Raymond & Raya

Forbidden Passion

An Adventure in the Incest Zone

R.R. Ryan

© Copyright 2025 by R.R. Ryan

NOTE: This work contains material not suitable for anyone under eighteen (18) or those of a delicate nature. This is a story and contains descriptive scenes of a graphic, sexual nature. This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental. All characters in this story are 18 or older.

Raymond & Raya

Forbidden Passion

Chapter 1: The Quiet House

What we have here is another type of relationship. A familial one, where they share not only healthy outings, meals, and movies, but forbidden desires. A brief peek into an astounding home where the only boundaries are those of love and lust, resistance and yielding.

The Alexander house-the blue one on the right side of the street. That one in the middle of the block, larger than the rest.

Behold, four-twenty-four, Bannock Street, Denver, Colorado. An average home, on an average street, of a more than average city. You walk into this home at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that might be, but one that shall be.

This is not a new problem. It’s simply an extension of what, from time to time, happens, unforgivable lust taking hold between a man and woman. A biblically forbidden passion, which has plagued fathers since the first man fell in love with his daughter and the first daughter fell for him. The moral dilemma festers between them.

But like every one of those who preceded them, this kind of love has one steely decree. Don’t do what you know you shouldn’t.

For Raymond and Rayanna Alexander, father and daughter, are about to step headlong into the Incest Zone!

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Raymond Alexander’s Laptop Journal

It’s odd but true, I woke up with my eyes already open. As if sleep was an afterthought or a practical joke someone else played on me. The ceiling hung there, a milky sheet of white cottage cheese covered with old water stains. Putting my hand to my face, I traced their outlines with my eyes, slow as a prisoner mapping escape routes with a spoon.

Outside, the sun was making a lackluster effort behind the clouds. Its light slipped around the edges of the curtains, spilled into the room in pale stripes, which didn’t so much illuminate as accentuate. It was a morning that asked for another hour, or three, in bed.

But the clock on the dresser disagreed, and the fucking clock always won.

The room was stale with the faint redolence of last night’s Jamison. My clothes, scattered everywhere, even an undershirt I didn’t remember wearing. A button-down shirt slouched over the back of a chair like it was waiting for a bus that’d never come.

On the bedside table, a glass of water sat, the rim smudged, surface still as a pond on a breezeless mountain day. The whole room screamed with neglect. Not casual negligence, but rather one that’s not quite curated. Almost deliberate in the lack of care.

All of it, the result of a man who’d stopped expecting company long ago.

At first, I didn’t move. The body, I’d learned, was like a machine you tricked into starting each morning. If one acted eager, the inertia would’ve taken it as a challenge and doubled down.

Staring at the patch of ceiling where the paint bubbled and peeled away, I let myself drift. It appeared to have survived a siege, if only just, and waited for the right moment to give up altogether.

Next to me, the mattress sagged a little. The indented hollow on the far side was deeper than my own. A ghost of a body heavier than my memory could carry. My wife, Dana’s pillow, was still there, slightly askew.

The cotton flattened in the shape of the head that rested there for six, horrid months. The logic of it still being there defeated me, and I should’ve thrown it away.

However, the bed was easier to share with a shadow than alone.

My joints ached. Not the clean, sharp ache of a night spent on a bad mattress, but the sticky, inflamed pain of something festering inside the bone. Flexing my left hand, the fingers protested with the slow crackle of old wood.

It took me four separate attempts to sit up. By the time I’d swung my legs over the side of the bed, I was sweating like I’d run a marathon.

Even then, I took a full minute to catch my breath, hunched forward, elbows to knees, head in my hands. Trying to remember how it felt to wake up next to someone who expected you to move and scrutinize dust floating through the air.

The rest of the house was silent. Not the gentle hush of a sleeping home. Rather, the oppressive, reverberating silence of abandonment. The floorboards under my feet stung cold through the threadbare carpet.

I’d meant to patch the spot where the fibers were worn away, but that was last winter, and the previous winter might as well have been another lifetime.

On the chest of drawers stood a photo in a cheap frame. It was the only thing there that didn’t gather dust. Dana’s face stared out from behind the glass. Smiling, lips parted as if about to say my name, or laugh, or tell me to shave. The glass, smudged with fingerprints from me holding it.

Because I never cleaned it, I didn’t want to risk losing the impression of her touch. Even if it was my thumbprints layered over old memories. Gazing at the photo for a long time, the woman in it looked nothing like the one who’d left.

She was happy and confident, and for a moment, so was I, because she gazed at me.

I reached for the glass of water on the nightstand and took a cautious sip. It tasted warm, with a flat flavor. Therefore, I set it back down, aligning it with the coaster’s faded ring. It was the only thing I ever bothered to align.

The bathroom was twelve paces from the edge of my bed. Why’d it take me half a dozen false starts? Each step labored, and as if I moved through syrup. My knees wobbled. Tendons grumbled. But I made the trip upright and unassisted. The mirror over the sink greeted me with the usual contempt.

The stubble on my jaw was dense, three days past reasonable, flecked with white like a dusting of salt. Running my fingers along the edge of my scalp, finding only more gray, more defeat. I stared at my reflection until my eyes looked back. The world blurred at the edges and blended with the wall behind.

With my shoulders hunched, I could see how my posture collapsed in months after the funeral. Each morning I promised myself to stand tall, but every evening gravity won. My shirt sagged around my frame. Even my skin seemed to have given up, pooling loosely at the elbows, hanging at the jaw.

My daughter and I wanted for nothing. Nothing except her presence. Couldn’t help but wonder why she’d never told me about her trust fund. An orphan, raised in foster care, with millions of dollars in a trust fund. A fortune she’d left to my children and me.

The twins, a boy and a girl, have now become a man and a woman, and they have left home. The son lived on the west coast, and his sister on the east coast. Both married and happy, they’d run back to happy lives as soon as the casket was in the ground. When I told them about their inheritance, it made them angry. Angry that we didn’t live better in their youth. Enraged at her for not telling us. Furious at me for not knowing.

In my head, I calculated how long it’d take them to burn through their ten million each. Five years, I estimated. But Rana and I could spend the rest of our lives barely touching the principal.

I splashed water on my face, cold enough to make my eyes snap shut. I counted to three, forced myself to breathe. The pipes groaned in sympathy as I let the faucet run. The bathroom window faced east, and for a second, the rising sun caught the mirror just right. Throwing a golden line across my neck like a stage effect.

It vanished as soon as it appeared. I reached for the towel, caught it on the third try, and wiped away the evidence of a man who’d tried and failed to start his life again.

The rest could wait. The rest always waited.

The kitchen existed as a crime scene, without the tape. Everything preserved exactly as it was on the last normal day, but it surrendered to entropy. Sunlight from the window over the sink turned dust motes into tiny, doomed planets.

The linoleum floor, checkered blue and white, faded everywhere but the corners. A single mug…her mug, with the chipped rim and faint lipstick crescent…sat on the dish rack, far enough from the others to make its absence a statement.

With her hair tied up in a makeshift bun, Raya stood at the stove. Wearing a battered t-shirt she’d stolen from me back when stealing from your father seemed a fun game. She moved with a rhythm I never did in the mornings.

As if she assembled a machine out of toast, eggs, and silence. I hovered in the doorway a second longer than necessary, hoping to go unseen.

Still, she had the radar daughters developed after years of living with a father who alternated between too loud and all but invisible.

“Morning, Dad,” she said, and tried out a smile. It didn’t quite fit, but she wore it anyway.

“Morning.” My voice held the consistency of old gravel.

She scooped eggs onto a plate, not the kind I liked. Over easy, yolk barely tethered to the white. The kind she wanted, which I tried to learn to appreciate.

Small but deft, her hands manipulated the spatula with the precision of someone who’d spent hours in this kitchen. Making breakfast for two and fantasizing that three would eat.

The table, set for two, but not without thoughtfulness. The chair at the end sat empty, except for the old cardigan draped over the back. I ignored it. I always ignored it, and Raya faked she did too.

“Coffee’s fresh,” she said, already pouring. She used the mug with the faded palm trees, the one from that awful family trip to San Diego. Without looking, she set it in front of me and topped off her own cup. The inside coated in the color of dried blood from a thousand unwashed mornings.

With my first pleasure of the day, I watched her move. While she noticed my gaze, she didn’t quite look at me. But she always looked at me secretly. Her hands trembled if you knew how to spot it. Never enough to spill, but sufficient to let you recognize she ran on nerves and stubbornness. She set my plate down. Toast, too. The jam, already open, with a knife perched on the rim.

What a beautiful woman she blossomed into.

She took her seat, folded her hands in her lap, and feigned studying the fridge door. The magnets spelled out a ransom note of old phone numbers and takeout coupons.

“How was your night?” With her eyes fixed on the fridge, not me.

“Same as always.” I smeared jam onto the toast, watching as the bread tore under the pressure. “Dreams, some. Mostly just… waiting for morning.”

She nodded. Picked at her eggs. The scraping sound filled the room, leaving little space for words.

“Mrs. Ellis called again. She said If you want to come to the group thing, she’d drive.”

Honestly, I grunted, the group thing, once, was enough. Nothing says catharsis like sitting in a circle with six strangers who all think their grief is special, trading sob stories like war medals. “Tell her thanks. Maybe next week.”

She nodded again. Ate another forkful. I considered the way she chewed - slow and methodical, like taking inventory of her own mouth.

“How’s school?” I asked. It sounded rehearsed.

“Fine.” She pushed a yolk puddle around her plate, stabbed the toast, and watched it soak up yellow.

“Classes okay?”

“Mm-hm.”

It went on like this for a while. I forced down half the eggs, tasting nothing. The coffee was strong, but not strong enough to shock me into wakefulness. The silence between us came alive. Growing with each minute, filling the kitchen with its own gravity. Raya cleared her throat.

“I’m thinking of applying to CU next semester,” she said, eyes flickering to mine for a split second before snapping back to her plate.

“That’s good,” I said, and meant it. Raya needed to get out of this house more than anyone.

She shrugged, but I caught the way her lips twitched at the corners, almost a smile.

“Still have to get the grades. You know how Mrs. Nelson is.”

I nodded. The calculus teacher, Mrs. Nelson, with her spine of steel and a heart that only showed up on the holidays.

“You’ll get them,” I said, and tried to sound certain. Not my strong suit.

The sunlight shifted, creeping up the table leg and catching Raya’s wrist. For the first time, I noted how thin she looked in this light. Her arms lost their softness, replaced by a hard, sinewy grace. She seemed more mature than yesterday. Or possibly I really saw her today for the first time in weeks.

The love for her bubbled up inside me. Unbridled, consuming, love tinged with an unfamiliar edge to it. Some dark and menacing feelings no father should have for his daughter.

She poured more coffee for me, and as she handed the cup over, our fingers touched, just for a second. Her cool, electric skin sent a shiver through me. Jerking my hand back as if it touched a live wire, I nearly sloshed the coffee across the table.

“Sorry,” I muttered, wiping at the splash with my sleeve.

“Daddy.” The irritation about my actions rang in my name. She stared at me, lips parted as if about to say something important, and looked away.

“You working today?” she asked. Turning back to me, her eyes shone.

I shook my head.

“Supposed to, but I called in. They don’t need me.” I hadn’t, but the idea of sitting in a windowless office all day didn’t appeal. Forced to make polite noises to people paid to make-believe I mattered. A bridge too far to cross.

She nodded, eyes unfocused.

“Since you never have to work again, you could sell the business. Hey, Daddy, take a walk. Those in the know say fresh air’s good.”

“I’ll think about it.” Realizing I’d been gripping my fork too tightly not to be a weapon, I set it down.

We sat. Captivated by the flickering sunlight, hypnotized by the way it spun and danced, never landing on the window. She studied her nails, picked at a hangnail until it bled, and sucked the finger clean. It was a nervous tic she’d picked up years ago. These days, it seemed almost ritualistic.

The kitchen clock ticked. The neighbor’s dog barked somewhere on the next street. Time dragged its feet, determined to make us sit together in this room until one of us broke. I stood first, scraping the chair across the linoleum.

“Thanks for breakfast,” I said, voice softer than I meant.

She nodded, gathering the plates. “I’ll do the dishes,” she said, which seemed a joke, since she always did the dishes.

I moved to leave, but paused at the door.

“You want anything from the store?”

She shook her head.

“We’re good.”

I hesitated.

“You’re good?” I asked.

“I’m good, Dad.” Flashed an almost-smile again, gave me a head bob.

For all the world, I wanted to believe her. I desired to reach across the table, hold her hand like I did when she was six and the world was full of monsters she could name. But the space between us became miles long, and I didn’t have the legs for it.

Also, I desired beyond reason to take her in my arms and kiss madly. Instead, I walked out, leaving her in the kitchen with the ghosts.

I didn’t go far. Just the living room, where the light glowed even more indifferently. The couch inherited the same disease as the mattress. I sank into it, the cushions giving way with a sigh. Trying to remember a morning that didn’t feel like an audition for the part of “dead man walking.”

The sounds from the kitchen filtered in through the cracked door. The hiss of running water, the disconnected clink of plates, the low static hum of Raya’s voice as she talked to herself or maybe to Mom’s ghost. I pondered Raya’s voice, her body, her shape.

Becoming uncomfortable in my body as my prick swelled at the thought of my daughter.

To take my mind off her, I picked at a rip in the armrest. Working loose a strand of stuffing and winding it tight around my finger. It cut off the blood flow oddly, comfortingly. The coffee cooled in my hand, but I didn’t drink it.

Eventually, the noise stopped. I heard Raya’s footsteps in the hallway. Then she stood in the doorway, towel slung over her shoulder like a weary waitress at the end of a double shift. She hesitated. Something new. Because my daughter never shied away from anything. Not even when she was a kid. Not when her knees, scraped raw from whatever tree, fence, or roof she’d conquered that week, told me she’d been a tomboy again.

“You want to talk about it?” she asked, voice pitched low, as if trying not to startle me.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” I said it too quickly, and regretted it. I crossed my legs to hide my engorged penis from her view.

Raya flinched barely, shrugged it off, and crossed the room to the window.

The light caught her face. I noticed how she really studied me when she thought I wasn’t paying attention. Scanning for damage, cataloging any new failures, eyes narrowed not in judgment but in a kind of pleading. Possibly, Raya didn’t want her old father back, she might only want a fellow who didn’t scare her.

Had my erection frightened her? Necessity forced me to compose myself and will my lust down. While doing so, I tried to smooth my hair with my palm. Which made things worse. The stubble on my jaw itched, but I’d lost the will to care.

“You look tired,” she said, careful and neutral. Leaning against the sill, she picked at the chipped paint.

“I am tired,” I said, “but it’s the kind that sleep won’t fix.” What would’ve helped me was telling her how much I loved her. Telling how much I needed to be with her. But not as her father. If I did, she’d hate me.

She nodded, chewing her lip, took a deep breath, and changed the subject.

“You remember that old park, the one with the stupid duck pond?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“I thought…maybe…I mean, it’s nice out. If you want, I’d love to walk with you.”

What a lovely thing, she said, as if it’d be a favor to her. Probably half expected me to shoot it down, might’ve even wanted me to. But I heard the hope in her voice. A small, quivering note, so faint I almost missed it.

Studying her, I set the mug on the table. Really examined her, not for the first time that morning. The color in her cheeks returned. A resonance of her mother’s complexion. A quickness to blush, and quick to fade. With her arms crossed, defensive, but her eyes stayed on mine.

Raya didn’t blink.

It should have been easy to say no. But something in me shifted, a tectonic crack in the crust of numbness. I felt the tremor before I recognized it for what it was. A pulse of want, not for air or food, but for something I couldn’t name.

A desire to be seen. A consuming love of her. An ungodly lust. So, I nodded. Slow, deliberate, as if moving through syrup.

“Yeah. Okay.”

When Raya smiled, the room felt bigger. Airier, as if the act of saying yes had let in a draft.

While Raya gazed at me standing, her regard shifted to the tremor in my hand, the sag in my shoulders. I wondered what she saw, if she believed I even resembled the man in the photo on the dresser, or if I’d turned into a ruined soul left behind by his wife.

“I’ll grab my coat,” she said, and turned to go. For a second, I thought about reaching out, perhaps even stopping her, but I let the impulse pass. The first step. Enough progress for today.

When she came back, her jacket was too big for her, and the sleeves bunched at the wrists. She sized me up as I struggled with the zipper on my own. Reaching over, she fixed it for me, her hands steady and warm. Her fingers grazed my neck. Leaving a trail of heat that lingered long after she let go.

We stepped out into the world together. The sky filled with autumn clouds that drifted above like dirty cotton. I kept pace with her, slow but steady, and for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t walking alone.

Forbidden Passion

Chapter 2: A Walk in the Park

Rayanna’s Tablet Diary

Dear Diary, today unfolded so perfect.

Our house was the only house in this part of town that was unique. Larger than the others, more distinctive. All of the rest are cookie-cutter homes from the 1950s. While ours, built before the rest, was nothing like the others, and oh, so much better.

The park was only three blocks away. It lay beyond the identical squat houses with their cracked birdbaths and toppled recycling bins. But the walk seemed to take us across state lines.

My dad didn’t speak, not even asking me if I wanted to cut through the corner lot where the grass grew knee-high. Always two or three stray cats in that field who ignore you, which cats love to do. An enormous black and white tuxedo tom kept all the queens with kittens to feed.

The twins had cats growing up. Tonie took hers with her, and Tommy took his. Leaving me cat-less.

As we moved along, Daddy kept his hands jammed deep in the pockets of his coat, his shoulders up around his ears, like he waited for a blow. I matched his stride, half a step behind, the way you do when you’re not sure if you’re allowed to walk beside someone.

Fighting the impulse to take his hand, to tell him I loved him so much it hurt. Throbbed inside me a need I couldn’t obtain. But he wouldn’t get what I meant. No, Daddy would assume spoke about a daughter’s love of her father. Not a woman’s love for her man.

By the time we reached the park entrance, my nose and cheeks turned red and raw from the wind. It wasn’t cold, not really, but the air had that dry, metallic taste of fall just before winter officially shits on everyone. I paused at the gates, wrought iron, fancy once, now rusting in streaks like dried blood, and watched my dad push through without slowing. He didn’t look back.

The park used to be a place for strollers and soccer games. These days, the pigeons and ducks ruled, and the old men fed them both. The trees, mostly oak, with the occasional weeping willow or sap-stained maple, held onto their leaves with grim determination. Yellow and brown banners fluttered overhead but refused to dislodge from the limbs.

The sun, diluted by clouds, made a half-hearted attempt to create shadows, but everything appeared faded. Nothing more than an old photo left in the back window of a car for a decade.

I caught up to my dad near the pond, where the path turned gravelly and the only benches that weren’t splintered or tagged by middle-schoolers faced the water.

Following the edge of the pond with slow, deliberate steps, Daddy kept walking. From behind, he looked like an overcoat stuffed with a laundry load. While big, he’d shrunk in places, especially about the neck and shoulders.

The collar on his jacket turned up, and his hair stuck out in every direction, uncombed and uncompromising. To be honest, he needed a haircut and a shave. But he needed both for months. Every few days, he used the sideburn trimmer and gave himself a half-assed shave.

Stopping at one of the better benches, this one, slightly warped, Daddy stared out over the water. For a moment, I hovered beside him. After a beat or two, I sat and made sure my jacket brushed his sleeve. Close, but not so close, he couldn’t mistake it for an accident.

The ducks were in rare form today, quarreling over a half-loaf of bread some generous but misguided citizen had dumped into the pond. The largest male, white, with a bill like an old banana, chased the smaller ones in tight, jerky circles.

The ripples made everything else on the pond, the reflection of the trees, the sky, the rusty playground on the far side, shake and double.

We sat in silence. My dad’s breath came in slow, heavy pulls, almost like he suffered in pain. His hands worked at each other, thumb scraping the nail of his index finger until the skin turned red. I tried to find something to say, but every option felt pointless or cruel.

He sighed, a sound like gravel shifting under a car tire, and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Up close, the circles under his eyes were almost purple, and a haze of gray stubble discolored his jaw. He looked like a man who’d been up all night digging graves. Or maybe dreamed about robbing graves.

While I watched the pond, I studied him out of the corner of my eye. However, Dad didn’t watch anything. A jogger passed by, shoes slapping the path in quick, efficient bursts. As she passed, Daddy didn’t flinch. But I saw his fingers twitch, his right hand curling into a fist before relaxing. Shifting his weight, the bench squealed in protest.

“Nice day,” I said, because sometimes you have to say something to prove you’re alive.

At that, he made a noise in the back of his throat. I couldn’t tell if it was in agreement or as a warning.

Leaning back, I tilted my head so I could see the lattice of branches overhead. The sky was gray, the color of a dingy window glass, with little to indicate where the sun stood.

“You ever think about moving?” I asked, and surprised myself.

At first, he didn’t answer, picking at a loose thread on his coat.

“What’s the point?” Daddy said after a long moment, voice stripped down to the frame.

The pond gurgled in reply, a duck diving and resurfacing with something unidentifiable in its beak.

I stared at him. The coat, the shirt underneath, even the jeans, everything about him hung loose, a size too large. For Daddy, lost weight, but not the kind that made you healthier. The kind that made you look like a shirt left too long on a hanger.

The coat too large, with shoulders caved in, the fabric puckered, wrinkled beyond salvation. Always big, blunt instruments, Dad’s hands seemed too heavy for his wrists. When he moved, he did so with the careful economy of someone counting the cost of every gesture.

I moved closer, a fraction of an inch. Daddy must’ve sensed it. Because his back stiffened, a ridge formed between his shoulder blades. Reaching down, he picked up the all-but-empty bread sack.

Tossing a chunk of bread into the pond, we studied the ducks as they fought over it. And the pond rejected their efforts to make some more profound meaning from the crumbs of bread. The silence between us grew dense as packing foam. But something underneath it. Something old and sharp, pressed against the surface.

Breaking the hush, he cleared his throat.

“You ever miss her?” The words came out strangled, as if each syllable held at gunpoint against its will. When I tried to swallow, my mouth was dry, and my tongue a useless lump.

“Yeah, every goddamned day.”

With an insignificant motion, Dad nodded. As if afraid he’d break something in his neck.

In that moment, I desired to reach for his hand. But I remembered the last time I tried, how he jerked away like I’d offered him a dead mouse. Instead, I picked up a twig from under the bench and snapped it in half, half again, until the pieces seemed small enough to forget.

Throwing more breadcrumbs into the water, he turned to me. The whites of his eyes shone in the dim light. Closer to me than I’d expected, and I felt the static charge of it in my chest, a weird flutter of panic and something else. A moisture crept inside me.

“Let’s go home,” he said, but he didn’t move.

Nodding, I didn’t move either.

Suspended in a moment, we sat there, neither able to say what needed to be said. Both of us returned our stares to the pond. Hoping it held the answers to questions we didn’t want to ask. How badly I yearned to hold Dad, kiss him, and tell him I’m in love with him. In love as opposed to loved him.

Enormous fucking difference.

And we could’ve stayed there all day. The two of us orbiting our own private moons. Circling each other, one pulled around the other’s heart. But my fingers started to go numb, and I could tell by the way my dad’s knee bounced, once, and froze. Oh, dear God, he experienced it too, the magnetic gravitational pull of me to him and him to me.

So, I glanced at him, waiting for a sign that he was ready to leave. Daddy’s face locked in a stare so hard I thought he might snap the horizon in two. His hands, so tough and rugged, sat in plain view. Resting on his thighs, splayed out, as if he expected them to bolt.

Trying to find courage somewhere inside me to tell him. Not the kind of courage you use to ask for a raise or stand up to a bully. This was smaller, meaner, and more desperate. The courage where the words I love you, lived.

The damn ducks occupied his attention a minute longer. My heart thudded like a trapped bird, and I reached out and put my hand on his.

A clumsy landing. My palm was cold, and Daddy’s hand was even colder. Rough as sandpaper from years of working jobs that had nothing to do with desks. For a second, I thought he might pull away.

After all, he’d done it before, always quick, always with a joke or a cough to cover. But this time, he sat there. Frozen. Our hands warmed the other’s. The tension in his arm twitched, a subtle spasm under the skin, and nothing.

For some time, we sat with Dad’s hand underneath mine. An electric current ran from me to him. Both of us stared at anything else. When my thumb traced the ridge of bone along his knuckle, he let it happen and didn’t even flinch. After a few seconds, I risked a glance up at his face.

And Daddy’s eyes weren’t on the pond anymore. They stared at our hands. He looked…surprised, like a magic trick performed for him, for the first time. Trying to figure out the secret, but not sure he needed to understand the trick.

The corners of his mouth twitched, not a smile, not a frown either. More of an admission that something happened and he didn’t understand how to stop it. More magic, as flesh and longing mixed. As I grew wetter, I noticed him growing as well.

The silence changed. Before, it had been dense and bitter, the kind that sours everything around it. Now our quietness charged, every molecule vibrated with possibility. I held Daddy’s hand tighter, and he took in a breath that sounded like he’d been underwater for a long time.

Noticing his pulse beat against my thumb, hard and fast. And his fingers flexed and curled around mine in a hesitant, unfinished grip. I should have said something, anything, but I couldn’t trust my voice not to shatter. Instead, I squeezed back. Not much. Enough to let him recognize I was still there.

A moment suspended in time, we stayed like that, both of us staring at each other. Back to the water as if the ducks might do something historic. After a minute, Dad’s body shifted. Turning his head a fraction of a degree, he looked at me, really seeing, not counting the seconds until he could be alone again.

In that second, his face changed. The skin around his mouth tightened, and his eyes shone with something unnamed. The heat came off him, a low, sexual, dangerous current that made my heart pound even harder. I’d never seen him like this. Not angry, not even sad. Alive, every nerve on fire.

“Yes,” I said, more of a question than a statement.

He opened his mouth, closed it. I watched his Adam’s apple move up and down, a tiny piston in an engine that wasn’t sure whether to start or die.

“I…” he started and stopped. The sound of his voice was strange, like hearing a recording of yourself and not recognizing it.

Not breathing, I waited. My nipples pressed rigid as pebbles firmly against the confining fabric of my sports bra. My mouth turned to a small O, and my tongue threatened to snake free through it.

He tried again.

“We should…” Another pause, longer this time, like he was checking every word for sharp edges. Breathing became ragged, and his body temperature rose. “It’s getting late.”

For a second, Daddy’s hand tightened around mine. For a second or two, perchance longer. And he pulled away, slow and careful, as if he was afraid I’d break if he moved too fast.

I let go. My hand was empty, my skin tingled where Daddy’s warmth once was. Ristance returned, and he stared straight ahead, breathing harder, a patch of color rising under the stubble on his cheeks. Rubbing his hands together, Dad stood, a little unsteady, and shoved them back in his pockets. Trying to push the coat over the outline of his angry cock.

So, I followed. What else could I do? Strolling the path home in silence, our steps crunched the gravel in time. Turning my eyes as we moved, I glanced over at him every few paces. But Dad turned away. With his jaw set, eyes locked on the sidewalk. With his pecker deflating with each step, he must’ve shoved me from his mind.

I suppose he worked to solve a complex equation. Enter, daughter + father press = total, unforgivable sin. As he performed his twisted calculation, Daddy’s breath steamed in the cold air, each exhaling a thin, private cloud. The color drained away.

Couldn’t help but wonder what he thought. If he was angry, or scared, or something worse. I wanted to apologize, but the words stuck in my throat. Instead, I just matched his pace, step for step, two shadows stretched long by the dying sun.

While we didn’t speak the rest of the way home, I had hope.

The house felt wrong when we got back. Not quietude. Silences, mine and his, I was used to. But emptied out, something crucial slipped by us through the door while we returned, escaping as we entered. When Dad unlocked the door with his usual slow-motion struggle and stomped the dirt from his shoes on the mat, not caring that he tracked it into the hallway anyway.

The whole place smelled like dust and old coffee. The heater barely kept up with the chill that followed us inside.

“I enjoyed everything. The touching of your hand gave me the most pleasure of all.”

“Shush.” The word fell from his mouth, and a lead weight tumbled to the ground. It crushed my heart.

After he peeled off his jacket, he draped it over the newel post. It slid down and pooled on the floor. Strangely, he left it there, which was unlike him. Mumbling something about work, a string of half-formed words, Dad shuffled straight to his study.

Leaving the rest of the house to me. I watched him go, the way his feet dragged, the heavy set of his shoulders. The way he shut the door, a little too hard. For a long moment, I stood there, frozen, replaying the feeling of his hand wrapped around mine.

Something to masturbate to in bed. The thought of Dad touching me like a woman, not his daughter. Thinking about it moistened me.

I should have gone to my room and frigged myself. Instead, I ended up in the kitchen. The table was still cluttered from breakfast, a crust of egg yolk congealed on my plate, and the coffee pot cold and oily at the bottom. I cleaned up without thinking. Stacking the plates, I wiped down the counters and rinsed the mug he used.

The lipstick stain on mine had faded, but I could still see the ghost of it if I tilted the ceramic. Despite that, I put it back on the rack, next to hers. Even though it wasn’t spotless.

The fridge was empty except for bread, mustard, and a half-eaten rotisserie chicken. I made sandwiches using my hands because I couldn’t remember where we kept the knives. With my appetite gone, I set the food on a plate and stared at it. My mind wouldn’t stop cycling through the moment at the park, his hand on mine.

The pulse of warmth that traveled up my arm and settled in my chest and down inside my pussy. The way he looked at me right before he pulled away. When I tried to remember if he’d ever held my hand before, all the memories blurred together. None of them were like this time.

In the past, only a father and daughter would touch. And this time, a man and a woman’s first touch. Not coming into contact with only the flesh, but their hearts as well.

Standing and leaving the kitchen, I wandered the house. With my sandwich in hand, I moved from room to room, and a ghost haunted me. Not my mother’s, but the spirit of myself, my need. In the living room, I stood in front of the television, the screen black and reflecting a warped version of myself. I reached out, touching the cold glass, and for a second, imagined Dad standing behind me. With his reflection overlapping mine, his hand reaching out for my shoulder

Turning around to see the room empty.

After a while, I found myself outside his study. The door closed for privacy, and light spilled from the crack at the bottom. Putting my ear to the wood, I listened. No sound except the faint clatter of keys. Answering emails he’d ignored all week, or staring at a blank screen, trying to make the words come. For an instant, I thought about knocking on the door. To hear his voice, but my hand refused movement.

Instead, I slid down the wall and sat on the floor, knees pulled to my chest. While I ate the sandwich, every bite tasted like cardboard and regret. My phone buzzed once. A text from a friend, asking if I wanted to hang out.

Didn’t bother to even answer her.

After a bit, the light in the study went out. I heard the creak of Daddy’s chair, the soft footfalls on carpet. The door didn’t open, though. However, he didn’t open the door to find me on my knees. No, he stayed inside, trapped by his own walls.

The house settled around me, ticking and groaning as the night came on. I thought about going to bed, but my body wouldn’t obey. I sat there, counting my heartbeats, feeling the ache in my fingers where they’d touched his skin.

Eventually, I stood, walked to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and left it on the counter for him. With my fingers tracing the rim, I lingered, remembering the feel of his hand. Calloused and warm, trembling a little with the wrongness of our feelings.

That’s when I closed my eyes. Letting the memory roll over me, making my skin flush and my breath catch. It was wrong, I understood that. But it didn’t feel retched. Finally, remembering something I’d tried to forget.

“I love you, Daddy.” And I turned off the lights and stood in the darkness. Listening to the house breathe. The only illumination came from the hallway, where his study door glowed faintly. The crack of light seemed an invitation. Slow and deliberate, I walked toward it, every part of me aware of the distance shrinking with each footfall.

I paused outside the door, hand poised just above the knob. I could hear Daddy breathing on the other side. Steady, but louder than usual. Almost as if he tried not to panic. Pressing my forehead to the wood, I leaned in, letting the coolness ground me.

I didn’t knock, didn’t have to, straightened my shoulders, set my jaw, and opened the door.

Forbidden Passion

Chapter 3: Confession in the Shadows

Raymond Alexander’s Laptop Journal

When it started, it began with the old creak in the stairs. The one I never fixed because it was the only thing that let me know I wasn’t the last man alive in this house. Each step had its own pitch. High, low, and two in tandem. I’d mapped them all by heart years ago, back when I could still convince myself it mattered.

I waited, listening, heart ticking along with the floorboards. I sat in my usual spot. The chair that groaned when I sat down, but remained mercifully silent if I didn’t shift my weight. A reading lamp burned weakly above, a cone of light pooling on my lap and between my feet. The rest of the room lay covered in a murky darkness. The kind of obscurity not restricted to the absence of light but a whole other presence, full of things without names.

Or perhaps thoughts, emotions, and drawings, which are best left unexplored by fathers and daughters. For in those unnatural matters one might lose oneself.

The clock said 8:43. Late enough for relection, but not so late that you didn’t understand tomorrow waited for you.

I heard her stop in the hallway, shoes shuffling the way they did when she stalled for time. In my mind, I pictured her there. With one hand pressed to the wall, chin tucked, eyes narrowed in the way she did when she was about to say something she thought might make me angry.

Or something she supposed would sadden me. For a second, I wondered if she’d already gone. Doubled back to her room to text a friend about how weird and ancient her father had become.

But the doorway caught a shadow, and she appeared.

Shorts and a T-shirt, neither meant for company. The T-shirt she’d won two years back from a science fair. The letters faded, collar chewed thin from nervous teeth. Her knees were red from the cold. She hovered on the threshold. Arms wrapped around her ribs, seemingly smaller than she once was.

Making believe, I didn’t see her at first. Keeping my eyes on the open book in my lap. Even though I failed to turn a page in half an hour. With my thumb pressed into the spine until it ached. Her stare burned into the side of my face.

Finally, she cleared her throat. A thin, fragile sound, a starter pistol that didn’t want to be fired.

“Hey,” she said.

I looked up. Raised an eyebrow in what I hoped meant nothing more than a mere casual recognition.

“Hey yourself.”

Hesitating, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. With her hair loose, a river of light brown tangled over her left shoulder. One strand hung over her eye, and she tucked it behind her ear. Glancing at the chair across from me, the one always piled with laundry I never folded.

“Can I-”

She didn’t finish, but I got the message. Gesturing to the ottoman in front of my chair. The only flat surface in the room that wasn’t covered in old mail or magazines.

She crossed the room, a straight line but for the little stutter in her stride when she passed Mom’s old knitting basket. Sitting perched on the very edge of the ottoman, knees almost touching mine, she pursed her lips. Something electrified between us. Not unlike the air right before a storm.

Up close, she looked older. Not in the meaning of more birthdays. In a way that meant more burdens. With a stress-induced tightness around her mouth that hadn’t been there even this morning.

She stared at her knees, picked at a scab on her shin. I waited.

The clock in the hallway chimed the three-quarter hour.

“How’s the book?” she said, nodding at my lap.

I glanced down. The cover, battered and nicked, a thriller I’d picked up at the Goodwill because the back jacket said it would “keep you guessing until the last page.” I still waited for the first surprise.

“It’s about a guy who makes a lot of mistakes. Tries to fix them, but mostly just makes more mistakes.”

She nodded, lips twitching.

“Ah, sounds about right. If he were a she, I’d be the main character in it?”

It was funny, but we didn’t laugh. Instead, we sat in that for a minute. I watched the way her toes curled, the way she couldn’t keep her hands still. First folded, flattened on her thighs, and at last curled again. Similar to someone trying to hold a bird that didn’t want to be held.

Finally, she looked up. Not at my eyes, but at my mouth, like she read my lips before the words even came.

“Dad. I need to tell you something important.”

My stomach did a slow, sour loop. I braced for something unusual. A failed class, a fight with a frenemy, some ancient grudge she’d nursed for years, and finally uncorked. None of those things ever happened, so I’m not sure why I expected that.

“Okay,” I said. My voice sounded normal. Not reassuring, not cold. Just there.

She drew in a breath, hard enough to make her shoulders rise.

“I love you, Dad,” she said.

That was the sort of thing parents say to their kids. Innocent, nothing monumental. But not the other way around at her age. I blinked, unsure if I’d misheard. The words came in a soft confession and weight to the. The heft of confessional admission, say five hundred Hail Marys and twenty million Our Fathers. For I heard no innocence in her words.

She saw my confusion and rushed ahead, words tumbling out faster than she could order them.

“And don’t mean-how you’re supposed to. Not just as a daughter should. I mean-I’m in love with you.”

The words made little sense at first. They were a jumble, familiar and foreign at the same time. For a second, I thought maybe Raya was drunk, or high, or making a joke I didn’t get.

But she wasn’t laughing. She wasn’t even smiling. Her eyes were glassy, bottomless, full of something raw and terrible and beautiful all at once.

My body went rigid. Every cell in my skin prickled. I tried to move, to say something-anything-but paralyzed, I said nothing.

She kept going, voice trembling but getting stronger as she spoke.

“I realize it’s wrong. I understand you don’t want to hear it. But I can’t keep it to myself anymore.” Her hands clenched into fists. “Truthfully, I think about you all the time. Can’t stop. See you in the kitchen, or the garage, or walking down the hall, and I just…I just want to be near you. Physically touching you. All the time.”

Looking down, back up, her eyes twinkling. The lamp painted a trembling shadow along her cheek.

“I don’t want to go back to school, or get a job, or do any of that shit they say you’re supposed to do. I just want to be here with you. Taking care of you, doing the cooking, cleaning, and doing your laundry. To make you happy, it started before Mom died.”

She gazed at me as though I were the only person left on the planet, and maybe, in that moment, I was.

The room tilted toward the darkness. The lamp, the chair, the brittle voice on the radio in the kitchen, none of it seemed real anymore. I opened my mouth, but all that came out was a dry click, like a gun misfiring.

She held my gaze, face flushed, a pulse fluttering at her throat.

“Daddy, say something.”

Well, I couldn’t. For some time, I stared, eyes wide, every muscle locked. My breath came in shallow pulls. Almost to the point of hyperventilation. As the world outside, the lamp’s circle shrank to nothing. And Raya didn’t glance away. Didn’t even blink.

We sat there, knees almost touching, her confession echoing in the dark.

And for the first time in years, I felt truly, utterly alive. I didn’t move for a long time. It could’ve been a minute, perhaps an hour. And I sat there, eyes locked on hers, unable to blink or breathe or think past the words she’d set loose in the room.

The only thing moving was my hands, which had migrated to the armrests, and I gripped them hard enough to wring water from the wood. I could feel every notch and splinter under my fingertips, the old varnish worn away by decades of restless fathers.

Somewhere down the hall, the grandfather clock struck the hour. Not a cheerful song, just a deep, iron-lunged toll, each note marked the seconds I spent drowning in the silence.

Raya didn’t break eye contact. Her cheeks were scarlet, color blooming high and hot, and a pulse hammering at the base of her throat, visible even in the low light. Her knees pulled tight against the ottoman. The rest of her was loose, almost limp, like she’d just run a hundred miles and waited for me at the finish line.

She must’ve known what this did to me. She must’ve seen my knuckles whitening, the sweat beading at my hairline, the way my jaw kept working, chewing over nothing. I tried to speak, but the words tangled and died in the back of my mouth. Once, twice, three times I opened my lips, only to snap them shut again, afraid of what might come out if I let go.

The clock finished its song and left us with nothing but the faint hum of the fridge and the brittle, irregular thud of my heart.

She stayed there, not moving, not blinking. She looked at me as if she searched for something behind my eyes, something she desperately needed to see.

For a moment, I looked away, down at the knot of her hands. Clenched in her lap, the nails left little white crescents on the skin. I followed the line of her arms up to her shoulders, her neck, her mouth, which parted enough that I caught the glint of her teeth behind her lips.

I wanted to reach out, to touch her hand, to run my thumb across the scar she’d gotten falling off her bike when she was six. Tried to tell her it was okay. Hey girl, I understand. I am as lost as you.