Chapter 4

They did it again. And again. And again. Leila's absence became the occasion for a nonstop orgy of incestuous sex in the somewhat gloomy bedroom of the Victorian summer mansion. They got out of bed only to go to the bathroom or to make a fast and unbalanced meal from canned foods. He began to worry about what Leila would say when she saw the mess they were creating in the kitchen. Examining this, it amused him that he could worry about such superficial things in the midst of his life's utter dislocation.

Melody remained the instigator, the leader, the consciously tempting temptation. She woke him many times in the night, snuggling, cuddling, arousing. Fucking her was the last thing-he did before dropping off for the night, the first thing on waking up in the morning. Night and morning became a blur. Time became meaningless. The only reality was the timeless reality of the bed, the increasingly eager and educated response of her slim young body.

He was amazed, even shocked, by her innovative ability. The first time she blew him was an example of that. From the way she did it, he was certain that it wasn't something she'd heard about from some well-informed schoolmate. She did it out of experimental curiosity, and she was delighted to discover that it pleased him. With no instruction or advice from her father, she developed an ever-expanding repertoire of little tricks and tickles and wiggles with her talented tongue.

The only sour note was her distaste and impatience with contraceptives, and his insistence, after that first night, that he wear them whenever he fucked her. Another of his minor worries was the necessity of replenishing the supply before Leila came home and wondered what happened to all of them.

Now, three years later, in Florida, she'd been on the pill for a year, thanks to a reasonable doctor.

John got up and walked to the window. The Gulf was an intense blue-green, the sand a blazing white. He was pleased with himself that his imagination could have recreated so clearly the cold and gloomy north, when the temperature here hovered just below ninety. I ought to be a writer, he thought sardonically.

"What's eating you?" she mumbled, not taking her mouth fully away from the pillow.

"Nothing. Today reminded me. Of that Christmas vacation."

She laughed, not needing to be told which one.

"I wouldn't have let you get this far away from the bed, that time," she said.

Down the beach he saw the lean, muscular figure of Ken Burke, blond and tanned. He was surf-casting, but he didn't seem entirely absorbed in the sport. He kept casting glances over his shoulder at their house. He felt again a surge of irritation that a man of thirty should take such an interest in his fifteen-year-old daughter. Examining the feeling, he laughed at himself with a trace of bitterness.

She murmured interrogatively.

"Your boyfriend again," he explained, "He's pretending to be fishing."

"If you keep calling him that, maybe you'll give me ideas."

Her words went through his heart like an iron spike. "Sorry," he said.

"Come back and show me how sorry you are."

He waited the moment it took to draw a deep breath and compose his face. He saw that Burke was still casually working his way toward their beach. But he wouldn't be able to see through the bedroom window, no matter how close he came; it was too high.

He turned to see that Melody lay face-down on the bed, not watching him. Her back glowed with a fine sheen of sweat. Her legs were parted. Her feet were hidden under the rumpled sheet they had kicked down to the bottom of the bed.

He pulled the sheet away, revealing the wrinkled pink soles, the toes like little pearls. Her feet were tiny, even for a small girl, feet made for an elf. The plump swell of her calf seemed large by comparison, more voluptuous and enticing. He bent over and kissed the sole of her left foot.

She flexed her knee, lazily raising the foot he had kissed. Her knelt on the bed behind her and kissed it again. He then slid his tongue into each of the interstices between her pretty toes, licking with the tip. He held her ankle lightly, massaging her calf with the other hand. His cock began to rise. She arched her foot daintily to let him kiss the instep, still not looking back at him. She made an unintelligible murmur of sensuous laziness. He kissed her ankle, planning to kiss his way to her cunt.

"The other one," she said.

He didn't know immediately what she meant, but she showed him by pulling her left foot out of his light grasp and raising the right one. He repeated the procedure but expanded on it, kissing all the way around the perimeter of her sole, savoring the salt of her sweat on his tongue.

"Now, kiss my ass," she ordered.

He leaned forward, resting his weight on his palms as he kissed each of the plump and perfect hemispheres in turn. She wiggled, spreading her legs wider apart. She slid the pillow under her belly, raising her buttocks.

"I meant my asshole," she said. "Kiss that."

"This time I'm the slave and you're the tyrannical queen, huh?"

"That's right. Do me with your tongue."

He didn't know which of the roles that she cast him in, king or slave, that he preferred, although this one was probably closer to the reality of the situation. He flickered his tongue down the deep cleft between her cheeks until it came in contact with even softer flesh, the pretty pink bud of her asshole. He stiffened his tongue and slipped it inside, vibrating it rapidly. She squirmed, sighing. He slid his hands beneath her body to cup the taut firmness of her breasts while he licked her asshole.

It was odd that their relationship should be like this, that even as a child of twelve she should have had the dominant role. Both Jean and Leila had been passive, malleable. He had interpreted these qualities not as traits of their characters but as reflections of his own, testimonials to his own forcefulness or leadership. Melody had shown him how foolish that notion was, He couldn't say no to her.

After the insane excess of that Christmas week, he had tried to wrench the situation back to normal. It had seemed possible then. Melody had returned to school after the holidays. He returned to the work he'd been neglecting. She still shared his bed at night, but he tried to condition her to the idea that things had to return to normal when Leila came home. She listened, saying little.

Leila had known that her mother was dying. The advance knowledge didn't seem to soften the blow. When she returned during the second week in January, she had lost weight. She was pale. She seldom smiled, and she sometimes cried at night. She was in her mid-twenties, but John thought that she looked strangely old.

Their lovemaking after her return was infrequent, desultory, uninspired. She often complained that she had a headache, or that she was too tired. John didn't insist. He would lie awake beside her body, a body that had once seemed exciting but now seemed pulpy and pallid and flabby. He would lie awake and think of Melody.

Melody watched them, cat-eyed, inscrutable. Leila would snap at her for no reason, sometimes scream at her over trifles. John uneasily remembered Jean, his first wife, and her battles with mental illness. He tried to be a calming influence, but he often found himself defending Melody with unreasonable vehemence.

Perhaps a month passed. Leila professed to be reading a new depth of contempt and mockery in Melody's impassive face. Toward John, Melody acted as if the Christmas week orgy had never happened. Then one night when Leila was asleep, Melody came silently into their bedroom. It was as if she knew he would be awake. She touched him and beckoned. He followed.

John had not yet achieved his limited success as a writer of thrillers in those days. His principal income came from the writing of pornographic novels-and the irony of that was not lost on him. Jean had left him with some stocks and bonds, but they hadn't lasted as long as he'd thought they would. He supplemented his income by rewriting articles for a sensational weekly tabloid. Leila worked as a receptionist in a dentist's office, and her paycheck was the only regular income they could count on with any certainty.

After the first time, when John begged her not to come to him again at night, they resumed their affair-between three in the afternoon, when Melody returned from school, and five, when Leila was due home. They also had Saturday mornings together. John found it a tormenting arrangement. His whole day was structured around those two short hours. They seemed more like two minutes, while the rest of each day dragged on forever.

The winter passed. They had to vacate the summer mansion by the first of June, when the rent rose from a hundred and fifty a month to fifteen hundred a month for the summer season, They found a reasonably priced bungalow inland, amid scrub pines and cranberry bogs.

To John's great relief, Leila emerged from the depression that had followed her mother's death. She began to regain some weight. She stopped crying at night and she took a renewed interest in sex, an interest that John was hard put to match.

It couldn't have happened long after they moved to the bungalow, because Melody was still in school. Even though he couldn't remember the date, he was amazed at how clearly etched were the images of that afternoon in his mind. Melody was wearing a red plaid miniskirt, pleated like a kilt, and a frilly white blouse. Her braids were wrapped in the coronet she'd decided was her favorite hair style, even though it made her look incongruously mature and sophisticated-Leila's opinion, really-at thirteen. She had a fine mustache of milk on her upper lip, and her breath smelled of peanut butter when he kissed her as she turned from the door of the refrigerator.

"Daddy!" she protested. She still called him that, because Leila had taken an inflexible stand against her early experiments in using his first name. Melody called her "Leila," though.

"We don't have much time," he said, rocking her gently as he stood behind her with his arms around her waist.

"I'm starving to death!" she cried, taking a wolfish bite of her peanut butter sandwich to prove it.

She wasn't in a bad humor. Even while she protested, she was rubbing her little ass against the hot, hard bulge in his pants. She rested her head back against his shoulder. He could feel her continuing to chew while he moved his hands up to press her budding breasts.

"What are these? Mosquito bites?" he teased.

"You know what they are."

"I'd better check them out."

He undid the back of her ruffled blouse. She never wore a bra, although Leila said that she ought to. Her skin was warm, perspiring slightly, as he slid his hands into the gap and held a breast like a little green apple in each hand. He kissed the long, bare back of her neck. She took another bite of her sandwich.

She permitted him to push her panties down, and then she stepped out of them when they fell around her ankles. She leaned against him, her ass still moving in a steady, vibratory gyration against his stiff prick. He tore at his belt and zipper and thrust down his trousers and shorts, unable to stand another instant of their painful confinement. His cock sprang out, hot and hard and dripping, and he slipped it under her skirt to rub against the bare skin of her ass.

Her sandwich finished, she licked her fingers. Then she flipped her skirt up. She spread her feet wider on the floor and leaned forward, her hands against the door of the refrigerator. The pose, the invitation, was almost shockingly direct, and it was intensified by the lecherous little smile she gave him over her shoulder.

Madness, maybe, but he couldn't wait to go and put on a rubber. He had to accept her invitation, he had to have her then and there.

He crouched slightly at the knees, nudging his cock upward against her cunt. He was surprised to find her wet and open and ready for his entrance. Hungry or not, her degree of sexual arousal was a match for his own. She let out a deep moan as his hard cock slid up into her pussy with the ease of a knife going through warm butter.

The day was warm and sunny, but oppressive with the threat of rain. The kitchen would darken as a thundercloud obscured the sun, then brighten suddenly. The birds seemed to be singing more loudly, more insistently than usual. All these impressions were engraved in his mind. He could see the white door of the refrigerator where Melody leaned, see the worn linoleum beneath her feet, smell the charred odor of coffee that he'd recently let boil over on the stove.

He clasped her slim hips in both hands, watching his big, red cock as it slipped in and out of her tight little cunt. Even though her tits had started to develop, her ass still gave no hint of womanly fullness. It was trim and neat and spare, muscled like hard rubber under her glowing skin. She clenched and unclenched its cheeks as he rocked from the knees, pushing his prick in and out of her pussy.

Shrugging and wriggling, she managed to get her blouse all the way off and let it drop to the floor. He explored upward with one of his hands, fondling her little breasts with the rock-hard nubs. She smiled a tight-lipped smile of pleasure, her eyes closed as she rested with her cheek against the refrigerator.

The room darkened. John thought it was only another cloud drifting before the sun. It wasn't until he heard the half-strangled, agonized sound, a cross between a sob and a scream, that he realized the shadow had been cast by a person standing in the doorway. He looked over his shoulder. Through the screen door he could dimly discern a figure that was unmistakably Leila's, but he couldn't read her expression with the sun at her back. She gave him no chance to. She turned and blundered away from the back steps. He heard dry, retching sounds.

"Finish it," Melody hissed when he made a move to pull out. "Finish it!"

He could never have predicted his reaction to such a situation. He might have imagined that he would have broken off the contact and pursued Leila with some incoherent and foolish attempt to justify himself. He never would have imagined doing what he did in fact do: he blotted Leila's retching sobs from his ears and continued to fuck Melody.

It was a fast, hard, aggressive fuck, lacking in tenderness, but she loved it. She humped her ass back against him, matching the furious, desperate pace he set. Her moans rapidly escalated to orgasmic wails.

"Fuck me, Daddy!" she almost screamed. "Fuck me fuck me fuck me!"

He was fully aware that her screams were reaching Leila's ears, more than half suspicious that they were being exaggerated or even manufactured for Leila's benefit, but he made no effort to keep her quiet. Leila knew. Nothing mattered, nothing except continuing to fuck Melody.

He screwed her almost violently, with a violence born of desperation, and she responded to it. Her voice rose again, and this time he was certain that Leila and her reaction to the sounds were far from Melody's mind. Even as she sagged against the refrigerator, gasping for breath, exhausted by the force of her orgasm, he felt the hot seed spurting through his cock.

He stood back, buckling his belt, while she rearranged her clothes. His mind raced like an engine out of gear, churning out a thousand possible courses of action, all of them obviously foolish.

He laughed almost hysterically at Melody's attempt to be utterly cool and nonchalant: "Do you suppose there are any cookies in the cupboard?"

Leila lay in the yard for a long time, face down in the grass. At first she lay there sobbing, but then she merely lay there. John's efforts to coax her into the house were futile, but at last she came in of her own accord, dry-eyed, and went about the task of making supper with cold and unspeaking precision.

But silence was not Leila's strong suit. She was a talker. She liked to discuss any problem from every possible angle, even a problem like this one. She was sometimes able to see angles to problems that other people just couldn't discern. Talking, examining, weighing, she seldom acted.

The only real action she took in this case was to exclude John from the bedroom. She made him sleep on the couch. Late at night, when he was certain Leila was asleep, he would slip into Melody's bedroom.

She talked about sending Melody away somewhere. She talked about psychiatric help for John. She talked about leaving him. But she didn't do anything. John tried to look appropriately tormented by guilt as he encouraged her to talk, not wanting to say much himself.

His memories were becoming painful. He tried to wipe them out and concentrate all his attention on the present, where he lay with his tongue flickering in and out of Melody's asshole. The present was delicious. No one was going to burst in on them. There was no more Leila to find them out. But there would be Carol, thrust into the same position Leila had held ... perhaps running the same danger? He pushed thoughts of Carol forcibly from his mind.

"I wonder if you could fit your cock in my ass," Melody purred. "Your tongue feels so good in there."

John hesitated. He'd never practiced that perversion with Melody, nor with anyone else, for that matter. He knew that it was possible to fuck a girl in the ass, though. He'd even written about it, back in the days when he'd been writing pornographic novels: whenever his characters were at a loss for anything else to do, they engaged in anal intercourse. Despite his objections, Melody had read all those dirty books he'd written.

"Let's see if you're ready," she said, twisting around to look at him. She smiled when she saw that his cock was stiff and hard. "Oh, my, so you are' Let me get it wet first,"

She coiled back with the ease of a snake, rested on her elbow, and began giving his prick a soft, wet massage with her extended tongue. She coated it all over with her glistening saliva, and her feather-light licks made it surge up to a new peak of throbbing rigidity.

"It's a lot bigger than my tongue," he observed. "Do you really want to try?"

"Of course," she mumbled, still licking. "I want to try everything. See if you can do it now."

She turned back and lay full length on the bed, readjusting the pillow beneath her loins that propped her ass up at a provocative angle. She reached back with both hands to spread the cleft of her ass open. Even the little pink mouth of her anus opened slightly under the pressure, but it still looked like it was going to be an impossibly tight squeeze.

Recalling that session in the kitchen, John was struck by how remarkably she'd developed in the past two years or so. Then her ass could have been described as even boyish, but now it was unmistakably feminine-not yet womanly, but decidedly girlish in its plump perfection of curvature. He could see, too, that she hadn't been entirely untouched by the sun, despite her efforts not to get a deep tan. When she parted the cleavage of her buttocks, it showed an even milkier shade of white.

He pressed the hot nozzle of his cock, purple with its engorged load of lust, against the wrinkled pink hole. She pushed her ass up slightly higher, spread her legs a little wider, tempting him in. He shuddered with his hunger as he inserted just the tip into her anus.

"Don't take all day," she murmured. "Just see if you can stick it in my ass."

He shrank from the thought of hurting her, but her words encouraged him to push harder. He felt her wince, though, before the head of his cock was fully buried in her rectum, and that made him stop.

"I thought those hokey fuckbooks you used to write were a load of bullshit," she said. "It can't be done. Come on. I'll tell you when I want you to stop."

He wiggled up more closely behind her on his knees, and his prick sank more deeply as he altered the angle of his penetration. Now the head was completely sunk, but the length of the shaft still loomed outside the tight, inflamed ring of her asshole. It seemed impossible that the hole could stretch any further to accept the thickest part of his swollen cock.

But still she didn't tell him to stop. Her clutching fingers pulled her ass wider, trying to make room for the total immersion of his hard tool. He shoved harder, even though the going got tougher with each inch, even though the tight squeeze of her secret depths was beginning to hurt him as much as it must be hurting her.

Nevertheless, the pain to him was secondary to the tingling delights that the delicious pressure sent through his hard cock. It was tighter even than the first time he'd fucked her, and it reminded him of that ineffable experience.

"Is that all of it?" she murmured.

He was tempted to tell her that it was, that she'd succeeded in taking every inch of his cock up her ass, in order to spare her further discomfort; but she frustrated his chivalrous impulse by reaching back to feel for herself what progress he'd made, and her fingertips told her that almost half the length of his swollen rod was still out in the cold.

"Oh, shit," she muttered.

"Shall I stop? Wouldn't you rather just fuck the regular way?"

"Maybe you ought to get me those things like they had in The Story of O, where the girl has to wear bigger and bigger things in her ass until she can really get buggered," giggled Melody, who had thwarted her father's sporadic attempts to guide her reading habits into respectable lines.

He began slowly to withdraw, but she squealed with impatience. "No, keep going! I know you can do it. There's just a little trick to it that I can't seem to get right, I can feel it. Keep going."

He pushed in again. The squeeze was just as hot and dry as before, but he sensed a new and yielding softness, as if she had indeed mastered the trick of relaxing her asshole for the intrusion of his prick. He clutched her thighs and pulled her towards him as he pushed harder against the resistance of the tight hole.

He began to realize that in buggering his daughter he not only had to overcome the seemingly impenetrable obstacle of her anal virginity, but that he was also in a race against time. The pressure of her tight rectum was building his excitement up to explosive force, and he began to despair that he would succeed in getting all the way in before he came. He pushed even harder than ever. She gasped, but she said nothing to make him stop.

"I think ... I think that's it," she said, once more exploring with her fingers.

She was right. His pubic hair was pressed into the crease of her ass, his balls were squeezing firmly against her juicy cunt, and every last inch of his big prick had been buried in. her asshole.

His excitement allowed him to rest for only a second. Now that he was in there, he felt an eager urge to ream out this new and untried hole, to fuck her just as vigorously as ever he'd fucked her in the cunt. But the tightness and dryness of the hot passage wouldn't permit that. He had to plod when he wanted to gallop toward the glimmering orgasm that he could sense coming nearer and nearer with each successive stroke. That mild frustration was like an extra spice to his pleasure, and his excitement fed and grew on its difficulty to consummate itself.

He had forgotten all about his efforts to make it easier for Melody, and he felt a twinge of guilt when he remembered. But she seemed to be in no discomfort. On the contrary, her full lips were curved in a tight smile as she lay on the pillow and presented her ass for his hard thrusts and plunges.

He gripped her tighter as the glimmer came closer, until it enveloped him completely and became transformed into the boiling eruption of his overheated cock. Gout after gout of simmering gism spurted and splurged into her rectum, at last giving the dry hole the lubrication it needed. Melody sighed with contentment as the thrusting of his prick became easier to take, and he found that the creamy grease of his orgasm allowed him to fuck her just as fast as he wanted to while the last jets pumped out.

"I hope it doesn't work like an enema," Melody said, startling him with the straightforward practicality of her concern. "Do you suppose?"

"I ... I don't know."

"You mean you never did that to anybody?" she demanded, looking back over her shoulder with a malicious smile.

"Nope," he said, not wanting to meet her eye as he pulled the wet length of his dwindling cock out of her rectum.

"Well. I'm glad I could be the first for you for something," she said seriously. Before he could explore the fact that he was touched by this sentiment, she added with a giggle: "But it just goes to show that your dirty books were a lot of crap."

"You downgrade the human imagination," he said, looking for a cigarette. "Henry James said that even a cloistered girl, if she had the novelistic imagination, could write a novel about army life just from hearing part of a soldier's conversation."

He lit two cigarettes, handed her one. Remembering, he got up and went to the window to see what had become of his neighbor, but Burke was nowhere in sight. He pressed close to the screen, willing to believe that he might be crouching outside just beneath it, but he wasn't. Maybe, he thought hopefully, a fish has caught him.

As if the dismal train of thought were waiting for him where it had begun, he found himself thinking again about Leila. After chewing over the problem of his incestuous behavior from every possible angle, she decided on a course of action: Melody would go and stay indefinitely with Leila's sister's family in Kansas; he would undergo psychoanalysis.

Both ideas were unacceptable. He didn't want to send Melody off to Kansas, nor did he think she could be persuaded to go. Psychiatry was abhorrent to him. It hadn't helped Jean, Melody's mother, and he was afraid that his writing talent might be damaged or destroyed if he let some witchdoctor tinker with his brain. But the alternative that Leila proposed was exposure and criminal prosecution.

They talked about it some more, but Leila's mind, at long last, was obviously and irrevocably made up. He told Melody about her stepmother's plan, and she opposed it as vehemently as he had expected she would. They both tried to keep Leila talking, to keep action deferred.

This was the way things stood by midsummer. Absorbed with their own problems, they hardly noted the newspaper accounts of the virulent form of encephalitis that had killed ten or twelve people in the area that year. Such deadly outbreaks of the mosquito-borne disease were relatively rare, and the story got intensive newspaper coverage.

Then Leila got it. At least that's what the coroner said, after she died in the most agonizing and horrible convulsions imaginable, only a few hours after the first symptoms were noted. John did not feel obliged to mention to the coroner that the same symptoms were not inconsistent with strychnine poisoning. Nor did he feel obliged to mention, after Leila's speedy cremation, his discovery that a box of rat poison which he'd noticed in the basement of the bungalow soon after they'd rented it was now missing.