Amy
by Centaur

Part 1
Jim

Chapter 1

I hung up the phone and leaned back in the chair in my hotel room. I had just spoken with my sixteen year old (by about a week) daughter Amy for the first time in three years. I had finally taken the chance and called her at our old house, the one she now shared with my, all but legally, ex-wife Jane. What a strange situation I found myself in, forbidden by Jane to have any contact - even by phone or in writing - with my daughter until she turned eighteen. I hadn't even been back in the Bay area since I left three years ago. Seeing her was, of course, by Jane's demand out of the question, but here I was arranging to meet Amy at my hotel behind Jane's back. Amy agreed to tell her mother she was spending the night with her friend Tami. Tami would drive Amy to my hotel after Tami's parents went to bed, and would pick her up again after we visited for an hour or so, Amy would work out some plausible details, she was very inventive in that way.

I walked out onto the balcony off my room and leaned my elbows on the railing staring out at the familiar skyline of San Francisco across the bay. The view was spectacular from the 12th floor of the Hyatt in Oakland's Jack London Square. The late afternoon June sun sparkled off the San Francisco Bay as my thoughts drifted back to how things had changed since I started my business in Berkeley some 20 years ago. I remembered how it all began and what happened that Sunday afternoon in October almost three years ago.

I am one of a vanishing breed, a Native Californian. I had been born in 1957 in Chula Vista, about as far south as you could go in California and still be a US citizen. We moved north to the San Francisco Bay Area when I was six. So mostly I grew up in the Berkeley area where my Dad was a professor of English at the University of California. Because I was the son of a faculty member I could attend UC Berkeley free so I naturally my parents insisted that I live at home and get my degree at Berkeley. I finished my undergraduate degree in computer science in May of 1977, just about the time the computer boom really took off a few miles south of us in Silicon Valley. Larry Ault, who was my best friend at school, and I had an idea for a new software utility program and scraped together enough money to start a small business operating out of the apartment over my parent's garage where I had been living during the last two years of school. We were lucky and got in at the right time with the right product and in six months had a real office in Berkeley on Telegraph Road across from the campus, two sold programs and five new employees fresh out of the computer science department. On New Years Day 1979 we celebrated 18 months in business with 12 employees and I got married to Jane Simpson and Larry married Diane Black.

I had known Jane slightly while we were in school, she was an English major and we saw each other occasionally since we had some mutual friends and also because at that time my Dad was the Chairman of the English Department and she used to show up at all the faculty-student parties. I usually attended those get togethers because it was a great place to pick-up on cute girls. The ones majoring in computer science in those days tended fall into the "butt ugly and real strange" category. We had gotten together after one of the end of semester parties and hit it off right away. Jane was mildly computer literate and was a fun person to be around.

Our company had grown to the place were we needed some competent full time office management, and Jane volunteered to work in the office and keep things running. I loved the idea, it allowed us to spend more time together and took the administrative burden off of me. The arragement was fine with Larry, writing payroll checks and keeping up with costs for projects and tax regulations was wearing us down, we weren't able to be creative and run a small business at the same time. Jane was perfect for the job, she was great with numbers and tax forms and seemed to be able to interact effectively with the sometimes weird programmers and software engineers we were hiring. The problem was that after a year of running the office Jane got bored and decided that she needed to go to law school and learn all about copyrights, intellectual property and patents in order to protect our new software products. So after a year of running the office Jane started law school full time across the Bay in San Francisco.

During the year and a half Jane was in law school we managed to come up with several new products and by the time she rejoined the company we had grown to over 50 people, about 20 of whom were involved in the production, shipping, handling and support of our products. In mid 1981 we moved the production and support section of the company to San Diego to take advantage of the lower labor costs in that area, the cost for relatively unskilled labor in the Bay Area was out of control. In late September of that year Jane delighted me by telling me that she was pregnant. Our daughter Amy was born May 25, 1981.

Jane had a rough pregnancy, and after Amy was born her doctor advised her that having additional children could be dangerous for her. Jane strongly suggested that I have a vasectomy; I resisted the idea just as strongly. We had a real intense fight about it lasting several weeks. To tell the truth ever since she finished her law degree Jane was becoming a pain in the ass to live with, and I wasn't into the idea of eliminating my capability to have children in the future if something should happen to my marriage. Jane reluctantly agreed to have her tubes tied, but somehow always seemed to hold it against me that I "forced" her into that decision. I thought it was an eminently reasonable solution. After all, it wasn't me for whom pregnancy was dangerous, it was her. I felt it was prefectly reasonable that she provide the solution, not push the action onto me.

The arguments about tubal ligation versus vasectomy really put a strain on our marriage. It even got difficult for us to be civil towards each other at work. Larry eventually mentioned that maybe having Jane in the office was becoming a problem. Jane solved the problem for us, in July of 1983 she accepted an offer from one of the largest firms in San Francisco, Wyatt, Huse, Taylor and Atkinson, to join them as their "new technology" associate. Having her own job interests seemed to calm Jane down quite a bit, plus our software business was doing really well and she convinced me to buy a large house on five acres in the Berkeley Hills off Bear Creek Road where Jane loved entertaining the partners in her law firm.

Things moved smoothly for the next five years until Christmas 1988 when both of my parents were killed in an airline crash while on vacation in South America. It was a terrible loss for me, and strangely enough I found myself relying more and more on my six year old daughter Amy (rather than Jane) for emotional support during my grieving.

Amy was such a delightful little girl, she was both beautiful and brilliant. Her hair had turned the color that we used to have in crayon boxes called "burnt umber." Amy began referring to the color as "red" however when her best friend Julie (Larry and Diane's daughter who was a few days younger) started referring to the color as "bummer" because she had trouble saying burnt umber. Jane was spending a lot of time working at her new firm to impress the partners while at the same time my workload was declining. I had so many programmers and engineers working for the company developing new software that my role had become one of strategic planning and attending conferences, and I was working out of my home office by telephone and the internet more and more. Because I was in the house more I was spending the majority of the parenting time with Amy, and she and Jane grew farther and farther apart. When Amy started first grade and was in school all day I was surprised how much I missed her and how empty my days had become. I decided to enroll in the MBA program down the peninsula at Stanford. With the company getting so big I really needed to have a greater knowledge base of how businesses ran and how to plan for the future.

For the next two years things were pretty hectic around our house. I left early in the morning to make the 30 mile, 1 hour drive in traffic, to Palo Alto and Jane stayed home until Amy got on the school bus. I had to be home by the time Amy got home from school and Jane routinely worked late (until 7 or 8pm) to make up for her late start in the mornings. Amy and I usually had our evening meal alone and then we watched a video or I would read her one of her books until Jane came home and then Amy went to bed and I studied. I really didn't mind being in charge of child care, Amy was so bright and entertaining. We loved watching old movies together, she and I would say the lines a beat before the actors and we would turn to each other and laugh. Jane hated it when we did that, she thought it was stupid and finally she refused to watch movies with us. I finished my MBA in June of 1991 and things around the house settled down for awhile. Things were so smooth in fact that my partner Larry decided to "retire" to Santa Barbara with Diane and Julie and just live quietly off his share of the profits while retaining his position as board chairman. Amy had been very close to Julie who was her best friend and really missed her when they moved. We established a pattern of sending Amy to Santa Barbara to spend three weeks with Julie at the beginning of the summer and then having Julie come to visit us for the three weeks before school started. The girls were very different, both physically and emotionally but somehow they got along wonderfully and stayed best friends, they really seemed more like sisters when they were together.

After Julie moved Amy became more and more attached to me. As she got older we had developed an uncanny ability to tell what the other was thinking, we often finished each others sentences, which truly annoyed Jane. In fact it seemed that almost everything that Amy and I together did annoyed Jane to some degree. Things came to a head in the fall of 1994. Amy had turned thirteen five months earlier and was changing in front of my eyes from a gawky pre-adolescent into the sketch of someone who was going to become a very beautiful woman.

I was sitting in the den with my feet up alternately watching football and dozing when Amy came charging into the room at full speed.

"Daddddy - look at the top of my head, I was putting books on the shelf over my bed and the end of the damn shelf came loose and fell on my head, it really hurts, look and see if it is bleeding."

Amy tended to dramatize things but I always humored her, unlike her mother who was most likely to tell her to just get on with life and clean up her room. Amy knew that Daddy was an easy touch for some attention or for a little extra cash for the mall.

Amy climbed up on my lap straddling my legs and sitting on my thighs and leaned over to let me look at the top of her head. She was wearing one of her long tee shirts hanging down to her knees and no shoes, only socks. As she leaned toward me with her head down the top of her loose tee shirt fell away and I was looking right down at two of the prettiest young tits that I had ever seen. I hadn't seen her undressed since she was about three, Jane was real prig about nudity-hers, mine or Amy's. I don't think even she had seen Amy undressed since she stopped bathing her at about age five. Amy's breasts were really beautiful, about the size of small oranges with very light pink cone-shaped nipples with a faint tracing of thin blue veins. Her nipples were on the top end of her tits and tilted up towards me. As Amy lifted her arms up to put her hands on the top of her head to show me the place that hurt her breasts rose and separated and the nipples poked up clearly.

"See Daddy, right here, I can feel the bump, is it bleeding?"

I was not even looking at the top of her head, I was so captivated by her young tits that I was speechless. When I didn't respond immediately Amy lifted her eyes to look at me. She noticed immediately that my gaze was down her shirt, not on the top of her head. I lifted my eyes quickly, but not before Amy noticed where I was looking. As my eyes moved up to her face I could have sworn that her nipples started to get hard. Amy sat up quickly and moved back slightly, this time bending her head from the neck.

"Look at my head Daddy, it really hurts."......(cont)