I kept up the routine, sitting in my easy chair and watching late night TV. When my wife got up to shower, Sarah burst into the room. She pointed at me and said, sternly, at almost a whisper: “What you did was really fucked up. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I just sat, frozen, feeling like a pathetic old man.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she repeated, her eyes wide and her face red, “You think you can do that to me? You think you can use me like that?”
I didn’t say anything. I just stared into her eyes, looking for empathy.
“What the fuck are you? You’re a fucking rapist, you’re disgusting.”
She stormed away before I could call out to her. The blood drained to my feet. Somehow I made it through the rest of the night, with the help of a few scotches.
The work week was brutal. I expected my wife to kill me or the police to show up at any moment. Regardless, I masturbated constantly, reliving my evil deed. I know I wore it on my face at dinner, as my wife repeatedly asked me what was wrong. By Wednesday, Sarah was looking up at me from dinner, sometimes with a worried look, when I would talk or my wife would inquire if I was “ill” or “feeling down.” By Thursday, she was making small talk with me and saying hello when I walked in the door. Friday, the entire day, we were like a normal family.
I was officially one of those scummy sexual predators you see shocked to be alive in mugshots on TV. In another time, I’d be up on a stake, lit on fire, dying to the cheers of righteous, angry villagers. I had such guilt. I should have done more to control myself.
Saturday was my son’s baseball game, and my wife told me to stay home so I could get over “whatever cold or flu I had caught.” This left me alone with Sarah for the first time since I’d forced myself inside her. She was showering in upstairs bathroom, so I headed downstairs to our sauna/shower combo and showered as well. It had it’s own water heater, so I knew I wouldn’t disrupt her.
When I was shaving with a towel wrapped around my waist, I heard footsteps coming downstairs. She came to the doorway, standing about ten feet away from me.
“Hey,” she said. I replied with the same.
“I want to talk to you,” she said. I told her that was fine as I turned to face her.
She sat on the sauna bench across from me. We had a good distance between us.
“That was messed up.”
I exhaled all the air in my lungs out of my nose and I think I turned white, “I know, I know, I fucked up Sarah….”
“Uhm,” she said. She was piecing her words together, “Just tell me, like, what led up to you doing that, and why you did it? Because I want to understand so I can, uhm, forgive you. That can’t happen again, you need to get some help.”
It touched my heart that she looked at it as a malady rather than a reason to turn me into the feds. Daughters love their fathers, to a fault I suppose. I started from the top.
“I’m so sorry. It was the worst thing a father can do, I just…”
She sort of motioned with her hands for me to speed things along, “Yea, I get all that crap. Answer the question so I can understand.”
wpDiscuz