearing her dress and watching her dad pack away the groceries. It’s a simple enough place. Rustic without being self-conscious about naked wood and cozy extravagances. There’s a big white circular family table and six wooden chairs and blue linoleum tiles that burn strangely under the fluorescent lights in the dark. They always have a drowsy coldness that feels like leaving.

He’s still wearing his suit. They didn’t even stop for toothbrushes, for anything until they hit Saint Ignace and he just had to take his chance at this anonymous sketchy looking grocery store with two checkout lanes, scuffed streaky gray tile, and overpriced everything.

At least they always have simple clothes here. The groceries feel like idiocy.

She feels the car’s dremel-tool buzz behind her knees. She’s aware of their voices. The way she pulls his hand on her thigh and only lets it off when she starts to sink into a weird drowsy place hypnotized by the forlorn green pines and malachite forests looking ancient and no older than her granddad holding vigil over a great empty freeway.

The bridge is a blue and green blur. Before it’s always scared her because he can’t help himself from gawking over the edge and she always can see them plummeting through braided metal cables thicker than a man’s wrist, a shrill screech of iron giving, the comic twang of snapping steel.

Now his eyes only are for her and he drives with a sure level duty. His hand never leaves her knee and the second they’re off its last metal-grated span she’s dragging his fingers into her dress.

The turnoff to the property is made sharp. The tires crackle a little on white pebbles, chew the gravel up a deep ravine cut into a tall hill furred thick with scraggly grasses this time of year.

She helps him with the four paper grocery sacks.

She spent the time in the store in a weightless daze. Whatever they bought is as much a mystery to her as the shelves.

She drifts behind him.

Wonders

is she

she must look mussed and her hair’s probably a disaster and they

she sees them in the dirty automatic door’s half-realized reflection

they look tired

beautifully tousled

like an exhausted couple on vacation

newlyweds, maybe

she smiles

she still smiles and looks at his broad shoulders, the way they look wider than the bridge’s giant pillars anchoring the horizon when you cross.

The movements have no drama behind them.

They sound banal.

He moves fast.

Not too fast.

She wishes she had wardrobe and makeup, had someone making her perfect, and she doesn’t really care at all when he turns and gives her smile.

“I love you.” There are ten trillion words circulating in her head before the time comes to speak. Then there are only these.

“I love you, too.”

There is movement.

Fumbling, hungry, urgent. It’s like swimming. It’s following a wisdom in the bones the way they collapse together on the stiff white bedspread in the Victorian room. It swallows the sun cut into fragmentary rays over a lake that dyes the world shades of sweet black cherry juice and ripe red blood.

There is the wonderment when her glasses catch magic green fire that lasts only long enough to be missed most days. They see it.

Look up by reflex.

They lie together in the long shadows. She kisses him, craves his lips. She wants light.

She hungers for sunset.

The room is closed-in and they’re not running the air-conditioning when the nights slide dark and cool. Crickets and katydids invade the dying light with desperate songs of lust and longing. Other windows are open.

She hears the pines sigh.

She rolls on her back and traps his large fingers under a shoulder. She pulls. He follows.

She wants his name.

Knows his name.

There’s another name that’s right, that’s better.

“Daddy.” The feelings are all twisted up inside her. Thoughts are all disarrayed.

Cattywampus.

She wants to laugh at the word and nothing feels like it could be absurd right now.

“Daddy, I’m-”

“Don’t worry.” She doesn’t know what it’s supposed to mean.

Don’t worry about what?

Everything?

Forever?

“I love you. I,” she’s afraid dams will give, all the fears will erupt like a guileless Pandora playing with a wooden box, just too curious, too faithless, if only she’d known what to do when fate was made to trap her and blame her for the part she was made of clay to play.

If she’d known what lay in the future she could have built the world’s hope for everyone else.

“Tell me.” Except he’s folding her body feeling small and fine and fragile against his chest, thick arms a heat that fosters every joy she’s ever really known.

“I’m, um, this is- my first. Um, anything. I-”

“O-oh.” There’s no disappointment.

She thinks she could follow the slow path his swallow takes down his throat with a drop of pitch.

“We don’t have to-”

“I want- um, I’m... Not on anything.”

“I took care of that a long time ago.” His voice is firm.

There’s still a little laugh in it.

She feels her heart crescendo.

He’s never wanted another

well

her.

Another love made from his own.

It’s not that she thinks this ever could happen with anyone else.

It isn’t that.

“Really?”

“I- you’re the specialest person in my life, Ariadne. I’ve been trying to understand what that meant for so long.” She feels as much as hears his voice. Just like hers, it isn’t willfully quiet. It just belongs to the private moment they share. “It was really scary. We’re- I know I haven’t been there-”

“We don’t have to-”

“I just mean that I- I’m always worried there’s something wrong and broken inside me.”

“I don’t care.”

“I was going to go my whole life just taking for granted this is something that- that belonged to dreams and thoughts you’re not supposed to have.”

“I was scared.” His mouth burns through her hair on the top of her head.

“Are you still scared?”

“Kind of.”

“We can stop any time you want-”

“I really didn’t say that.” He relaxes his arms just enough to let her lean back and raise her face to his. To reach for his lips. She kisses him. Slow. Hungry. There’s an odd lightheaded feeling.

More than just kissing him earlier. That will never become pedestrian. She never will think of it as just a kiss.

It’s delirium.

But something is making her blood run thin and dig deep in her shins.

“I need you.” The word is desperation. She knows it. She’s sure of it. If he doesn’t touch her she’ll die when fever slashes down through her head.

“I need you, too. I love you. I’ve really- I just knew.”

“Yes.” The words are confused. The ideas aren’t. He pulls her close and everything fits together by nature.

She’s expecting heat and frenzy but this is the wrong idea. It’s a silly and senseless one. Instead it’s delicacy and progression, gingerly picking through the moments the way she tried to learn the piano and never could reason out. She feels none of the thunder her dad incubates inside him.

None of what animates Howard.

Instead she lies on the floor and stares up at him, wonderment in her eyes. There is magic and she cradles a prayer in her heart and it is to step close to him.

In something.

Anything.

To pass through the veil that lies between them, that will make her not just his daughter, not just his little girl, but someone he wants to hold in his lap longer than the word will allow. She wants to feel the closeness thickening in the air around her dad and the girlfriends she sees with him, the way it excludes anyone not in that silk-lined bubble.

She sees the way the beautiful women

and they are all beautiful

not all caricature starlets or even full-bore Stars wrapped in silver but often just women so beautiful she’s dumbfounded when she sees them.

The kinds of smiles that turn an interstate to a parking lot.

The shapes and poise that make the feelings inside her turn hot and a color like cheap brass.

She knows they touch him.

He touches them.

She pulls at a smoothie or thuds a straw around in a malted or just looks and for a second she doesn’t exist at all to them against saturated California light.

They don’t ignore her. But for those moments she can’t belong.

She doesn’t become a writer for him.

But her writing does pull them close the way she thinks all art inevitably does artists. She hears the quirk of a mutual language and understands there’s a layer in the world that isn’t even hidden but just needs to be held in your hands and chewed in your mouth and swallowed and its scent sucked like the sweetness off a newborn she has no desire to hold in her hands and at her breast.

She holds no fear in her heart.

She just knows what she wants.

He kneels in front of the sun and his shadow warms her. He protects her from the heat’s last wavy strands.

He holds up their hands together because her sinews already melt and droop more and more every time they kiss, a quick graze, a delirious little quirk in her lips, a smile looking shy and standing on the boundary between past and future, the right shapes but not perfectly set yet, full and watered.

He crushes his mouth to hers and it’s the feeling of a guitar pick on a string.

Something pinches tight in her.

A strum.

A squeeze.

A hard beat between her thighs turns flat and strangled because he isn’t there.

“I feel really weird.” It’s a breathless flighty feeling in her head and chest. It’s too light and she doesn’t want the ballast back. “Good weird. Wonderful weird.”

She smiles again and he’s pulling her close.

“Please, daddy.”

“You’re sure?” Metal shakes in how he asks it.

He sounds like he wants to be gallant.

And doesn’t want to hear one of those two possible answers.

Can’t stand the thought of that moment breaking.

Ariadne’s smile turns a little crazy. Thoughts pull at her from everywhere.

The missing pieces in a jigsaw of ideas and ideals and desires and designs just resolve. There is no substitute for the doing and the feeling.

You cannot tell yourself what it means to fall in love.

The way there is no subtraction from the self. The way your heart would splinter to pieces if your desperate vanity weren’t fulfilled.

She’s spent her whole life dodging other people’s desires.

Now if she isn’t wanted she will die.

She wants him.

Before she thought the worst thing in the world was someone turning their eyes away at what you want.

Now it’s not having his.

She has certainty in her heart.

“I’m sure.”

His hands ratify some of the ink she has spilled as if by prophecy.

They struggle a little with her dress’ clasp.

She still wonders.

In all the fantasies there are rough sure hands. The florid searching prose makes her wonder if she’ll ever really know the truth. The porno she’s seen is ugly and she knows it’s wrong the second she lets it hit her eyes.

She doesn’t like the cold televisual distance and the way human flesh becomes object, pieces exiled from a whole, no longer beads and buds and an entire garden of soft fragile metaphors but the celebration of rough hands and rough voices and violent ideas men are all the same and have only the one thought on their minds

that romance dies in a cruel-looking man’s arms

innocence is slain by the looking

by the way she lies there like the body of her own dreams

she is not receptive but submissive

she does not invite and embrace but endures

even the man’s cock looks angry and turns her heart into an icicle

it is large, as if by magic, all large, all ruddy and stripped of their hair not to make them smooth but angular and dangerous, a weapon a man holds even when he is unarmed to gash out a girl’s heart from between her thighs.

His voice gets hard.

She wonders.

There’s fear. She hates herself just for a second for the sacrilege like reading a book out of order, learning something without the context to know what it means, maybe just staining what should be natural and pure.

The zipper quiets her head.

“Daddy.”

“You’re so beautiful.” He doesn’t pull and tear and there isn’t a bought-and-sold act of violation. Instead he runs his palms down her shoulders and arms and asks, asks again with his eyes, big and vulnerable.

She hopes there aren’t the same fears in his head.

She’s afraid she’ll just be another beautiful body.

“Daddy?”

“Will you help me?” All he needs to do is pull and the fabric she feels loosen off her back and swell in front of her chest will disappear and he will see everything.

It will fall from her body and all the distance will fall with it.

“What?”

“Take it off you.” Their hands move together. It isn’t just tugged and let to fall. They guide it, slowly, morsel by morsel. They take in everything together. She’s never seen her body like this. Never seen it changed by the closeness of another person.

The air is made cool by the growing night and she feels his shirt too much when he pulls her body up against his. Her nipples scrape on the fabric. His shirts always have felt soft and now they’re like sandpaper.

She pulls at him.

Plucks at buttons.

She’s the rough one with crude hands.

She’s the one whose breathing is a rasp in the air and whose face is twisted with the pitiless urge in her marrow. She’s the one who might use words like fuck and cock and pussy and who wants every piece of him in her.

It isn’t something is different.

She just is willing to let it come.

“I need you.” She’s still wearing her glasses. It’s mostly because she forgot they were there at all. She nips at his neck, suckles up his throat, seeks out all the shapes she’s never been allowed to know the way she deserves.

Laughter sparkles in front of her eyes when she licks his neck.

His gasp melts steel when she bites.

“G-god!” He isn’t pure patience. Not when he can run his palms down her shoulder blades, taste her back’s soft skin. He redeems the growth marks, makes them a part of her instead of something to be cast off.

His buttons come undone.

One after the other.

Too slow.

She wants to pull. Wants to rip open his shirt in a way that belongs to the movies and she thinks it’s why she doesn’t. How many girls have wanted to shred open his shirt like some tailored breakaway? She follows behind the buttons with her lips.

There’s still barely any hair on his chest.

“Ariadne.” He feels her smile when she pushes her cheek right up against his heart. His chest is wide, deep, rumbles with his voice’s dark echo.

His nipples are puckered and sensitive to a pinch.

“W-whoa!”

“Don’t you like it? I love playing with mine.” She loves the way his sinews stiffen when she coos the words and they float up to his ears. “I touch myself all the time in your bed. I’m always hoping you’ll feel the wet spot.

“I’m always hoping you’ll want to keep it.” She’s so close to an answer to those unanswerables tenting his pants. She sees it doesn’t just jut at the crotch. It’s big enough it’s straining down his left leg.

The silhouette is obscene.

She’s sure she can smell it when she drags in a long breath. She pushes her face up against his chest and shucks his shirt unceremoniously off his shoulders.

She is a hypocrite and this does not bother either of them.

She moves like an animal in the cold dark woods. She listens to her skin brush his, her hair rustling like soft young leaves against a shaggy wolf’s fur.

She and her dad have been out in the woods stumbling through the dark and studiously not caring about the sinister gleam of compound eyes under silty light leaking through broken pieces of a fragrant sky.

And they see it.

Wolves and dogs look alike in photographs the same way all trees look the same and you cannot tell the difference between the spirits of a maple and a jacaranda.

But they are different when you see the movement and the size, the paws crunching little saplings.

Their hearts soar.

The wolf’s eyes are mirrored opals.

Lips curl around fangs and then the beast wheels, vanishes.

They will never see a wolf again.

She bites.

Wounds.

And soothes.

Her thumbs tug at his waistband and she jerks open his belt with fingers that feel like she’s been outside in the snow for hours.

“Ariadne-”

“I want- I want to see.”

“Let me-”

“I wanna see, daddy.” They fall back together. She ends up with her face in his tummy, her naked chest against a hard jut. With his voice in her ears, a dark sincere animal growl.

It’s the Doppler effect rattle of sound coming from the woods when the wolf retreats.

It’s a warning and a promise.

“Ariadne-”

“I wanna see.”

“God. God-”

“You want me to be a good girl, right, daddy?” Every time she says it insanity flashes in his eyes.

Mirrored opals.

Her breasts are big.

Heavy.

She’s watched the way they fall in front of her when she sees herself in the mirror with back arched and hips rising.

They overflow out of her hands.

His fingertips are blunt and big on her back.

She wants to steer them with her hair flowing down her left shoulder to her breasts.

Are they tits?

Are they made to be squeezed and pulled and bitten or are they there to sit gracefully in front of her like she’s asleep?

He touches.

He doesn’t choose for her but lets her know all the same.

She wants to be held.

She loves the way it’s a ghost of a touch through her hair and tickles her. He finds their fullness and cups them in his hands. Big as they are, they spill out, too much to hold if he has another two to help.

She doesn’t want another two even if they only belong by magic to another Henry Carter.

“Daddy.”

“I’ve seen this in my head too many times. You were driving me crazy in that swimsuit.”

“I’ll be sure to wear it more, then.” She promises. Teases.

He doesn’t pinch and pull.

His thumbs skirt her nipples, roll across areolae that feel like ironed silk.

Just that collapses her back and shoulders and pulls a whimper out of her mouth.

“Dad. Dad. More. Please. Touch- touch them.” The button fly and zipper come open without much pageantry.

She sees his body really is iron strength when his hips lift off the bed without disturbing much else and she can pull. His underwear comes with his pants. It frees everything. A scent she thinks must be animal.

She recognizes the sweat.

But not all of it.

There’s a close musk and a flash of light and shadow. It looks like a jackknife. Once it’s no longer trapped it springs high.

He’s confident

strangely shy in the look he gives her.

“It’s...” Fucking gigantic is the amateur opinion. The truth is, she doesn’t find any anchor in the faraway fetishistic daddy-daughter lust fantasy.

His body is closer than anything but the past in her skin.

There’s a faint tang of his sweat in the air and heat lofts off his body and there is only honesty in front of her.

There is nothing veiled in his eyes.

When she springs out and kisses it she doesn’t surprise herself the way it feels like it shocks him with legs still wrapped in his pants.

She wants them away.

Doesn’t have the patience.

“Ariadne, oh, god.” The first kiss there tells her it’s silky and full of blood heat and gives off a hard wash of something salty and rich.

He doesn’t have hair there, either. Everything is smooth, polished.

“Manscaping, daddy?” She’s pure brat and needs to feel the goofy smile on his face. “Really?”

“Do you want to hear all about the speedo I had to wear-”

“I want to see it eventually. Right now, um, something less indecent.” She kisses it again. This time she winds her hands around it.

She’s been expecting melodrama. Timid shivers in her hands.

It’s flesh and the movement is no different than reaching out to his cheeks.

It’s the touch that brings the shivers.

She’s holding his cock in her hands.

Hands, the plural, even stacked one atop the other there’s still more cresting fingers she feels farther apart from each other than should be realistic. The skin is velvet softness layered on hot metal.

She’s not expecting the way it yields and dimples and throbs back at her, the way there’s a limit and when she hits it his voice takes on serrated edges just for a second.

“Wow. It’s- it’s really beautiful.” It’s not an ugly violent thing at all in her hands.

She can feel his pulse through a huge thumping vein wound over the back.

It feels like she’s found some animal lever. She can steer him with the smallest little pull and squeeze.

“Daddy. Oh. Oh, god, I, it’s really big.” Something panics a little.

Just a bit.

In the world inside her head whenever this moment comes everything follows mellifluous words on a page and there is no fear, the pain is delicious and just enough to hone the inevitable bliss to a needle’s point pushing even deeper for it. And then she will blossom and

and it’s humongous. The domed head is bare and there’s just the smallest bead of something smelling bitter welling in the slit.

She kisses it again. And again. Drags wet lips over the tip, down its side, tastes salt and teases her tongue along its beveled edge.

“A-ah, honey.” His hands find her cheeks, her hair, warm her chin. She’s caught in the dead sunlight and in the mirror in front of a low writing desk against the other wall she thinks she looks like a mermaid. Sweat has crumpled her hair and made it moist and sheeny.

“I’m beautiful.” She sees herself. More than a silhouette.

“You are, honey. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.” Her heart tattoos itself with her ribs. Her breathing is too fast.

Just for a second.

She knows what she’s touching.

Knows enough to know this is what she wants.

Not exactly how she wants it right now.

“You’re so sweet-”

“It’s true. I love how you’re touching me. How you’re going so slow-”

“I want to try.”

“What?”

“I want”

Ariadne’s breath is suspended for a second without form like a cloud waiting for the wind to give it life.

How do you ask someone to change your life? Do you beg for someone to pull you through that threshold into another world? Are all the received images right and it’s avid lips and needy whines and hungry bodies lying there in submission?

Do you command it? Do you feel your way toward being the whore every man is supposed to want in his arms?

“I want to make love with you.” But she doesn’t think so. “You- can you go gently?”

“I don’t want it any other way. You’re so sweet. I want to be sweet with you. I want to,” his laughter is halting and ironical, “take it slow.”

Depending on how you want to see it, she doesn’t say, it’s either been lightning fast or a whole lifetime.

This is where all the easy formulations end. Nothing tells you how to coax your lover up without just sprawling on your back and mewling, Please!

She kisses.

Rises up over his body. Lets his cock bump up against her breasts

hears the gasp

“You like these, huh, daddy?”

“I- I hope you’re not joking-”

She wraps him tight.

Pushes.

“A-ah-”

“Is it just breasts?”

“It’s all of you.” Another squeeze. Another swallowed breath. “Oh.”

“It’s always breasts.”

“You forgot your legs.” It’s a little laugh. “Your hips. The way you smile just like that from that angle.” The words turn that steaming dark-eyed come-hither she’s been rehearsing for five years through the wringer.

She’s smiling.

Shaky.

“I love the way I know it’s your shoulders. I can see your shape from a mile away, Ariadne. In a crowd. The way you hold your head, the way only you wear your hair that way, the way when I see your face you’re always thinking.” He pulls himself up without a struggle.

Wriggles and finally frees himself from the pants. Flicks off his socks.

That matters.

Somehow.

It’s naked skin and only their skin in the shrinking light. Shadows fill their bodies with ink.

He winds her in his arms.

She falls and he does with her, controls it, doesn’t just throw himself on top of her.

Kisses her.

His words aren’t cruel. There are no cold eyes and judgment in how he looks at her.

He supports himself on his knees and elbows, frees his hands to push up through her hair, to cradle her cheeks in his palms.

“Ariadne.” She feels it. His body’s size, the hardness inside muscles’ soft borders, the raspy edges from his calluses and little nicks and imperfections from badly-healed scars.

She knows they glow white even when he darkens.

His cock against her thigh.

It’s not a bruising weapon but it jolts, prods.

“Daddy-”

he kisses her

“Daddy-”

again

again

harder, crushes his mouth on hers, pulls a hand away to stroke up her knee toward the apex of her thighs.

This isn’t a tease.

It’s not a feint

it’s his fingers splitting her apart, easing in one

she’s so slick even he feels like it shocks him how fast one disappears up to the second knuckle. It’s not big enough.

Bearing down on him isn’t even enough to relieve a gnawing itch inside of her.

She rocks with a swoony feeling and seesaws on his hand. He punctuates every little twitch with a kiss, every long push and curl with his tongue’s tease at hers.

She feels the second finger.

“Daddy, I-” it’s impatience, of course it’s impatience, it’s being told to wait for ice cream to thaw a little, cake to cool, his flight to taxi instead of just racing out to greet it on the hot tarmac. “Please.”

“I have to or it’ll really hurt.”

She doesn’t care.

In the fantasies she shouldn’t care.

There should be the perfect catechism. She will break and he will remake her in the image of the woman she wants to be for him.

His fingers feel almost too thick.

A third pinches. This is the first time she’s ever felt that little flicker of insecurity, wondering if her body even is made for something she’s sure is her birthright.

“Daddy. It feels- it feels really weird.”

“Does it hurt?”

“K-kinda? But...” Pain isn’t supposed to have ambivalence behind it. But the more he works in the third finger, the more her knees shake, the tighter her toes curl. Breath catches in her chest, hooked on something and dangling half-dead when he slides in the third totally alongside the others and she feels herself reflected in his skin.

She writhes on his fingers, shoves her hips down into the mattress springs with a little creak, spreads her thighs and tries to pull him deeper.

“It- it feels so good. It feels really, really good.”

“Really?”

“So good.”

“My good girl.” His voice, those words, just good, that word alone is a hot lick at her pussy. It feels like he’s trying to juice her when he twists his fingers a little. They reach something under her clit and make it feel like they’re touching the root, stroking it to insanity from underneath and inside and so much stronger and so much different from just touching the surface.

Her slick feels like oil and water on his knuckles.

“I- I want to,” he’s peeling her wider and wider. She feels something loosen. A little sting. “Daddy, I can’t wait. Please. Please.” The recumbent virgin usually doesn’t need to beg the sinewy hard rogue with sure smiles and arrogant certainties to live a little, let’s not be too careful.

“We’ll see.” His fingers pump.

Slowly at first and finally faster and faster. Her knees stiffen, unravel, straighten and slacken ten times a second, vibrating like a piano string.

Orgasm whites out her eyes.

It comes suddenly and gracelessly and just clobbers her around the head.

No serenity comes with it.

When it leaves all there is in its place is obsession. It’s like listening to static through a wall, distracting, fills her with the simpleminded need to know what it means.

“Now. Now. Now.”

“You don’t trust me-”

“Now now now now now. Please. Please. Please.” He can’t refuse when she’s almost yelping, when her voice is a half-melted plea.

He won’t refuse that.

He won’t.

His cock is closer now.

“Okay. Just- tell me if you want me to slow down, honey.” Calling her that isn’t going to put the brakes to anything.

“Okay.” Her voice makes her sound like she’s drunk.

It’s better than that.

His fingers slide out with a thoroughly lurid sound.

She wants to see.

Instead he’s painting his cock with her juices.

It nestles up against her.

This is real.

“Daddy?”

“I love you.”

This is scary.

The kind of frightening that’s a second before you put the last period to a sentence in your favorite paragraph. It’s dreading this will be an end, the bottom of a valley that will entomb you instead of a slope to summit.

“I love you, Ariadne. I love you.” His mouth is firm and gentle on hers. She kisses him back and knows what’s coming and cannot know it’s going to feel like that.

Even after his fingers she knows she’s being spread and opened and widened.

“Daddy. Daddy!” She claps her palms on his shoulders. Her nails bite. She knows they do.

“I don’t want you to hurt.”

“I’m- am I hurting-”

“No. Not at all.” It has to be a lie. She doesn’t care. Feeling his heat like she’s tunneling into his body doesn’t banish the pain when his cock’s bulky head nudges at some important doorway but it dulls it a little.

Maybe more than a little.

“Daddy. Please.” He kisses her to seal the moment. And pushes. It’s a slow and steady ache. It grows. Something bows. She feels his abdomen’s strength and definition. Her pulse races under her belly like a card in bicycle spokes snapping to punctuate the intervals. A tight metal band links her heart and brain.

It does hurt.

It already hurts.

She doesn’t want it to stop. It’s a sprint tearing into your legs you can’t bear to let end, an early morning turning too late and you write through reason’s thin edge, pinching and pulling precious places on your body to shock yourself with the sparks.

“Daddy.” He makes her feel fuller than was ever there in imagination. It always was a Goldilocks archetype.

This is not just right.

This is too much.

This is his body and she’s happy for it not because it has to hurt but because he’s folding a hand around her shoulder and his fingers brush her neck and he kisses her.

Kisses her and pushes and she thinks she should hear it out loud like tearing a towel. It’s a palm-clap in her ear. She wants to jolt upright and thrash and kick and protest. She doesn’t need his weight to pin her hips to the bed.

Because it feels good.

Not instantly but with the kind of promise good things will come from this.

“Daddy.” It’s a little bark. “Daddy?” A question with only one answer.

“This feels so good. How does it- how does it feel for you?” She feels him. Some part of her hates the idea that she can’t just peer into his mind and see for herself.

She loves knowing he has to drip those words into her head.

“It feels- it feels good. It feels so good. Harder. I want- I want all of you.” More. There is a knowledge in the bones and these moments recite their holy murmurs in temples made empty until her ringing voice will fill them again.

There is still music and in between little kisses she feels more than just the sharp pain in her hips.

She smells blood in the air, the way it gives her perfume an edge of old pennies after a rainstorm in a parking lot.

It’s hers.

She’s giving it not only to him but to both of them. She grafts this moment into her spirit.

His kisses are a confusion of his lips, rough pulls at her chin, his mouth and face disappearing in her hair and realizing little groans in her ear.

He bottoms out inside of her. She feels a big swollen pouch stick to her skin, knows it’s in blood and her slick heat. His hips push. Her toes curl.

It makes her aware of how the world isn’t just condensed down to his body. She feels her arms like she’s never known them, suddenly becomes conscious of how her right shoulder is buried deeper in the bed than the left, how far she’s tearing into his skin.

His hand scoops under her neck and holds her sure and steady.

“I want- I want you to start moving.” She is a needy body, too, a thin whine, a hungry mouth.

She is curling toes and a place meant for him to fill now full and sure he should be splitting her up to the wishbone and instead he’s folded deep in her belly.

“I love you, daddy. I want you to start.”

“Yes.” Still inside she is made conscious of the shape, the bulgy veins, the head she wraps in what she thinks feels like oiled velvet and squeezes almost flat.

When he moves she takes in more of contours, the way when he breathes it almost does in unison.

She learns he loves when she wills her hips to pulse from the inside.

When she smiles and looks up at him from under heavy lids everything quickens.

His body is vast between her thighs. She feels his hips’ smooth edges against her skin, the anemic scratch of the bedspread against her heels when he finally starts.

There’s a sticky resistance when he starts lifting himself away.

It hurts.

A lot.

That special sawtoothed kind of pain that flashes into cottony brightness on its back edge and flickers like a caged bird illusion.

She wants it.

Wants more.

There’s no ambivalence about that. His cock is half-out of her. Just hearing the syrupy sounds from inside her body is enough to shove her into unfamiliar sensations.

He pushes again.

It sounds like sinking a finger into jelly.

She’s overflowing with sweet things. They paint themselves down her body’s curves. His fingers and palm tease her neck.

He stops.

And finds a regular rhythm.

“Faster.” She commands. Her voice is brittle and bright and sure.

“W-what-”

“Faster.” She knows it’s probably wrong. That it should be elegant and gentle and last for six and a half hours. Right now something is on its knees sobbing and demanding to be given violence and speed. “Faster. Faster. Please. I- I need it. I need it. Faster.”

He obeys.

It hurts more.

But the pleasure comes in faster surer intervals and wraps all the jagged edges in luscious silks until she knows they’re there but doesn’t care. Not when she scratches at his shoulders and tears into his back.

He snarls.

This is what she wants.

Her glasses blur with smudges and sweat. She doesn’t even know how it’s happened and doesn’t care. His face is immersed in her neck. His shoulder is rounded with the tension pulling at his body. His cock lunges deeper, quicker, makes soft slap-slap-slap sounds at her hips.

“Daddy. That’s- that’s what I want-”

“You feel so good. Fuck.” He almost sounds like he wants to erase that obscenity.

“Such a bad influence, daddy.” Except she coos that in a voice she only loosely feels linked to her mouth. She swabs it with her tongue into his ear. Bites.

“Fuck! It feels so good inside you.”

“You’re making me feel crazy. It feels- it’s so weird- I-” She’s always read it’s not going to happen the first time.

Or maybe it’s supposed to and you’re a frigid ice princess who deserves uneasy looks over the pillows if you can’t.

Or maybe

she doesn’t even think about it. Ariadne just feels it pirouette in her belly, gathering momentum, getting twisty and confused and lurching drunken the way she feels when he moves faster and faster.

“Daddy. Daddy.” She needs more. “Faster. Daddy. It feels so good.” She needs him closer. “Hold- hold me. Hold me really tight.”

He does.

She barely can get her arms around his shoulders; when he pulls she rises with him and he can fold both of his hands at the small of her back made slippery with sweat. They drip with it; haze the room with a sweet-smelling cloud.

His palms are wide and soft and cushion her, give her just enough lift from the damp hot bedspread to make her feel like she’s soaring.

She pours along with his body now.

To the root and out and back again. Gentle as he wants to be he’s punishing her from the inside, stretching and mashing something deep in her body. Her hips already ache. Her eyes are starry.

She sees his face out of the corner of an eye because he’s struggling just to catch a glimpse of her. The smell of the room, the smell of his skin, his hair, his sweat, her body, it all muddles together into something brilliant and sharp.

Every time his cock’s head slaps at her belly from the inside she lets out tiny hiccupy sounds. They’re brittle, a little wounded, maybe a lot wounded.

It hurts.

She wants more.

There’s safety in his arms. His big body is shelter.

The muscle isn’t oppression. It’s his arms around her tortured by coarse-feeling felt pajamas in a summer fever.

A hand made cold-hot on her thigh.

A smile in the dying beach light when he holds her against cold wind.

“Daddy.” He dives into her hair, worries at her ear, hazes her with his voice.

“You feel so good. You make me feel so good. You’re so wonderful, Ariadne.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah!” Inside the staticky white-noise feeling in her head there’s a little figure taking shape like a gemstone forming from crystals. Every new pump inside her, getting quicker, wetter, easier, greased with all the juices he frees hitting that deep sugar-sweet place inside of her, that just adds another flake.

More.

More.

She comes.

It’s unceremonious and weird. It’s supposed to grow and then erupt but it just comes the way sometimes it’s almost a reflex, not one of those anemic little ones but just a jolt, a surprise, a feeling like a needle spiking your skin when you’re not expecting it.

She screams.

Something crushes deep through her body and becomes a big pink and red spill inside her hips. She feels her knees lift, ankles hook around his broad back, kick and pull him until he’s finally doing it the way she she wants.

She’s coaxing him to a gallop. Everything is too fast. Sometimes reality disappears like she’s swimming with him and crashes back into the lake and all she hears is the windshield wiper sound of her breathing.

“Daddy. Daddy.” His cheek and face and hungry kisses devour her world. His weight is steam and sweat and it’s almost unbearable in the swelter grown again around them. Her body is red-hot. There’s an itch under her skin and she can feel something’s weird because there’s another orgasm just like the last one.

They don’t lose their momentum. He’s keeping it up at a perfect rhythm, hips like a metronome, in, out, in, out, sticky clingy noises, her lips pulling at his cock and bowing back inside her body, and

and they’re building one atop the other until an anvil settles on her brain and squeezes

her whole body shakes and crushes tight around him.

“Daddy! Please! Please! Please!”

“I’m- I’m- you feel so good, Ariadne. Ariadne. Honey. I’m coming-”

“Do it. Do it!” Needy.

Begging.

She hears flashes of voice between her drowning pants

his

hers

mine

a growl

she tells him he belongs to her

nobody else

he says she’s his forever.

It gets bigger. Swells inside her and the second it happens that pillar of white light she’s climbing suddenly breaks and she’s suspended in space with him, floating now but falling and happy to taste the wind’s pull at her hair and listening to the silvery air’s shriek and ravenous for the landing.

It stiffens like granite, turns so hot it sears her.

It feels like he’s splitting her in two and fusing the pieces back together.

“Daddy-”

“It’s- I’m coming-”

“Daddy-”

“I’m- I’m-” there’s no production. She hears his jaw tighten ‘til you could bend steel bars between his teeth, feels his body tense.

He comes with a jolt. Heat swirls in her. Ropy spurts dig into her belly from the inside. It stings and feathers and heats and chills and there’s none of the fear she expects alongside the happiness.

He keeps moving, longer, longer. The movement pulls out rubbery tendrils of it, a slimy coating of her blood flowing over her skin, cleaving tight to the curves of soft springy fat on firm muscle.

“Daddy- it’s-”

“Just- it feels- ah-”

“S-stop. Please.” He doesn’t want to stop.

She thinks that’s almost as delicious as the way his ear tastes in her mouth, between her teeth.

Just one last little pump.

She wants him to stay like this forever.

Her body’s already trying to push him away with these incredible tidal throbs.

“Aria-Ariadne, I-”

“It’s okay.” She doesn’t want him to leave her.

But he does. Disentangles himself from her arms and legs and lifts her delicately to unwrap his hands.

He pulls her atop him without another word, her body moistened and glowing with their sweat, hair flat against her cheek.

She wants him to see. Wants him to study her, to coo over the raw sore proof of what’s just happened. She pulls his hand there and slides a finger inside her with a soft stickiness.

“O-oh-”

“I can’t believe you were just inside me.” The sun has died. Their voices belong to shadows with hard sure outlines. His cock isn’t soft yet when she touches it.

It’s softer.

Trembles and jolts back against her when she polishes a thickening resin-tight skein of their cum on the head.

He doesn’t invade her with his fingers again.

Teases.

Finds that sweet spot inside her and snaps her teeth around her bottom lip before she has to pull it away.

“Daddy-”

“You expect me to want to stop now?”

“No.” It’s simple, matter-of-fact.

“I love you, honey.” She’s never heard his voice like that. It gives without weakness. There’s a depth and thickness in his throat that tells her if she reconsidered now this moment will never scar because it will never heal far enough for that.

“I love you so much.”

Sleep chases her as surely as fever turns delirious waking fantasy into prophecy.

She sags on his chest and dreams about nothing except the white walls and his heartbeat.

She doesn’t have to fantasize about some things.

She hears questions not made in haste.

He asks.

She smiles.

They see one another in moonlight washing through the room’s big tall windows.

A mechanical clock strips time to seconds.

Green-printed figures tick unseen in the dark.

His fingers card through her hair.

Hers are still on his jaw.

She promises.

And so does he.

She believes him.