BISHOP STOOD UP straight and crossed his arms. He bit the inside of his cheek and kept his eyes down, transferring his weight from foot to foot before leaning against the doorframe of the dining room again. Not able to stay still, he straightened again and raked a hand through his hair before shoving his fists into his pockets.
Ann brushed past him on her way back from retrieving the matches that were kept on the living room mantle. Glancing over her shoulder at him, she frowned. “What is the matter with you, Bishop? I’ve never seen you this fidgety.” She began lighting the candles on the huge, pink-frosted birthday cake while Penelope grinned up at her. “Come and sit down,” Ann demanded, glancing up at him again as she moved the match from wick to wick. “You look like you’re ready to bolt out of the room, and there’s too much cake for us girls to eat by ourselves.”
She placed a hand on Pen’s shoulder and smiled sweetly down at her. “I didn’t have eighteen candles, so I hope eight will do.”
“No worries. I don’t need candles to tell me I’m finally an adult.” Penelope said this while staring straight at Bishop.
He swallowed, his stomach flip-flopping in a way that made his knees feel unsteady. The flame from the candles seemed to make Penelope’s beautiful, warm eyes glow with a heat of their own, though he knew it was only his imagination. He was too far from her to see the details of her face.
He didn’t need his eyesight, though, to pull up her features. They were burned into his psyche. The way her hair, auburn now, the pink faded and clinging stubbornly only at the ends, fell around her shoulders, just past her collar bone. Those collar bones, delicate and straight, exposed when she wore tank tops or an oversized shirt that slipped off her shoulder while she lounged in the library across from him, frowning down at a book.
Her eyes, warm and burnished brown, the opposite of his grey, cold irises.
He swallowed against a rising panic. His ward was now an adult, and all the thoughts he’d dammed up in his head as absolutely forbidden were threatening to come spilling over his mental gates for the first time.
“Now I won’t make us sing,” Ann said, shaking out the last match. “That would just embarrass all of us, I think. Besides, this cake is meant to celebrate your graduation too, and I don’t know a song for that.” She laughed, and Pen smiled up at her.
Not for the first time, Bishop was immensely thankful for Ann. The notice that Pen had passed her correspondence tests and had been granted her high school diploma had come in the mail a week prior. Bishop would never have thought of getting a cake to celebrate, and Penelope deserved special moments like these to mark important events in her life.
Bishop, though, had been dreading this day. He continued to hover in the doorway, afraid to get any closer to the birthday girl.
“I don’t have to think of a wish,” Pen said. “I already know what I want.” She hesitated and then raised her eyes to Bishop’s. Slowly, she pursed her lips and blew out the candles, never moving her gaze from his face.
He wondered what she could read there.
Penelope had said inappropriate things upon their first meeting, things that had made him uncomfortable. What he’d refused to admit though, even in the darkest depths of his poisoned mind, was that those comments she’d made had given him thoughts.
Thoughts that caused him terrible guilt, so he’d worked hard to tuck them away where they could never be acted upon. He’d spent all the years since he was seventeen trying to forget the barbaric evil he’d come from. Trying to convince himself that he wasn’t his father. That even though his dad’s blood ran in his veins, he wasn’t the same kind of monster.
The truth, that Bishop worked so hard to suppress behind walls, routines and control, was that his father trafficked human beings to satisfy his depraved lust and the lust of his wealthy clients. Bishop had discovered this hideous reality when he was seventeen, and had participated, unknowingly, in his dad’s sick business.
It was unforgivable, and Bishop had sworn to spend the rest of his life making up for it. Then Penelope had burst into his life, demanding his attention. Demanding he acknowledge her femininity, her sexuality. Things he absolutely couldn’t do. First, because she was underage, and now, still, because he was her legal guardian, practically her father, from a moral standpoint.
He controlled her finances. Any involvement with her would naturally be wrong. He still had some authority over her until she was nineteen and would receive control of her trust. Until then, and even after then, their relationship could only ever be that of a mentor and mentee. Anything else would violate his personal oath to never again take advantage of a woman.
Professor Sullivan had entrusted Penelope to him as a father-figure. He certainly hadn’t done this so that Bishop would use his daughter to satisfy his naked lust. Out of respect for the professor, Bishop had to keep his hands off his mentor’s daughter.
But lately Penelope had been hell-bent on breaking him. They read together every evening, and it was Bishop’s favorite part of the day, but she’d been dressing in such skimpy clothing that he couldn’t even read anymore. He’d sit on the couch each evening, with Pen sitting across from him, staring at the same page of his book for what seemed like hours as his thoughts fought a war between piety and lust.
Of course, he would never touch her when she was a minor, but he’d known her birthday was coming, and with her full-on seduction campaign as of late, that dam he’d built to contain the inappropriate thoughts about his young ward was full to bursting with all kinds of unclean ideas.
It didn’t help that he hadn’t touched a woman in years. This tactic had seemed like a practical way to keep his oath, but had morphed into a forced penance for the terrible act he’d committed on that girl long ago, on the last day he’d spent in his father’s home.
Unfortunately, his ward dissolved his self-control like tissue paper in water. All of the things he wasn’t supposed to think about were the only things that came to mind, as he stared from her lips to her eyes. Something passed between them in the dim light of the dining room, and Bishop’s mind was suddenly full of indecent ideas about his ward’s pursed lips.
Images of Pen on her knees, hollowing her cheeks around his hard cock, popped like firecrackers through his head.
When the candles were extinguished, he made his escape. “I’ve got to go,” he insisted gruffly. “I’m sorry.” He fled the room, and they both called after him, Ann about eating cake and Penelope about seeing him later in the library. He knew it was rude, but there was no way he could stay. He had rock-hard, straining erection to hide, the evidence of his depravity.
He needed to somehow stop such thoughts about the too-young girl under his authority. But right at that moment, most of all, he needed to relieve his aching balls with the release his body suddenly and desperately demanded because of his wicked fantasies about Pen’s mouth.
In the privacy of his bathroom, almost crazed with shame and need, Bishop fisted a hand around his cock and allowed the dam gates in his head, the ones with his ward’s name on them, to open just a crack. Just enough so that he could come. He let his perversion spill over those gates in small droplets only. An amount he could control.
With the door shut and locked, where no one could witness his deviance, he trembled as he allowed himself to enjoy just a few forbidden thoughts about the young girl.
Penelope, naked and kneeling in front of him, gazing up at him with flashing, wild eyes, her small, pink nipples pebbled hard.
Pen’s hands wrapped around his erection, letting him feed her his cock. Her throat straining to accommodate him like he wanted it. Hard, and as deep as she could take it, her innocent mouth never before having been used like that. Her tongue lapping up his beads of precum when he eased up on her throat long enough to give her a breath before plunging in again.
Bishop had barely stroked himself one full time up the length of his shaft when he pictured his cum splashed across young Penelope’s full, rounded lips and cheeks, and he exploded.
He braced against the mirror with his free hand, his hot release spattering in rhythmic waves into the sink as he made a noise that sounded like pain, but choked in his throat like a sob. He’d needed to come so urgently that the orgasm was nearly devoid of pleasure. He felt only a sweeping and hollow relief.
As quickly as his desire had demanded the sacrifice of a small bit of his soul, just as quickly came the cruel, familiar self-disgust.
His hands shook as he cleaned up. He kept his chin tucked, unable to look at himself in the mirror. He wasn’t a sexual deviant, he told himself. He wasn’t a monster in a fleshy, carnal world of his own creation, like his father.
Bishop took a punishingly hot shower, wanting to feel clean but never succeeding.
*****