Chapter 1

I know you’re supposed to start out a story or book with some memorable sentence that grabs the reader’s attention and won’t let go. But the truth is, there isn’t anything special about me or my situation that is memorable or attention grabbing.

Well, to be honest, there were plenty of things that happend that were memorable now that I’m older, but none of them had happened yet. It might seem a little jumbled around, because I’m going to tell some of this from my present perspective, and some of it as it happened back then. It’s hard for me to keep them separate, so forgive me if the ‘voice’ changes back and forth. One of my friends is an English major and he looked at this. He pointed out the voice issue. But I’m not an English major and for all I know no more than five or ten people will ever read this. So you get me like I am.

When this story started, I was a junior in a five year mechanical engineering program. I had no girlfriend because I didn’t have the time it takes to both keep a girlfriend entertained and study. And while you may have coasted through your first years of college, I had to take courses like thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, where you study the way fluids interact with everything around them. Did you know air is a fluid? I didn’t either. Scientifically speaking it is, though.

Anyway, just about the only respite from studying were holidays, when I got to go home and get a good meal.

And maybe some sex, too.

I know that sounds counter-intuitive, since I said I didn’t have a girlfriend. But when you have no girlfriend, you can ask any girl out who you want to, and take things just as far with her as she’s willing to go. And some of the girls you went to high school with, and who didn’t go off to college, and who didn’t get married, tend to think a college guy is sexy. I’ll also admit to kicking up my heels at school now and then. Coeds are willing to go quite a ways these days. You can only go so far, though. It’s an old song, but it’s still true. Girls just wanna have fun... you know? At least some of them. Enough that I get my dick wet once in a while. Not very often, mind you. Girls do want to have fun, and that means going to concerts and on dates and out to eat, as opposed to hopping in bed for thirty minutes of sexual calisthenics and then watching your boyfriend study for four hours.

So now you understand why I didn’t have a girlfriend.

Besides, most of the time I could handle things by myself, if you know what I mean. In some senses, masturbation is quicker, easier, cleaner, and safer than the real deal.

And it turns out that my masturbatory habits were more important than I would have believed. You’ll understand that in a little bit, but for now I’ll just keep going so you don’t have to jump around. For now let’s just say most of my orgasms were self-induced when I felt the need to bust a nut.

I used visual aids, of course. What guy doesn’t? And my favorite source of visual aids was the incredible array of Tumblr sites on the web. They are literally countless, at least from the outside of a monitor. There isn’t enough time in the day to look at all of the sites, even if that was your job.

If you’re not familiar with the service, Tumblr is a website that lets you array your collected pictures in an archived format, meaning as sort of extra big thumbprint pictures. Then, if a viewer clicks on the thumb, it expands to a full sized picture. Tumblr has all sorts of visual blogs, running the gamut from nature scenes, to animals, to clothing, to hats, to whatever someone wants to collect.

And a lot of people collect pictures of naked girls.

They collect pictures of naked guys too, of course, and transsexuals, and every other stripe of sexual being. But all I was interested in were the girls, and I had a collection of pictures that never failed to produce a boner virtually on demand, and then aid me in making that boner wilt.

My favorite kind of Tumblr picture was the kind where the girl was posing, meaning she knew the photographer was about to take a picture. It’s very popular for girls to take pictues of themselves in the mirror, in the privacy of her own home. Those girls aren’t actually posing for another live person, though, who is standing right there, taking the picture. There are hundreds of Tumblr blogs where people use telephoto lenses to take candid shots of people on nude beaches and stuff like that, but I like it when a beautiful girl is looking at the camera... displaying herself to a separate photographer... me.

Of course I know she’s not displaying herself to me. She doesn’t even know I exist. I understand that. But she was displaying herself to someone when the picture was taken. And it’s easy for me to imagine it was me... and that the picture taking was merely a prelude - foreplay, if you will - to letting me touch her and make love to her.

My favorite kind is of a woman with shaved pussy lips that are slightly open, as if she’s already aroused and her pussy is ready for me. She’s willing to have sex. She wants to have sex. It’s not impossible that she could look at me that way too.

My collection has grown during the four years I’ve been surfing Tumblr sites, and probably has a thousand such pictures in it.

Anyway, you didn’t start reading this to delve into my masturbatory practices, so I’ll go on.

It was at this point in my life when my father called me and asked if I was coming home for Thanksgiving. I said yes, of course. The college made that into a four day mini break and I wasn’t about to pass up a chance for that much food and being able to maybe watch a movie or play one of my old video games or something.

“Bring nice clothes,” said my dad. “We’re going to have company.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t ask who was coming to visit. To be honest, I didn’t really care who came to visit. Knowing my mother, there’d be plenty to eat, and that was all that mattered.

I guess I still had a lot to learn about myself.

I’d forgotten all about the company by the time I got home. Nobody was there when I arrived, so I took my stuff to my room. I still called it my room, even though, technically, none of my stuff was in it any longer. I had expected my sister, Lori, to commandeer my room when I left, because it was bigger than hers, but she’d lost out when Mom had turned it into a guest bedroom. This was primarily because Mom had gotten all caught up in the Facebook rage and had found a bunch of her old high school friends and they invited each other to visit and all that stuff. I had a Facebook page, but I hadn’t looked at it for months. If you let it, Facebook can take a huge amount of your time, and I didn’t even have time for a girlfriend. My motto is, if it won’t get you a degree, and you can’t fuck it or eat it, then it’s probably a waste of your time.

I know that sounds harsh. You try understanding the art of containing a nuclear reaction that is basically a small star, in three sessions a week for one semester, and then talk to me about my priorities.

Speaking of small stars, my mother was obviously going through menopause, because she had the heat up to what felt like ninety degrees. I sighed. I hadn’t brought home any shorts.

Anyway, as soon as I walked into “my” bedroom, I remembered that we had company coming. I assumed it was another one of Mom’s long lost friends, and that she’d probably want to give them this room. So I went to the basement to see if the fold-out couch was still down there, or if Dad had replaced it with a pool table, like he was always saying he wanted to do.

Thankfully the couch was still there. Even more thankfully, the rolled-up two inch thick egg carton cushion thingy that went on top of the mattress was still in the closet. At least the springs in the mattress wouldn’t poke me all night. And, being a tired college kid, I made up the bed and laid down on it to catch a few zees before I had to act like I was interested in anything more than not having to study until one in the morning.

I woke up to the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs to the basement.

“His car is here,” I heard my mother’s voice say. “He must be down here for some reason. Maybe he’s going through his old stuff. I had Don store it down here.”

About the time I remembered that, because my mother had the heat so high, I had slept like I always sleep - naked - my fuzzy mind informed me that the reason I didn’t feel the sheet covering me was because I had kicked it off while I slept.

And, of course, that’s when my mother and whoever she was talking to stepped down the last step and came into the basement. My mind casually informed me that, for whatever reason, in addition to being naked in front of my mother, I also had a diamond hard boner, the kind that points upward if you’re standing and is in the perfect position to enter a woman’s body. Believe it or not, I wondered, for a few brief seconds, if I had been having a nice dream before being wakened.

Then there were a chorus of gasps of consternation from multiple female vocal cords, and I lifted my head, turning bleary eyes towards my mother, Lori, and a girl I didn’t know.

My mind was muddled enough by sleep that my reaction was slow. I didn’t really think about the fact that I was displaying my engorged manhood to the world in general, and my mother and sister specifically. I just tried to wake up. I hadn’t had time to process any feelings for the other girl.

“Wow!” said the stranger. She sounded like an alto who was trying hard to be a soprano at the moment.

“Bobby!” squeaked my mother in obvious surprise. Lori said “Bobby!” too, but the translation was, “Of course you’d do something gross like that!”

Don’t ask me why, but for some reason what came out of my mouth at that point was, “I go by Bob now, Mom.”

It turned out that the visitors my parents had invited to Thanksgiving dinner were Tom and June Austin and their daughter, Cassie. I remembered them vaguely from previous family reunions I’d been to. Our extended family, or at least most of our extended family, had a reunion every two years. Because we were scattered all over the place, reunions were held in a different part of the country each time. They lasted a week and were held near some tourist destination, like Six Flags, or Disneyland, or a national park or whatever.

I had loved reunions in the past. That’s because when we all got there, the adults did their thing and us kids were turned loose to do whatever we wanted as well. When you’ve got 200 people coming to a reunion, that means there will be forty or fifty kids to play with. And in that particular setting, the prohibition against playing with kids of other genders or age ranges just wasn’t there. It didn’t matter how old you were... you got to participate in whatever was going on, if you wanted to. The relationships were complicated and once you got past uncles and aunts, which pretty much meant any adult, everybody else was usually just addressed by putting “cousin” in front of their name.

June Austin, as I understood things, was my dad’s first cousin. She was Uncle Joey’s daughter. Dad called him Uncle Joey, and so did I. I actually had a real uncle named Fred, but he was my mother’s brother. Don’t ask me how, but I was able, somehow, to rationalize calling my real uncle Uncle Fred, and my great uncle, Uncle Joey, and feel like I was making perfect sense.

Cassie, the girl my mother had brought downstairs while looking for me, was my second cousin. I knew this because it had been explained to me (at a reunion) that because Cassie and I shared the same great-grandparents, we were second cousins. The lesson had gone on to explain the difference between a second cousin and a first cousin once removed, but that made my head hurt. It still does. I’m convinced that’s why the entire Victor clan all call each other by the generic name of cousin. If they didn’t, then trying to figure out the actual relationships would use up the whole week.

Rather than talk about types of cousins, though, let’s talk about Cassie. I called her a “girl” but that’s probably because I had missed the last three reunions, and the last time I saw her she was eleven or something. She was the same age as Lori and they had been fast and true friends at all the reunions. When I had seen her last, she was at that stage of female development when it’s obvious she is female, and yet she has no traditional female attributes. She had been, quite literally, flat as a board, with no hips, and long, coltish legs. She’d almost always had her hair in pig tails, since that kept it out of her face while hiking or swimming or climbing rocks, all of the things us kids traditionally did at reunions.

Basically, I remembered Cassie as one of my girl cousins, younger than me.

She was still younger than me, but believe me, she wasn’t a girl any longer.

The little girl with pigtails was still an inch shorter than me, but that put her at five feet eleven inches, instead of the four feet she’d been the last time I saw her. Further, her board-flat chest had somehow mushroomed into twin mounds that brought to mind my sister’s Barbie Dolls. She was wearing a dress when they walked in on me. It fit her rather well, which accentuated those breasts and then hung in little ripples from hips that swelled outward from her thin waist, revealing quite a bit of her legs. The last time I’d seen those legs they’d been knobby-kneed, with scratches and bruises on them. Now they were long, and smooth, and I was a little shocked because, like a stab of lightning from the clouds, I wondered what they’d feel like wrapped around my body.

And I don’t mean in terms of two kids wrestling and goofing around.

I was so shocked by the changes in my cousin that I echoed her own comment by saying “Wow!”... and with what I’m sure was the same level of amazement that her own voice had held. I shouldn’t have been so surprised, being in the learning and thinking business, because Lori had filled out over the years and looked two or three years older than she was. Lori was a babe, but of course I’d never have told her that. She had been a brat for most of my life and always would be. Shows you how little a learner and thinker comprehends, at least when it comes to something other than physics.

“Bobby!” my mother gasped again. Whether that was because I was naked, or because there were seven inches of excited-looking manhood standing up from my loins, or because I was in better shape than the last time she’d seen me, was unsure. I had started working out while I studied, both because I needed to tone things up, and because that kept me awake. If you read a few pages and do some exercises and then read a few more pages and then do more exercises, it keeps your metabolism going and you’re less likely to doze off.

“Hi, Bobby,” said Cassie. A deaf person could have heard the interest in her voice, and my mother’s head swiveled like a target-seeking radar dish.

“He’s your cousin, Cassie!” she snapped.

“I mean Bob,” said Cassie, poised on the steps like a dancer, ready to leap into the void. “Sorry,” she added. “It’s really nice to see so much of you.” Her hand flew to her mouth and I could see her blush clear across the room. “I mean see you again,” she gasped.

Lori had been staring at her, but suddenly she giggled. Her eyes turned back to me and I saw interest in them, too. I figured that was because she was trying to figure out a way to turn all this to her advantage. I ignored her and gazed at Cassie.

I lay there, trying to look like some statue Michelangelo might have carved. I never even felt the slightest urge to cover my groin with anything. Instead I felt myself flex my pecs and almost burst into laughter because of it. She was gorgeous, and just then I didn’t care how cousins were supposed to feel about each other.

“Get dressed!” said my mother, snapping at me this time, instead of Cassie. “Our company is here.”

“Do you need any help?” asked Cassie, her voice high and a little breathless. If anything, I got even harder.

“No, he does not!” said my mother. I was shocked, not by what she had said, but the way she had said it. When she’d snapped at us both, her voice had been all mom, and she’d been talking to two kids who needed to be disciplined. But that last comment had come out with something suspiciously like suppressed laughter in it. I wouldn’t know until almost five years later that she was remembering a scene very much like this from her own youth.

I had the insane urge to grip my boner and sit up casually while saying, “Be right there, Mom.” One hand even moved a little, whereupon my mother turned, grabbed my cousin, and spun them both away from me. Lori looked back over her shoulder as she followed them. She grinned and it ruffled me because it wasn’t her signature evil grin. It was more like a conspiratorial grin.

I got out the “Be right there,” but by then they were out of sight.

“Wear something nice!” came my mother’s voice. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

I may have made it sound like my mother was a prude, but that’s not true at all. She’s actually been the more liberal of my parents. I knew what women looked like long before my peers, most likely, because my mother is a bit of a nudist, around the house. Not that she goes around naked. A lot of the time she wears a bra and panties like they were shorts and a T shirt. But if she goes to bed and then wants a drink of water, or something else from the kitchen, she’s quite willing to go get it naked. My father, on the other hand, is always fully dressed in either street clothing or pajamas. I’ve never actually seen him naked.

The point is that, by the time I got my clothes on and my tie tied and my hair combed and got upstairs, my mother was already over what had happened. She was bustling around, and I suddenly realized she had been wearing the apron she had on when she’d brought Cassie downstairs. I happened to walk into the kitchen about the time she was taking a bowl of mashed potatoes to the dining room. She shoved them at me and said, “Put these on the table. You look nice.”