Lucy's Photograph

Inspired by just one such image I came across while browsing, this is not an explicit story, but explores what might be happening inside the characters' heads as a father confronts his daughter's sexuality.

“What the hell is this?” said Bill, throwing the door open,and marching into Lucy’s room. Bill practically threw the laptop down on to the desk.

Lucy was perched at the end of bed, one knee drawn up, a nail file in one hand. Her brow knotted in indignation.“Dad! What are you doing? You can’t just... oh shit.”

Slack jawed, Lucy stared at the screen. Her own image smiled back.

In the picture she stood in front of the same mirror that reflected back her own shocked face now. But instead of the big white bath robe she was wearing as she prepared to go to bed, the Lucy in the picture wore her favorite black hoody. Her dark brown hair, carefully back combed and worked so that it stood round her head like an anti-halo framed her pale, flawless face. A cute, friendly smile lit up her face, and her eyes, picked out in a thick line of Maybelline mascara, sparkled mischievously. She was posing with her phone, her little Sony Ericsson that never left her side, taking her own portrait in the mirror.

In the picture the other Lucy stood facing the mirror at an angle, posing with one hand on her hip. The hoody was unzipped and hung open. Tan-lines from their holiday in Spain the previous summer, long since faded, still played across her skin. At the centre of the alabaster triangles left by the bikini she’d almost been too scared to wear, delicate pink aureole were crowned by the perfect strawberry points of her nipples. Below that, across the expanse of smooth, flat skin of her stomach, the fly on her shorts was undone to reveal the crest, the merest hint of her pubic hair.

“Where did you get it?” Asked Lucy, her voice nothing more than a horse whisper on account of her mouth having gone entirely dry.

“That’s not fucking important young lady,” snapped her dad. “The question is, how is it there? Why , is it there?”

Lucy knew full well where it came from - she had after all taken it. She’d snapped it months ago as a birthday present for her boyfriend. Correction. Scumbag ex-boyfriend. They’d broken up three weeks ago after he’d forgotten her birthday. The bastard had obviously found a way to have his revenge.

“And what the fuck is this?” bellowed Bill, pointing at her hip in the picture.
“It means powerful woman. It’s Japanese.”

“I can fucking well see it’s Japanese. Didn’t I say you weren’t to get a tattoo? Did I not explicitly forbid you to do that!”

“Dad, I’m 18 now, I...”

“Show me.”

“But...”

“Show me NOW!”

Lucy knew not to argue. Since her mum left, her dad had been a great parent, but every once in a while the stress of raising a child on his own got to Bill and he cracked, shouting like he was now. She’d never felt threatened, but she did know the only way to calm him down was to do what he asked.

Standing slowly she undid the belt, but then she realised she had a problem - she’d only just returned to the bedroom from her evening shower. Beneath the robe she was wearing even less than in the photo. She always closed her robe, left over right, but the tattoo was on her right hip. She tried to shuffle the two sides around so that she could show her dad her tattoo without having to show him any more of her body than was absolutely necessary.

Without warning, impatience got the better of Bill. He yanked at her bath robe, pulling it apart, wanting to see with his own eyes the dirty ink that stained his perfect daughter. Stunned, Lucy froze and in that instant the robe slipped from her shoulders and fell to the floor. Her small cry was stifled by the following silence.

Bill stood still, his eyes fixated on the two black-inked characters picked out on Lucy’s white skin. He lent forward to get a better look. They were sharp and clear, placed delicately on the cusp between her hips and her abdomen. Had his daughter been wearing underwear, they’d probably be covered. Bill’s mind raced, wondering when she did it, where she might have gone. It was then he thought of the artist, bent over her stomach, his face, his hands only inches away from his daughter’s most private place.

Lucy was locked in place. Her Dad was staring at the little tattoo with such intensity she half expected lasers to shoot from his eyes at her to burn it away and eradicate it. The robe around her feet, Lucy was frozen as she was when it slipped, arms thrown back slightly, her chest out, facing her father straight on.With encroaching horror Lucy realised her Dad might see something else. Her hands twitched, not sure whether to cover herself. After a moment she decided to leave it, not draw his attention, and let her arms hang at her sides. But his eyes were locked on her tattoo - the two delicate kanji characters her friend Mie had picked for her, written out in a dainty hand with a brush and ink and posted all the way from Japan so that she could be sure the symbols were true. If his eyes were to stray just a couple of inches, like any other man’s would surely have done, then perhaps he’d spot something likely to send him off again - but the explosion never came.

Bill stared, then, as if returning to his body, the edges of his vision expanded. Suddenly he was aware of the flat, toned stomach, a red crease still visible where Lucy had had her legs up, examining her toes; he took in the curve where her slender thighs met the gentle bulge of her pubis, that sweet mound topped with a neat tuft of thick dark hair, just like her mother’s; again to the perfect swollen mounds of her breasts topped by such beautiful nipples - breasts that again reminded him of her beautiful, wayward, negligent mother; Bill became aware of her long, slender legs, flawless, though bruised from the various sports that she enjoyed, and the fine gap at the top; finally he was aware of her face, scrubbed clean and pink from the shower, her usually wild hair scraped back and held in a cutesy skew-whiff ponytail.

It felt as if it had been for ever, though Lucy knew it was only seconds, but slowly her Dad began to straighten, drawing back from his fixation on the ink at her hip. His face displayed nothing, then suddenly his eyes darted down, up, back, forth, as if only now realising what was happening. His eyes,his mouth, his eyebrows leapt and contorted wildly, signaling the confused expressions of horror, anger, shock and finally fear .

Bill looked at his daughter, aware now that her slender frame, all 5 feet and 7 inches of it, was naked before him as it hadn’t been for more than a decade. Her body was not that of a little girl any more - she wasn’t his little girl any more. Of course he’d known that - without her mother he’d been the one that had had to deal with those little rituals on her way to womanhood, but now it came home to him like it never had before. Lucy, his Lucy, was a young woman. And right now - fresh from the shower and stripped of the horrible “emo” dressing that he hated, but never mentioned - she was a beautiful, elegant and a very sexy one.

Lucy met his gaze - stared right back at him. In her eyes was not fear and it certainly wasn’t shame. No. It was something else. She was looking back at him with sorrow? Compassion? Her composure broke him.

“Oh god, Lucy, I’m... I’m so...” Bill looked away, suddenly not able to cope. Lucy stood still, not sure how he would react. He held up his arms as he backed away, as if trying to shield himself from her nakedness. “I’m so sorry Lucy. I had no right. I..” He stumbled from the room.

Lucy stood still a moment longer, bemused and confused. Should she follow her Dad? Leave him a bit? She looked again at the laptop - the picture of her that no-one else should have been allowed to see. It was a good one. She knew when she snapped it how cute she'd looked.

She stooped and picked up the bathrobe, slipping it over herself as she pulled up her chair at the machine. The programme displaying the picture of her was Firefox, so she knew that it was on a website somewhere, but where? She didn’t recognise the address - it didn’t make sense - but before she could pull up the history her Dad reentered the room.

“Sorry, I forgot this,” he said, still clearly a little embarrassed. Reaching past her, he closed the lid and picked up the laptop. “Look, Lucy, I’m sorry about all that. We’ll talk about this in the morning, okay?”

“Dad, I...”

But he was gone. Lucy heard the door across the landing brush closed.

Unsure what to do next, Lucy instinctively reached for her phone - she had to speak to someone, to communicate. But who would she text? What could she say? What, really, had happened? Unable to put her finger on it, she instead send a terse four-letter message to her ex-boyfriend and after a moment's consideration an equally terse update to Facebook. Then Lucy climbed in to bed, hoping for swift sleep.