Author: AnonyMPC

Title: Rent-A-Daughter

Summary: A 12-year-old suggests her pedophile neighbor hire her to find out what having a daughter is like.

Keywords: Mg, MF, pedo, cons, cosplay, 1st, slow

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Rent-A-Daughter by AnonyMPC (Mg, MF, pedo, cons, cosplay, 1st, slow)

Chapter One:

It was the biggest moral lapse in my life and yet, at the same time, one of the most fulfilling experiences I’ve ever had.  It made me a criminal, but more importantly, it made me a father, and it all started with ‘Rent-A-Daughter’.

The day I first heard those words seemed to start out like any ordinary day.  I was working a little extra, by choice, in my home office, which was the second bedroom of my two bedroom apartment.  I worked from home, making a decent living at a job that let me set my own hours.  I considered it a great job, about the only good thing I had going for me.

I’m not making excuses, but when this happened, it was a pretty low period in my life. 

I was unhappy, and had been for a while.  I knew something big was missing from my life.  Most obviously, I was lonely.  I hadn’t had a date in three years, and a girlfriend since I got out of college, six years ago.  My dating life, when it was active, was not very notable either… my last girlfriend cheated on me and it pretty much wrecked me, making me too shy to try again.  I guess subconsciously I didn’t want to let somebody get close enough to hurt me. 

I wasn’t just romantically isolated either.  I didn’t have many friends aside from the distant, more-or-less anonymous types you make on Internet fan-boards.  My parents were both dead, my dad of a heart attack when I was eighteen, and my mom eight years ago, while I was still in college.  Both hit me hard, but I knew my dad wasn’t healthy.  Mom’s death was so sudden and senseless.  She was murdered in a robbery by a meth head, who was later killed by police.  In the comics this would have made me into a grim vigilante, patrolling the streets looking for justice, but in reality, the whole event just left a hole that my ambition slowly drained out of.  I pulled away from people, gradually, just by not putting myself out there.  Sometimes I didn’t blame my girlfriend for cheating, she said it was because I was emotionally unavailable and she might have been right.  It was a wonder I was hired at all when I got out of school, but I had good marks and my company had an aggressive recruiter. 

My life pretty much consisted of work, TV, weekly trips to the comic store, less frequent trips to the movies, occasionally out to eat, and every couple months an old friend would ring up and we might do something or a cousin would remember me and invite me over for a holiday.  On those occasions, I was good at pretending I was more-or-less normal.  I hadn’t fallen apart on the outside, and could fake having a life for some time before retreating back to my fortress of solitude where I just… continued.  It was like I was living in some kind of stasis bubble, outside time passed, but me, inside my little apartment, I was stuck, frozen. 

Then one day, a knock at the door punctured that bubble.  When I heard it, I put my work on hold, extricated myself from my work area, and crossed into the living room, through the kitchen, and to the door.  

I peeked through the peephole first, it was only prudent.  Through it, I saw a little blonde girl, probably eleven or twelve years old.  She made a face at the peephole, an exaggerated grin that made me smile despite myself.

I knew her, but not by name.  She lived in the apartment across from me.  My place was situated at the very end of the hall, just around a corner.  There were only two apartments around that corner, one was mine, and the other for the last few years was rented by her parents.

We never exchanged more than a simple hello, and more often polite nods of recognition instead.   The mom was kind of cute, the girl was adorable, and the dad had a shaven head and looked perpetually tired, but other than that I didn’t really know them, and I certainly didn’t have much to say to them.

But I didn’t have anything against them either, so I opened the door, thinking she might need something.  “Hi,” she said.  She crossed one foot behind the other, seeming a little shy. 

“Hi,” I said.  We stood quietly like that for a few seconds, as I looked at her.  She came up to chest height on me, and was very slender, almost waif-like.  I bet I could almost have closed my hands, fingers meshed, around her thigh.  The girl wore a long-sleeved sweater-jacket over top of a thin white shirt, with blue slacks.  Like I said, she was cute, although a little oddly so.  Her ears stuck out, there was a spot on one cheek like a lone, dark freckle, and when she smiled there was a little gap between her two front teeth, and one of her others seemed just a little crooked.  On an adult face, these might be a flaws, but in her case, it just somehow made her all the cuter. 

“Hello,” she said, greeting me again.

“Hello,” I repeated.  I curled my lip into a little half smile.  “Did you need something?” I asked.  “Did you get locked out or something?”

“No, I wanted to talk to you.  Can I come in?”

I had an instinctive, knee-jerk rush of fear.  If I invited a young girl into my apartment, even if it was completely innocent, it might look the wrong way… and my thoughts were not completely innocent.

To my secret shame, I’d always found little girls attractive.  I’d guess most people would call me a pedophile.  Technically, I’d say I’m more of a hebephile, because my attraction peaks in the early years of puberty, although I’ve had some impure thoughts about girls who haven’t quite reached puberty too.  Most people don’t draw the distinction, though, so why not go with the pedophile label?  Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t some child molester.  I’d never touched a young girl inappropriately.  All my girlfriends were around my own age, and I could get sexually attracted to fully-grown women, easily… but there was something about the sweetness of a little girl combined with innocence, and a tight little body on the cusp of womanhood that penetrated many of my most hidden, and therefore strongest, fantasies.  I never once intended them to be anything more than an exercise of the imagination.  The last thing I wanted was to hurt anybody, and trying to make a move on a girl would inevitably hurt them.  But occasionally, I did things I knew I shouldn’t just because I could later use them to build much better fantasies.  When your only sexual outlet is masturbation, and has been for years, you tend to really focus on it, zeroing in on the most effective fantasies and anything that can be used to help forge a new one is valuable. 

So I let her in.  I never wanted anything to happen, but I thought I could imagine later that night that something did and have a particularly intense masturbation session.  In reality, I intended that our interaction would be totally innocent.  I even left the door open.  I moved into the kitchen to give her room to enter without crowding her.  “Do you want a drink?  I think I have some Coke.”

She shook her head, but then seemed to reconsider.  “Okay.” 

 I pulled one from the fridge and handed it to her.  “I’m sorry, I don’t think I ever learned your name.”

“It’s Madeline.  Most people call me Maddy.”  The can opened with a slight hiss as she cracked the tab. 

“So, what can I do for you, Maddy?”

“I was just thinking, Mister…” she trailed off, inviting me to supply my name.

“Brown.  But you can call me James, if you want.”  Yes, my name is James Brown.  I’ve heard all the jokes.  Maddy was probably too young to even know who he was, so she didn’t make any. 

“That’s okay Mister Brown.”  She giggled a little.  “Anyway, I was just thinking how it’s odd that we’ve lived next to each other almost half my life and I’ve never been inside.”

“I’m sure it’s pretty much like your place,” I said.  I didn’t want to give her too much leeway in my apartment, although she had the kind of face you just wanted to give in to.  I bet her parents spoiled her. 

“Actually, I wanted to ask your advice about something.  Me and my dad got into a fight because I wanted an iPhone and some designer clothes and he said it was too expensive.  He said that he couldn’t afford to get me what I wanted, just what I needed, and that if I wanted anything extra I should save up or find a way to make my own money.”

“I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but he’s probably right about that.”

She frowned a little.  “I know.  That’s why I’m here.  I’m trying to start my own business.”

I raised an eyebrow.  That was unexpected.  “So…” I ventured, “you want to sell me some cookies or something?”  It was the only way I could think of that little girls made money, although that was for school fundraisers.

“No, silly.”  She put a finger up to her lips.  “You know, that’s a good idea too.  But I had an idea for a business that I don’t think anybody’s ever done before.”  She leaned forward and whispered, “Do you have children?”

“No,” I said. 

“Do you wish you did?”

I thought about it.  “I guess so.”  I probably wouldn’t have admitted it to somebody my own age, but kids had a way of disarming me.   I did want a kid of my own, even though I knew I should never allow myself to have one because of the fantasies I harbored.   I never really considered it a possibility, either, given my lack of the usual prerequisite of some kind of social life. 

“My dad says nobody’s ever complete until they have a child of their own to love,” she said.

“He might be right about that, I don’t know.”

“That’s why I thought of my business.  I call it ‘Rent-A-Daughter’.  I rent myself out to people without kids so they can find out what it’s like.”

****
Chapter Two:

Rent-A-Daughter.  There was a moment of terrible weakness when I thought of all sorts of ways somebody with my inclinations could exploit a situation like that, or what they might do if they had a real daughter.  “I don’t think that would be such a good idea,” I said.

She thrust her lip out in a cute little pout.  “Why not?”

“Have you talked to your parents about this?”

“No, I haven’t told anyone my idea yet.  I wanted to ask someone without kids about it first.  Why?”

“I don’t think your Mom and Dad would let you, first of all.”  How would I explain to somebody so innocent looking that there were people who might take advantage of her?  I went for a softer lie.  “They’d be terribly jealous.  Nobody would want anybody else parenting their child, even only rented.  Especially a cute little daughter like you.”

She thought about what I’d said, then decided, “I guess I could lie to them.  I could just tell them I’m doing something else.  Or not tell them at all.  They don’t get home until 6 usually and I had planned to do this for 2 hours after school every day anyway.”  I glanced at the clock.  It was 3:30.  She must have just got out of school.

That moment of weakness returned, only now it was much longer than a moment.  Whole seconds passed while I thought of things somebody could do with that amount of time alone with a girl like Maddy.  A fatherly massage, a fatherly bath, fatherly kisses, maybe some landing in unfatherly places.  I opened the fridge again and pretended to look inside, so that my erection wouldn’t be visible. 

“I think I’d have to tell them.”  That’s what I should have said.  That’s what a responsible person would have said.  What I actually said was, “Also, people who might WANT to rent a daughter would be too ashamed that they have to.  They’d be terrified of anybody finding out.  See, most people without kids like to pretend they don’t want any.  Even when they do.”  I convinced myself that I was still trying to dissuade her.   “I know I’d be scared of somebody finding out.”

“Oh, I can be very professional,” she said.  “I won’t tell a soul.  It would be like lawyer-client confidentiality.”  It seemed like she had to pause over the syllables of that last word to pronounce it right. 

“Forever?” I asked.  “No matter what?”

“Swear to God,” she said. 

“How much were you thinking of charging?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she admitted.  “I used to get paid $10 an hour for watching Mrs. Marshall’s grandson.  I was thinking something like $15 an hour.”

$15 an hour for a little nymphet to hang around my apartment and pretend to be my daughter.  I did a quick calculation in my head.  $30 a day, 5 days a week.  $150 a week was a hefty price, but I made a good living and had a lot of savings. 

I wasn’t thinking of having sex with her… or, at least, I wasn’t intending at that moment to have sex with her.  But I thought there was plenty of technically legal but extremely shady things I might be able to do that would remain in my memories and serve as fap fodder for years to come… and it would keep her out of the hands of anybody really dangerous.  “I might be interested, but if I was going to try it out I’d have to be your only client.”

“Really?” she asked excitedly.  She practically jumped up and down.  “You’d want to hire me?”

“I have always wondered what it would be like to have a daughter,” I said.  “But only if you promised never to tell a soul anything that goes on.”

“Oh, I swear,” she said, and put one hand up in the air, the other over her heart.  “I won’t tell anybody, no matter what.”

“Okay.  I’d be willing to try it out.  When do you want to start?”

“We can start right now,” she said.  She closed the still open door, and slipped off her shoes.  She wore light blue socks.  “What do you want me to call you?” she asked.  “Dad?  Daddy?  Papa?  Father?  Sir?” She broke into a little story.  “One of my friends calls her dad Sir.  I think that’s totally weird.  But I’m your daughter, so you get to set the rules.”

Oh, how easy she was making it.  It was a good thing I didn’t intend to be a sexual predator, just a sexual browser.  “I think Sir’s a little weird too,” I said.  “Just call me Daddy.”

****
Chapter Three:

“Okay, Daddy,” she said.  “What do you want to do first?”

What I wanted to do was pull out my dick and ask my new daughter if she would suck it.  But I knew that was wrong, even for a fantasy, so I settled for a much more tame, saner choice… letting her decide.  “I don’t know.  I’ve never had a daughter before.  What would you normally be doing if you were home?”

“Watching TV probably.” 

I waved her towards the living room area.   

She went over there and immediately set herself down on my couch, grabbing for the remote control on one arm.  “You’ve got a nice TV, Mister… I mean, Daddy.”  It was a flatscreen TV, pretty big screen.  What money I did spend tends to go to gadgets.  I actually did have both an iPhone and an iPad when this happened.  I used the latter more, because I didn’t have many people to call. 

“Thanks,” I said, and sat down beside her, on the other end of the couch, afraid to get too close.  There was space for another person, maybe two, between us.  She turned the TV to the Disney channel, and began watching, laughing along with the lame jokes.  I just sat there, pretending to watch TV, but mostly looking at her.  At the first commercial break, she took off her sweater top and set it aside.  Beneath, her top was thin, with just spaghetti straps, and clung to her body tightly.  She had almost a flat chest, only very tiny bumps denting the shirt.   

Inside me a war began to rage, between the pervert who wanted to push the envelope, tell her how sexy she looked to me and hope she responded, and the decent man, who was screaming at me to do the right thing and call off the plan, send her home.  The winner was the unlikely coward, who would neither side completely with one extreme or the other, nor was willing to make any move at all except watch.

I finally found it in me to say something.  “So, um, how old are you, anyway?”   She looked like she was just at the earliest stages of puberty, but that wasn’t really much of a guide these days, there’s such a wide range.  Judging on her body I might have guessed she could be anywhere from ten to a very undeveloped 14, but considering how naïve she seemed to be about her business idea, I had to guess it was probably towards the lower end.  Unless she was trying to seduce me.  The thought thrilled me but I knew how unlikely it was and so discarded it as impossible.

“Twelve,” she said simply, and went back to looking at the screen.  I watched Maddy.  I realized that I was very likely going to be paying a young girl to sit and watch TV at my house for a few hours a day while I stared at her from the other end of the couch, and somehow I didn’t even mind. 

I let her watch until the end of the show, and would have let her watch another, but she said, “I hate this show,” and looked at me.  “Hey, why don’t you show me around our apartment?”

“Sure,” I said.  I got to my feet.  “But there’s not much to show.”  Since she’d already seen the living room and kitchen area, I took her down the hall, let her have a quick look at the bathroom, then my room. 

My room was sparsely furnished.  I subscribed to the philosophy that the bedroom was for sleeping in.  So, since I had two bedrooms, I chose the smallest one to actually sleep in.  It had a bed, dresser, a TV on top of the dresser in case I couldn’t sleep or wanted to whack off to porn, and a little night table.

“Don’t you ever make your bed?” Maddy asked, gently chiding me.  “You live like a slob.”  She was right.  There were clothes all over the floor, and the bed was a mess, but then I wasn’t expecting company.

“I guess when you live alone long enough,” I admitted, “you kind of fall into some bad habits.”

She looked at me tilting her head a little like she was a miniature psychiatrist, analyzing me.  “Are you lonely?” she asked seriously.

I don’t have my normal defenses up against kids, so I answered honestly, automatically.  “I guess I am.”

“Well, not anymore,” she told me, grabbing my hand.  “You’ve got a daughter now.  Come on, what else.”  She dragged me along to the last room in my apartment, aside from closets, my office. 

“This is my work room, and library,” I explained.  It was a bigger room, with a top of the line computer, another TV, and lots of shelves full of books, both regular and comic books in long boxes.  There were a number of comic-related figures lining the shelves as well. 

I loved them when I was a kid, but I really got into comics again after my girlfriend left me.  It just seemed to be a nice refuge away from the world, escaping into childhood.  I told myself that I wasn’t extremely geeky like many people were, that I didn’t have a collector mentality, I just got books I enjoyed and a few toys to liven up a dreary workplace.   But let’s be honest, I was a comic geek, and a big one. 

“So, where’s my room?” she asked, and I stammered, looking for some way to answer, while she grinned at my discomfort.  “I’m just teasing you.”  She stepped inside my work room.  “What do you do?  For your job?” 

“I’m a database administrator.  It’s a little complicated. Basically I just make sure everything runs smoothly for my company’s computers, so they can keep track of all their customer records, things like that.”

“Hmm,” she said.  “Sounds boring.”

“It can be,” I agreed.  There were interesting aspects, but I didn’t think a child would appreciate those subtleties.  “But I can do almost everything from here, and unless there’s an emergency I only have to work when I want to.”  Emergencies weren’t very common… every once in a while there’d be a power failure or something else that caused some inconsistent data that needed to be fixed right away, and a little more often somebody in the company screwed up and, not knowing how to correct it, forced me to do it.  The most serious thing I had to deal with was when somebody pulled off a SQL injection attack because our web designer cut corners. 

“Cool.”  She took another long look around the room, eyes roaming over the shelves.  “You sure have a lot of superhero stuff, Daddy,” Madeline said.

“Yeah.  I guess I just always liked them,” I explained.  I moved to one of the shelves and pulled off a comic, flipping through it.  “I started reading comics when I was a kid, my dad was into them and he passed some of his old ones on to me.  I always used to imagine passing on my love of the comics to my kids, too.”  It was one of many non-sexual fantasies I had involving kids, right up there with playing catch with a son, or taking either gender out camping.

“Then let’s do that,” Maddy said. 

“What?”

“You can teach me why you love comics.  If that’s what you really want.  You’re not going to keep paying me if I just sit on the couch and be myself, right?”  I shrugged at her, because I probably would, but she took it as agreement.  “So if there’s anything you wanted to do with a daughter, just tell me and I’ll do it.”

Oh, if only she knew how tempting it was to take her up on that offer, all the way.  As it was, an evil little thought formed in my head.  “Well, I guess I always wanted to have my little girl, or little boy, cuddled up and reading a comic with me on my lap.”  There was nothing wrong with a girl sitting on a man’s lap, I told myself, if he didn’t try to grope her or anything. 

“We can do that.  Choose one.”

There were so many options, I didn’t know where to begin.  “Are there any characters you like?” I asked.  “From cartoons or movies?”

“I watched the X-Men movies,” she told me.  “And some of the Spider-Man cartoons.  But just pick something you like.”

I looked through my shelves, settled on a hardcover collection of the beginning of Ultimate Spider-Man.  It started from the beginning so I thought it would be easy to get into, and I now liked that version more than the regular universe.  Ever since the original Peter Parker sold his marriage to the devil, I couldn’t read his adventures in the regular Marvel universe without wanting to smack him.  But Ultimate Spidey, he was untainted, and a hell of a lot of fun. 

 We walked back to the living room, I sat down and held the book, and she climbed up on my lap.  I smelled coconut from her hair, and the pressure of her body as she awkwardly tried to find a comfortable way to sit with me was incredibly comfortable and uncomfortable all at once.  As much as I tried not to, I started to get hard.  Luckily, her butt had pinned my dick pointing down, so that she settled back, she wasn’t getting poked directly with it.  If she felt a lump, she gave no sign, just opened the book and began looking.  I held her very loosely with my arms. 

She read through the book, rather quickly, although for some reason she started out reading the panels and word balloons in the wrong order, right to left instead of left to right.  All the while she sat on my lap, and I just watched.  Surprisingly, my boner started to fade with time and it just felt incredibly right to have a child in my arms.  My heart ached a little knowing it wasn’t real.

Madeline wasn’t a quiet, passive reader, she asked questions all the time, mostly about things she considered “wrong” from how she remembered it in the cartoon.  I tried to explain as best as I could without spoiling the story.  It was a good thing I didn’t start her off with an X-Men book.   That would have been impossible.  Her head would have exploded.

“That was pretty cool,” she said when she reached the last page, then began flipping through the cover gallery idly.  “Do you have more?”

“Plenty.  You can read any of them you like,” I offered.  It was kind of nice having the chance to share the hobby with someone that wasn’t an internet shut-in like me.

“I always thought guys who liked comics were all mega-dorks like Comic Book Guy.  You know, on the Simpsons?”

I grimaced.  “Thanks,” I said sarcastically.

She giggled a bit.  “No, I mean it’s just you’re not like that at all.  You’re kind of cool.”

I felt a little better.  “Comics do attract a lot of people who are… mega-dorks.  But there are lots of normal people, too, and loads of people go see comic movies.  I mean, I guess it is kind of a geeky hobby to be in to…”

“It’s okay,” Maddy said brightly.  “I have some geeky hobbies too.”  She didn’t elaborate, though, her face just brightened up with a new thought.  “Do you ever go to those conventions I see on TV?”

“I’ve gone to a few,” I admitted, embarrassed.  When you’re not a very social person, that counts as a social event.  I met up with a few people I knew from forums, we all had dinner together and a few drinks at the bar, I picked up a few exclusive statues, and for a while felt like something other than a recluse. 

“Do you dress up?” she asked excitedly.  “Like as Spider-Man or Wolverine or something?”

“Oh no,” I said.  “Guys just look stupid when they dress up like that.  Girls can do it.”  With barely a pause to consider what I was about to say, I said, “If I had a daughter I thought I might have her dress up as a comic characters.”

“But you do have a daughter,” she said, and then added, “Daddy.”

I felt an anticipatory tingle go through me, my heart beating slightly faster.  “Would you want to dress up?”

“I’m your daughter,” she said again.  “I have to dress how you want me to, right?”

My breath caught in my throat.  Images of her, dressed up in the most obscene little outfits, crotchless garters, see-through nighties, leather bondage outfits flashed through my head.  I tried to put a stop to it.  “No, I wouldn’t make my daughter wear anything she didn’t want to,” I told her.  But the fantasy was too strong, so I added, “But if you wanted to, I might get some clothes I’d like to see my daughter in.”  Nothing smutty, I told myself.  “Not just superhero stuff, regular clothes too.” 

“Sure.  It’ll be fun.  Like I’m modeling.”

“I’ll need to know your measurements.”  I knew nothing about sizes, and told her that, so I just told her I might decide to special order something and would need to measure her myself.

So, minutes later, I had my trembling hands on her chest, over her clothes, and with a measuring tape providing one extra layer of distance.  Perfectly innocent, at least to her mind, but I doubt an adult would have been fooled.   I was uncomfortably excited about the positions of my hands and I had to read the measurements twice before I could remember.

After I did her chest, I did her waist, and she undid her jeans and slid them down, just a bit, at my urging so I could get an accurate measurement.  I saw a glimpse of her yellow panties.   The other measurements weren’t nearly so exciting, but being able to touch her thrilled me in a way that scared me.  I knew I was going down a dangerous road, because I didn’t really know how much control I’d have.  “Okay, I think I have enough,”  I finally told her.  My mouth felt bone dry, but somehow my tongue managed to work.  “I’ll come up with some ideas and maybe in a few days I’ll have something for you to wear.” 

“Okay, Daddy,” she said with a smile.  “I can’t wait.” 

We spent a little more time together, watching TV, and then I realized it was time for her to go.  I pulled out my wallet and paid her for her time.  That felt wrong.  It wasn’t the only part of those hours that felt wrong, but it was the only part where the feeling wasn’t combined with a perverse thrill.  Yet I paid her and she took the money with a smile. 

“See you tomorrow?” she said.  I nodded dumbly.

****
Chapter Four:

After she was gone, I went into my bathroom and masturbated to the thought of my new, rented, daughter.  I did it shamefully, but I did it all the same.  I had to.  Once I was done, I resolved firmly to put an end to any naughty stuff.  It was wrong.  It would only lead to pain for her, or jail for me, if not both.  Either seemed intolerable for a little thrill.  I jacked off a few more times that night playing with fantasies, but each time told myself that that’s all they’d be. 

The next day, I tried my best to keep that firm resolve.  When Madeline came over, we watched TV, I read comics with her, but I didn’t ask her to sit on my lap or try to cuddle directly with her, no matter how much I wanted to.  The only contact we had was two chaste, fatherly hugs, one at the beginning of our time together, and one at the end, which included a kiss on her forehead.  It probably helped that I masturbated just before schools let out, to unleash any pent up frustrations.   

It was a Friday, so the next time I would see her, as my daughter, would be Monday.  I was pretty proud of myself for my restraint, so I didn’t cancel our arrangement entirely as I’d thought about doing.  As stupid as it seemed, she filled a hole in my life, the idea that I had a daughter who looked up to me and depended on me, or more fundamentally that I mattered to somebody, even if it was all just pretend. 

I saw her once on Saturday, in the hall as I returned from a trip to the store to pick up milk for my breakfast coffee.  She was walking down the hall with her grim-faced mother, going out somewhere.  I smiled politely, but my smile was for her.  She waved back.  My heart fluttered a little, and I had a smile on my face for minutes after she was out of sight.

Shortly after that encounter, I was spending some time on the Internet and weakness struck me again.  On an imageboard, I spotted a thread featuring underage girls around Maddy’s age.  None were nude, but many were dressed and posed provocatively.  I got aroused, and imagined them with Madeline’s face, which only made the arousal more intense.  I remembered the measurements I’d taken of her, and my promise that I might dress her up with my own choice of clothes.  

With those images in my mind, and no plans for the day, I soon found myself halfway around the city looking for something to dress Maddy up in.  I had an inkling to shop far away from where I lived, to limit any chance somebody would recognize me and wonder why I was buying clothes for a little girl.  I found a little plaza that contained a thrift shop and a few other places where clothes could be bought.  Several hours of looking around later, I had a few outfits that I wanted to see her wear. 

There was nothing technically obscene about the outfits, or they wouldn’t have been sold.  If the dresses happened to be a little too short for the sizes Maddy gave me, well, that could be chalked up to an innocent mistake, couldn’t it?

By the time Monday had rolled around, I had flipped back to a desire to be responsible and moral, to not even risk anything that would lead to anything else.  That lasted only a few minutes after Maddy arrived.

She had her schoolbag with her, slung over one shoulder, and a simple black T-shirt with High School Musical on it, and a pair of jeans.  She smiled her disarming, slightly gap-toothed smile at me when I opened the door, and said, “Hi, Daddy.”

I let her in.  “Hi, Maddy.  How’re you?”

“Not bad.  How are you?”

“Good.  Have a good weekend?”

She looked towards the window, a far-away expression on her face, but only for a moment.  “It was okay,” she said softly.  Then, brightening, she asked, “Didja miss me?”

“You know what?  I think I did,” I admitted.  “I was actually thinking about you this weekend…”

She beamed, her bright smile lighting up the room with innocent joy.  “You were?”

“Yeah, I was doing some shopping and I happened to see some outfits that I think are in your size…”

The smile broke into a grin.  “You bought me clothes to try on?”

“Just while you’re here,” I said.  “If you want.”

She changed in the bathroom, of course, with the door closed, but I hadn’t expected anything else.  Even if I might have hoped for a private strip show, I still intended for this to be entirely innocent.  If I was going to take advantage of her, it would be in the most minor way possible… hopefully so little she’d never realize that’s what happened.

I waited, my heart pounding in my chest, alternating between indulging in a fantasy and berating myself for what I was doing, until finally she emerged in the first outfit.  It was simple, a shirt and shorts, but both were a little too small for her. The shirt clung tightly to her body and ended just below the belly button.  As for the shorts, they made her thin legs look impossibly long, and it was hard to resist staring at them, imagining running my hands up along them. 

Maddy herself seemed a little unsure as she stepped out.  “It’s a little small I think,” she said, looking down.

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I must not be very good at picking sizes.”

She smiled.  “It’s okay, my dad… my real dad isn’t good at that either.”

“You do look very cute in it,” I assured her.  “I almost want to get a picture.”

Her mouth opened into a grin, teeth flashing.  “You can if you want.  Dads have pictures of their daughters, right?”

I nodded.  “Okay, just let me get my camera.”  I had it on a nearby shelf, just hoping for this.  I took a handful of pictures.  There was nothing erotic about them, or even exploitative.  They were, if anything, just cute.  When I would later masturbate to those images, it was only to the bright, happy smile on her face, to imagine the smile was for me.

The next outfit was a black skirt and white top, looking a little like a school uniform, with stockings that ran up past her knee.  Although it showed off far less skin than her last one, it was somehow more provocative.  When I asked her to pose for pictures, I suggested she lean forward and blow a kiss to the camera. 

I had two more outfits, but I only got her to try on one that day.  It seemed to be extreme enough.  This one was a short pink skirt and a top that was a much lighter shade of pink, almost white.  Both were again too small for her, this time in particularly revealing ways.  The skirt barely came down to the bottom of her ass, and the top left quite a bit of belly showing, including her navel.  I could see she had an outie, like a literal button nestled in a little depression.   The overall effect of this outfit was profoundly erotic.  I guess some parents actually do dress their kids like that and see nothing wrong with it, but it looked to me like she was some kind of preteen hooker. 

She didn’t seem to notice anything salacious about the outfit, and although I took pictures of her in it, I made sure they were innocent.  Just standing straight, or sitting on the couch.  The most risqué I got was one where she was lying on the couch, on her stomach.  It was taken from behind, and so you could just barely see up her dress to the bottom of her white panties and the hint of buttocks extending out of the leg holes.

I didn’t pose her in that way, and didn’t intend to take that picture, but since it was the last outfit I gave to her, she stayed in it, and when I saw her lying on the couch like that, reading the next installment of Ultimate Spider-Man, I couldn’t resist.

The little fashion show turned me on of course, mostly the thought of the pictures and what I could do with them later, but I was able to keep my erection down through a force of will and instead just felt a sort of drunken giddiness.   As if my better self was reacting against such impulses, the rest of our time together that day turned out remarkably normal and innocent.  We read comics, talked about her day, played cards, and I helped her with her homework.  I loved it all, and not just because of what she was wearing.  In truth, I would have found it almost as satisfying if there was no fancy outfits at all. 

The dirty little secret about pedophiles, I think, is that we really do love being around children, and not just for sexual reasons.  You always see pedophiles in TV and movies, the ones who don’t just grab a kid and abuse them, as lurking menaces, being nice to kids in order to groom them for later molestation.  If you believe the media, they act nice, but secretly, they’re monsters, wanting to destroy innocence.   I’m sure there are some like that, but I bet there are many others like me, where the truth is stranger.  

I genuinely like kids.  Before I knew what sex was I liked playing with younger kids, and when I see a bored kid when visiting one of my relatives, my first instinct is to try and entertain them.  I’d almost forgotten this part of me because I’d kept myself away from them for so long, but there’s just something about spending time with younger people that fills me with joy.  If I could one day make these urges just disappear (something I prayed for back when I believed), I’d still be drawn to children just for their own qualities.  I loved how you could read their emotions right off their faces, because they didn’t see a need to hide it or play games with how they feel.  I loved their idealism, their unbridled enthusiasm for the things they loved.  Maddy had eventually opened up to me about her self-identified geeky passion for archaeology and ancient civilizations, including lost ones like Atlantis, and in doing so, she made me love it too, a little.  I also love that you can influence younger people, guide them, make a positive difference in their lives like you can’t do for someone who’s grown up and won’t let anybody in.

In truth, I don’t think I like kids because I have these sexual urges, but that I have sexual urges because I like them so much.  Imagine someone that makes you happier just by just being with them.  Now imagine that they also have physical qualities you find attractive.  A beautiful, angelic face, the beginnings of a womanly form, combined with an awkward unawareness of their own beauty and a vulnerability that makes you want to do anything to protect them.  Size, as well, I guess, in my case.  I’ve always been attracted to petite women.  Is it that unexpected that, even if they were a child, some part of you would instinctively consider the impossible, crazy idea that you could unite that happy feeling with your most powerful drive, sex?  That you’d think about them sexually more than other, more socially acceptable alternatives?  I don’t think so. 

That doesn’t mean it’s ever right to act on it, but I don’t think most of us pedophiles are monsters for having the feelings, the thoughts.  There are real monsters out there, certainly, ones who would just use a little kid like Maddy as a convenient hole, or thrive on ruining her, shattering that innocence.  Those are the ones I thought of as dangerous pedophiles.  I didn’t count myself in that category.  I knew I wasn’t completely safe around children, but for different reasons.  I couldn't ever understand my urges completely, but what I did understand was that the danger wasn’t that I’d try to destroy a girl’s innocence to satisfy my sexual urges, but that I could delude myself into thinking that you could be innocently sexual, that if she trusted you, you could touch without hurting, or even somehow be helping.   That’s what drove my interactions with Maddy.  I loved being with her, and I thought that I wasn’t going to do anything sexual with her… I didn’t expect even to touch her in any inappropriate way.

I was wrong.

****
Chapter Five:

My behavior towards Madeline tended to vacillate… I’d push a little past the boundaries of propriety, like by getting her to dress provocatively and pose for pictures, or a too-long cuddle, and then I’d pull back and for a while afterwards I wouldn’t even touch her except for a brief hug, then I’d go back again.  After I’d gotten her to dress up for me, I was good for a while.  That last, unused outfit?  I threw it away, deciding in one of my better moments that it was too much.  It was sleepwear, something like a nightgown, but again too short for her, and I knew I shouldn’t try to get her to wear it.

But slowly my urges would creep back into the picture and I’d tell myself it was okay to get just a little bit naughty.  So it was only after several more afternoons of strangely fulfilling pseudo-father-daughter interactions that I slipped again, when I got another package in the mail, something I’d ordered on the internet.  Two, actually, but they arrived the same day and were for the same purpose.

When I opened it up and lay it out on my bed, I knew I was going to have to have Maddy dress up again, and to take more pictures.  I started masturbating with an elaborate fantasy, of her putting the costume on, straddling me, and then pulling out my dick and practically raping me.  That was a surprisingly common type of fantasy for me, by the way… not me manipulating a young girl into doing something, which I was sure would hurt her, but her taking the initiative and, wanting to experience something sexual, forcing the issue with me.  That I could convince myself was her true desires, and that if I didn’t resist as much as I ought to, it was, if a sin, at least a more forgivable one.   

In this particular fantasy, the costume itself played a role, where she took on the role she dressed up as, so I couldn’t resist, even if I wanted to.   I was pinned by one hand of this delicate-seeming twelve-year old, and she pulled her panties to the side and told me she wanted me to be her first, she wanted to feel me inside her, for me to cum inside her.

As I stroked myself, I felt the panties… they weren’t part of the main outfit, but came in the second package, and the logo matched.  The satiny material was so smooth, and although it was fresh and clean the thought occurred to me that she would be wearing them soon, and if I rubbed them around my cock as I jacked off, or even came inside them, that it would in some weird psychosexual way, be like I was cumming on her directly. 

I didn’t do it, but I came very close, and weighed the possibilities of her noticing a stain before she put them on.  Fear of that made me decide to avoid it… not that she might know what it was, which I doubted unless she was far more sexually experienced than she let on, but that I might have to explain what it was, and thus have to lie.  Finally, I decided against it, dropped the panties on the bed and went into the bathroom to finish up in the toilet.

Afterwards, I felt pleased with my restraint, figuring that if I could restrain myself from that when so horny that I was about to cum, surely there’d be no way I’d let the situation get out of hand when Maddy next showed up. 

The next day, I waited in eager anticipation as Maddy changed in the bathroom.  Her face lit up when I showed her the outfit, like she always secretly wanted to dress up, but didn’t often get the chance.  “I can’t exactly take you to a convention,” I said, “but at least we can do this.”

I looked forward to seeing her big reveal… even all sexual desire aside, I thought she was going to look cute as a button.  Of course, the surprising erotic power of cuteness is part of the attraction of girls Madeline’s age.  The pervert within me, though, was most curious about whether she’d wear the panties.

I presented them all as one outfit, in the hopes she might not suspect anything out of the ordinary, or if she did, that she might think it was an innocent mistake.  For although the outfit was designed for a girl, not a woman, the underwear was virtually a thong.   I’d carefully cut out the crotch piece that was built into the skirt to preserve a girl’s modesty, and didn’t think my alterations would be obvious… but my plans would be for nothing if she just decided to wear her own underwear.

“Ready?” she called from my bathroom.  I assured her I was.  She told me to go sit on the couch, and I complied.  The door opened, but I couldn’t see her yet.  Suddenly, her voice rang out.  “Look, up in the sky… is it a bird?  A plane?”  She darted out of the bathroom in a leap that became a slide on my floors.  “No, it’s Supergirl!”  Then she broke out into a grin.  “How do I look?”

She looked… like Supergirl.  Red boots that came up to just below the knee, a blue top with that classic symbol proudly emblazoned on the front, and a red skirt and cape.   Sure, it was not quite the traditional representation of Supergirl, who almost always looked like an older teen, and most Supergirls didn’t have such straight hair, or ears that stuck out a little, or a cute little tooth gap.  But Supergirl must have been an awkward tween at some point in her life, and in a media filled with adaptations, relaunches and redesigns, not to mention alternate universes, it was close enough.  After all, in the comics, Power Girl is just the Supergirl of another universe, despite the two characters having completely different body types.  With all that, if you ask me, there was more than enough room for the little twelve-year-old Supergirl that posed happily in front of me. 

“You look great,” I said, honestly, though when she tugged at her skirt as she turned from side to side, I couldn’t help but wish she would pull it up.  When she made her entrance, the skirt bounced but not quite high enough to see about the panties, so the one big mystery of the outfit remained that way.   “I should get some pictures, if that’s okay.”

Her grin widened.  “Of course it is, Daddy.”  While I got my camera, she added.  “Of course, I don’t really know what kind of poses are good for Supergirl, I haven’t read anything with her in it.”

“I could get you some, if you want.”  I was never a huge Supergirl fan, but I think I had a few issues of her most recent series, if only I could find them. 

“Maybe later,” she said.  “I’m still reading Spider-Man.  Hey, is there a Spider-Girl?”

“Yeah, actually.”  And a Spider-Woman, though I didn’t want to spoil her upcoming appearance in the Ultimate Spider-Man series she was reading.  “I’m not sure there are any good costumes for her, though.”  They certainly wouldn’t be very revealing.

“Hey, have Spider-Man and Supergirl ever met?”

“Different universes,” I said, trying hard not to roll my eyes.  “Remember?”

“Oh, right.  I keep forgetting which characters are in which.  They should just combine them all into one.”  She nodded at the camera.  “So what kind of pose do you want me in?”

Bent over with her skirt pulled up.  Standing on her head.  Legs spread wide with her hand in her panties.  I blinked, hard, to try and banish that line of thought as much as I could, and said, “I don’t know, hands on your hips?”  Snap.  “Now with one arm out like you’re flying.”  I tried a few more poses, but they were all innocent… I was either unable to, or too timid to, suggest something that would get her skirt to fly up.

It took a few minutes for me to remember that there was a simpler, though less appealing, way of answering that question, and I excused myself to go to the washroom.  There, piled neatly on the edge of the tub, were Madeline’s everyday clothes.  The panties were sandwiched between the jeans on the bottom and the blouse on top, and they were red with white cartoon cat faces all over.  If those were the panties she came in with, it meant that she was wearing the thong right then. 

It also meant one more thing…  I lifted the panties to my face and inhaled deeply.  I’d done it before when she’d changed into underwear I’d provided, and the familiar scent permeated my whole body and made me feel like I was the one who had the power to fly.  It’s hard to describe the actual aroma, there was certainly a good deal of the smell of sweat, but there was that something special in it.  Maybe it was pheromones, or maybe it was just some shadow of the subconscious borne of the knowledge that it was next to her tight virgin pussy… although the effect was certainly stronger on the panties she wore the whole day.  I’d surely smell the Supergirl panties after she left, but, as was the case of the other borrowed panties, the smell was usually less intense. 

The smelling, and the mental pictures it provoked, were starting to stiffen my prick, so I quickly put the panties down, back on top of the jeans, and then carefully replaced the blouse on top, so that it seemed untouched.  Then I flushed the toilet and washed my hands, and returned to my little Supergirl.

****
Chapter Six:

When I came out, I found Maddy lying on the very top of my couch, arms outstretched, like she was flying.  It was adorable, and I smiled genuinely.  She grinned back at me.  “It’s too bad I can’t really fly,” she said. 

An idea struck.  “I could probably lift you up and carry you around in the air,” I suggested.  “It wouldn’t quite be flying, but it’d be closer…”

“Really?”  I nodded.  “Then let’s do it.”

I approached her cautiously, suddenly nervous and unsure about how to approach it, but Madeline must have sensed my confusion, because she helped.  She slid off the couch into a standing position, and put my hands on her waist. 

I’m not a gym nut or anything, but I do like to keep in shape.  The heart problems that led to my dad’s death were in no small part due to his weight.  As a teen, I wasn’t as bad as him, but I already tended a little towards the pudgy, and when he died, it was a wake-up call. I became determined to get healthy and stay that way.  Throughout college I tried to do a light workout in my room every morning, and it became a regular routine.  I’d lapsed a little in recent years, dropping down to a couple times a week, when I remembered, but ever since Maddy started coming over, I’d gotten back in the regular habit again.  

And she was a wisp of a thing, looking so light and fragile that I was sure I could lift her.  So I hefted her up and raised her as high as I could.  It couldn’t have worked out better, I could look right up her skirt and see a thin strip of blue the only thing keeping her butt-cheeks apart, and the little wider spot of fabric that covered her pussy.  I couldn’t maintain her in that way for long, so I steadied her with one hand on her stomach and slid the other down her skirt and over to her legs, giving me a wider stance and letting me lift her over my head in a lying down position, although she did step on my head briefly in the changeover.  I didn’t mind.  “Ready?”

“Yeah!”

I couldn’t run, I didn’t want to risk running her into a wall or something, and she was getting heavy enough without trying to move fast as well, but I walked around the apartment a little, while she made an exclamation of excitement, not unlike a “wheeee”.   I couldn’t keep it up for very long.  My estimates of my strength proved to be a little overambitious, and before long my arms were beginning to feel like they were on fire.

“I think we’re going to have to come in for a crash landing,” I said.  Luckily the couch was right in front of me and I half-dropped, half-tossed her onto it, and took a deep breath.  “Whew.  You okay?”

Her giggle told me she was before she spoke, and to my surprise, the force of the impact caused her skirt to fly up at an indecent level, over her waist.   I could see the panties I’d bought on her, in full light of the apartment instead of the dark under her skirt.  The classic red and yellow S-Shield emblazoned right over where her pussy mound made a little bulge.  I drank it in for a few seconds, while she said, “I’m fine.  That was fun, Daddy.”  She suddenly seemed to notice the way her skirt was, although from the casual way she adjusted it, she either didn’t realize or didn’t care that I was looking.

“Yeah.  Sorry, I guess I’m not as strong as I thought.”  I had what I wanted, my little perverted look of the day, and decided I’d try to be good the rest of our time together.  “Now, what should we do next.  Do you want a snack, or maybe I could help with your homework, or, well, there’s always the next book of Ultimate Spider-Man…”

We did a little of all three, as it turned out.  First she had me help her a little with some math questions for homework… I think she was doing it deliberately for me, to give me the ‘experience’ of helping a daughter with her homework, rather than actually needing it for herself.  She seemed to be pretty smart.  After homework, I brought her a plate of store-bought cookies and sat beside her while she read comics. 

It was when she almost finished the comic when I reached over for another cookie, which turned out to be the last on the plate.  Maddy shook her head at one of the developments on the page, and then announced, “Wow, Spider-Man’s really not that great at having a secret identity.  People keep taking his mask off or finding his costume!”  With that observation, Maddy leaned forward to grab one just after I snagged it, and then, finding the plate empty, eyed me suspiciously.  “Did you take the last cookie?”

“Maybe,” I said.  It was curled up in my hand, hidden from view.

“You thief,” she said lightly.  “Those were supposed to be for me.” 

Of course, I bought the cookies and felt I had every right to take them, but I knew she was joking and so I played along.  I revealed the cookie and said, “What are you going to do about it?”

“You do know I’m Supergirl, right?  I fight crime and, like, aliens and stuff.  I’m sure I can take down a cookie thief.”

I launched myself off the couch.  “You’ll have to catch me first.”

Maddy tossed the book aside and chased me around the room.  She had more energy, but I had longer legs and knew the apartment intimately, so even when she tried to hop over the couch, I was always a few steps ahead of her.  “No fair,” she called out, laughing, as we paused on opposite sides of the couch.  “I’m supposed to have super speed!”

“Maybe I do too.  Come on, if it was easy to catch all your foes, you wouldn’t be much of a hero, would you?”  But I decided it was time to let her catch me.  So, after a few more times around the familiar circles in the apartment, the next chance I had a free place to run I took a detour into my bedroom.   A deliberate mistake, for, once she followed me in, there was no room for me to run, I’d have to try to push past her and pretend to be ‘caught’ by her super strength. 

That was the intention, at least, although it worked out a little differently.  “Ha, I have you now,” she said from the doorframe, and then jumped me.  If I’d expected the sudden attack, I could have held my ground, but I hadn’t, and we tumbled backwards onto my bed.  When we landed, her legs were on either side of mine, and Maddy pulled herself upright, and then crawled on her knees over my body until she was straddling my hips.  She put one hand on my chest, lightly encircling my neck and applying slight pressure, not enough to hurt but enough to be play-strangling me.  “Now return that stolen cookie,” she said.  She was a little out of breath and inhaling and exhaling rapidly. 

I’d forgotten the cookie.   I had an underage Supergirl on top of me, on my bed, in a dominant position that echoed sex… the only things separating our genitals were my pants and our underwear.  If those three layers of fabric were absent, it would practically be the exact same thing I’d fantasized while holding those panties.   “So?  Are you going to give it up?”

Naturally, it moved.  My dick, I mean.  It stiffened rapidly, like it wanted to tear through those three layers and the barrier between fantasy and reality, and plant itself.  My rigid cock was lying back, up against my chest, pinned under her weight, but I imagine she must have felt the bulge right on her crack. 

She didn’t say a word about it.  I didn’t know if she didn’t feel it or just didn’t know what it meant, or maybe she knew and just didn’t want to say anything.  We stayed like that for what felt like five minutes but must have only been a few seconds.  “Well?” she said.

I finally opened my hand and revealed the cookie.  It was one of those round ones with the sugary raspberry jelly in the middle, a little broken from being mistreated.  Maddy grabbed the cookie and snapped it in half, smiling as she pulled the jelly apart.  “See, because I’m such a good girl, we can share it.”   One half, she thrust towards my mouth, and I opened, accepting it.  Somehow that sugary sweetness only made me harder.

I felt my hands drift towards her legs, as though under some supernatural control, and landing on her bare flesh, and I struggled to keep them from sliding upwards.  “Okay,” I said.  “You won.  What now?”

“I don’t know, Daddy,” she said, and one of those eternally long moments happened again as my dick swelled once more.  “But I still have to find out how Gwen’s going to react to finding out.”  And, just like that, she was off me, and I struggled quickly to turn to my side and hide the tent in my pants, but she didn’t look back.  I needed a couple minutes before I could follow her. 

It wasn’t long after that that she went home, after changing back into her normal clothes, of course.  We parted the way we usually did, with me paying her and her giving me a hug, no discussion about anything unusual having happened. 

I masturbated the moment she left, clutching her Supergirl thong in my hand and convincing myself I detected a spot of now-dry wetness, but after I blew my load, I lay back on my bed full of shame.  I’d always convinced myself I could play the “look but don’t touch” game… aside from completely innocent touches, but, even though I hadn’t intended her to straddle me, I came awfully close to touching.  My hands on her thighs might have looked innocent, but it wasn’t, and I knew it.  And maybe the whole thing wasn’t as accidental as I wanted to believe, either… maybe I’d subconsciously arranged it to happen just like that.  However it happened, I was on the slippery slope, and I knew it.

So I made a decision to end our arrangement.   I could thrive off the memories I’d already had for years to come, and I could lock that dark part of me back in the Phantom Zone where it could do nothing but fantasize. 

****
Chapter Seven:

The decision made, I felt good about it, with only a little reluctance.  I knew I’d miss Maddy, and not just sexually, but it was for the best.  She was the sweetest kid I’d ever known, and I genuinely cared about her.  I loved having her around, treating me like a father, and rediscovering Spider-Man’s adventures through her eyes was a joy, but the last thing I wanted to do was hurt her, even accidentally.  I had no serious second thoughts, and was determined to make the next session of Rent-A-Daughter my last.

That resolve lasted until I actually tried.

“What do you mean?” Maddy exclaimed sadly, her mouth hanging partly open like I’d just done something inexplicable.

“I just think we shouldn’t do this any more,” I said.

“You don’t like having me as your daughter?”  Her face had crumpled, like I’d just actually hurt her.

“No,” I said, trying to sound soothing.  “You were a wonderful daughter.  It’s just… I think it’s run it’s course.  There’s only so much we can do… I mean it’s not like I can take you anywhere so we wind up doing the same things.”

“But it’s fun, isn’t it?  I thought you liked it.”

“I do…”

“And you said you wanted to share your love of comics, and we’re still doing that, right?  I still haven’t read all of that Spider-Man series and you said you were going to get me Spider-Girl and some Teen Tritons and X-Men.”

“Teen Titans,” I corrected automatically.

“See, that’s why you still need to teach me, cause I don’t know this stuff yet.”

“I can give you a bunch of comics if you’d like, like a going away present, it’s just…”

“What… you’ve got to have a reason.  Did something happen?  Did I do something wrong?”

It was breaking my heart.  And it exposed my biggest weakness in the whole plan… I didn’t come up with an idea for what I was going to tell her, I just assumed she’d take it professionally that I wanted to end it, like it was just a business arrangement for her. 

“You didn’t do anything wrong… it’s just…” Inspiration struck.  “I can’t really afford it any more.  I had some financial difficulties and…” I hated lying to her, but it was for the best.

It didn’t work.  “I can cut the price if that’s what it is,” she said earnestly.  “How about $10 an hour?”

“Maddy…”

Guessing I wasn’t going for it, she said, “$7.50.  That’s my final offer.”

It was less than she said she could earn babysitting, and that was what made me wonder… maybe I wasn’t the only one getting something out of this relationship, and I don’t just mean the money.  Maybe she liked it, as strange as it sounded.  I’d have thought she’d have relished the chance to spend time with her friends after school, and assumed she was just doing this to earn some extra money.  By now, she surely had enough for the iPhone. 

Still, I had her best interests in mind.  “You’re worth much more than that.  I’d feel like I was taking advantage of you.”

“It’s okay,” she said.  “Take advantage of me.”  If only she knew how that sounded.  “I mean, it would be so much more work to find another wannabe Daddy who wants to hire me.”

That stopped me cold… if I was no longer her client, then she might go out and find another… whoever she found might be better at talking her out of this dangerous plan, but they also might be like me, but without my restraint.  “You shouldn’t look for one,” I said. 

“Why not?”

Because the only people who’d hire her are pedophiles like me… but I couldn’t say that.  “You should just spend time with your friends.  A girl your age doesn’t need to be working every afternoon, you should be enjoying life.  You must have earned enough by now.”

“No, I still need the money,” she said.  “I’d rather you still hire me, even at a discount.  I like you, you’re a good Dad, you’re fun.  But if you don’t want a daughter anymore…”

She left it hanging, and I was weak.   I could have scared her away with the truth, but I convinced myself that she liked me, that for some reason she liked spending time with me, even though she had a father of her own.  Maybe she even had a crush on me… that was possibly the most dangerous option, for it could lead to me taking advantage of it while telling myself that she wanted it.    Or maybe she just really needed the money for some reason.  But I was afraid to tell her the truth, and more afraid that, without me, she’d run into somebody worse.   I could control myself, for Maddy’s sake, I wanted to believe that.  “Ten dollars an hour?” I said.

“I said seven…” she stopped herself.  “Yeah, ten dollars.”

I had to laugh.  “I didn’t forget.  But I said you were worth more than that… and if you need the money that much, I wouldn’t want to short-change you.”

“So you still want to be my Daddy?”

“For a while longer.  We’ll see how it goes.”

She rushed forward and hugged me, more intently than she had before, then let go, and rushed into my living room area.  “So, let’s decide what to do today.”

Our relationship resumed, and I was much better about it.  I didn’t buy her any more racy outfits, or touch her inappropriately, although sometimes I got a nice peek when she wore a loose shirt that revealed her budding breasts when she leaned over too far, or a flash of panties under a skirt.   One thing did change, other than the price.  Maddy took to heart the idea that I was getting bored doing the same things over and over again.  At first she suggested I take her out, but when I gave that idea a firm no, she came up with the idea of, every so often, doing “theme days”, to give me a fuller range of the father-daughter experience. 

The first of those was Movie Day.   I’d take my daughter “out” to a movie… really it was just watching Raiders of the Lost Ark on the couch, but we’d dim the lights like it was a theatre, and make microwave popcorn (which Maddy brought with her), and Maddy said she’d do her best to pretend we were out at a movie. 

Next there was a School Talent Show Day, where we pretended we were at a parents night type event, and she showed off her talent… and to make it realistic, made me sit through a bunch of other kids with their talents, dressing up in different outfits and talking in different voices to pretend to be different people, and demonstrating various talents from dancing to juggling to singing, with varying degrees of success.  The singing was particularly bad, but she insisted she was pretending to be one of her friends who thinks she’s a great singer but wasn’t. 

 I didn’t know her friends, but Maddy probably could have done “impressions” as her talent, if it were a real talent show, they all seemed to come to life with their own quirks.   The actual talent she did for her own role was a surprising one.   I expected something to do with her love of history and archaeology, but instead, she took out a few green tennis balls and began juggling.    She managed three at a time pretty easily, and when she moved up to four she was still pretty good, although she did drop one once.

I clapped for that one enthusiastically, because that’s what I was supposed to do as a father... she’d coached me that I could just pretend to clap for everybody else, but for a daughter I had to stand up and act like she was the best, even if she wasn’t.  She was the best, but then, she was also all the worst performers, too.    “How’d you learn how to do that?” I asked, after the ‘show’ concluded.

“Oh, my, um, other dad used to do it with grenades,” she said simply.  I stared, and she laughed.  “Not real ones, of course, but fakes.  It would freak people out.” 

“I bet,” I said nervously.  If I needed any incentive to be good the rest of that day, the reminder that her actual father was ex-military and could probably fuck me up in all sorts of ways provided it.  “Don’t try that at the school talent show,” I joked, to try to dispel the tension that only I felt.

She laughed.  “Nah, I don’t even enter the real one.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged.  “It’s just juggling.  People would think it’s dumb.”

“Well, I thought you were wonderful…”

Her eyes shone.  “Really?” 

I nodded.  “Don’t worry so much about what other people think.  You’re great.  If you ask me, and…” I fake-looked around, then continued, “I seem to be the only judge here, you totally won that talent show.”

She hugged me briefly but fiercely, and, although the image of her father with a military rifle pointed at my face kept me from hugging her as tightly as I wanted, I gave her a light pat on the back and later presented her a mini-bust of Batman (who I described as the most talented human in the DC universe), as a trophy.  She didn’t get to keep it, of course, but she never asked.  I guess we both knew it would lead to questions if one of her parents found it. 

But it was the next theme day that caused me to get into more trouble.

****
Chapter Eight:

After Talent Show Day Madeline had some trouble thinking of things we could do.  We couldn’t exactly build a fire in the apartment for a camping day.  Then, one day, she came up with, “How about Beach Day?”

“How exactly would that work?”

“Well, we pretend we’re at the beach.   We get a blanket, and pack a picnic lunch in a cooler, and pretend we’re sitting out under the sun, and maybe fill up one of those beach balls with air.  I can get one at the dollar store.  I don’t think we can do sand, but we can use the bathtub as the water.”

“So, we just sit around in swimsuits that afternoon?”

“If you think it’s dumb we don’t have to do it, but I’m trying here.”

Swimsuits.  The word echoed in my head, accompanied by images.  “No, that sounds fine.  Do I buy you a swimsuit?”

She shrugged.  “If you want.  Or I could bring one from home.”

I chose the safer path.  “Maybe that’s for the best.  If I bought one I’d probably screw up the size again anyway.”

She laughed.  “Yeah, that’s true.  So, what do you say?  You can make the lunch, I’ll bring the beach toys.”

“Okay,” I said.  “Beach day.  Let’s do it.” 

I was conscious at the time that I might drift once again into forbidden territory, but I had no idea how much I’d wind up slipping. 

She showed up at her usual time, with a little pack under one arm.  “So, Daddy… are you ready to go to the beach?”

“You bet.  I packed us a lunch and everything.”  Well, I made two sandwiches, and a couple of sodas.  I didn’t want to spoil her appetite when she went to her real home. 

“Let’s see if we can find a place to set up.”

I’d done that already, pushing my couch up against one wall and table next to the TV, there was a wide open space in the middle of the room, where two towels lay.  “Oh, well, this looks like a good place,” Maddy said.  “I’m just going to go into one of the change rooms.”  With that, she disappeared into my bathroom.  I decided to go into my room and pull off my shirt and pants while I waited.  I had a pair of trunks underneath, not that I expected to do much swimming, but I wanted to get into the spirit of the day.  I’d forgotten about Maddy’s suggestion of using the bathtub as the water, but she hadn’t… I could hear a torrent of water running as she changed, filling the tub. 

Finally, the water stopped, and shortly after that, Maddy came out.  She wore a blue two-piece swimsuit that clung to her little body.  There was nothing indecent about it, but it made my breath catch all the same, seeing her body on display.  It was hard to believe there was any fat on her, although some clearly hid underneath the silky fabric of her top.  I allowed myself a few seconds to stare, but then looked away and sat down on the towel.  With no cushioning sand, it was a lot less comfortable than a real beach would be, but I tried not to complain. 

“So, what do we do first?” I asked.  I usually let Maddy set the agenda, especially on her theme days, because she had an idea in her head about what the “Daughter Experience” was all about.   Moreover, I couldn’t trust myself not to suggest something inappropriate. 

She had a pair of sunglasses in her hand, one of the type that doesn’t actually have any glass in it, just a series of horizontal strips with spaces between them wide enough to see through, and put them on.  “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to soak up some rays…”  She pointed to the ceiling, where a light mounted in the fan served as her imaginary sun.  Maddy reached into her bag, pulled out, to my surprise, a bottle of suntan lotion, and squirted a small amount into her palm.  She then rubbed the oily liquid up and down her legs, making her skin glisten.  Then she turned to me and said, “Can you rub some on my back?”

It was like asking an alcoholic if he’d like to go to a wine tasting.  How could I refuse?  Maddy squirted some goo in my hands and rolled on her stomach, and I worked it into her skin, caressing it lightly, feeling the warmth of her body.  I wanted more, I wanted to slip beneath the strings, to massage it all over her body, front and back, but I restricted myself to a few seconds of enjoyment of the physical contact, and then lay down on my stomach… mostly so my erection would bang against the floor instead of tenting my trunks. 

“Aren’t you going to put any on?” Maddy asked.

“No, I think I’m okay.” 

“You’re going to burn,” she warned, uselessly.  You couldn’t burn on lights, after all.

“I’ll risk it.”  Although I wanted her to return the favor and rub some on me, my mind was already racing to places it shouldn’t go.  I actually thought about suggesting she might want to avoid tan lines by sunbathing topless.  If I got more turned on, I might have convinced myself that I could say it as a joke, and that if she took it seriously, it wouldn’t be my fault… but I knew better, and wanted to stay knowing better.  I bit my tongue, literally for a few seconds, but after that, just metaphorically.  

We lay there, on blankets in my living room, pretending the ceiling light was a sun, and that we were tanning.  It was a little dull, at least until we started talking.  Mostly, I let her talk, and I just got her started.  I could ask her about her friends and she’d tell stories of some of the kids at school.  At one point I asked her what got her interested in archaeology. 

She hesitated, as though worried it was something she shouldn’t say.  “I guess 'cause of my dad at first.  I mean my real dad.  He was stationed in Egypt and would send home postcards and stuff and always said he’d take us to see the Pyramids one day.”

I knew from before she hadn’t been.  “Well, I’m sure sooner or later you guys’ll go.”

“Yeah,” she said softly.  “Anyway, my mom used to tell me about the pharaohs and Pyramids and I just got really into it.  And then I learned about other places and how they found out about them.  It’s really interesting how they piece things together.”  She shrugged and abruptly said, “Anyway, I’m going swimming.”

Swimming consisted of Maddy running to the bathroom and jumping into the water.  A few seconds later, I heard her high-pitched voice.  “Daddy… come watch… are you watching?”

I smiled and got off the towel… she really was determined to replicate the experience of having a daughter of the beach, at least as close as she could, although she sounded a little like a clichéd kid trying to get their parent’s attention.  Then again, maybe it was a cliché because it was accurate. 

Inside, she was lying in the tub, her face the only part poking out of the water.  With her volume displaced, the tub was close to overflowing.  “Look,” she said.  “Watch how long I can hold my breath.”  With that, she closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, then submerged.  It was only about thirty seconds before she came back up, gasping.  “See?”

“Yeah,” I said, then joked, “Just don’t swim out too deep, I don’t want to have to swim out and save you from sharks.”

She giggled a little and then pushed towards me, through the water, splashing me and more importantly depositing a large amount of water on the floor.  “Oops, sorry,” she said.  “I didn’t mean to get your floor wet.”

I shrugged.  It was nothing towels wouldn’t fix.  “It’s not the floor, it’s the beach, right?” 

That wide, gap-tooth grin that was becoming so familiar to me appeared again.  “Right.  You want to swim?  I can get out.”

I couldn’t really come close to swimming, and the idea of lying in a tub didn’t appeal to me, even if I was sharing bathwater with beautiful little Maddy.  “No, it’s okay,” I said.  “I’m going to have a sandwich, though.”

“Yeah, I guess I could eat too.  Here, help me up.”  She held out both hands over the edge of the tub and I grabbed them as she got to her feet, and then stumbled out towards me. 

We ate our sandwiches and drank sodas on the towel in the living room, Maddy had another towel draped around her shoulders.  Sitting casually, in a bikini, partly covered, hair still wet, I think she was the most beautiful I’d ever seen her.  “So what next?” she asked as she drained the last drops of cola from the can.

“I don’t know, you could go swimming again.”

“No, I can’t,” she said.  “I have to wait a half hour after eating, don’t you know anything?”

“Oh, right, I’d forgotten… I don’t know, you have any ideas?”

She held up the deflated beach ball she’d bought from the dollar store.  “We can play ball.” 

I agreed, and she tossed it in my lap and asked me to blow it up.  “Me?”

“It’s a daddy job,” she said. 

Well, I couldn’t deny that.  I had more air in my lungs, she would have taken forever to fill it.  It was still a pain in the ass, but I got it into a ball shape, and we played an impromptu game where we bounced it back and forth to each other, trying not to let it hit the ground.

No matter how much we pretended, we weren’t at the beach, with comfortable sand and lots of room to run around and nothing that could get damaged.  After only a few minutes into our game, Maddy started getting more reckless, waiting to catch the ball when it was close to hitting the ground, and she couldn’t control exactly where it went, and, one time, when one bounce sent it into my home office, she followed it.

I heard a sudden impact, then dead silence, followed by the words, “Oh, shit.”

****
Chapter Nine:

“What?” I asked, walking into the room.  “Are you okay?”

“I am so sorry,” she said, and when she did, I saw what had fallen.  Wolverine.  Or rather, a statue of him that was on one of my shelves.  “I bumped into it and it just fell off.”

Wolverine might have unbreakable bones and adamantium claws, but the statue was made of resin and wasn’t so durable.  The arm had snapped off.  I swore softly. 

“It’s not expensive, is it?”

“A little.”  It was a little shy of a hundred dollars when I got it, and that was when it was new in stores.  Now I’d have to find it on eBay or something and that could get much pricier.

“I am so sorry,” she repeated. 

“It’s okay,” I said, trying to feel it.  I was mad, but I knew deep down I shouldn’t be.  It was just a statue, after all.  A stupid, geeky thing.  I tried to press the break together, trying to see how easy it would be to glue back together.  It seemed to be a clean break, at least.  When I looked back to Maddy’s face, she still seemed worried, almost scared.  My concerns over the statue faded, and I just wanted to reassure her.  “Don’t worry, it’s not like I’m really your daddy and you’re in danger of me spanking you, or anything.”

That comment hung out there between us for a few seconds, as I looked back at Wolverine, checking for any damage I hadn’t noticed.  Finally, in a small voice, she said, “You can, you know.”

“What?”

“You can spank me, if you want.  That’s what some dads do.”

“Does your dad spank you?”

She shrugged and, with her expressionless face, I thought she was trying to put on a tough front, but she said, “When I was littler, he did sometimes.  He hasn’t in a while.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t even really know if I’d be the kind of dad who spanks.”

“Well, don’t you think you should find out?” she said.  “You’re paying for the experience of having a daughter.  If you didn’t know what kind of dad you’d be, I wouldn’t be doing my job, right?”

I didn’t answer, my mind thrown off-kilter by the offer, and my desire, and then I guess Maddy took my silence as an admission that I wanted to, but wasn’t sure I should.  That was the truth, but I don’t think Madeline had any idea of the reason why.  I was already a little hard.  Since I hadn’t answered, she stepped forward, took my hand, and led me back to the living room, to the couch, up against the wall.  I sat mechanically, and then Maddy submissively laid herself across my lap. 

As if that wasn’t enough, she reached back, and pulled the bottom of her bathing suit down.  There I sat, in my trunks, with a young girl exposing her perfect bottom just inches from my face.  And it was perfect, it looked plump and well shaped, just small. 

I still had Wolverine in one hand.  I put it aside on the couch, face down so he couldn’t watch and judge, and took in the sight of Madeline’s beautiful rear.  I tried, and failed, to will down an erection.  I was only wearing trunks, she had to feel it, but she said nothing, and I was forced to wonder if she wanted this for some reason, or maybe her father got erections when spanking her and so she just thought of it as normal.  “Are you going to?” she said, with what seemed like a quiver of fear.  “Just try not to do it too hard.”

Well, she’d given me permission, after all.  I raised my hand up to head level, and began to swing it down.  At the last second, I stopped myself, removing much of the speed but being unable to prevent myself from making contact at all.  I touched that sweet little ass, with the force of a firm grab.  My thumb brushed between her cheeks, just slightly.

“It can be a bit harder than that,” she said.  “That’s not really a spanking at all.  Not that I’m complaining, you know, but you’re trying to make me learn my lesson, so it’s supposed to hurt a little.”

“No,” I said, scared, realizing I’d already gone too far.  “Get up.”

She pushed herself up and then pulled the swimsuit up to cover her ass again.  She looked at me, questioningly. 

“I can’t,” I said.  “I don’t want to hurt you at all.”  And that was true, the only reason I moved to spank her in the first place was because it was a means to touch her, and I didn’t have it in my heart to do it in a way that would cause her pain, which was why I pulled back as much of my force as I could.  “It was just a statue anyway,” I told her.  “I guess I don’t have it in me to be a spanking daddy.”

Madeline impulsively leaned forward, and gave me a hug.  “See, you really would make a good father.”

Hardly… my erection would argue otherwise.  “I think the punishment’s just going to be that Beach Day is over, okay?  You should just get dressed and go home.  I’m going to see if I can fix the statue.” 

She seemed a little disappointed, but nodded, and shuffled off to the bathroom to get dressed.  I took the broken Wolverine and, after taking a few bills out of my wallet as her payment, hid in my room, not wanting to face her, the guilt for what I’d just done overwhelming me.  When she returned, I told her through the door that I was changing, and that I left her money for her by the door.  She said goodbye, that she’d see me tomorrow, and then left. 

She didn’t see me the next day, because I wouldn’t let her.  In the past, I’d told her that if I was called into work and couldn’t see her, I’d leave a little sticker on the door, so she knew she could just leave and spend the afternoon with a friend or something.  I was home, but I put the sticker there anyway.  At the usual time, I heard a soft little knocking, but then eventually she went into her own apartment, and I was left alone to think about what to do.

I had to end it, I’d decided.  I’d broken my “look but don’t touch” rule, this time firmly, and in a way that was decidedly not innocent.  I’d committed a crime, touched her bare ass, even grabbed a little.  That was molestation, even if she didn’t realize it.  I knew I had to stop, I had to remove the temptation.

The problem was, the last time I tried that, I crumbled, because I was worried that she would look for somebody else.  I couldn’t see her until I’d thought of a way to end it, one that would stop her from selling her particular services to somebody else.

Unfortunately, there was only one way I could think of to do that… by telling her the truth.

****
Chapter Ten:

The next time I let her in, I took her to the couch and had her sit down.  She seemed a little wary, because I didn’t usually direct her to do anything specific, but she waited for me to begin.  Even though I’d rehearsed what I said, I still felt at a loss.  Finally, I said, “Madeline, I think it’s time we put an end to Rent-A-Daughter.”

Her eyes widened.  “This is because I broke your statue, isn’t it?  I’m sorry!  I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

I kind of expected she might think that, but I shook my head and said, gently but firmly, “No, it’s not that.”

“You said it was okay, that you weren’t mad!”

“I’m not, it’s not that,” I assured her.  “This isn’t about anything you’ve done.  But it’s not good for you to be spending so much time here, you should be enjoying being a kid, out with friends…”

“You’re my friend,” she said.

That gave me a warm feeling, but I pushed it back.  “I mean friends your own age.”

“I don’t have any friends my own age,” she admitted in a small voice, her hands plucking at the dress she wore nervously.

I didn’t understand that.  “What?  Of course you do, you’ve told me all about them.”

“They’re not my friends, they’re just people at school.  They all think I’m weird though… but you’re my friend, I like spending time with you.”

That broke my heart, but it didn’t really change anything.  “Look, Maddy, you’re a smart, beautiful girl, and a great person, I’m sure if you tried, you could get somebody at school to like you.  Maybe if you didn’t spend so much of your after school time here you’d have better luck.”

“But I like it here.  Don’t you like being a daddy?”

It was time to break out the big guns.  “I do, but it’s not right, Maddy.  You can’t do this Rent-A-Daughter thing, and not just with me, either.”  I took a deep breath.  “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anybody before.  So you can’t tell anyone either, okay?”

“You know I won’t.  Confidentiality, remember?”

“Right.”  Another breath.  This was hard, even when rehearsed.  “Do you know what a pedophile is?”

She looked at me a little warily, drawing back slightly.  “Yeah, it’s one of those creeps who hurts children.”

“No, not quite,” I explained.  “Some of them do.  But it’s like… Muslims and terrorists.  A lot of people think all Muslims are terrorists because the ones who are terrorists are always in the news.  But most of them aren’t.  The same is true with pedophiles.  All a pedophile is, is someone who’s attracted to young girls, even though they know they shouldn’t be.  Girls your age, in my case.”

Maddy put her hands on her knees and bumped them together, while her face reddened and she wouldn’t look at me.  “You’re saying you’re attracted to me?”

“Yes.  I know I shouldn’t be.  And I don’t want to ever hurt you, but it’s getting to be hard for me to spend so much time with you.   When you’re nearby, my mind goes to places it shouldn’t, I want things that could get me in trouble, things a daddy definitely shouldn’t want.”  She didn’t say anything, so I continued.  “I’m sorry, but the truth is, Rent-A-Daughter can’t work, because the people who would want it most are like me, except some of them might be way worse.”

“So what do you want?” she said finally.  “To like, see me naked and stuff?”

Thinking it would scare her, I told her the truth.  “Yes.”

Another long silence, but finally she said.  “I can do that.”

If I believed in the devil, I’d think he was there, tempting me by granting my wishes.  “I can’t ask you to do that,” I said.  “It’s not right.”

“No, it’s fine,” she said, standing up.  “Look, some families don’t wear clothes around the house, right?  We can pretend it’s like that.”

“This wasn’t what I meant... I’m not trying to get you to…” The rest of the sentence died on my lips, as Madeline reached for the bottom of her dress and, with just a moment’s hesitation, started pulling it over her head.  Within seconds, it was dropped on the floor, and I saw more of her body than I ever had before.  She wore only a pair of pink panties, and her socks and shoes.  No bra.  Her chest was almost flat, but there were the beginnings of bumps for breasts, topped with what seemed like an impossibly tiny nipple.   I stared.  I should have protested, told her to cover herself up, but when someone you find attractive is stripping in front of you, you can’t do anything else but look.

She wasn’t done, either.  She bent down at the waist and slipped her panties downwards in a smooth motion, like this was an everyday thing.  It was only when she stepped out of them that she began to look nervous, and her face darkened with a deep blush.  “How’s that?”  Her hands covered her pubic mound for a few seconds, and then swung apart, giving me a look at her slit.  It was bare and closed in, nothing peeking out except a bit of clit at the top.  It was the most beautiful one I’d ever seen. 

“It’s… uh…”  My tongue seemed to have lost its connection to my brain. 

“So can I stay?”

I found myself nodding.  I was weak, I knew it, and I also knew how ashamed I’d be later, but for the moment I felt high, like I’d just accomplished something wonderful without even trying.

“Do you mind if I keep my socks on?” she asked.  “The floors make my bare feet feel all sweaty.”  I nodded again, and she back sat down on the couch, beaming.  “See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?  All you had to do was ask.”  I thought I detected a note of false cheer, like she was just trying to tell herself it was okay.  “Can I have the next Spider-Man comic?”

I got up mechanically and went for it, then handed it to her and watched as she sat on my couch, naked except for socks, and read it.  I sat on the far corner, taking in every glimpse of ass or pussy or breast I could get, as though I was in a dream and might wake up at any second. 

Finally, when she was about halfway through the comic, she put it down and looked at me.  “Are you okay?”

“Uh, yeah.  Are YOU okay?”

She shrugged.  “It’s kind of weird being naked in front of you,” she admitted.  “But you know, if we really were a nudist family, you’d be naked too.  Maybe that’s why it feels weird, because it’s just me, and it’s like you’re staring at me.”

“I’m sorry, I’ll try not to stare.”

She frowned.  “So you’re not going to undress?  Just leave me as the only naked person in the room?”

“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“It won’t make me uncomfortable,” she said.  “I trust you.  I know you’re not going to try to like grab me or anything, right?”

She had more faith in me than I did in myself.  But I didn’t think I would. 

Maddy was staring at me, expectantly, so, hardly believing what I was doing, I took off my shirt, then I stood and took off my pants.  I was waiting for some kind of negative reaction, but she just watched, not with any obvious arousal, but with sort of a cool detachment, like she was an archaeologist watching as an ancient piece of pottery was slowly uncovered.  So, finally, I took the plunge and dropped my underwear.  My rigid prick sprang forward, up, alert, pointed towards Madeline as though it could see her. 

“Wow,” she said.  “You weren’t lying, you really do think I’m hot.”  She looked up from my dick to my eyes.  “That’s what that means, right?  That you’re… turned on?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “You thought I was lying?”

She shrugged.  “I thought maybe you made it up, that you were just trying to scare me away because you didn’t want me anymore.  I mean, I’m nothing special.”  She looked down at herself.

“No, you’re very special.”

“Maybe to a pedophile,” she said.  But there wasn’t any judgment in her voice, at least not for me… maybe for herself.

“Beauty is beauty.  Even a pedophile is attracted to beautiful girls, the ones who will turn into beautiful women.”  It was a lie, a white one, but a lie, because childhood is kinder on features.  There are genuinely ugly kids, but they’re rarer than ugly adults… some percentage of kids just lose their cute when their features set.  I don’t think it’s just because I’m a pedophile, I see the same thing in boys, and I’ve heard other people, people who probably aren’t pedophiles, refer to the same phenomenon with girls.  Look at the kid from Home Alone, or Two and a Half Men.  But forget the truth, Madeline seemed like she could use a self-esteem boost.  I added a little extra truth on top.  “And even aside from how you look, you’re something special.”  She reacted to my compliment quietly, but the blush returned. 

“So you don’t like women your own age at all?” she asked. 

“No,” I said.  “That’s not how it works.  Some people are like that, I guess, but for me, it’s pretty much just that my interest starts at around your age.”  She shuffled on the couch and her legs spread a little more than they had before, unintentionally giving me a good look between them.  It was strange having a conversation like this naked with a raging and quite visible erection. 

She noticed it too, looking back to it, which made it bob.  “You want to have sex with me?”

It didn’t sound like an offer, just a question, so I answered it that way.  “Part of me does.  But I know it’d be wrong.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to try anything.”  And the weird thing was, I was suddenly absolutely confident about that.  If she offered, that was another story, but I knew then, staring at her with the biggest hard-on I’ve ever had, I was absolutely certain that I would not try and force her to do anything.  I just really, really wanted her to offer.

She seemed to relax, though.  “Good, because I really think I’m too young for that.”

“I know.  It’s not a really Daddy thing to do, is it?”

“Yeah,” she agreed.  “I mean, I guess some do, but they’re the bad ones.”  She stole another glance at it. 

We didn’t speak for a while, just had an awkward silence full of looks, sometimes stolen, sometimes blatant.  Finally, I excused myself to go to the bathroom.  There, I pumped my shaft rapidly, trying to reach a climax, and, in some ways, exorcise my own demons.  For though I knew I’d never force anything on her, some part of me was thinking of ways to try to suggest something, to manipulate her, to dig myself deeper in the hole.  I knew that once I’d ejaculated, that urge would go down and I’d feel the shame I felt was appropriate.  Maybe I’d find the strength to push her away, though with her admission about her own loneliness that seemed harder than ever. 

It didn’t take very long, as aroused as I was and with vivid memories of Maddy’s slit in my mind, and I deposited loads of sticky cum into the toilet, then flushed and washed my hands. 

When I stepped out, Maddy was back to reading the comic, but it didn’t take long for her to look up and notice the obvious.  “It went smaller.”

“Yeah,” I said embarrassedly.  “You don’t think guys walk around like that all the time, did you?”

“No, just… I guess you must have…” she lowered her voice, putting the book down again.  “Masturbated?”

I guessed there was no harm in admitting it.  “Yeah.  I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.  Besides, we’re supposed to be Daddy and Daughter, right?”

“Right.”

I didn’t want to push my luck and so tried to return us back to the path of Rent-A-Daughter standards by asking her about her homework.  She played along, and we played the normal game of Daddy and Daughter for about half an hour, except both of us were naked. 

Then of course, I got hard again.   It happened when she lay on her side, legs curled up towards her chest, while watching something on TV, giving me a perfect view of her ass and pussy, if I just leaned a little to the side.  I couldn’t resist leaning.  Who could?

She noticed it eventually.  “You’re stiff again.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Sorry.”

She shrugged.  “It’s okay.  Umm…” she hesitated, and then finally said, “do you need to masturbate again?”

“Not right now,” I said.  “I can wait until after you’re gone.”

Her eyes flicked towards the clock display on my cable box.  It was almost the time she usually left at.  “Oh, right.”

So we sat in more or less silence, although I think she tried to tease me, as she began opening and closing her legs, as though absently fidgeting, while I watched.  “Okay, I think it’s probably time we got dressed and you went home.”

“Okay,” she said, and got off the couch, then began to dress.  I did too, feeling much more comfortable when I had clothes on me, even though my erection was still strong.  As she pulled her dress back over her head, she asked, “So did I give you what you wanted?”  She eyed me hopefully.  “I can come back tomorrow?”

I hesitated, but finally said, “Yes.” 

She smiled then, and, since we were both dressed, I gave Maddy her “allowance”, and she gave me the traditional goodbye hug and said “Thank you Daddy.”  I was stuck now, I couldn’t turn her away.

****
Chapter Eleven:

I didn’t plan on it, but when we saw each other again, once more we took things to a new level.  In my apartment, she started to undress again like it was an everyday thing, which I guess it was becoming.  “Are you sure you’re okay with this?” I asked warily.  “Getting naked?”

“It’s a little weird,” she admitted, one hand hooked into her panties, the only thing she had left on.  “But it’s kind of fun, too.  Though I guess I’ll miss dressing up, that was fun too.”

“You can still do that,” I said.  “And you don’t have to get all the way naked if you don’t want to.”

“But you want to see me, right?”  I couldn’t tell if she wanted to please me or wanted me to be pleased by her. 

“Yes,” I said.  “But that doesn’t mean you have to be all naked all the time.  Even a little is… well, more than I ever dreamed.  If you wanted to stay in panties, or wear, say, the Supergirl costume without panties, it would…”

“Make you want to masturbate?” she supplied.

I was going to say “be fine,” but shrugged at her answer.  It was honest, anyway.  She pulled the panties down and then raised each knee to free her feet. 

I made no move to get undressed this time, considering the way she seemed to stare and be especially aware of how hard I was at any given time.  I thought it was because she was uncomfortable, despite her suggestion yesterday, which I chalked up to curiosity, that it was weird if she was the only one naked.  Boy was I wrong.

“So, do you want me to get you… what was it we were due to be reading next, Wonder Woman?”  We were getting close to up-to-date with the regular single-issues in Ultimate Spider-Man so had been spacing out the last few trade paperbacks by reading other stuff in between.    I’d picked up a few trades of Wonder Woman before I met Maddy, because I liked the new writer’s prior run on Birds of Prey, and while looking through my books recently found them again, thought the mythological aspect might appeal to her, and suggested it during Beach Day.   She seemed interested at the time.   

“Sure, but, ummmm, aren’t you going to, you know, get naked too?”

“I don’t think so,” I explained.  “It’s really not right for me to let you see me like that.  I mean, it’s not right for me to see you like that either, but… when you started undressing I couldn’t resist.   But like I said, if you want to put something on, you can, too.”  I took a breath.  “I won’t say you can’t come back if you’re not going to get naked, even partly naked.  That’s unfair.”  It was easy for me to be noble when she had already admitted she thought it was kind of fun.

“Umm, okay,” she said, hesitated, and added, “but, I, umm, kind of wanted to ask if I could watch.  You know, watch you masturbate?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Please?” she asked with hopeful eyes that made me just want to melt and give into her every demand.   “I’ve never seen what it looks like.”

“Maddy, I’m just trying to look out for you…”

“Please?” she said again.  “I’ll show you how I do…”  She spread her still bent legs once more, aiming her pussy right at me, and then began rubbing it.  She didn’t touch her slit directly, or at least not very much.  Instead, her parted fingers ran along the sides, pressing down and pressing the lips together.  She did this several times in a row, while all I could do is stare, transfixed at this little girl, my pretend-daughter, masturbating in front of me. 

She seemed to smile a little at my staring, but it seemed like an innocent smile, like she couldn’t believe it worked.  Finally, she said, “So, Daddy, are you going to show me?”

I don’t even remember doing it, but I was so hard and the offer seemed so natural that pretty soon I had taken my dick out of my pants and was stroking it rapidly.  Maddy spun around on the couch so that she could get a closer look, but I could still see her hands working between her legs. 

“Can I touch it?” she asked. 

“No,” I said.  “It’s not a good idea.”

“I just want to know what it feels like,” she said.  

“No.”

“It’s not like I haven’t felt it before.”

That shocked me enough into slowing my pace.  “What?”

“Not with my hands, but sometimes I’d feel it, like when we were play-fighting, or when you spanked me, and you were hard.”

That answered one of my long-standing questions, but rose others.  “So you always knew I was attracted to you?”

“No,” she said with just a hint of confusion. 

“But you know what being hard means…”

“Yeah, but I just figured I brushed against it.  That’s how it works, for guys, right?  If you accidentally touch it gets hard?”

Well, that explained it.  “Sometimes, I guess, if it’s unexpected, but usually there has to be some attraction first.  It’s mostly thought that does it.”

“Oh,” she said, considering this new information.  I wondered if she had experienced other guys hard-ons after she accidentally touched them, and was now evaluating what that meant.  Instead, though, she asked, “What do you think about?” she asked.  I was getting close to climax.  In ordinary circumstances, I might have only just begun, but this wasn’t an ordinary circumstance, it was practically a pedophile’s wet dream.  “While you’re doing it?”

“You know what I’m thinking about,” I said, a little grumpily.  “Things I shouldn’t be thinking about.”

“About me?” she asked.

I nodded.  “What do you think about?”

She shrugged.  “I don’t know.  I don’t really think of anything in particular, it just feels good when I rub it.”  After a few more seconds, she said, “What would you want to do if I said you could?”

“We shouldn’t really be talking about this,” I said.  “This is hard enough as it is.”  She giggled at my unintended pun.  “No, I mean it,” I said.  “It’s like if I was hungry and you started talking about food, and I know I’m not allowed to eat… it makes me feel more like I’m starving.”

“Well, if you’re starving…” she let that dangle and asked, “I mean, I just don’t want to do sex… but if you ask for something I can give, maybe I can give you a bit of what you want.  Just a bite.”  She laughed nervously.  “Unless you just want sex and that’s it.”

I was nearly reaching my peak, and that’s what made me ask, “So what would you let me do?”

“I don’t know, what would you want to do?  If I said you could do what you wanted except sex?”  I was too afraid to answer.  “I’d guess you’d want to touch me and stuff, right?” 

“Yeah.”

“If it’s just touching, I think we can try that.”

No touching was required, my cock began to feel like it was humming and a pressure built up along the shaft with surprising force.  Soon, I was saying, “Oh, shit,” and my seed started to shoot out, beating out even the feeling of orgasmic bliss, which only happened to me when I was on the edge and something pushed me over without warning, which I guess is what happened there, when Maddy told me she’d be willing to make one more of my naughty dreams come true.

I made a small puddle of semen on my floor, which I only noticed after I came back to myself.  Surprisingly, to myself, at least, I was still pretty hard.  That hadn’t happened since I was a teenager.

****
Chapter Twelve:

Maddie’s giggle almost made it shrink again.  “You look funny when you did that,” she said, and then made a weird face, rolling her eyes up in her head a little, I guess approximating my O-Face.  I shrugged nervously, and she continued.  “So are you going to touch me, or what?”

I thought for just a second.  “No,” I said.  If I was still fully aroused, I might not have been able to resist, but right then, even though I was still a little hard, I was more in control of myself.

“Oh, I get it, you don’t want to anymore since you just…” she looked down at the puddle.  “You know.”

I ducked into the kitchen to grab a paper towel, thinking what I want to say.  “No, I want to, but I’m not going to.  It’s not right.”

“I’m telling you it’s okay,” she said with a little bit of exasperation.

I crouched down to wipe up the mess I left and said, “Maddy, you know that I do care about you, right?”

Her hand, the one in her crotch, stopped moving.  It was only in the absence that I really noticed that she was still stroking herself, albeit much more slowly than before.  “You do?”

“Yes, very much.  I love having you around, and not just because I find you attractive.  I care a lot about you.”

“You mean, like a daughter?”

“I guess, yeah.  Or maybe just how like two people can care about each other.  I don’t ever want to see you hurt, and I just want all your dreams to come true.”

“So what does that have to do with anything?”

“Because I’m trying to look out for you.  I’m not doing a very good job of it, but I’m trying.”

“But I’m telling you it’s okay.”

“You might not think that in the future.”

“So future-me gets more right to decide what’s okay than now-me?”  She shrugged.  “Sounds stupid to me.  Anyway, I don’t think future-me will have a problem with it.  I mean, you’re paying for me to be here, you might as well get your money’s worth,” she joked.

I winced instantly at that.  “And that’s another thing.”

“What is?” she asked as I dumped the paper towel in a garbage bag hung from a closet door. 

“I’m paying you.  What we’ve done already is dodgy enough, but you could call it modeling, I guess.  But if I pay you to let me touch you sexually, well, that’s prostitution.”  I shook my head vehemently.  “And I will not be responsible for you committing an act of prostitution.  I care about you too much.”

“But you’re not paying me to touch me,” she said.  “You’re paying me to be here.”

“It doesn’t matter.   It’s the same thing, since I wouldn’t be touching you if you weren’t here, and I’m paying you to be here.”

Maddy wrinkled her forehead in thought, and then said, “Okay, then I won’t charge.  I mean, I like coming over here anyway.  I wish I could get paid for it too, but I care about you too, you know, and I mean if you’re starving and if you want to touch me and this is what’s stopping you, then I guess I don’t need the money that badly.”

I’d meant it as a last ditch effort to get her off the idea, but it seemed like she was frustrating my every attempt.  It was like some Bizarro-world comedy, the pedophile trying everything he can to avoid touching a little girl, and the girl practically throwing herself at him.

I couldn’t do it anymore, and when Maddy said, “So now can you touch me, right?” I broke, and slowly shuffled toward her. 

She lay back and stretched herself out on my couch, arms and legs extended, allowing me the access to touch whatever I wanted. 

It seemed to take an eternity, but finally my hand made contact with her shoulder.  You’d think skin wouldn’t feel very special, you’re covered in it, but when it’s someone else’s skin and they’re someone you’ve fantasized about, it’s like there’s an electric charge running through you when you touch it.  The charge only increased when I swept along her collarbone and then descended to her breast.  She made no move to stop me, so I proceeded, and soon, with one hand, I was cupping her small breast, giving it a squeeze.  I could feel the bone underneath the slight padding, and I could feel the nipple… when my fingers first grazed it, it was nothing but a slight disturbance of the perfect smoothness, but then as I held the breast, I could feel it harden, tighten. 

That made me bolder, the thought that she was enjoying it, not just letting me do something but actually wanting it.  So, I let my hand drift down, running over her ribs like a staircase, rounding her belly and that cute little outie, and towards her mound.

I heard a sharp intake of breath before I got to it and paused.  “If you don’t want me to, I won’t,” I said.

“No, it’s okay, just… don’t try to go inside, okay?” 

I nodded and smiled, and my fingers crossed over into hot pussy territory.  I say hot pussy territory and mean it, it felt like it must have been at least a few degrees above the rest of her body temperature, and also softer than even the soft skin of her belly.  I rubbed my hand up and down, avoiding the slit, and kneaded a little, somewhat mimicking her own masturbation style. 

I’d crossed another line, the one that divided being a pervert who touched, once, in the heat of a moment, from being a full-on child molester, even if the child in question didn’t seem to mind being molested.  She seemed to spread her legs a little wider, in fact, as though to give me more access, and when I looked over to her, her eyes were half-closed and not looking at anything in particular.  It almost looked like she was asleep, but enjoying a really good dream.

At least there was still the line between the molester who did what the child allowed, and the one who did what she asked him not to.  To that end, I followed her instructions and didn’t try to dive my fingers inside her crack, no matter how much I wanted to, and instead just massaged the mound area for a few minutes while she lay there, squirming a little but not in pain or fear, just pleasure.

I probably could have done it for hours, just enjoying her own enjoyment, and I was so entranced by what I was doing that I was surprised when I felt the light play of fingers on my shaft.  She’d reached out and touched me back, more, she wrapped her hand around it and squeezed gently.  I pulled my hand off her and looked down at the sight.  “Is it okay?  I just wanted to feel it…”

“Hey, if I can touch you, you’re certainly entitled to touch me,” I said. 

“You do it like this?” she asked, and pumped her hand up and down my shaft a few times, very slowly. 

It’s been my experience that, no matter how well intentioned, a girl can’t give a hand job that feels as good as masturbation.  It’s hot because she’s actually doing it, but the angle’s a little wrong and the pace is off, and overall the sensation pales to what you can do to yourself, with years of practice.  That said, Maddy’s tentative little stroke probably came as close to heaven as any girl before.  It just needed a little practice.  “Yeah, just a little faster.”

I let her increase the pace, until she said, “You know, you can keep touching me, if you want.”

I wanted to believe that meant she wanted me to, so I returned my hand to her pussy.  I couldn’t do everything I wanted because she told me not to go inside, so in essence, it was something like a pussy massage, while she stroked my cock.  I think her growing quivering turned me on more than her hand on my dick, but pretty soon, I was feeling another climax approach.  “Faster,” I suggested through nearly gritted teeth, and she picked up the pace. 

“Okay,” I said.  “I’m about to cum.”  I said it to give her a chance to pull away, but she didn’t, though she did stop and just held it still, and soon I was squirting again… more of a dribble, actually.

She giggled as it ran down her hand.  “It’s warm.”

“Yeah.”

She pulled her hand away from me and brought it up to her face to take a good look.  What she did next surprised me, she extended her tongue and put it right in the creamy mess on her hand.

Her reaction was immediate, and nothing like in my fantasies.  She scrunched up her face and drew back.  “Eww,” she said.  “It tastes nasty.”

“Sorry,” I said, feeling more guilty for that than for the fact that I was molesting her.  I’d stopped touching her while I was cumming, and I would have resumed it, except she sat up and curled up her legs towards her body.  “I never said you had to taste it.”

“I know, I was just curious.  People actually do that, right?  Drink it?”

“Some,” I said.  “Mostly in porn, but that’s not always reality.”

“Can I have some coke to wash out the taste?”

I nodded, and she ran to the kitchen, first to wash her hand, and then to get a can from the fridge.  I cleaned up whatever had spilled on the floor. 

She returned, gulped some of the cola, and swallowed with a refreshed gasp.  “I’m sorry, but blowjobs make no sense.  I don’t know how anybody could do that when it tastes like that.”

I smiled a little, trying not to take offense.  My last girlfriend claimed not to like the taste either.  “Well, it’s like a lot of things in sex, you do it to give pleasure to somebody else.  When you’re ready to do it with a guy, maybe it won’t matter so much.”  I shrugged.  “Besides, you only really taste the cum at the end, if he shoots in your mouth, right?  If you don’t want that, and a guy cares about you, he’ll pull out before then.”  I really didn’t think ‘the guy’ would ever be me, which I guess was pretty naïve of me. 

“I guess.”

I got dressed, then, and Maddy put on her shorts and panties but continued to sit around topless, as though it was nothing unusual.  We read some comics, watched some TV, including a special on Atlantis, which got us talking and went to look up some of the theorized locations on Google Earth.  Actually, we started just searching for Atlantis, but that just gave you the city in Florida, so we looked at places rumored to be the site, like the Azores, Thera, even a place in Northern Spain that was new to me, and checked out what they looked like, in some cases on the ocean floor.  She sat almost in my lap in the computer chair and, now that she’d given me permission, it was hard not to let my hands roam to her breasts while she typed or used the mouse.  She didn’t seem to mind, but she didn’t comment either way, so after a little soft rubbing I let them drop, and that was the extent of the touching for that day.

****
Chapter Thirteen:

Once she was gone, the guilt cycle returned, but I knew now that I wasn’t going to be able to stop unless she asked me to.  Still, I tried to be good, and the next time she came over, I didn’t initiate anything, and unlike last time, neither did she.  She didn’t even undress right away.  She was wearing a small green ruffly skirt and a white t-shirt on top, and made no move to remove either, apparently having taken to heart my promise that she didn’t have to be naked to come here.

I was a little disappointed at the time, both about that and, especially after how we started things yesterday, that the one time watching me masturbate, and even helping the one time, seemed to have satisfied her curiosity, but I guess Maddy was also trying not to sound too eager.  We were a little awkward the first couple minutes, until I decided to just forget any hope of touching, that she’d either changed her mind or she wasn’t in the mood, and so we should just behave like our normal Daddy-Daughter encounters. 

We went into my office to choose a new comic to read that day (she wanted to go back to Spider-Man since she knew all the characters), and she sat down on the couch and opened it up.  After I’d given up all hope that anything would happen today, she brazenly spread her legs in such a way that you could see under the skirt and said, “If you wanted to, you know, touch me again I guess you could do it while I’m reading.”

Like I said, I knew I couldn’t stop unless she stopped it, and she was doing quite the opposite.  I even told myself that she had to have liked it before and wanted it again, because otherwise, what kind of person would offer that when she didn’t have to?  She just didn’t want to seem obvious about wanting it, maybe out of fear for looking like a slut, and so instead acted like she was doing me a favor.

Given the new theory, I thought a request would go over well.  “Okay,” I said.  “Do you mind if I take off your shirt?  Your breasts are very beautiful too.”

She let the comic lie and raised her arms, letting me pull it up and over her head.  “Should I take the skirt off?”

“No, I can work around it.”  Actually, I liked it how it was, it seemed dirtier for her to be wearing just a skirt rather than nothing at all. 

“Just, remember, don’t go inside,” she warned, and went back to looking at the comic. 

I sat on the floor beside the couch, and let my hands roam around her legs and pussy, mostly massaging, and staring, enjoying the sight of that magical little slit as the area around it started to redden with the contact.  I didn’t have as easy access to her chest, for sometimes she raised the comic in such a way that blocked it, but the pussy, it seemed, was all mine. 

I could have felt it for hours, but I was getting that ineffable scent off it, very faint but distinctive and alluring.  It’s probably as much a feeling as a scent, like your head swimming or you’re just about to faint, probably as a result of pheromones, but there’s a sharp, tangy smell that goes along with it, far more intense than what I’d smelled on her panties in earlier days.   So powerful that when I smelled it, I wanted to do more.  So, nervously, I asked, “Umm, Maddy, do you mind if I use my mouth a little?”

She looked up from the book and at me.  “What do you mean?”

“You know, like, kissing, and licking.  I won’t do it if you don’t want me to.”

“Oh,” she said, and seemed to take a few seconds to think about it.  “It’s all right, I guess.”  Her eyes went back to the comic, but a few seconds later I caught her giving me a sidelong glance, wanting to see what I was doing.

I sat up on my haunches and planted soft kissed first along her upper thigh, then going high, pushing up her skirt a little so I could kiss all the way up to her belly button, but finally descending towards where I most wanted to kiss, her mound.  Still I hesitated, going around the slit but not actually on it. 

Maddy’s breath was becoming more intense, but when I looked up, she was still reading the comic, or pretending to, so I let loose my tongue, again just to the side of her slit, but I couldn’t resist any longer and my next lick was right down the middle.  I heard a sharp gasp, followed by a nervous giggle.  “That kind of tickles,” she said.

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No, it’s okay, I know you like it.”  She shifted position, though, so she was sitting up against one of the edges of the couch, legs stretched out, instead of lying mostly on her side.  It was as though she wanted to look more directly, but still wanted the excuse.  She held the comic in front of her, but low enough that she could easily look over it to watch what I was doing, and I came to notice she didn’t turn the pages very often, either.

I put my tongue into action, enjoying the taste, like it was pure, distilled innocence, and enjoyed even more the effect I was having on Maddy.  I tried to hold to her rule of “don’t go inside”, but with a tongue, that’s a little ambiguous, because it can’t penetrate as far even as a finger.  I mostly worked on the edge of her labia lips, and avoided the hole itself, but once or twice I did lick just inside. 

She didn’t say a word about it.  In fact, she didn’t say a word at all, but there were little vocalizations of pleasure and every so often she would thrust her hips upward towards me, but I really knew I was having an effect when she threw her head back, and, seconds later, tossed the comic to the side, abandoning the pretense of reading and instead just watching what I could do to her with my mouth.

I took that as the signal to focus more on the clit, first licking around and just breathing on it, then occasionally a soft kiss on it, which made her twitch and moan, and finally, I couldn’t resist and wiggled my tongue around it.  She squealed, a sharp, high pitched, “Eeeeeeeeeeee…..”

Her whole body tensed up for what must have been a few seconds, and then she relaxed and slumped in the couch.   I pulled away, feeling proud of myself.  “I’m sorry Maddy, I got a little carried away… I hope you don’t mind.”

“That,” she said, taking a breath and starting again, “That you can do anytime you want.”  She laughed.  “I didn’t mind that at all.”

“Did you have an orgasm?” I asked.

“I think so.  I mean, I’m not really sure but… it’s supposed to be like the best feeling ever, right?  If that’s not one then I can’t imagine what a real one is.” 

She was speaking all excitedly and her enthusiasm was so infectious that I smiled a silly, dopey smile, while I stood up.  “I’m glad.”

A few seconds later, the excitement faded for a moment and she asked, “Did I taste… bad?”

“Not to me,” I told her, honestly.  I had briefly thought about telling her that she did, but that it was more important to make her feel good, in the hopes that she’d reciprocate, but deep down, I never wanted to lie to Maddy, or worse give her a complex. 

If I was wrong and there was a God, he was a pervert who respected honesty, because my decision was almost instantly rewarded.  She saw the bulge in my pants and said, “So I guess you want to go masturbate now.”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“So you can have an orgasm too.”

“Yeah.”

She was silent for a second, and I was about to turn away and go to the washroom to do it, but she suddenly said, “If I let you put it in my mouth, do you promise to pull out before you shoot?”

I was too aroused, wanted it too much, to tell her she shouldn’t do it at all.  After spending so much time looking and licking and inhaling the pheromones she was giving off, I wanted something.  “I promise I’ll never do something you don’t want me to do.”

“Okay,” she said.  “I’ll try it.  But just once.”

I took off my pants, quickly, partly afraid she would change her mind.  For a second, she did seem like she might have had second thoughts, as my dick bobbed in front of her, but she closed her eyes, leaned forward and opened her mouth wide, tongue extended.  It seemed pretty much like an invitation, so I closed the gap, and felt the underside of my penis slide on her soft tongue on its way into her mouth.  The head brushed against the sides of her mouth on its way in, and after I was inside, she closed her lips. 

We held that position for a few seconds, mainly because I wanted to make sure she had no complaint, but she didn’t seem to be bothered.  She didn’t seem to be especially into it, just sort of blank.  I slid in and out a little, and her head bobbed sympathetically.  “Maddy?”

She pulled off me entirely.  “Am I doing it wrong?” she asked with an adorably concerned look on her face.

“No, it’s good, it’s just, can you move your lips up and down a little?  Kind of like you’re sucking on a popsicle.”

“Oh, okay.”  This time I didn’t have to put it in myself, her lips resumed their position and started sliding, just a little.

It certainly wasn’t the best blowjob I’d ever received, and she didn’t even ever get more than halfway down, but seeing her beautiful face on the end of my cock was a memory that I’d cherish forever.  I put my hand on her hair and stroked her lightly, saying, “Oh, God, Maddy, you’re so beautiful.”

As horny as I was, it was only a few minutes before I felt the pressure start to build to an explosion with the inevitability of a runaway train, and I remembered my promise.  “Okay, Maddy,” I said.  “I’m about to shoot.”

She pulled off quickly and backed away, but still had her eyes fixed on the end of my dick.  I turned away from her, groaned a little, and gave it a few last strokes of my hand while my seed fell upon the floor.

After I was done, my dick dripping just a long strand towards the ground, she asked, “Why did you have to use your hands at the end?  Didn’t I do it good enough?”

“Oh, it’s not that, Maddy, I promise, you were great.  It’s just…” I searched a moment for a good way to explain, my mind still muddled a little with post-orgasm fuzziness.  “When guys ejaculate, it feels so much better if there’s still stimulation going on.  Since I’d pulled out of your mouth, I had to use my hand, that’s all.” 

“Oh.”

“I hope that wasn’t that unpleasant for you,” I said next, feeling a little guilty again, knowing she hadn’t wanted to do it. 

“It wasn’t so bad,” she said, looking down at the mess.  “I mean, it didn’t really taste good, but not bad, either, like the white stuff.  So, you had an orgasm?”

“Yeah, that’s what shooting out means, for guys.”  At least, usually.

“Does it feel like mine do?”

I smirked.  “I don’t know, I’ve never felt what you felt.  I’d need to be like Professor X to know that.”

“Right,” Maddy realized with a giggle.

“But I’m sure it feels very similar.”

“Okay, well, I’m glad I gave you one.  I guess I don’t mind using my mouth to give you one sometimes if you don’t mind using yours to give me one sometimes.” 

“That sounds… pretty fair,” I said, but in my head I was doing a happy dance, the guilt washing away.  It was more than fair, it was practically a dream come true. 

Later that day, while we were done with sex and just talking Madeline pointed out that school was ending in a few weeks. 

“So, you all ready for your final exams?” I asked, trying, and failing, to remember if final exams were a big problem at her age, or if they were just another test. 

“Yeah, I think so, but, I was wondering…”  She stopped.  I looked over at her, until she continued.  “Well, since I won’t have school, and it’s not like you’re paying me any more… can I just hang out here, during the day?”

“I’d be happy to let you, Maddy, but you do know I have work to do…”  I’d been structuring my days around Maddy’s visits, waking up earlier and doing work before and after she was gone, but if she was going to be here all day, I couldn’t do that.

“I know… I can entertain myself.  I mean, at home I’d just be watching TV anyway, but I thought I could do it here, and read comics, and maybe when you’re not busy we could hang out.  Please?  I’ll do it naked if you want…”

The thought of her hanging out in my apartment all day, naked, willing to be touched and, as of today, to give me blowjobs… “No,” I said.  “I mean, yes, you can come over, as long as your parents won’t get suspicious…”

“They won’t,” she insisted rapidly, overjoyed that I gave her a ‘yes’.

“But if you’re naked all day, I don’t think I’ll get any work done at all.”  She giggled.  “So you should probably wear some normal clothes or something.”

****
Chapter Fourteen:

Regardless of that suggestion, I got a lot less work done when summer came around.  Luckily, my bosses didn’t seem to notice… it helps to be the top guy on the database, the people employing you don’t really understand what you do, and so they only really notice you’re not doing your job when things start to go wrong, and very little did.  I just didn’t do as many of the optimizations and anticipatory work I usually do, most of which I could catch up on at other times.

Instead, when I wasn’t needed for a specific task, I tended to hang out with Maddy, watching movies, chatting, or reading comics.  She quickly ran through my total collection of Ultimate Spider-Man, so I started buying other comics just because I thought she might like them.  It was only fair, I wasn’t paying her any more. 

We did more sexual touching too, but not every day, and when we did, it was only a small part of the day.  Mostly, in fact, it was just when affectionate play and touching would sometimes lead to other things. 

One time that I’ll always remember was when we were playing dress-up again, with Maddy playing Supergirl.  She’d just started reading the comics, which I bought for her, though she didn’t like it as much as Spider-Man or, her more recent favorite, Thor.  I’d bought a trade of that one a long time ago, intending to give it a look, but never got around to reading it.  Maddy picked it off my shelf and really took to it, more than Wonder Woman or Teen Titans.  But Thor didn’t have any girl characters with an easy-to-buy costume, so she still dressed up as Supergirl, with one difference.  Now, she completely skipped wearing the panties.  With every quick movement her skirt would lift and I’d see a flash of ass or pussy.  If Supergirl really dressed like that, she’d be a shoo-in to distract her foes.

Suddenly, and I can’t remember exactly what sparked it this time, she decided again that I was a criminal who needed to be apprehended, and chased me until I let her catch me and drag me to the ground.  “Now what am I going to do with you?” she asked the air.  “If I take you to jail, you’ll just bust out again.”

“I don’t know,” I said, unable to suppress a grin.  “Just as long as you don’t make me taste your Kryptonian super pussy or something…”  Please don’t throw me in that briar patch. 

“Hmmm,” she said with a grin.  “You know, that might be a fair punishment.”  I was already mostly lying on my back, and slid down all the way as Maddy crawled over me, pinning my hands down over my head to prevent me from escaping.

It was one of those little ways reality is just a bit disappointing compared to fantasy.  In fantasy, when I considered scenes like this, I had a perfect view of Supergirl as her perfect pussy descended on me.  In reality, her skirt fell over my head, so all I got is a very brief shadowy look as she descended, then mostly darkness with a red tint.  But darkness never smelled or tasted so good.  I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t move the skirt out of the way myself without breaking out of her grasp, which would have been easy but not as fun.   

My tongue worked feverishly, and soon she relaxed her grip on my hands, so I could move them to and up her sides, and pull her skirt up… but as I tried, she was already turning.   I felt a hand on my crotch as she reached almost behind her.  “What’s this?” she asked.  “Some kind of weapon, I bet.  I’d better disarm it.”

She reversed herself on me once again giving me a brief, shadowy view of heaven before I was back under the red skirt.  At least now I had my hands free to lift it a little, which wasn’t as great a view as it would have been before, but at least seeing her ass was better than darkness, and this time there was extra compensation.  Zip went my zipper, my underwear was pulled down, and a soft hand exposed my dick to air.  Madeline shook it back and forth, and then bent down to take it in her mouth.  Reality began to win out over fantasy at that point, as she sucked me and my tongue delved into her crack.  It felt incredible, every time I made her moan I could feel it echoing into my cock.

Finally, that old feeling began to rise, and I knew I hadn’t much time.  “Maddy, I’m about to…” I said, or tried to, but her pussy mashed itself into my face when I tried, so I couldn’t warn her, just continue to lick. 

I exploded into her, and for once, she didn’t pull away.  She must have decided that since it was in her mouth anyway, she might as well swallow rather than risk it getting all over her face, or all over my pants.   I was glad, and even if it was all psychological, for there was no way my dick could know, it still felt so much better knowing that it was going down her throat. 

Finally I was spent and she pulled away from me, sitting upright on my face.  “I swallowed it,” she said excitedly.  It was the first time for that. 

“I know,” I said, took another lick, then managed to pull away long enough to say, “I’m proud of you baby.”

“It didn’t taste as bad as I thought,” she said.  “I guess I didn’t really taste it much at all until the end.”

I couldn’t exactly answer back, but continued trying to make her feel as good as she made me feel.  That took a few more minutes, but finally she began to moan and let off a little squeak, then her high pitched squeal, as her body, and especially her butt, tensed up, and I knew she was done.  I gave her a gratuitous series of kisses on her pussy while she exhaled deeply and regularly a few times, laying on top of me, and then she got off me.  “Well, I hope you’ve learned your lesson about trying to take over the world,” she joked. 

“I did,” I said.  “I totally did.”  If that was the punishment comic book supervillains got, no wonder they kept trying instead of just giving up and making money in the private sector. 

****
Chapter Fifteen:

It was starting to look like a pretty glorious summer, at least for me.  I had what seemed like a dream come true, for someone as fucked up as me.  I had a great daughter, someone who made waking up in the morning seem worthwhile… but I wasn’t a great father.  Not just because of my pedophile tendencies, but because I took everything for granted, and never really stopped to wonder why Maddy wanted so badly to spend time with me.  I never noticed the most important thing going on in her life, or figure out that she was clinging to me because her own world was falling apart. 

I found that out with a sudden, urgent knock at my door.  I’d heard the sound of her fist too often to not realize it was her, but there was something different about it too, it was more desperate somehow… and, also, it was a Saturday.  We only spent weekdays together, because her parents were out all day.  For her to be knocking late on a Saturday afternoon, something had to be wrong.

It was.  I opened the door to find Madeline, red-eyed and wiping a tear away.  “Can I come in?” she asked, sniffling, her voice on the edge of cracking.

“Maddy, what’s wrong?”

Instead of answering, she just cried out, “Please?”

I took a look around the hallway, worried her parents might step out at any moment, but decided that she needed to talk, and stepped away from the door to allow her entrance, then closed it behind her.  She moved mechanically over to my couch and sat listlessly.  I sat beside her, watching her.  Her mouth opened, as though to speak, then closed again.  “Maddy?” I asked, really starting to get worried, but not sure how to help.  It was one of the ‘daddy experiences’ we never rehearsed, how to comfort a daughter in distress.  For a second I wondered if that was exactly what she was doing, giving me that experience, but no, it was all too real, nobody was that good an actor.  “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”  She nodded, but a minute or two passed in silence.  “Do you want a hug?”  She nodded once more, and this time tears filled her eyes, and she moved over to me and put her arms around my neck.  I put mine around her back and held her tightly as she began to sob. 

Finally, the crying stopped as she took in one breath, and in her exhalation she managed to get it out.  “They’re divorcing.” 

“Oh,” I said, my heart sinking in sympathy.  “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”  I held her tighter, thinking of nothing more than comforting her in her hour of need.  

After a while, she seemed to stop shaking, and added, “He threatened to leave before, he always threatened but…”

When she didn’t finish, I supplied, “You never thought it would actually happen.  I’m sorry, Maddy.  I know how much that sucks.  My parents split when I was about your age.”  I cried a fair bit myself at the time, and it was a fairly amiable split.

“They did?”

“Yeah.  And I hated it… but, in the end, it was probably for the best.”  She might not be ready to hear that, but it was true.  “Better they be happy apart than together and miserable and fighting all the time, right?”  Especially for the last years of their lives, in my parents’ cases. 

She finally pulled away from the hug, but still sat very close.  “I don’t care, I don’t want things to change.”

“Nobody does,” I said.  “But nobody can stop it either.  But there are good parts to change, too, even bad ones.”  I struggled to find one.  “You’ll get twice as many birthday and Christmas presents.”  It was a cheap cliché, but I hoped it might make her feel better.

She sniffled a little, and then muttered, “No I won’t.”

“Sure you will.  My parents practically spoiled me.  I guess they thought it was a way to prove who loved me more.”

She was quiet for about half a minute, and then said, “I’ll probably have to move.”

I had my own little sense of fear of loss hit me then, but I knew it was nothing compared to hers.  “Even that can have its good sides.  I mean, I’d miss you like hell, but maybe you could still visit once in a while, and meanwhile, you get a chance at a fresh start, make some new friends at a new school.”

“I wish I could just live here with you.”

As much as a part of me loved the idea, it wasn’t realistic and I knew I had to cut it off.  “I don’t think your parents would be too happy with that idea.  As bad as I’d miss you, they’d miss you worse.”

She laughed, but it was almost a sob itself.  “Yeah, right.”

“Of course they would.  And they’d never allow it.  You don’t think they’d be fighting like hell to keep you?”

“Mom might.  My dad wouldn’t care.”

“What?  Of course he would.  You remember what he said?  Nobody’s complete until he has a kid?”

“He never said that.  Somebody on TV did.  A TV dad.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Well, even if he didn’t he’s still…”

“He thinks I ruined his life.”

I frowned, feeling a strong desire to punch him, even if he was in the military and could almost certainly kick my ass.  “He said this to you?”

She shook her head.  “To Mom.  I overheard, through the wall.”

That was slightly better, but only slightly.  “People say stuff when they’re angry, stuff they don’t really mean.  You’re a great kid, Maddy.  I’m sure your Dad knows that.  Anybody would be lucky to have you as a daughter.”

“I’m never going to see him again.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” I told her, but in the end, I didn’t really know.  I knew nothing about what went on in the other apartment except what Maddy told me, and as today revealed, she clearly hadn’t been telling me everything.  But I hoped it wasn’t true.  “You’ll see him.”  

Instead of agreeing, or arguing, she slid back up to me and put her arms around me again.  I stroked her hair gently and we sat together for a few minutes before it occurred to me again that it was a Saturday.  “Where are your parents right now?”

“I don’t know,” she said.  “Dad left, said he was moving in with someone.  Mom ran after him to yell.  I came here.”

For all the apartment-living stereotype of the walls being paper thin, I hadn’t heard any of this, nor any of the arguments that must have preceded this.  Or maybe I just blocked them out.  Still, I couldn’t see her mother following him and yelling forever, sooner or later she’d come back home and find Maddy not there.  “Maybe you should go back home,” I said.  “Talk to her about this.”

“No,” she said plaintively.  “Please, let me stay here.”  She held on to me more tightly than before.  “Please, you can have sex with me or do anything you want, just let me stay here a while longer.”  She shuffled a little while she lifted and moved one knee so that she could straddle my legs, as though ready to make good on that offer right away.

The prospect made my penis swell, but only a little, because I was very conscious of the fragile girl I held in my arms.  “Maddy, I’m not going to have sex with you.”

She raised her face from my chest and looked up at me with red, glistening eyes.  “Don’t you want me?”  she whined.  It sounded like a complaint, like she was afraid that her parents didn’t want her, and now neither did I. 

“Of course I do, but not like this.  Not when you’re sad and scared.  I care about you too much to be that selfish.”

“Can I stay though?”

Knowing I probably should say no, I said, “For a little while.”

She sank back into my chest and we sat in silence, mostly.  Sometimes she cried, sometimes I said a soothing word, but mostly I just held her and let her hold me, trying to be that rock she could cling to as her world fell apart, from her perspective. 

Finally, after what must have been a half hour, of trying to think of something comforting to say, I had something I was willing to try, “You’ll get through this, Maddy.  I know it doesn’t feel like it now, but you will.  You’re strong.  I can see it in you.  Just like Spider-Man, and Supergirl, and Thor, you can take whatever the world throws at you, and find a way to carry on, not let it beat you.”

“They have super powers,” she said.

“Well, then like Batgirl.  She doesn’t have powers, but she has the heart of a super hero, like you.”

“I’ve never read any Batgirl,” she pointed out.

“Well, maybe I’ll buy you some issues.”  Batgirl was, at that time, a blonde girl, just like Maddy.  I hadn’t read it, but I heard it was fun.  In retrospect, if seemed like an obvious choice of a comic she might like.  “But you’ve got to do me a favor…”  She looked up at me and I continued.  “You have to be brave, go home and face what’s making you sad.  You can’t run away from it forever, and if you stay here much longer, I could get in trouble.” 

Her forehead scrunched up, “What do you mean?”

“If your mother had any idea how close we were, she’d probably kill me.  And sooner or later, she’s going to go knocking on doors or call the police looking for you.” 

I hated myself for thinking about my own neck at a time like that, but it seemed to do the trick.   “Oh,” she said.  “Right.  You’re right.  I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“You can see me on Monday, okay?”

“Okay Daddy,” she said.  I hadn’t even notice she used the name until she was gone.  “I’ll go home.”  She slid off the couch, and started towards the door. 

She got halfway to the door before I started to follow.  “Wait,” I said.  I knelt down in front of her, wiped her tears away in what I hoped was a fatherly affection, gave her one last hug, and then kissed her on her forehead.   She smiled… it was a weak one, and maybe for my benefit, but it was there.  I walked her to the door, and then she left.

The moment her feet crossed into the hallway I heard, “Oh, thank God, Madeline, I was worried sick.”

It was her mother.  There was no way she couldn’t have seen her coming out of my home, and Maddy looked like a deer caught in headlights, or somebody caught red-handed doing something they shouldn’t.

****
Chapter Sixteen:

“Where have you been?” her mother demanded.  I hadn’t noticed before, but she spoke with a slight accent, something that sounded a bit Slavic, maybe Russian, but pretty faint, and she had no trouble with W’s. 

The damage was done, so I followed Maddy out the door, trying to look somber and not at all like a pedophile.  I’ve had practice at that.  The trick to that is to look like you’re a little uncomfortable around children and confused why they’re near you.  A perplexed look helps.  I sometimes, to inspire such a look, I start trying to make sense of the Clone Saga in Spider-Man.  “She came knocking on my door,” I explained.

Her mother gave me only a cursory glance up and down, and then redirected her attention at Madeline.  “You know better than to knock on strange men’s doors… and to leave without telling me where you’re going or taking your phone?  I almost called the police!”

“I’m sorry, Mom…”

“I want you to go to your room, right now.  You’re grounded.”

“But…”

“No buts.  Now.”  She unlocked the door and ushered her inside.  Maddy went without a word.

Her mother stayed behind and looked at me with a gaze that, to me, seemed like it was running a pedo-scan.  Luckily, it must have been defective, because she said, “I’m sorry she bothered you, Mr… uhm…”

“Brown,” I said.   “Don’t be too hard on her, she just seemed like she really needed somebody to talk to…”

“Yes, well…” she paused.  “She told you what happened?”

“Eventually,” I said.  “First she just cried a lot.  I’m sorry about you and your husband.”

She shook her head derisively.  “I’m better off without him, the bastard.”

“I know it’s none of my business, but… she seemed to think she’s never going to see her father again.”  I wanted her to say that was ridiculous, that they wouldn’t let whatever was between them hurt Maddy. 

She looked back to the door, and then to me, and said, “Well, that’s up to him.  But if I were her, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

“I just don’t understand that,” I said.  “If I had a daughter…”

“She’s not his daughter, not really.” 

“Oh,” I said, a little stunned at this new information.  I assumed then that he was a stepfather, but Maddy never said or even hinted.  “I didn’t realize he wasn’t her biological father.”

She laughed bitterly.  “That’s the problem, neither did he.” she said.  It must have been obvious how shocked I was by that explanation, because she rushed to justify herself.  “Don’t look at me like that, you don’t know me, so you can’t judge.  I’m not proud of it, you understand, but we were only married a few months, and he was stationed out of country.  I got lonely.  I made a mistake, but Maddy was a little premature.  Eleven years everything was fine and then boom, out of nowhere he watched something on TV and he tells me her blood type wasn’t right, demanded a test.  Personally, I think he was just looking for an excuse to leave us and go fuck some stripper whore.  I mean, sure, I made one mistake, but he raised her just like I did.  What kind of man holds that against a kid?”  She shook her head one more time, and said, “You’re right, this is none of your business, I don’t know why I’m even telling you.”  She wiped away her own tear, and said, “It’s been such stress today… I need a drink.”  With one deep inhalation, she composed herself and said, “Thank you for trying to comfort her, Mr. Brown.”

“It’s no problem.  I, uh, hope things work out for you.”

That was the extent of our conversation that day.  Maddy later told me her mother cancelled the grounding and apologized to her and they talked a little.  I never mentioned the revelations about her father, because I wasn’t entirely sure if she knew the truth.  Her world was precarious as it was, I couldn’t bear to accidentally add one more thing for her to be shattered about.

Those next few days that I saw Maddy, I was very gentle with her.   I told her she could keep her clothes on, and we did none of our sexual touching or play… while we did play Daddy and Daughter, it was subdued, like at the start of our relationship, with one added subtext, I’d talk to her about her worries over the divorce a lot more, and sometimes she just needed to cry and be held.  The surprising thing was, I didn’t really miss the sexual touching or nudity, the closeness was worth more to me.  If she never wanted to do that again, I could enjoy her company just as much. 

The first few days, the sadness put a pall over most of our time and the crying was liable to break out at any moment.  But gradually, over the course of a week or so, she cried less and smiled more.  The divorce and whatever the situation was with her dad, who she’d only heard from once more when he stopped by to pick up the rest of his stuff, still hurt, but it no longer seemed to overwhelm her whole day… it only seemed to bother her when she was reminded of it.  I think she was deliberately trying to push it out of her thoughts as much as possible. 

When we did return to sexuality, it was because Maddy prompted it, at least mostly.  We were watching a movie, and were sitting beside each other, when suddenly she decided to lie down, resting her head in my lap.  Well, the sudden, surprising contact awakened my dick and before I could think it back down, I felt her hands working at my zipper.  That ended any hope of making my erection fade.  “Maddy, you don’t have to…” I said.

“It’s okay, we haven’t done it for a while.  I want to.”  That was the last thing she said for a couple minutes, because she wrapped her lips around my dick and began sucking.  She may have been out of practice, but it hadn’t shown, she was better than ever. 

While she went down on me, I found my hands drifting down to her skirt, and decided I might as well give her pleasure too, so I felt underneath to rub her crotch along her panties… back and forth, back and forth.  After a minute of that, Maddy herself decided to remove the obstacle.  She reached back and pulled her panties down to mid-thigh.  I didn’t fully finger her, because Maddy still had a fear of penetration, but I rubbed along the wettening slit while she gave me a blowjob. 

“I’m about to cum,” I warned her, but instead of pulling off, she made a sound of acknowledgement, but kept her lips on me.  I emptied my balls into her mouth for only the second time, and she swallowed every drop.  When she was done, she looked back up at me and smiled.  I ran a hand through her hair and said, “I thought you didn’t like the taste.”  She’d done it the once, as Supergirl, but after that she still wanted me to pull out. 

“I don’t, but if you swallow it as soon as it comes out it you don’t really taste it… and you like it, right?”

“Yeah.”  I stopped myself from telling her that I didn’t want her to do it just to please me.  After all, if she enjoyed pleasing me, who was I to complain?  Instead, I said, “Can I use my tongue on you?”

Her smile turned into a grin.  “Oh, yes, Daddy, you certainly can.”

It wasn’t a cure for her sadness, not by any means, but I think it’s natural for people to seek comfort in things that give them pleasure, so I made it my job to give her as much pleasure as possible.  Of course, I would have tried regardless, but I tried harder, and that day didn’t stop until I’d given her two orgasms, telling her that I just couldn’t get enough of her, a prospect that amused and seemed to delight her.  My tongue was a little sore by the time she left, but it was for a noble cause. 

I also had some more opportunities to talk to Maddy’s mother over the next few weeks.  Now that we’d said more than a polite hello, the ice was broken to say more.  The very next time I saw her I was returning from the convenience store with some milk again, and as I exited the stairwell I saw her carrying a heavy duffle bag and swearing at the elevator.  “Something wrong?”

“I think it’s broken again.”   It had been doing that at least once a month, maybe more.  I usually took the stairs, they were more reliable and good for keeping in shape.

That wouldn’t work for her, at least not easily, and I saw a chance to maybe get a little inside information on how Maddy was doing, since she had a tendency to not tell me when things weren’t all right.  “You want a hand with that?  I can just throw this in the fridge, then help you carry that downstairs, if you’d like.”

She considered it, but not for long.  “If it wouldn’t be much trouble.”  Her accent was far milder than it was that first day we talked.  Apparently stress brought it out more strongly.

“Nah, I don’t mind, I’m not doing anything.”   I popped into my apartment, put away the milk, and returned to heft the bag full of clothes, and the laundry detergent.  She carried the fabric softener.

“I really appreciate this, Mr. Brown,” she said as we descended.

“Oh, it’s no problem.  I imagine it’s not easy suddenly being a single mother.  And you can call me James, if you like.”  I braced myself for the joke.  I’ve heard them all.  I tried switching to Jim when I was a teenager, but it never took. 

She didn’t make one.  “I’m Natalia… and, well, it’s not like Brian was much help to begin with,” she said.  “But at least he brought money in.  I had to pick up some extra shifts, so I barely have time to do everything anymore.”  What followed was a rant about how busy she was that lasted well past the time it took to get to the laundry room.   We continued to talk while she put things into the washing machine.  I didn’t mind.  I wanted to get to know her a little so it wouldn’t seem out of place when I asked about Maddy.  So, I learned that she was from the Ukraine, but moved here when she was thirteen.   She met Brian when she was 18 and married far too quickly.  According to Natalia, Madeline didn’t know Brian wasn’t her father, but, to my surprise, Brian had found out for sure, with 100% scientific certainty, that he wasn’t Maddy’s father several months ago.  Natalia and Brian were struggling to work things out ever since, and getting into frequent fights before things finally fell apart for good.

I came out of that conversation feeling a little more sympathy for her ex.  Nothing could forgive how he made Maddy feel, but at least he had tried to stick around and be a father for some time, despite knowing she wasn’t his.  Maybe it was just that every time he looked at her, he was reminded about how his wife had betrayed him.  I could empathize, after my last girlfriend had cheated on me, I couldn’t hang around many of my friends anymore, because either they still talked to her regularly, or they were involved in introducing us.  I never did anything so dramatic as storm out, but I slowly stopped initiating contact with them until they stopped trying with me.  But that was friends, not a daughter.  I hoped one day soon Brian’d get over it and remember those years of acting like a father and come to miss them.

We parted when it was time to put the clothes in the dryer, but I offered to help her carry the duffle bag up back up the stairs when it was done, and she took me up on that offer, so I made another.  “I know it’s hard right now, so just to let you know, if you ever need anything, feel free to knock on my door and ask.”

Natalia gave me that appraising eye for a moment, but then said, “I might take you up on that.”  An hour later, she knocked at my door to fetch the clothes, and a little later that afternoon, already had another favor to ask… to haul out some garbage that was too big for the chute and too heavy for her to carry downstairs with the elevator out of service.  It was the first she’d asked without me explicitly offering, but wouldn’t be the last. 

****
Chapter Seventeen:

I didn’t actually see very much of Natalia, since she was working probably more hours than I was, but every couple days I’d hear a knock on my door, or she’d phone from work, and she’d have a request.  Sometimes it was to borrow something common, or to change a broken light bulb in the bathroom that she didn’t want to touch (it takes our super days to get to tasks sometimes).  

Once it was to ask if I could bring Maddy to meet her at her doctor’s appointment.  Natalia had to work an extra hour for someone at work and wouldn’t have time to come home and get Maddy and get to the doctor in time for the appointment.   Since I was there, and had a car, she asked if I could pick her up and drive her there. 

Some of the other favors might have been a bit inconvenient, but of course I grudgingly, but secretly happily, said yes to that one.  It was the first and only time I was able to take little Maddy out into the world without fear. 

I took advantage of it and did something else I always wanted to do… I took her to a comic shop.  It wasn’t Wednesday, the day comics come out, so the store was pretty empty, but there were a few guys, including one who stared openly, and for a while I started to regret my decision to bring her. 

There’s always been a sort of usually unspoken stereotype about comic fans being more likely to be pedophiles, and although I’d deny it if asked, I really think there’s some truth to it.   Just from my own observation, in comic circles, particularly online where anonymity is allowed, there seems to be far more people who admit attraction to young girls than other places… and then, of course, there’s a lot of erotic art out there of teen superheroines, even young ones like Kitty Pryde or Jubilee, both of whom started out not much older than Madeline.   More recently, at this time, there was Hit-Girl, who had a lot of drawn porn specifically based on the movie version of the character, where she was played by a real little girl.  I can’t deny, right before I met Maddy those pictures were some of my more frequent masturbation aids.  The movie wasn’t great, but I watched it four times because of her.   If we had more time together, I probably would have tried to get Madeline to dress up as her. 

I think it’s because of what I said before, that pedophiles just relate to kids, liking what they like, and so naturally become attracted to them.  Being a fan of works full of honorable, stalwart heroes, I’m pretty sure most of these are the ones I thought of as the “good” pedophiles, but there’s always a few freaks who relate to the villains, and I didn’t want to risk exposing Maddy to those kind of people. 

I tried to guide her away from the potential pervert and took her on a tour of the shelves, picked up a couple trade collections and let Maddy buy something she liked.  The guy who stared, whether a good pedophile or a bad, didn’t make a move.  Luckily, social phobias are also pretty common in comic fans.  Maddy for her part didn’t even notice, she seemed thrilled to be in a store, brought there by her pretend daddy, and get to own some comics of her very own. 

The best part was, she didn’t even have to hide the comics from her Mom.  I explained that I needed to stop in and pick something up anyway, so I did it on the way, and when Maddy asked for something so she could read while waiting for her appointment, I couldn’t turn her down.  There was nothing sinister-sounding about it.  It fit into the ‘good guy neighbor’ image I was trying to project for her mother, and Natalia smiled indulgently about the comics and didn’t seem to press the issue. 

I just said I was trying to project a “good guy neighbor” image, but it wasn’t really an act… I really thought I was just being considerate, like neighbors should act when they know each other.  Sure, I was helping Madeline in a sort of roundabout way by making things easier on her mother, but beyond that, I didn’t have any ulterior motives.  So I was surprised when one day Madeline said, in part of a casual conversation, “Oh, yeah, my Mom wants me to invite you over to dinner tonight.”

“What?” I instinctively panicked, mostly because she sent Maddy, which, to my mind suggested she somehow knew Maddy was spending a lot of time with me, and was going to confront me about it.  “When?”

“Tonight, I told you.”

“No, when’d she tell you?”

“Oh.”  She stopped for a moment, and then said, “Before she went to work, I guess.”

“She doesn’t know you come here, does she?”

“Of course not!”  I relaxed, a little.

“So why’d she tell you to invite me?”

She shrugged.  “I guess to thank you for helping her out.  And we’re having Hamburger Helper, there’s always plenty left over, especially with… just the two of us.”

I meant why she asked Maddy instead of asking me herself, but I let it go.  I assumed maybe she wanted to give me enough warning and wasn’t sure if I’d be awake when she left the house, and would be too busy at work to phone. 

I didn’t want to go, but I couldn’t think of a way to refuse without being rude.   So, nervously, I knocked at her door at a quarter to 7, just as Maddy suggested.  I could smell hamburger, so I guess dinner was well underway. 

Natalia opened the door.   I could see Maddy at the end of the hall.  “Oh, hello James.”

“Hi,” I said. 

She didn’t make a move to let me in, and we just looked at each other for a few seconds before she said, “I can’t talk long, dinner’s just about ready and Maddy invited a friend over.  Did you need something?”

Oh, shit.  I tried to think of a way to back out quickly, but Madeline jumped in.  “He’s the one I invited,” she said.  “I just thought it would be nice to have company, and that we should thank him for helping you so often… and, we have plenty extra.”

“Oh you did.  And you didn’t think of running this by me?”  Natalia looked first to her daughter, then back to me, but, to my relief, the look she shot me was one of amused tolerance with a hint of conspiracy.  Like she was saying, “We both know what’s going on here, right?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I thought you were the one who invited me.  I can go.”  I wanted to go.  I was terrified, having no idea what Maddy had in mind, or if she’d mess up and reveal how well we knew each other.  As far as Natalia knew, there was just a few brief encounters. 

“No, no, you might as well stay, if you were invited.  And we will have plenty.”

I entered and while waiting for dinner, tried to look at or talk to Maddy as little as possible, to reinforce the suggestion that she was just a kid to me, one I barely knew, but luckily she didn’t seem to try to force the issue.   She was pretty quiet while we sat near each other.   I think she realized she’d crossed a line that shouldn’t have been crossed, and even felt guilty.  Instead, I talked to Natalia, asking about how her day went, and giving her a chance to vent about stupid customers or co-workers which filled the time nicely, even if it was a bit of a chore to listen to. 

After putting the plates on the table, Natalia opened up a bottle of red wine and poured a liberal amount into a glass.   “Would you like some wine?”

“No thanks,” I said.

“It’s not as though you have to drive home, you know,” she joked. 

Mostly I wanted to be completely clear-headed to navigate the minefield, but for politeness’ sake, I smiled and said, “Maybe just a little bit, I don’t drink much.”

She poured me about half the amount in her own glass, slid it over, and then gave Madeline a choice between apple or orange juice.  She chose apple. 

We ate the cheesy beefy macaroni in relative silence for a minute or two, before Maddy broke it.  “So, Mr. Brown, what do you do?  For, like, a job?” 

“I’m a database administrator.  Computer stuff, not very interesting.”

“Oh.  We don’t even have a computer anymore.”

My eyes widened in surprise.  That just seemed impossible, but then Natalia explained, “Brian took it.”

I turned to Maddy.  “Sorry, I guess that must be hard, not being able to get on the Internet.”

“Maddy’s not allowed on the Internet anyway, not without me there.  Too many bad people.  We had a problem with cyberbullying last year.”

“So this database minister,” Maddy said.  “It must pay a lot, right?  I hear computer jobs pay a lot.”

“Madeline,” her mother scolded.  “That’s not polite.”  Though I noticed her eyes lifted towards me as though wondering about the answer herself.

“I do all right,” I said. 

Maddy continued to prompt me.  “I bet you had to go to college for that, right?”

“Yeah.  It’s not easy, but it pays off in the end.  Do you do well in school?”

“I guess.”

“Madeline gets very good marks,” her mother said, clearly proud, as she refilled her wine glass.  “She’s a… what do you call it, bookworm.”

“That’s good, you should keep it up.  School’s important.”  Realizing I was breaking my own rule about talking too much to Maddy, I looked back at her mother. 

Madeline suddenly had another question.  “So I know you’re not married, but do you have a girlfriend or something?”

“Madeline,” Natalia said with a warning tone that was probably more about her lack of subtlety than anything else.  I had to agree on that point.  It was like she was trying to shove me in front of her mother and say, “Look, he’s single, smart, and financially secure!  Date him!” 

The problem was, I didn’t especially want to date Natalia.  Oh, she looked good enough, and if we met under different circumstances, maybe I’d consider it, but it was wrong to do it when the primary thing I was interested in was her daughter, and, to be honest, she was a little annoying.  A lot of the times when she complained about someone at work, it was for innocent mistakes, and sometime it sounded like she took a kind of cruel delight when they failed.  She struck me as the type who found fault with everybody else but downplayed their own errors or blamed others.  The kind of person who would bitch at somebody for not helping them in a tight spot, and yet also bitch if forced to delay her own break to give them a hand.  Maybe I was being unkind… after all, she was just venting after a long day, but still, she seemed nothing like the kind, forgiving, open person her daughter seemed to be, and not really the kind of person I wanted to date. 

I thought about lying to put Maddy off that path, but that plan could backfire.  If I said I had a girlfriend and Maddy thought I was telling the truth, or that I meant her, who knew how she might react?  So I just said, “No, not right now.”

I asked Natalia more about her life, what it was like growing up in the Ukraine, despite not really being interested, mostly to divert Maddy from asking more questions about me.  She did point out that I seemed fit and asked if I worked out, but that was probably the most blatant of her attempts to sell me to her mother. 

Maddy also invited me to watch a movie with them afterwards, which got another glare from her mother, and I decided that was as good an excuse as any to make my exit.  “No, actually, I do have a bit of work I need to catch up on before tomorrow, but thank you, dinner was lovely.”

Natalia sent Madeline to her room, and walked me out, then followed me to the hallway.  “I’m sorry about my daughter,” she said.

“Oh, no, it’s okay, she seems like a nice kid.”

“I don’t know where she got the idea that she should try to set us up.”  She paused, and then looked at me sidelong.  “Unless… you didn’t put her up to it, did you?”

“No,” I said quickly.  “Why would I do that?”

“You think I haven’t noticed?  How since my husband left you’ve tried to be so nice, listening to my problems, offering to do me favors.   Men don’t act like that for nothing…”

“Oh, no,” I said.  “It’s nothing like that.  Really.  I just thought you might need help.  Just being neighborly.  That’s all, I swear.”

“Neighborly.”  Her lips tightened into a line. 

“That’s it,” I said.  “I feel bad for you, and I wanted to help out where I can.”

“Good,” she said suddenly, turning away a little too quickly.  “Because it’s too soon for me to get involved with somebody.  The divorce isn’t even final yet.”

Did I offend her?  I hadn’t meant to, although if I knocked out hope out of a relationship, it was hard to consider that a bad thing.  “I don’t mean that you’re not beautiful or anything, I’m just saying I wasn’t thinking like that.  I figured it was too soon for you anyway.”

“Good, then we’re on the same page.  And to be honest, you’re not exactly my type.”

That was blunt.  I guess I had offended her.  “Okay.  Well, thank you for dinner.”

“Good night,” she said and returned to her apartment.

****
Chapter Eighteen:

The next time I saw Maddy, I confronted her on the obvious attempt to set us up.  She teared up a little.  “I know, it was a dumb idea, okay?  I just thought… if you and Mom got together, we wouldn’t have to move, and you could really be my daddy, and you’d want that.”

“I would want that,” I told her.  “If it were possible.  But you can’t just force people together.  Your mother’s nice, but I just don’t feel that way about her, and nothing’s worse than people being together who don’t want to be.”  I knelt down and said, “It doesn’t affect how I feel about you, though, that will never change.”  I hugged her, and she hugged back tightly. 

“Mom keeps talking about how we’re going to have to move soon,” she said.

“I know.  I’m going to miss you so much.”

“Me too.”

“But we can enjoy our time together, until then, right?” she nodded and sniffled, but composed herself, and we had another summer day of talking, father-daughter fun, and partial nudity.  We didn’t do anything sexual, though, that day, aside from light, casual touching while we were playing a game, but not to arousal.  

Only weeks ago, I would have worried that, with the specter of Maddy’s departure looming, that I’d have wanted to push the envelope, get as much sexual enjoyment out of her at I could before she was gone, maybe even push her into having sex, but I guess I should have had a little more faith in myself, because I actually held back even more.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I wanted Maddy to remember the fun of having a father-figure who would give her his attention, rather than one who just wanted sex in those last days.  And I think I decided that I really would miss the closeness more... after all, although sex with a girl Maddy’s age might be a rare experience, the ultimate fantasy for a pedophile, but mechanically, it’s just sex.  If I put out the effort, I could probably get sex from somewhere else, and it would probably be better for Maddy if I held off and didn’t try to take her virginity… but it wouldn’t be as easy to have someone who I could treat like a daughter. 

That’s not to say we didn’t do anything over the next few days, I’m no saint, and I made her cum quite a few times and she returned the favor with her hand or mouth, sometimes swallowing, sometimes not, but I tried not to make it the focus of our time, even while we both knew that time was running out. 

Sometimes, in my weaker moments, I considered actually doing what Maddy had wanted, putting myself out there and trying to go after her mother, romantically, just so I could keep Madeline in my life.  How bad could it be, I told myself.  Maybe I could get to really like Natalia.  These moments never lasted long before I decided it could never work, and it only took seeing Natalia one more time before those thoughts were banished forever.

It was a few days after that awkward, unexpected dinner date that she came knocking on my door again after work, for the first time since I’d, presumably, offended her.  “Can I come in?” she asked, which was a bit unusual.  She’d actually never been in my apartment, whenever she had a favor she asked me at my door and never came inside.  But this time she did, and seemed nervous.  “I don’t know exactly how to say this…” she began, once inside.

I shrugged, a little wary just on general principle, but she didn’t seem to be upset at me, so she probably hadn’t figured out anything was up with me and Maddy.  “Simple is probably best.”

“You know it’s been hard, since Brian left.”  I nodded, relaxing.  It was just another favor. “Especially with money.  It’s not cheap taking care of a daughter.  I picked up extra shifts, and my rainy day fund lasted a lot longer than I thought it would, but… it’s still not enough.  Rent’s coming due in a few days, and… I’m going to be a little short.”

“How much do you need?” I asked.

“Three hundred.  Four if you can manage it.”  I frowned instantly, and she saw it.  “I know, it’s a lot to ask, but I’m desperate here…  please.  I promise you, James, I will think of a way to make it up to you.”  She took a step forward, and all of a sudden, her hand was on my crotch, rubbing it into stiffness. 

“Uhm, I don’t think…” I was going to say that it wasn’t necessary, that it wasn’t a good idea, but she must have thought I meant that I wouldn't give her the money, because she dropped suddenly to the ground.

“Please, can’t you see, I’m on my knees here?”  She was, and working my zipper. 

I let her, and let her take my cock out.  She did it like someone who’d had a lot of practice at doing that quickly and efficiently, but then, I didn’t do anything to stop her.  I think there’s an instinct that when a woman is coming on to you, doing something sexual, and it’s a complete surprise to you, to just let it happen, even if you have loads of rational reasons why it wouldn’t be a good idea, even if you don’t really want it. 

She stroked up and down the shaft a little, keeping me pumped and erect, and then opened her mouth, extended her tongue, and licked the underside of my dick as the top of her mouth closed over it.  Natalia went down on me four or five times before she pulled back and looked up at me.  “So what do you think, will you help me out?  I will be very appreciative.  I might thank you every time I see you.”

She sucked on me again, and I had this vision, of Natalia coming to suck my dick every day shortly after her daughter Maddy had just done the same thing.  It was a powerful image, and my cock pulsed and jerked at it, but I also felt incredibly guilt, and this time the guilt was more powerful than the arousal.  More than the guilt, I felt so bad for Madeline, a deadbeat dad and a mother who was now, literally, a bit of a whore. 

I pulled away the next time she came up for air, and started to turn so I could zip myself up.  “Look, don’t do this,” I said.

“What’s the problem?” she asked with a frown.  “You’re not a homosexual, are you?”

“No,” I said.  “It’s just, this isn’t right.  You shouldn’t do… that, to ask for money.”

“Don’t be so naïve,” she said.  “You give me something, I give you something, that’s all it is.  What’s the harm?” 

Technically I might have agreed with her.  I had no moral problem with prostitution, and in some ways I felt it was refreshingly honest… it just felt so wrong in this case, particularly because I was thinking about Maddy.  I guess I’m one of those stereotypical liberals who has no theoretical problem with prostitution, but wouldn’t want my daughter to do it… or my daughter’s mother.  “Look, if you need the money that badly, I can help you out, but… no favors.”

She stood up, rolling her eyes a little as though I was the crazy one.  “Good then.”

I told her I’d be right back, and went for my office and got some money out of my wallet.  I like to keep a lot of cash on hand, because I’m cheap enough to hate paying ATM fees, but what she wanted pretty much cleaned me out.  I gave her about three hundred sixty, in all, which she took with a grudging thank you.  You’d think she’d have been more grateful, getting the money she wanted without having to promise regular blowjobs to do it, but maybe she resented me looking down on her.

I guess that must have been the case because, aside from brief encounters in the hallway, I never saw Natalia again and though I could sense my time with Maddy was coming to an end, I had no idea how quickly and abrupt it would be. 

****
Chapter Nineteen:

We still spent days together, during the summer, and by her own choice she started spending more time naked, or nearly so, again, saying she was hot, even with my air conditioner running, and why wear clothes if she didn’t have to?  I certainly had to agree, she was hot.  When she was mostly clothed, even topless, I found it easy not to make a move unless she practically asked me, but when she was almost completely naked the whole day, I usually couldn’t resist, at some point, rubbing her pussy, which usually would lead to more.  But though we performed oral sex on each other regularly, I still never pushed beyond it for anything we hadn’t yet done.   Maddy kept bringing up how she was going to be moving, and I knew it was on her mind, but considering I’d just helped her mother pay her rent,  I didn’t think it was serious until one day she said, “Mom wants to be moved in before school starts.”

That was only a few weeks away, depending on the board.  Some started earlier, some started later.  “Oh.  I thought you’d be here longer.”  If Natalia’d paid her rent with the money I gave her, then she still should have an extra month from the money she paid when she first moved in.  Now I wondered if she’d used the money for something else. 

“Yeah.  It sucks so much.  I’m going to miss coming here.”

“I’ll miss you too.  But you can still visit.  And, hey, a new school, that’s something to get excited about.”

She shrugged.  “I guess.”

“Fresh start, new friends,” I reminded her.

“Big deal,” she said with a pout.  “I’ll still be the same geeky girl nobody liked here.”

“That’s not true, not everyone can be as stupid as the kids in your school.  But anyway, that’s the thing about a fresh start, you get the chance to reinvent yourself.”

She thought about that for a minute.  “You mean like try to go scene or something?”

I didn’t even know what scene was, not exactly, just that it was a style.  “If you want.”

“You know what I should do,” she said.  “Stop coming off like such a geek.   Just be one of those girls that sleeps through class.  Get rid of all my books.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said.  “How are you going to be an archaeologist without good grades?”

“So what?  Everyone thinks it’s weird to want to be one.”

“But you love it, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but whenever I try to talk about it people just roll their eyes and start talking about something else.  I’d have more friends if I just stopped caring about it.”

“You’ll have friends regardless.”  She made a dismissive noise.  “It’s true.  The girl I’ve come to know over the past few months is charming and sweet and funny and brave.  Anyone who doesn’t see that and want to be near you has their head up their ass, and doesn’t deserve to have someone like you around.  You know the most important thing I’d tell my daughter?”  She looked up at me, waiting.  “Life’s unfair, and sometimes you just can’t hold on to what you love… but you never, ever, abandon what you love.  Not for something as fleeting as popularity.  Those people aren’t going to be with you forever.  Please, Maddy.  I love who you are… don’t change for other people.  I mean, if you think you need to, you can build a new image for yourself, but don’t lose track of who you are underneath.”

“I guess I could just pretend to be dumb, but still study hard at home.”  She smiled a little.  “Like a secret identity.”

I smiled back.  “Yeah, you could do that.  Personally, I don’t think you’ll need one.  You just need to be confident in who you are.”

That ended that conversation, but the next day, she brought it up again.  “I was thinking,” she started.  “About my new image.”

“Yeah?”

“You said I needed to be more confident.”

“Uh-huh… well, that would certainly help.  Confidence helps with so much in life.”  I felt like a hypocrite, because I certainly wasn’t confident.

“Well… there’s one thing that could make me more confident.”

“What’s that?”

“If we had sex.”

What a bombshell.  “What?”

“Then I wouldn’t be a virgin anymore.  I wouldn’t have to wonder or be scared.  I’ll have something over all the other girls who’ve never done it yet.  The girls at my last school always said I acted too immature, and what’s more mature than having had sex?”

“Maddy… you really should give your virginity to someone you love.”

“I love you, Daddy.”

Those first three words were powerful, words I hadn’t heard from anybody in far too long.  Even if it was just as a surrogate father figure, as I thought she must have meant.  “That’s not what I mean…” 

“Do you love me?”

I paused, then answered honestly.  “Yeah.  I love you.”  It wasn’t quite romantic love, perhaps, although it could have grown into it, but it was still love. 

“So let’s do it.  Before it’s too late.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.  I wanted it, and was practically shaking with excitement, but I didn’t want to push.

“Yes.  Come on.”  She led me into my own bedroom.  At the time, it being a bit of a cooler day, we were both dressed.  She wore a pair of shorts and a light shirt with spaghetti straps.  I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, my usual outfit when we weren’t hanging around naked.  “Just tell me what to do,” she said as she took off her shirt.  By now, she had no shame around me, walking around with her nipples showing, but it still astounded me for the first few seconds every time I saw it.  “I mean, I know how it works, I think, but I don’t know what you like best.”

I undressed too, as she sat on the bed and drew her bent legs up, looking unsure what to do.  “You know it might hurt the first time, right?” I warned her.  “We don’t have to do this.”

“I told you, I want to.  Just… be gentle.”

“Okay.  Then I should probably lick you first.  It’ll make it easier to go in.”

She nodded and spread her legs widely, and I crouched by the side of the bed and began planting soft kisses up and down her thighs, closing on her mound.  Soon, I turned kissing into licking, and spent almost half an hour down there, my tongue in her slit and playing around her clit.  My intention wasn’t just to lube her up, although it seemed to be doing that well, but also to get her as close to orgasm as possible.  If this was going to be her first time, I wanted her to cum before I did.  Ideally, I’d have liked to cum at the same time, but I’d settle for knowing she reached a climax with my hard cock inside her. 

With that image making my cock swell once again, I remembered her previous hesitancy towards penetration of any kind, except for a tongue.  If we were going to have sex, she would have to get over it.  “I’m going to put my finger in if that’s okay,” I said.

She was already breathing heavily, but it sounded like she took an extra long breath.  “Okay.  Just, slowly.”

My finger approached her slit, made contact and slid down to the hole, and then inside.  To cover any discomfort, I put my tongue back into action.  She tensed a little, but there was no resistance and a lot of slickness, and my finger started to slide in easily.  I sawed it in and out, right to the knuckle.  “Is that okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, sounding surprised.  “It didn’t hurt this time.”

“This time?”

“Umm, I tried before once to stick something inside.  It hurt.”

“Oh,” I said, realizing she must have already busted her hymen.  All that worry she had for nothing.  “You remember how I said it hurts the first time?”

“Uh huh…”  She sounded just a little scared.

“Well, I think you already got the hurt out of the way.  I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.”

She smiled, beautifully, showing the little gap in her teeth.  “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Then are we going to do it?”

“Let’s just make sure.”  I inserted another finger, and she took that easily, and I practically slobbered my tongue over her slit while pushing in and out of her hole.  She was ready… or maybe I was.  I pulled out and stood up.  “Okay,” I said.

As if I wasn’t a bad Daddy already for what I was doing, I didn’t even really consider a condom.  It briefly passed through my mind, but I think I realized that this might be my only chance to have sex with a girl like Maddy, and I wanted to do it without a barrier in between us.  I knew I was safe from diseases and somehow didn’t think Maddy was old enough to get pregnant yet, but I still should have put one on, and I didn’t.  Yet another failing.

I lay on the bed beside her.  “Come over here.  We’ll do it with you on top.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.  That way if it ever does start to hurt, you can stop any time.  It’s also my favorite way to do it.” 

“Okay… show me how.” 

She crawled on top of me, and I guided her until her pussy was right above my dick.  I held it up straight.   “Lower yourself, slowly.”

The wet lips parted smoothly as she slid onto my cock.  She took it slowly, with a little bit of grunting, but no obvious pain, and soon she was down all the way, her ass on my balls.  “We’re doing it,” she said, as though scarcely able to believe it.  “It feels good.”

I could hardly believe it either, it was so tight it was hard to believe it all fit.  “Yeah.  Now, just slide up and down, at whatever pace you’re comfortable with.”

I let her take it slowly at first, but as she began building up speed, my own hands guided her, and I became more active, pushing up into her as she pushed down.  “You like that?” I asked.

“Yes Daddy,” she said.  “I love it.”  

After a few minutes of her riding me up and down, she started a low, undulating moan, and her body, her pussy especially, started tensing and relaxing, going into contractions.  The moan turned into the words, “Oh, Daddy, oh Daddy, oh Daddeeeeeeeeeee…” and I almost blew my load right then, but I rode out her climax, and then, shortly afterwards, had my own, exploding inside of her. 

After we were done, she fell on my chest and we lay together in one sweaty mass.  “That was…”

She lifted her head.  “You liked it?”

I nodded.  “Yeah.  It was incredible.”

“I’m glad.  I did too.  I’m happy we did it.”  She put her ear to my chest, like she was listening to my heart.  “We’re moving tomorrow.”

****
Chapter Twenty:

Tomorrow?  In surprise, I shifted in the bed to look directly at her, and almost knocked her off me.  “What?”

“Everything’s already packed.  I almost wasn’t going to tell you.  I didn’t think I could bear to say goodbye.”

I could feel the loss already.  It was heartbreaking.  After a few seconds thinking of what to say, I came out with, “It doesn’t have to be goodbye,” I said.  “You can still visit.”

“We’re moving in with my aunt.  In Florida.”  That put visits out of the question.

“Oh.”  It seemed pathetically inadequate.  Just “Oh.”  Like she told me she didn’t like one comic and wanted to get another.  It was news that was just too big to process all at once, I knew I’d be losing something that had become an incredibly important part of my life, and I’d be losing it tomorrow.   In some ways it was like losing a best friend, a lover, and a daughter all in one. 

She sniffled, like she was choking back tears and echoed one of my biggest worries aloud.  “I’m never going to see you again.”

My need to comfort her outweighed my own sadness.  “You don’t know that,” I said, trying to be soothing, but my voice cracked a little with my own pain.  “Nobody knows what the future will bring.”

“Do you think I could call you, sometimes?  Just to talk?”

Although on one level I’d have loved that, I also knew how dangerous it could be.  One long distance number appearing on the bill and her mother might grow suspicious.  “That way might not be safe,” I said, hating that I thought of my own safety at a time like that.  “But I’ll give you an e-mail address.  For once you get a computer, or you can get on from a library or something.  I’ll check it every day.  Then maybe we can work out some safe way to talk voice.”  Maybe we could eventually Skype or something.

She smiled a little.  “Okay.”  A few seconds later, she looked at my clock.  “I should probably go.  Mom said she’d be coming home early today.”

While she got dressed, I slipped on my boxers and went into my office.  There, I wrote down an e-mail address… it was one of the backup ones I had for signing up to places that I might use again, but that risked spamming me.  I gave it to her out in the living room, then suddenly thought of something, and told her to wait a minute. 

I returned with a trade paperback collection of Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, stories of Spider-Man she’d never yet read because they weren’t part of the main series.   While she read the main books, sometimes they referred to things that happened in the Team-Up book, between the regular comic arcs, and when Maddy asked me about those references, I tried to explain… but I didn’t have a copy of it at the time.  I’d read them online when I first started getting into the series.  Last time I was at the comic store I picked up the collection, but I hadn’t showed it to her yet.  “Here,” I said, crouching a little to be closer to eye-level.  “Take it.  A going-away gift.  Something to read on the trip.”

She took it from me, turned it over to look at the cover, and gave something that was between a giggle and a sniffle, and wiped her eyes.  “Thanks,” she said as she tucked the paper with my e-mail address in between the pages, like a bookmark.  “I’m really going to miss you, Daddy.”

Tears were beginning to well up in me, too.  “I’m going to miss you, too.  Whatever happens, you’ll always be my little Supergirl.”

She ran into my arms and gave me one last, desperate hug, then pulled back a little, looking into my blurry eyes.  After a moment’s hesitation, she leaned in again, and kissed me… on the cheek.  At first, I thought she might be about to kiss me on the lips, but she moved aside at the last second.  I returned the kiss on her own cheek.  “I just want you to know I couldn’t imagine having a better daughter, even if it was just pretend, and I hope one day you find the kind of people who deserve to have you around.”

She laughed ruefully and started to pull away.  “Okay, I better go or I’m going to start bawling and I won’t be able to stop.”  With one finger she wiped away at her eye once more. 

“Yeah, me too.”  My eyes were more than a little dewy, although so far none had broken free and dripped down my face.  “Goodbye Madeline.”

She took a few steps back, reached behind her for the doorknob, and slipped out, leaving my apartment for the last time.  I did see her briefly the day she left, just long enough for her to wave goodbye while her mother dragged her by the hand to the elevator, and then, she was out of my life.  She never e-mailed me.  Every so often, I’d try to look her up, but even in the Google and Facebook age, I never managed to find her.  I never forgot her, but tried my best to put her in my past. 

It was over ten years before my past caught up with me.

****
Chapter Twenty-One:

I lived in that same apartment, all those years.  It sounds odd, because I wasn’t a hermit, at least not as much as I was before Maddy, but I’d just grown used to it, and unwilling to change that one thing.  Aside from that, though, after Maddy moved, my experiences with her kicked me out of that bubble I’d made and gave me the drive to try again out in the world.  At first, the loss of Maddy and all the joy she brought in my life put me into another isolated depression, but when the pain receded a little, I actually began to feel better, and feared a return to the unchanging status quo of what I was before we met.  More than that, I felt for the first time in a while that I didn’t have to return… because if somebody as great as Maddy could find me worth being around, even knowing my darkest sides, then perhaps I didn’t have to be alone.  So, over the next few months, I made an effort, socialized, cultivated a few new friendships and did the work to maintain them, and even dated a little.   

But even with all of that, knocks on my door were unusual.  While I went out more freely, I still considered my apartment something of a Fortress of Solitude, with only my closest friends or whoever I was dating allowed inside, and I wasn’t dating anybody just then.  So when I heard the distant tapping, I thought it was my imagination at first.  Then there was another series of knocks, a little louder, and I got out of my office chair and went to the front door. 

By the time I opened it, nobody was there, but I looked down the hallway and there was a dark-haired young woman halfway to the corner.  She had heard the door and already turned back, and just stared at me.

“Oh my god,” she said finally. 

“Can I help you?” I asked, and as she got closer, I noticed she looked familiar, but couldn’t place her immediately.  The dark hair threw me at first.  But when I looked at her face, I noticed there was a little dark freckle on her face that seemed familiar, and then, when she next spoke, I spotted a gap in her front teeth that brought old memories home.  Her ears still stuck out a little, too, but her face had filled out so it wasn’t anywhere nearly as noticeable.

“It is you.  You’re still here.”

“Maddy?” I asked, hardly believing it. 

She smiled.  “You remember me.”

I did, but I was also worried that the years had converted her memories of our time together into a story of abuse.   If she came here looking for justice, I’d soon be in jail, or maybe even dead.  Guns were easy to get, after all.  “Of course,” I said, then deciding to risk her sudden wrath, added, “My little Supergirl.” 

There was no wrath, just a genuine smile.  “I can’t believe it’s you.”

“I can’t believe it’s you.  Would you like to come in?” 

She nodded, and followed me inside, looking around wide-eyed at everything.  “It’s almost like I remember it.  Like I’m stepping into a time capsule.”

I sat down on the couch, not the same couch we used to sit on, I’d replaced that one, but it was similar.  “What are you doing here?”

“Looking at an apartment.  I just moved here.  I kind of felt like I needed a fresh start while I go to college.” 

“Oh?  What are you studying?”

“Ancient History.”  She smiled.  “See, I didn’t give it up.  I just got a little sidetracked.”  She looked up to one of my shelves, saw Wolverine, the one she broke.  My collection had expanded out of my office and into my living room.  “Do you still read comics?”

“A little, but mostly collections of old stuff… ever since Eternity Crisis, it’s not been the same.” I said, wondering if she’d even know what I meant.  If she didn’t follow them herself after we parted, it was unlikely.  Eternity Crisis was the last hurrah of the traditional comic book format, a story that ended the regular DC universe a couple years earlier.  Marvel ended the year before, and started the business model that now dominated the industry. 

“Oh, come on,” Maddy said, disbelieving.  “It’s better than ever.” 

I shrugged.  “I guess I don’t like reading everything online.”  Only a few comic stores remained in business in the country, in the biggest cities, but by the time Eternal Crisis rolled around, only one store survived in my city, and it closed soon after.  But without brick and mortar stores, there was probably more material out there than ever, without Marvel or DC publishing a thing except for reprints.   Instead of making new material themselves, the big two now sold licenses to any fan or company who wanted to produce their own works for profit, monetized in any way they desired, whether subscription or advertising or sales to the handful of comic stores.    With the advent of automated computer penciling, anybody could produce comics online as a solo effort.   Even though it was a lot cheaper to produce, only a few “fanverses” were actually profitable.  The terms of the licenses required the licensees to split any proceeds with DC or Marvel, and it managed to keep the old companies alive when the bottom finally fell out of the market, at least until Hollywood began to implode. 

“You know, you can get printed versions, too…” she pointed out.  “They’ll even mail them to you.”

The other downside, for old fans like me, was that there were now so many universes to choose from, and many only lasted a few months before the originator realized how much work writing was and got bored, so it was hard to get invested in any of them.  “Yeah, but there’s so many out there, hard to know what’s good.”

“MUSH is pretty good so far.”  That was one of the popular ones, Multi-Universe Super Heroes, from one fan who managed to exploit an early loophole and acquired license to both DC characters and Marvel’s, and build a universe where Superman and Spider-Man coexisted.   “They’ve even got Brian Michael Bendis writing a Daredevil/Batman crossover.”

“I can’t get into it,” I admitted.  “I like my universes separate.  Besides, I miss the X-Men.”     They were sold separately from Marvel’s normal license, and the creator of MUSH never got the rights to them. 

She laughed.   She browsed through my shelves, trying to pick out which ones were new and which ones she remembered, and she stopped, transfixed, at a small, framed picture.  “That’s me,” she said with wonder.  She was dressed as Supergirl, posed with her hands on her hips.

“Yeah.”  It was the only picture I kept of her.  Whenever someone in my apartment asked about it, I claimed it was the daughter of a woman I’d dated for a few years and felt a little like a father towards. 

She looked around, all over.  “I don’t see any pictures of any other little girls…”

“There were no other little girls,” I said.  And it was true.  I had some limited social contact with younger girls since Maddy, mostly relatives, and in one case the daughter of a real woman I was dating, and I never once slipped and did anything inappropriate.  The funny thing was, I had no serious temptations, either.  I think part of it was because none of those girls were practically my whole world like Maddy was.  I wasn’t as socially isolated, and I was having sex with women regularly, and wasn’t prone to sinking deeper into the dangerous fantasies.  If I wasn’t seeing somebody for a long enough time, I patronized escorts (of legal age), just to prevent the build-up of urges. 

I wasn’t cured of pedophilia, I still had fantasies, and collected dangerous porn… mostly cartoon images, but sometimes I’d stumble upon naked pictures of tween girls and save them for several months before deleting everything in a spiral of guilt or when starting a new relationship.  It had just recently become possible to manufacture computer generated child porn at home that would fool anybody, and even include them in some limited virtual reality sex scenarios.  I got on board with that as soon as it was possible… I always did like new gadgets.  But that was strictly a release, a safety valve, never anything that dragged me deeper.  I knew I’d slipped once, and I never wanted it to happen again with a real girl.  “I’ve dated women, but never touched anyone under eighteen.  You were my only mistake.”

“Mistake,” she said flatly.

I took a breath.  “It was wrong what I did.  I cared about you, but that doesn’t make it right, it makes it worse.  There was no excuse for me taking advantage of you, and I’m sorry.”  It was a long time coming, but I owed it to her.

“Don’t be,” she said.  “What you did… it wasn’t so bad…”

“It was wrong.”

“Maybe,” she said.  “But you know what I remember?  That no matter how much you wanted it, you never once forced me or pressured me to do anything I didn’t want to do.  And that you were there when I needed you.  I can’t think of any other guy in my life I can say both things about.  And it really, really felt good.  So I guess I should say thank you.”

I didn’t even know how to deal with that.  I’d apologized for molesting a girl and she thanked me for doing it.  “I thought I’d fucked you up.”  Maybe I still had, if she was thanking me.  “I’d just assumed you realized I’d taken advantage of you and hated me.  You never contacted me…”

She grimaced.  “It was the stupidest thing!  I lost the paper you gave me, with your e-mail address.  It must have slipped out of the book you gave me, and got lost in the move.  I was kicking myself for months!  I tried looking you up a few times, but do you know how many James Browns there are?”

“Yeah,” I said.  There were at least four in this city alone.  My number was unlisted, and even on Facebook very little is visible to non-friends. 

“You wouldn’t believe the number of times I wanted to talk to you and I couldn’t.”

“But…” I asked.  “You’ve had a good life, though?  Overall?”

She shrugged.  “It’s a life, you know?  Some good, some bad.  You probably don’t want to hear about it.”

“Actually I do.  I’ve always wondered what happened to you…” I said.  “I thought about you all the time.  I tried looking you up, too, you know, to see how you were doing, but I couldn’t find anyone with your name in Florida…”

“My Mom’s fault.  She kind of got involved with a creepy stalker guy in Florida and we had to move again, and she went back to her maiden name, and made me too.”

“Oh my god.”

She laughed a little.  “It sounds worse than it was.  He didn’t follow us or anything, and I actually liked Ohio more.”  She moved back to the couch and sat down, and for the next half hour or so we talked about our lives.  From the sounds of it, she had her troubles… more than her share, in fact, but had started to overcome them.  Her mother drifted into alcoholism and now they didn’t talk, her father Brian found religion and had a brief desire to make amends, but then later reversed himself and wound up deciding that she didn’t fit into his new family.  But there were good spots too, she had to drop out of school but had recently gotten her high school equivalency on her own initiative and was now putting herself through college.  “I know it’s not like there’s any demand for it these days.  I’d be lucky if I even get a teaching position, much less anything in the field, but… I love it, you know?  And you don’t abandon something you love.”

“That’s great,” I said.  “I’m glad you pursued it.  And I’m sure you’ll find something… degrees are still valuable, even if it’s just to show you’re willing to follow through.”  That was true, but I was probably overestimating her chances.  The country was in another massive job slump, especially for skilled jobs, in part because of the increase in computer automation in fields that were previously considered safe.  College courses could be better done online without teachers, and the same programs that made it possible for virtual immersive child porn and that automatically draw comics was threatening to implode Hollywood and turn it to a town where one man with a computer and an idea could create a whole blockbuster movie by himself, without the need for lights, catering, practical effects, or even actors.  Even my job was now mostly done by software.  I survived a massive downsizing by convincing my bosses they needed me to monitor and maintain the programs.  Like I always say, it pays when the people who employ you don’t really understand what it is you do. 

It got quiet… I guess we’d reached a natural lull in the conversations, our stories both told, or so it seemed, and after a minute of silence, she asked, “So, are you seeing anybody right now?”

I shook my head.  “No, it’s been a few months now.”

“Good, then I don’t have to feel guilty about doing this.”  She leaned forward quickly, so quickly I didn’t even know what was happening until her lips made contact with mine, softly at first, then a little insistently as our mouths opened.  Her tongue darted out, sought mine, and I responded. 

Finally, she broke our kiss, and pulled back, just a little, but still intimately close.  “I’ve been wanting to do that for years,” she said.

“Really?”

“I kind of did have a crush on you, you know…”  I didn’t… I didn’t even really consider it.  I knew she liked me, maybe even loved me, like a father figure, but even though we were sexual with each other, I’d always thought that she was just going along with it, and she had no romantic or sexual attraction to me.  “And you were the first guy to make me cum.”

Her admission of a crush, that was the last piece, that let me let go of some of the guilt I’d held over those last few years.   She had really wanted me, on some level, and, from what she told me of her life, it didn’t seem like I’d damaged her.  Maybe I was responsible for some of her troubles in some indirect way, but there was nothing I could point to where my weakness all those years ago obviously ruined her.   She’d even told me she’d clung to the things I said to her when she was feeling like nobody could love her. 

I’m not trying to downplay it, but the more I heard about her life, the more I came to think that we weren’t abuser and victim, but just two damaged people that needed each other at a particular point in their lives, and maybe even helped each other.  It was still wrong, a moral lapse as I called it earlier, I’m not going to deny that, but… wrong doesn’t always mean hurt.  It’s like if I was driving drunk with a child in the backseat.  It was totally irresponsible of me, and just because we got home safely, it doesn’t negate that.  But there’s no need to keep dwelling on that one mistake, if she came through it okay. 

I didn’t know what to say, though, at that moment, after she admitted her feelings.  “I hope it was worth the wait,” I mumbled. 

“Sorry,” she said, blushing a little.  “I know I’m not exactly your type any more.”

“No, trust me, you’re well within my type…”  And it was true.  She was older than my ideal, but that didn’t matter.  She was still beautiful, and her body still seemed tight and petite, although now she had a rather impressive bust for someone her size. 

Madeline looked down at my lap, and let her hand fall there.  I had a bulge, and she grinned.   “Then you want to see if you can still make me cum?”

Before I knew it, we were making out, and then, not long after, making love.  In the bedroom, she rode on top of me, much heavier than the last time, and now with an impressive set of grapefruit-sized breasts to hold onto.  And though, in my heart of hearts, I find a much flatter chest to be more attractive, boobs are certainly a lot of fun to play with in the heat of passion. 

We didn’t talk much once we got to the making out stage, just let it happen, but as she bounced up and down on my cock, she began to say softly, “Oh, yes, fuck me Daddy, that’s it, fuck me hard…”

****
Epilogue:

She climaxed first, and then again, before I was done… maybe it’s one of the side effects of getting older, but I seem to last longer… it’s not quite as intense, but still a fantastic ride, and for longer, and it’s incredibly fulfilling to be able to make your partner cum twice before you’re ready to go.  But her second orgasmic cry of “Oh, Daddy,” triggered that sensation, and I shot off into her, and then we lay together in my sheets. 

“I think I’m going to take the apartment,” she said, after she’d caught her breath.  “It’s on the floor below.”

“So we could see each other… more?”  We hadn’t really discussed if this would be a one-time thing… we hadn’t discussed anything, really, it had happened so fast. 

“If you’d want to.”  She seemed a little insecure, unsure of herself, almost like she was a kid again.

I put an arm around her.  “I would.  I really would.”  Whether that meant casual sex or dating, I didn’t know.    We hadn’t talked about exactly what we were looking for.  But I’d take what I could get, though I knew I’d prefer something more like the latter.  We had enough in common, seemed to be sexually compatible, and it would be refreshing, once, to have a woman that knew my darkest secret, my attraction for little girls. 

“There’s just one thing…”

“What?”

“I have a daughter.”

My heart jumped.  She’d conspicuously left this out of her life recap, although now that I thought about it there were some pauses where she seemed to think twice about what she was about to say, and changed tack.  “Oh.”

“Her name’s Mary Jane.  She’s seven.”  I did the math quickly and relaxed a little.  One bullet dodged, that meant it couldn’t be mine.  I didn’t screw her up by getting her pregnant at twelve.  But there was only one other reason I could think of to hide it, or bring it up now…

The moment hung, and I decided to broach it first.  “I understand.  You don’t want to risk it, with me being… what I am.”

She looked up to me.  “No.  I mean, I trust you.  I had to practically beg you to touch me remember.  I think you’d be okay… but… her dad split before she was born.  And after, well, most guys don’t want a relationship with a single mother.  They’ll hang around a while for the sex, but don’t want to be a daddy.  I promised myself I wasn’t going to get serious with anybody unless I thought they were going to stick around.  She could use a father figure in her life, maybe someone who can supervise her while I work… do you think you could do that?”

“I want to,” I told her.  “But are you sure you’re not worried I might… slip?”

“Are you?”

“No, but…” What I didn’t say, just thought, was that you couldn’t, probably shouldn’t, trust a pedophile at his word.  Even one of the ‘good’ ones.  We sometimes slip. 

“I don’t think you’d hurt me like that, and I don’t think you’d hurt her at all.”  She snuggled up a little closer. 

I told her I’d think about it, but never came to a firm decision… yet we kept seeing each other and eventually she introduced me to her daughter.  MJ’s a great kid, and I fell into a fatherly role pretty easily once exposed to it.  That’s how Rent-A-Daughter made me a father, even if it took over a decade, and we’re even talking about making it for real, and having another kid together. 

I know what you’re thinking, but nothing ever happened with Mary Jane.   Not once.  She never did take to calling me Daddy, but she’s told me she thinks of me “like a father” before, and I certainly think of her like a daughter.  She’s entering high school now, and now that we’re past the age of maximum attraction, I’m more worried about the boys she goes to school with than I am about myself.  I’m not saying I was perfect… I had a few inappropriate fantasies, but even those were rare, and I’ve never touched her.  There was no need.  Fantasies are overrated, they don’t need to be made real when what you have is pretty damn good.   Maddy took care of all my sexual needs, and Mary Jane took care of the need to be a father and protect somebody.  Like the old Marvel and DC universes, they didn’t have to be combined, they’re probably better separate. 

And Maddy?  We’re still together, doing great.  Last summer we fulfilled her lifelong ambition and took a family trip to see the Pyramids.  She also got me back into reading comics, the new ones, regularly, and we even go to conventions together, with her in costume, making geeks salivate.  The best part of those is, little Mary Jane thinks superheroes are kind of dumb, so we leave her at home with a sitter.  Maddy and I get some much needed private alone time, and, when we retreat to the hotel room, usually the costume stays on for quite a while.  These days Madeline mostly favors Sif, X-23, or Lady Doomsday for her cosplay, but one thing hasn’t changed since the days she used to dress up like Supergirl for me.  Unlike her daughter, Madeline does call me Daddy.  She only does it in the bedroom, and that’s enough for me.

The End

Fanart!: Artist NeckRomancer drew an alternate ending of James, Maddy, and MJ having fun together. So if you were disappointed that James' relationship with Maddy's daughter never turned towards the smutty, check it out! (Warning: link is to NSFW drawn art of underage characters, which may in some countries be more illegal than stories involving underage characters, click at your own risk).

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