Summer of Amy's Dad

Flight BA 233 from Larnaca to London Heathrow was twenty-thousand feet somewhere above Western Europe and for at least one passenger the plane was a flying prison. Ali Fisher toyed with the chicken in white wine sauce in her compartmentalised plastic tray. She leafed through the in-flight magazine without reading a word. She even tried watching a movie, but Drew Barrymore's roller derby antics could not retain her attention. The images on the screen were blurred by the ones already in her head, the actors' faces obscured by those of Amy and David. And Melanie come to that.

Passion and lust. Pain and betrayal. Quite a lot of mess to create in ten short days.

She leaned back against the head-rest and closed her eyes, but that only served to bring the faces into sharper focus. Checking her watch, adjusted back to British Summer Time, she saw three hours' flight-time remaining. A brief wait at the baggage carousel please God, and then take the train home. Strip off, get showered. Try and wash away all the guilt. Like that would work. Hot milk, codeine for her headache, something to make her sleep. Her night at the airport had been unending. She needed unconsciousness. She needed to blot out the whole sorry denouement. She needed to quell the arousal which still surged intermittently through her, for with it came an accompanying surge of remorse. Damn.

She bit her lip, then stopped, recalling his words, the ones breathed to her over the breakfast buffet the morning after their first time. "Little tease. You know what I feel when you do that? You know what I want to do to you?" She'd blushed, for by then she'd known very well, and she'd bitten her lip all the more knowingly, played up the girlish innocence and blended it with the oh-so-knowing big-girl-now routine to drive him wild.

Big-girl, who was she trying to fool? Her eyes stared wide as she tried to stem the tears which threatened. The last thing she needed was concern from the elderly couple beside her.

"Everything okay?" Shit. The young flight attendant with her hair in a French plait had noticed instead. The girl was stooping over her, a hand laid solicitously on her arm. "You're looking a bit peaky."

Alison shook her head. "I'm fine thanks," she lied. "Could I maybe have a drink of water?"

The attendant was just going to fetch one when the seat-belt lights dinged on. Ali half-listened to the pilot's intercom voice. "...Going to be experiencing some turbulence... trays in their upright position... seatbelts on please."

"Water'll have to wait," the girl smiled apologetically. "You'll be all right?"

"I'll be great." A little turbulence she could deal with. She'd left much more back in Cyprus, hadn't she?

Flight BA232 from London Heathrow to Larnaca, ten days earlier. Ali Fisher outward-bound for two weeks in the Mediterranean sunshine. Same plane, same menu, but angst-free and set for fun. Rotten shame that Sara was still in hospital with a compound fracture, but Alison's friend had provided a blessing from her sick-bed. "Don't stay at home, for God's sake, get out there and raise hell for both of us! Just think how many more boys there'll be without me as competition!"

Ali felt she'd had enough of boys. A girl of maturity and academic prowess beyond her years should be with someone a little less callow than Adam Rylance. There was still a pang of sorrow however at the thought of him. He had been a sweet first boyfriend in an endearingly clumsy jockish sort of way and a perfectly adequate popper of her cherry. His sexual style had been a triumph of enthusiasm over technical ability; she'd always felt like the novice were teaching her own deflowerer. Still there had been affection between them. That plus the sheer thrill of illicit manoeuvres in one or other of their family homes, or similar covert sex-games in whatever other naughty locations they could find. Backs or bonnets of cars, secluded glens in the New Forest and at least one night-club restroom.

She still grinned at the memory of him peeling off her panties on his bed, while his parents watched television below, or the night when her father had nearly stumbled on their mutual masturbation in her living-room. Adam's climax had already been triggered when the paternal voice sounded on the staircase; he had staggered into the lower bathroom hoisting trousers with one hand and clutching his spurting cock with the other, while she giggled desperately, still semi-delirious from where his fingers had been. That recollection, she thought, would always make her laugh out loud.

End of school and different college aims had heralded the break-up. Her sights were fixed on Edinburgh, he wanted to stay a London-boy. She had paid lip service to trying the long-distance thing, but in her heart she had known it was time for the split. An act of cruel kindness for them both. He'd grow up properly and become a better lover for someone else. And she would start on a whole new life-chapter with minimal reference to the previous one.

Their final conversation had been wrenching. She'd been tender but resolute and had cried as she held him. But along with the next day's melancholy there was undeniable excitement. Life was an adventure. Fresh fields awaited to be romped through. And where better to start the romp than Ayia Napa?

She had got made-over especially for her pre-university sunsplash. Sad break-ups sparked serious gym-training and Ali had run, lifted and stretched herself to a womanly tautness over six weeks of summer. Her long straight brunette mane had been trimmed so that shaggy tresses spilled around her shoulders and a broad fringe brushed the upper lashes of her green eyes. Oh, and she had dyed it a deep reddish-burgundy which complimented her dark red lips and the natural strawberry of her nipples in striking fashion. Ali felt positively sultry on that flight. Virginity happily jettisoned, she was on the cusp of adult life. A vibrant fusion of girlish fun and burgeoning sophistication. It seemed almost apt that she were a lone-traveller. Look out Cyprus, look out fucking world - Ali Fisher is landing!

Her wrangle at baggage reclaim and the hauling of her suitcase through a crowded airport did much to see off that initial bravado. The glint of sunshine of Mediterranean blue water stirred her heart during the coach trip, but how much better to have had a comrade in arms beside her with whom to share the adventure. By the time she arrived at the Grecian Sands, her Ayia Napa hotel, Ali could not shake the sense of lostness. Sure she could hit the beach, but the prospect of heading out to party alone was a daunting one. Small wonder that she allowed herself to be picked up so easily by Amy Gosling.

The vivacious teenager struck up conversation as Ali was checking in; she was standing at reception as though waiting for someone, dressed in baggy beach-wear and flip-flops, her sunglasses pushed up into her mousy fair hair. "Tough journey?" she asked on seeing Ali flag against the cream-veneered desk.

"Early start," Ali answered ruefully. "I need sleep."

"I know how you feel... We just got here an hour ago." The girl had an attractive round face and smiling eyes. "Mum's still crashed out, but Dad and I are headed for the beach. I swear it's my last ever family holiday. I mean I love them..." Her voice dropped so she could confide. "...But once I'm seventeen I'm making my own plans. It's just I've always wanted to go to the Greek islands, so I'm tagging along this year. Not so much for the party scene - I'd have to sneak away for that anyway - more the history, I love all that stuff. I'm a bit of a geek I suppose. Hey, I love your hair!"

"Ehhh - thanks." Ali was overwhelmed by the sheer rush of words, but gratified nonetheless. "It's... something new. Just got it done a few days ago."

"And you're trying it out somewhere new... Re-inventing yourself, that's so cool!" her new acquaintance gushed. "Like you can go a bit wild here. Not that I can, with Mum and Dad around..." The last bit was a cheeky aside for the benefit of the tall athletic-looking man who had just joined her.

"I'm keeping tabs on you as long as I can, sunshine," he grinned, giving the girl a jokey punch on her arm. "Just arrived then?" His amiable stare fell on Ali and she made an instant favourable comparison between him and all of her friends' dads back home. He had a rumpled still-boyish look about him, despite the mild creasing of his face, along with sun-streaked fair hair and cornflower-blue eyes that just held a girl's gaze.

"Yeah." Ali made a conscious effort to keep her thoughts internalised. "Just got to get this monster to my room." She patted her substantial suitcase.

"I'll help you," the daughter almost sang, "and then why don't you come down to the beach with Dad and me?" She looked to her father for approval.

"You'd be welcome." He smiled and Ali reciprocated. She'd planned a nap in her room and might have rain-checked on the precocious girl, but the dad was so instantly likeable that she found herself agreeing. "I think you've just been commandeered as Amy's friend," he told her cheerily. "I'm David by the way." He reached out and shook her hand, eyes lingering on her just intently enough to fluster her a little, inwardly at any rate.

"I'm Alison. Call me Ali, please."

"Let me take this!" Amy was already wheeling Ali's great trunk towards the elevators as the newcomer was passed her room key. "You'll love it here. They leave fruit and a bottle of wine in your room and everything. And you've got to check out the outdoor pool and the sports facilities... Do you play tennis?"

"She's always like this," Amy's dad grinned semi-apologetically. "Forward. Gets it from me."

"It's fine," Ali smiled, happy to have fallen into such pleasant company. "I like her. See you in a bit..."

She made the ascent with Amy to her room, on the same floor it turned out as the younger girl's. Amy gabbled merrily about ancient Cypriot history and Greek boys and what few phrases of the language she actually knew. She showed Ali all around the room, resembling as it did her own. She'd been right about the fruit and the wine; both were laid out and ribboned on the dressing-table. Ali felt a moment's sadness that there'd been need to change from twin to single, but fate seemed to have provided a stop-gap friend, so she let it pass.

Amy returned downstairs to let Ali shower and change, insisting that she and her dad would wait. Delving into her suitcase, fresh from under the cooling jets, the London girl considered a modest one-piece costume for the beach, but opted instead for the little red bikini. No faffing around - she was here to feel the sunshine on her skin, on as much of it as possible, so to hell with coyness. She glanced at the pretty green-eyed girl in the mirror with the smattering of sun-freckled over her gracefully ski-sloped nose and gave a cheeky smile. Refreshed and renewed in her spirit of adventure she joined father and daughter in the lobby, a beach-bag slung over her shoulder and a pastel-green tee-shirt barely concealing the hot red number beneath.

"Ready to hit Paradise?" asked David, as they set out into the late-afternoon sunshine.

"After the Great British Summer fizzled out mid-July?" returned Ali. "I should damn well think so!"

They all grinned their way through the palm trees which fringed the warm sands, Ali basking in the sub-tropical heat, loving the breeze coming off the crystal-blue Mediterranean Sea. The beach was still crowded - a mix of partying teens and twenties and more sedate family groups. A boom-box was pumping out Katie Perry's California Gurlz a few hundred yards off. Everything screamed of high summer.

"Now we're talking," breathed David in a tone of someone who had abandoned all workaday concerns. His daughter had already flung down a blanket and was beginning to comfy herself. He whipped off his tee-shirt in a single flourish, revealing a compact and already tanned upper body. Ali admired involuntarily but discreetly; it was good to see a married man in his - what? - late-thirties, early-forties, who took care of himself.

Amy was stripping down to swimwear as well, though in her dad's presence she had gone with a rather more demure costume than Ali's. There was a moment of doubt in Ali's mind before she went for the big summer reveal, hands crossed to grip the thigh-brushing hem of her tee-shirt. Was this a little too much - make that a little too little - in front of these strangers? But then they had adopted her, and she was on her holidays for Heaven's sake. Let the good times begin. She peeled the tee up and over her head in similarly cavalier fashion to David, introducing her lissomness to the Greek sunshine.

It was all she could do as she plonked her neat rump onto the blanket not to look see if Amy's dad was reacting. She knew how to use her body to tease, Adam Rylance could have told anyone that. How many times had she slinked her sinuous form around his or her bedroom butt naked or as good as, wiggling he pert rear for him as she snaked from the bed or drawing her firm hard-nippled little handfuls the length of his body as he gasped and tensed? Or that memorable occasion she had danced in the mesmerised boy's car headlights wearing a rain-soaked, translucent summer dress, just like she'd seen Nicole Kidman do in a movie. She found herself hoping such magic could work on this older experienced man and checked herself immediately. A little propriety was called for, so she settled on the blanket as primly as she could in her tiny two-piece.

"God, you look amazing," Amy enthused. "You're just built for the beach. All the boys will be looking, you'll be fighting them off!" 'Boys' again. Like everyone was urging her to court the interest of boisterously inept youths. Amy looked over to her father with an arch grin. "Just as long as I don't catch my dad checking you out. I'll make you cover up!"

Ali glanced inadvertently at David, but he betrayed no sign of guilt. "It's supposed to be the other way around," he told her with a wry smile. "The father embarrassing his teenage daughter. Feel free to swat my offspring on the back of her head. I'm off for a swim." She smiled in return, liking him all the more. As she set about her body with sun screen, she felt a moment's regret that he had not stuck around to view the creamy application, but she shook off such an inappropriately naughty thought. What sort of temptress did she suddenly think she was?

"Your dad's cool," she told Amy, by way of atonement for her secret thought-crime.

"Yeah, I suppose he is," Amy replied affectionately, "but not as cool as he thinks he is. He pretends to like Kings of Leon, but he's got Dire Straits in his collection. He's still an Eighties guy at heart." They giggled together and shared sun screen and Amy's i-Pod. Ali dozed to the sounds of N-Dubz and of Ayia Napa at play, the soft rush of waves on shore underlying it all, as the sun reflected off her skin.

She was awoken by David's return, opening her eyes to the sight of his salt-water-glistening frame sitting down the other side of Amy. "It's great in there, it's like a heated pool. You girls need to try it out before we head back."

They did, David accompanying for a second dip. The waters were truly blissful, caressing Ali's body as she floated on her back, her flat tummy just shy of the surface. She couldn't help but feel proud of the slender physique she was sporting this summer. Amy lay buoyed up beside her, till her father made to duck her under. "Dad, you can't do that any more! I'm not a kid!" She flipped over and swam off, still protesting merrily at the dad-perpetrated indignity, Ali laughing at the whole performance. Amy evaded her flailing parent and as he spun around to seek her he found Ali confronting him instead. For a moment he looked like he might dunk her in Amy's place, but he backed off immediately in his intent.

"My daughter's now officially too fast for me - that's bad," he quipped instead. They smiled together and Ali could not help the tingling sensation in her bikinied loins. Then Amy surfaced behind her father and pushed him under, so that both girls squealed with laughter.

"All that running, dad," Amy giggled when he spluttered to the surface. "And you still can't catch up with me."

"You run?" Ali asked, as she bobbed in the water, hopeful that David might share one of her favourite pursuits.

"It's his fitness regime. He's going to be ready for the London Olympics," Amy laughed. "He says he's going to go beach-jogging every morning before breakfast. You run too, Ali?"

"Inter-school athletics. I'm trying to keep it up, maybe do some competitive stuff at Uni."

"You should join dad in the morning. Shouldn't she, dad?"

"Give the girl some space," David responded hastily. "She's only just arrived. Although maybe you'd like to join us all for dinner tonight...?"

Ali accepted the invitation, to Amy's delight, and that evening she accompanied them all, meeting Melanie Gosling for the first time. Amy's mother was a neat and attractive woman with short-styled dark hair, around the same age as her husband. She was friendly enough, but cast an appraising eye over her daughter's holiday friend as they ate souvlaki and Greek salad at the gladed taverna.

"So what are your plans for after the summer, Ali?"

"I'm starting my Degree course," Ali responded with a surge of pride. "My A-level results came in last week."

"She got an A and two Bs," Amy interjected with delight at her new friend's success. "She's super-smart."

"And just maybe she studied hard," Melanie suggested meaningfully to her daughter. Amy protested about her own academic endeavours and Melanie let the subject go, turning back to Ali. "What course will you be studying?"

"Business Studies and Applied Economics," Ali said a touch sheepishly. She always felt embarrassed and pleased in equal measures when revealing her smarts to strangers.

"That's impressive," Melanie smiled, glancing at her husband. "Maybe she could give you some advice, David, on managing your new enterprise."

"Dad's kicked in his job to start up a restaurant," Amy informed, beaming at her father.

"Despite knowing little or nothing about the restaurant trade," added her mother, though there was more indulgence than reproof in the woman's voice.

"And it's going very well," David replied, swilling retsina around in his glass. "The good people of Bury St Edmunds are really taking to Cajun cuisine."

"Initial signs are... modestly encouraging, I'll give you that," said Melanie, and she gave her husband's hand a brief squeeze. "Although you picked your moment with all Amy's university fees ahead."

"Sometimes you just need to go with your instinct and the moment," he replied, his blithe tone coloured with just a touch of defensiveness. "I think that's a good lesson in itself."

"It will be if everything works out," Melanie said quietly.

Amy's eyes darted between her parents, a touch of concern on her face. "Ehhh - can we maybe lighten up here?" she requested. "Like we're on holiday?" They both smiled as though she had called them on their silliness and relaxed into the meal.

"She's supportive of him really," Amy explained to Ali later on.

"She even took on extra legal work to help support while he was getting it off the ground. He'd been a manager in his firm, you see? Doing really well. And then he said he got fed up with it all, so he felt he needed to go change some things in his life. Mum thought he was mad. Hey, are you going to go running with him tomorrow?"

Ali didn't join David on the beach next morning, with her need for a lie-in and a certain bashfulness which had come over her. She did however hook up with him two days later. By that time she had spent a full forty-eight hours bonding with the father-daughter team; they had played tennis, swum in the expansive hotel pool and gone windsurfing - laughing and taunting each other at their sometimes faltering progress. Ali had found much to admire in the wet-suited David taking control of his sailed board, standing strong and harnessing the breeze to surf smoothly shorewards. She got the measure of her sail as well and they shot each other appreciative glances as they sped.