Chapter 3

John Creighton lay in bed, the telephone propped between his ear and his shoulder. A cigarette dangled from his lip. His daughter knelt over him, her knees straddling his hips. Her palms rested lightly against the hair on his chest. His hard prick was buried in her cunt.

He hung up the telephone. "That joke was what killed burlesque," he told Melody. "'He just got in.'"

"I thought I just made it up."

"They had this routine where someone would keep calling a doctor's office and ask, 'Is the doctor in yet?' And his nurse would say, 'No, he's not in yet and the gag would be that the doctor was trying to screw her, only each time he got to the point of doing it, the telephone would ring."

"You shouldn't have answered it."

"I figured it was her. She's been known to ring the phone thirty times if nobody answers."

"You didn't have to lie there all day jabbering about Beau Boulton. And smoking a cigarette, like you were having your shoes shined in a railroad station, for Christ's sake."

She took the cigarette away from him and took a deep drag. She shifted her position slightly, impaling herself more firmly on his stiff cock. He could barely see the root of it protruding from the distended lips of her pussy.

"How do you suppose that makes me feel?" she continued.

"Conspiratorial?" he suggested.

She frowned at him. He knew she wasn't really angry with him. She'd enjoyed mocking Carol over the telephone. But the interruption reminding her of Carol's existence, had put her in a bitchy mood. He twisted his hips, stirring his prick around in the tight clasp of her quim.

"That's better," she murmured. "I was afraid you were going to make me do all the work."

That was a laugh. He felt as if he'd been put through a meat grinder today. Melody had been insatiable. He supposed that his impending marriage had something to do with her redoubled hunger for sex. She was trying to prove to him that he didn't need anybody else, perhaps that he couldn't even handle anybody else if he hoped to keep her satisfied.

She allowed him to retrieve his cigarette, but there was only enough left for a single puff before he ground it out in the bedside ashtray. His hands free, he slipped them under the firm cheeks of her ass and raised her slightly, revealing the thick red stem of his cock, glistening with her juice. He'd already fucked her four times today. In addition, she'd started the day off by blowing him. He wondered how long he could fuck her without coming. They'd already been joined in this position for nearly half an hour. If he was trying to set a record, this was certainly the time to do it. He felt as if she'd milked every last drop of come from his balls. His cock, though swollen and hard as a club, felt anesthetized from the treatment she'd already given it.

Melody sank forward on her braced palms like a lioness drinking. Her coronet of braids was unbound now, and the perfumed weight of her golden hair fell around him as her mouth sought his. Her soft tongue slipped inward, tangled momentarily with his, then slid out again, duplicating the rhythm she began to establish as she raised and lowered her cunt on his prick. The hard nubs of her breasts grazed his chest as she writhed in constant, sinuous motion.

John slid his hands upward to hold her closer against him as he pushed his hips up from the bed to spear her on his quivering prick. She squeezed him with her cunt so tightly that it was almost painful, then eased her grip and slithered the wet flesh around his cock like jelly. She had amazing control over the muscles of her cunt, little tricks and wiggles and slippery surges made it ripple in a constant syncopation to the movements of her hips. No grown woman he'd ever fucked could fuck like Melody could, and it seemed that she'd known how to do it almost from the start. But she'd been right, in that double entendre she'd delivered to poor Carol. She was getting steadily better.

He winced at his own choice of words: poor Carol. He tried to convince himself that it was the wrong epithet to use. Lucky Carol, that was more to the point. She was getting an understanding man who had succeeded in making her shed all the self-crippling defenses she'd erected around herself. She was getting a husband who would be tender and devoted and considerate and who ... who was in love with his own daughter. Poor Carol.

Nebulously, without ever spelling out the details to himself, he'd been trying to evolve some scheme for weaning Melody away from him. The affair would have to end sometime. Melody herself had brought that truth painfully home to him this morning when she'd seriously suggested that they avail themselves of phony identification papers and get married. It was the next logical step; and because it was logical, it showed how crazy was the premise on which it was based. He couldn't hold on to her forever.

But beyond that point, the scheme simply failed to evolve. Boarding school? He could just see himself trying to talk her into that! And even if, by some miracle, he did manage to talk her into it or force her into it, she'd promptly find a way of getting herself kicked out and shipped back home.

The only other alternative would be to try to get her interested in boys her own age. Even if she would buy that-and he didn't think she would-his own emotions wouldn't let him do it. Encouraging her to accept dates would make him feel like a cross between a pimp and a cuckold.

There were other possible solutions, of course, but they were too drastic to consider: he could turn himself in to the police, or lay the problem before a psychiatrist, or enter into a suicide pact with Melody. The last solution, the most drastic of all, was one that often crept unbidden into his midnight thoughts.

All right, then: poor Carol. She didn't know what she was getting into, and there was no way he could change it. The only decent thing to do would be to break the engagement-but that was impossible: he needed the money. If he could create something eternal, if he could only write the work of genius that he knew he was capable of writing, then his wasted life would be justified and its sins rendered meaningless. He could do that only if he had time; and he could buy time with Carol's money.

"I'm not boring you, am I?"

That was Melody, snapping him back abruptly from another trip through the dull gray rut he'd worn in his mind. He'd been lying immobile for a few minutes, just letting her work on him with the steady pumping of her cunt.

"Jesus, baby, no, of course not. I was just-just working on my self-control, that's all."

"Don't worry about that," she purred. "Just let it happen."

That, he thought, might be the motto of his life, or its epitaph: he just let it happen. That was the reason for Jean's death and probably for Leila's, too; that was the reason for his impending marriage to Carol, and that was the reason for what he was doing now-he just let it happen.

Melody snatched his attention away from his bitter thoughts. She pulled back from his embrace to kneel upright above his loins, still firmly skewered on his upthrust cock. Her face was expressionless, but her cat-eyes smoldered with lust as she tossed her tawny mane back from her white shoulders.

He saw her everyday. He'd seen her everyday of her life. But each time he saw her she seemed more beautiful, more desirable than the last, and now her beauty wrenched his heart. She crouched over him, her back slightly arched to thrust her tits out to the best advantage. Her cheeks were flushed, and fine beads of sweat glittered in the central groove of her triangular upper lip. Her nipples quivered as she pumped with alternate thighs, pushing herself up and down on his cock, slapping her buttocks against his legs.

He pushed up as far as he could, burying every last inch of his prick in the depths of her shaven cunt. He felt her hot juice trickle down around his balls as it seeped and spattered from her churning pussy. He realized that he wasn't going to set any marathon fucking records with her, not this time, because already a tingling glow was building up in this prick, slowly but surely building up to explosive force.

She was slowing down, though. Her bouncing rhythm grew erratic as her thigh muscles began to tire from her long exertions.

"Ow," she muttered, pouting. "Fucking legs."

John couldn't bear the thought of stopping or even slowing down at this point. He rolled over, taking her willingly with him, not breaking for an instant the tight union of their bodies. Now she lay on her back and encircled him with her lithe legs while he stroked his prick into her deep and hard. Her cunt was like a jar of hot honey, oozing and sliding around his hammering cock while her hips bucked and wriggled against his thrusts.

She moaned and grunted in time to his rhythmic humping. Sometimes she would fling all inhibitions aside and shriek with ecstasy when she came. She had been holding herself back with some difficulty during the past two weeks, uncomfortably aware of the proximity of their neighbor's house. Sometimes she would slip, though, and give vent to screams that sounded like the death agonies of a wildcat. For all Ken Burke's efforts to get acquainted with them, John thought he detected an undercurrent of coldness, even hostility, in the man's manner toward him; and he wondered if Burke believed that he was in the habit of thrashing his daughter.

She didn't scream, not this time, but she did one thing that she often did in the grip of an orgasm. She whispered first, then groaned: "Daddy ... Daddy!" It was the only time she ever called him that anymore.

She writhed and twisted beneath him. He felt her nails digging into his shoulders, but the pain seemed remote and unimportant compared to the overwhelming sensations that were surging out from the pillar of flesh embedded firmly in her clinging cunt. He thrust harder and deeper and faster than before, trying to drive her over the edge again before the spindling strand of his self-control snapped. He clawed at her buttocks, dragging her closer and tighter against him while her moans became loud whimpers and she finally unleashed the sort of scream she'd been trying to suppress, a long, quavering howl that would have drawn pity from a damned soul burning in hell.

Their neighbor was now the last thing on his mind. He exulted in his power to take her to such heights of ecstasy. The bedsprings clanked and jingled as the tempo of his fucking escalated to jackhammer vibrations. He thought that he couldn't possibly have a drop of gism left in his balls after all the fucking they'd done today, but her incredible cunt was able to draw on still untapped reserves. He groaned, clutching her hard against him as his balls boiled over and sent gout after gout of simmering come down the electrified path of his prick to spatter deep inside her sucking quim.

They lay in a lazy tangle, sharing a cigarette while a warm breeze from the bedroom window dried the slime on their loins.

"You ought to make a point, one of these days, of telling what's-his-name that I don't beat you," John murmured.

"So what'll I tell him instead? The truth?" Melody giggled.

He hadn't thought of that. He frowned. Then he had an inspiration. "Tell him you throw fits. Maybe that will keep him from sucking around you."

She favored him with an inscrutable mask. He suspected that she was again going to attack the inconsistency of his jealousy, but she said: "He's always got his air conditioner going. He probably doesn't hear me."

John snorted with mild contempt. His dislike of air conditioning almost equaled his hatred of telephones. He found even the summer heat of the Gulf Coast preferable to the steady drone of machinery. Melody agreed with him, and even took his eccentricity a step further: closed doors and windows gave her claustrophobia. He was pleased with this reminder of their concurrent tastes; tastes that Ken Burke didn't share.

But she couldn't resist digging him a little where it hurt: "Will we tell Carol that I throw fits, too, in case she happens to overhear me?"

He tried to sound calm and reasonable. "We'll just have to be careful, that's all. I'll get an office away from home. Tell her I have to be absolutely undisturbed there. Then-"

"Oh, great. It'll be just like fucking your secretary. A little love nest over a Chinese restaurant. Will you fuck me on the desk, or will you pick up a second-hand couch for that?"

"It'll work out. Something will work out."

He supposed she was angry now, but he couldn't really tell. Her blue, slant-eyed gaze made him uncomfortable, and he studied his cigarette as if it might tell him something.

He found himself thinking about the novel he ought to be writing, tentatively titled The Last Man Left Alive. It was about a mild-mannered businessman whose wife suddenly and unexpectedly deserts him for an itinerant rodeo cowboy who happens to pick her up in a bar. At first her choice seems so ludicrously inappropriate to the hero that he wonders if she hasn't lost her mind. But then, thinking over her lover's qualities-his youth, his fitness, his dashing lack of responsibility-he comes face to face with his own, dullness and flabbiness and drudging respectability. In order to prove to himself that he is as tough and intrepid in reality as he is in his daydreams, he sets out with some friends to scale a difficult peak in the Rockies. Getting to the top becomes an overwhelming obsession, even after the ascent begins to turn into a disaster. He succeeds, but only at the expense of his companions' lives.

It should have been easy. He had a clear idea of where the story was going and he knew the characters inside out. He'd written a dozen such thrillers before without great difficulty. The emphasis in his work was on fast pacing, violent action, and moderately explicit sex, all of it done in a brisk and spare style that owed a deep and unacknowledged debut to Ernest Hemingway.

This one wasn't easy, and he thought he knew why. In a moment of nostalgia, or playfulness-or maybe it was just laziness-he'd patterned the character of the absconding wife on Leila, his second wife. Leila, of course, had never done anything to him like the wife in the book. On the contrary, she never would have looked at another man. She not only put up with his quirks and his moods and his sometimes downright churlish behavior, she loved him for them. She was convinced that he was a genius. She was the closest thing he'd ever met to a saint. Having Leila around was like having his own resident cheerleader, always willing to tell him how great he was before he even hinted that she ought to.

But in most things-appearance, speech patterns, habits, tastes-he'd modeled the fictional Linda McLean on the late Leila Creighton. He'd never before tried to pattern an imaginary character directly on a real person, and he knew now that doing so had been a ghastly mistake. Whenever he tried to write about Linda, he found himself thinking about Leila. Instead of pounding the typewriter, he sat in front of it and reminisced.

The characters were interdependent, all parts of the same fabric. Taking Linda out and replacing her with an entirely different character would have been as easy as chopping a man's arm off and sewing on someone else's. Even if he had commanded such surgical wizardry, he didn't have the time to do it. He was writing the final copy as he went along, on white bond paper with carbon, knowing that he didn't even have the time to retype it.

Leila. She'd been blonde and blue-eyed, with high cheekbones and a squarish chin. She'd looked a little like Jean. She'd looked a little like the woman Melody might grow up to become. He'd loved her. He'd wanted her. And then Melody had started to grow up.

He'd always liked living near an ocean, any ocean. Then they'd lived in a ramshackle summer home in a northern state, a big barn of a place that had been haphazardly winterized for year-round living. It groaned and sighed when the wind blew through its sprung seams from the North Atlantic combers. He used to take long walks on the winter beach, ostensibly thrashing out problems in his work; actually, trying to face up to his incestuous desire for his daughter, trying to understand it and fight it down.

Leila tried hard to gain Melody's affection. She was a sort of cheerleader for her, too, praising her, flattering her, but subtly trying to nudge her where she wanted her to go. But she thought the child was hostile to her. John scoffed at this, pointing out that Melody seldom let her emotions show. What Leila took for hostility was the cool, composed facade she'd possessed even then. But the girl made Leila uneasy.

Then came the winter when Melody was twelve. Leila received word that her mother was dying in Kansas. It was near Christmas. Leila made much of holidays, perhaps trying to recapture her own happy childhood by turning them into mammoth productions for Melody. During the four years that Leila had been her stepmother, Melody always had a fancier Halloween costume, a bigger spread of Christmas gifts, a fuller Easter basket, than any of her contemporaries.

Leila had to go to her mother's bedside, but she hated the idea of a family separation at Christmas. Kansas was the last place John ever wanted to go. He promised Leila he would defer the celebration of Christmas until her return, and she reluctantly went by herself.

The holiday season usually plunged John into a black depression. He hated it. He usually observed it by starting to drink on Christmas Eve and continuing to do so through New Year's Day. This year, even without the formal observance-although he did fudge a bit on his promise by setting up a tree and getting Melody a few preliminary gifts-was no exception.

Maybe the drinking explained it. It was- Christmas night? He couldn't remember, not precisely. Something disturbed his sound sleep. He coughed, and he felt someone stroking his back. A naked body lay in the bed beside him, close to him. Leila, of course. He snuggled against her. She drew closer.

Maybe he dozed. Maybe he dreamed. He didn't remember the onset of his erection, nor did he recall when the hand had first touched it and encircled it. He grumbled. His mouth was full of fur, his brain full of fog, his stomach sour and restless. Despite his erection, the prospect of sex wasn't very alluring. He grumbled something, pretending to be less awake than he was, and tried to shift his position. The hand stayed on his prick. The hand squeezed it.

He turned back toward her. He rested a hand on her hip. It was cool and smooth, but somehow it didn't feel right. Her fingers pulled and peeled his cock, masturbating him slowly, lifting his erection to full engorgement.

A whisper so soft it might have originated inside his own skull: "Do it. Please."

Almost without conscious effort, his hands began to recreate a familiar structure of caresses. It didn't take him long at all to realize that he wasn't in bed with a grown woman. Nor did it take him long after that to realize who it was. He froze, fully awake and fully sober.

"Baby. No." It was a plea.

"Yes." It was a command.

He held her wrist to make her stop pumping him. His strength or his will didn't extend far enough to draw her hand entirely away. She tickled it with her fingertips. He told himself that the shock of recognition should have withered his prick. It didn't. His prick got harder and stiffer. It began to seep fluid against her wrist.

He buried his face in the pillow so hard that red blotches swam before his eyes. She coiled around him, insinuating, touching, kissing, guiding. He tried to pretend he wasn't there, but it didn't work.

His hand was on her cunt. Maybe she had placed it there, but he didn't think so. She spread her legs wide and arched her pelvis up against his touch. Only the finest peach-fuzz covered the soft flesh, the protuberant little bone of her pubic mound.

"Lower," she said.

His fingers, obedient to her will and not his, touched even softer flesh, warm and moist.

He lifted his face from the pillow. Snow had frozen on the windows. Light from a streetlamp filtered through, not strong enough to let him see her except as a shadow in his bed. Her white teeth gleamed. She kissed him on the lips. She didn't know how to do it. It was a chaste pucker. It enflamed him. He bore her head down on her pillow, his mouth clamped to hers, worrying her lips as a dog worries a bone.

He didn't remember rolling over, but now be was propped above her, his weight supported on his elbows. She was breathing hard.

"Put it in me."

"It'll hurt."

"No, it won't. I stretched it with my fingers."

The calmness of that remark, the calculation it revealed, numbed him. The dreams that had been plaguing bun, the dreams in which Melody submitted willingly, joyfully-had they been spontaneously generated by some sickness in his soul, as he'd thought, or had they been triggered by the subconscious recognition of her desires? Or had he unknowingly revealed his lust, igniting hers?

Analyzing those questions now would have been like studying nuclear physics in the midst of an atomic attack. The questions bubbled in his mind, but they had no meaning or importance. The only thing that mattered now was that the tip of his cock was pressing at the threshold of his daughter's virginal cunt.

"I didn't know it was so big," she said.

"I-"

"Don't stop."

He shifted his position, easing inward. Her body was obscenely slim, her breasts criminally undeveloped. Her cunt seemed tight as a loop of wire.

"Don't stop," she repeated, but her voice threatened at any minute to break into a yelp of pain.

He paused, breathing deeply, resting when the head of his cock was inside the tight wet furnace. Before this, he would have found it hard to imagine a man experiencing ecstasy and shame at the same time. Now he didn't have to imagine it. Guilt and shame gripped him like a physical sickness, but it coexisted with a wave of pleasure and desire.

He could salvage something if he stopped now. He could tell her that he'd been half asleep, that he hadn't known what he was doing. He could still explain to her that it was wrong. But even while he was entertaining these thoughts, he was beginning to push his prick inward again.

Melody tensed, shivering, then relaxed. She tensed again, but this time she went looser and softer and more yielding than before when she relaxed. Her slim, small body seemed to have become strangely larger in the darkness, no longer awkward and bony but sure and womanly and all-engulfing. Her kisses had become as hungry as his, open-mouthed, tongue-tangling sucks.

His cock slid into her more easily than before, but hers was still the tightest hole he'd ever penetrated. Even if she'd been playing with herself with her fingers, she was still technically a virgin, the only one he'd ever had. He sometimes regretted that neither Jean nor Leila had been virgins when he'd married them, although he told himself that what they'd done before meeting him was none of his business. Nevertheless, he regretted it. An odd world, where a man could fuck a virgin only by fucking his preteen daughter-and he felt a sudden chill when he put the proposition in such blunt words.

"Don't stop," Melody whispered, sensing his sudden tension.

"It's ... "

"It's all right," Melody supplied when words failed him. "It's wonderful."

He felt her little fingers tapping lightly around his crotch, caressing his hairy balls. It was only then that he realized he'd given his little daughter every last inch of his big, adult cock. She couldn't find any of it to touch beyond the stretched confines of her pussy.

"You did it," she murmured approvingly. "We did it."

"Oh, sweetie," he groaned, and he kissed her, and his groan was an outlet for violent emotions that he couldn't begin to understand or sort apart.

One emotion, however, was so direct and blunt and overwhelming that it swiftly blotted out the others: the simple desire to fuck her. She sighed and murmured in time to his strokes as he pushed his swollen prong in and out of her. She clutched him tighter and wiggled against him, encouraging him, reassuring him that she wanted it as badly as he did.

"God ... damn!" fee snarled, unable to hold back the sudden splurge of his ejaculation in the tight confines of her pussy. He fucked her faster while his prick pumped hot jets of come into her cunt, slowing only when he knew that his climax was ended.

He lay still for a long time, and so did she. Finally Melody said, "We can do it again. Can't we?"