Chapter 3

About a week after the incident I just described, Amy had to go out of town to a realtor’s convention of some kind. It was assumed Chas would stay with me. It wasn’t even discussed.

My relationship with Chastity had been completely normal that week. She hadn’t gotten weird on me. She’d come to the range three days, and done whatever on the other days. It was summer and I assumed she got together with friends.

The day her mother left was a day she worked at the range. It was a hot day and we were busy. She’d worn a halter top on this day, and shorts. I noticed that the men on the line were either peering at a sight picture ... or at Chastity. Whenever she bent over to sweep brass into the dust pan, there always seemed to be a man there to help her. That help always involved standing where they could look down her cleavage. At one point I motioned her over to me.

“You’re distracting people today,” I said.

“You mean all the dirty old men who keep trying to see my boobs?” she asked, with a half smile on her face.

I saw two guys turn and look at us. They were wearing electronic ear muffs. I mentioned before that you could hear with them on. What I didn’t say is that you can actually hear better with them on. That’s because they have microphones in them and actually amplify speech. If a gun goes off, though, the circuitry in them shuts down and turns those microphones off. The report is muffled and then the microphones turn back on. So you can talk with them on, but they protect your ears from loud, sudden noises. That amplifying feature, though, means you can hear much better, when it comes to talking. I can often hear what people are talking about twenty or thirty feet away, even if they’re talking softly.

“That’s not fair,” I said, for the benefit of the customers. “Not when you’re dressed like that.”

“Millions of girls dress like this,” she said.

“Millions of girls don’t work at my range,” I said, “or cause men with guns to turn around to look at them.”

“You know good and well nobody is swinging guns around all willy nilly,” she snorted. “If my outfit is distracting, maybe I should just go naked?”

Two more guys turned to stare at us. Rod Krieger, one of the first two I mentioned, grinned at me and gave me a thumbs up.

“What’s gotten into you?” I said, realizing for the first time that I should have kept my mouth shut from the very beginning.

“Nothing, Uncle Bob,” she said, sweetly. “I’m still a virgin.” She smiled at her own jest.

I didn’t even look at the line. I knew we had an audience. It was time to assert my dominance, or at least my control as owner of the range.

“If you can’t take this seriously, then maybe you need to go home and think about it,” I said. To be honest, she wasn’t causing any real problems. It wasn’t really a safety issue. Men weren’t mishandling guns because of her. She knew not to position herself where flying brass - very hot brass - would land in her cleavage. She’d learned that lesson when she was only eleven or twelve. That was one of the common safety issues the RSOs had to deal with, in fact. When a piece of brass flipped between the neck and collar of a shooter, or into exposed cleavage, the shooter often reacted in ways that pointed a loaded gun where we didn’t want one pointed.

To keep being honest, I was sending her home just to remind her I was in charge. It was a chickenshit thing to do, on reflection, but some macho part of me demanded I do it.

“Okay,” she said, as if it didn’t matter to her where she spent her day. “I need a shower anyway. I’m all sweaty.”

As if her words were magnets, my eyes dipped and I saw a runnel of sweat obeying the law of gravity as it slid over the tanned skin of her exposed chest, on its way to a resting place between her breasts. I jerked my eyes up, only to find her looking at me. I was caught. She didn’t say anything about that, though. All she did was hold out her hand, palm up.

“Keys?” she said, reminding me that the only way she had to get home was in the truck we’d both come to the range in.

I dug them out of my pocket and handed them to her.

“I’ll pick you up at closing time,” she said, as if everything was fine and dandy.

I bet ten guys watched her saunter out the gate, towards the parking lot, hips swaying.

It could have been more or less. I don’t know. I was watching her, too.

When she picked me up she had on the same clothes. I got in and she watched my eyes slide all over her.

“I decided to weed the garden, since I was already sweaty,” she said.

“It needed it,” I said.

“Yes, it did,” she agreed.

She put the truck in gear and moved us down the road toward the gate. She stopped and I closed and locked the gate. She didn’t offer to let me drive. The radio was tuned to one of “her” stations. Since it wasn’t the one that played rap all the time, I didn’t complain.

The only clue that she might be unhappy with me was her uncharacteristic silence as we drove home. I had realized, by then, that I’d overreacted, so I felt awkward. I wanted to apologize, but was too stubborn to do it.

“I put a pork roast in the crock pot,” she finally said.

“That’s good.”

“First dibs on the shower when we get home,” she said.

“I’ll use the other one,” I said.

I need to explain, here, that there is a guest bath in the hallway that led to the bedrooms. It has a regular tub in it, with a shower head on the wall and a plastic shower curtain suspended from a rod. In the master bath, attached to my bedroom, I did some remodeling and installed one of those large glass-doored cubicle enclosures that had multiple jets of spray on three walls. And one above, of course. You could hold your arms above your head and turn in a circle and you’d be blasted with spray all over your body. The first time I used it, I couldn’t help but think about the decontamination chambers you see in movies, where somebody gets blasted with chemicals to get whatever off of them that’s bad for them. You could turn the various jets on and off if you didn’t want to feel like you were in a gentle hurricane. I liked it. You soap up, and then turn around a couple of times and presto, you’re squeaky clean.

Chastity liked it too. Whenever she was at my house and wanted to take a shower, she took it in there. There was even a hook on the wall that had her fluffy, white, terrycloth robe hanging on it.

So it wasn’t odd for her to use my shower. I hadn’t even turned the other one on in years, so I figured I needed to test everything anyway, so I didn’t mind going in the guest bath. I took clothes with me, of course, and emerged ten minutes later feeling much better. I wore jeans at the range, and a range vest that has patches on it telling people I’m an RSO and the owner of the range. It has pockets all over it that I keep various tools in, in case somebody has a malfunction that needs tools to correct. With a T shirt on under it, it’s perfect in the spring and fall, in terms of comfort. In the summertime, though, it gets hot and uncomfortable.

So there I was, all comfy in gym shorts and a tank top, looking at the guide on the TV to see if there was anything I wanted to watch, when Chastity came out from her shower.

Chastity, it seems, had done things a little differently than I had. She had not, for example, taken clothes to put on after her shower. All she had on, in fact, was a towel, wrapped around her body. Another one had her hair bundled up inside it. The one around her body was knotted in the front, a little to one side, which meant the gap in the rest of it gave tantalizing little glimpses of the front of her body ... below her breasts and just enough off center that only high thigh was exposed. Or maybe it’s low hip. I don’t know what it’s called. All I know is it’s skin that isn’t exposed when someone is wearing clothing. Any kind of clothing.

Oh ... and she was wearing the pearls from Lucy’s jewelry box.

“How do they look?” she asked, getting right to the point.

“Ummm,” was my response. That’s because my mind was grappling with the concept that hundred-year-old pearls were touching the skin of a girl who hadn’t even seen seventeen summers. Both looked beautiful.

My response was apparently not what she’d been hoping for. Her fingers came to the knot in the towel and flicked it loose. The towel dropped like it was made of lead. While I stared, stupefied by her nudity, her hands went to deal with the other towel and her hair fell free. When she did that her breasts seemed to perk up on her chest, rising a little. I had seen those breasts a hundred times, but they’d always been confined in some way, or hidden behind cloth of some sort. She had the kind that looked bigger, naked, than they did in bikini cups, and her nipples were a little cockeyed, looking off in different directions.

There was a lot going on in my mind, and it wasn’t like anything I could remember happening to me before. For example, while I was noticing all those things about her breasts, part of my mind contemplated on how her hair wasn’t damp, which meant she’d protected it from the water during her shower. As my eyes fell to examine sparse, blond hair cut to a perfect V that I knew had been trimmed for her bikini, some part of my brain realized the towel she’d wrapped around it wasn’t wet, either, which meant she’d put it on for effect, rather than because it was needed. At the same time my eyes followed the natural direction indicated by the V of her pubes, which led them to pussy lips that looked like they belonged on a woman twice her age. Her inner labia bulged from between the outer ones, as if too much pussy had been packed into too small a package.

“Is this what you had in mind?” she asked, her voice entirely too innocent for the situation.

I forced my eyes back up to her face. She was simply looking at me. She didn’t look uncomfortable, or nervous. That, and the fact that she displayed no trace of embarrassment as she wantonly displayed her charms to me, signaled to my brain that something very serious was going on here.

That would be my large brain, the one in my skull.

My little brain, down in my groin, didn’t take time to think about anything at all, other than the fact that there was a naked, prime piece of pussy standing in front of it.

In the time it takes me to type this sentence, I went from soft and floppy to rarin’ to go. The front of my gym shorts suddenly poked up obscenely.

She walked over to me, watching me staring at her, and bent over to put her face maybe five inches from my traitorous prick. She left her legs straight, and as she bent over, her breasts hung there like ripe fruit, ready to be picked and consumed right there in the orchard.

“That’s better,” she said, standing up. She put her hands on her hips. “Now, where’s your camera?”

It’s hard to talk when your jaw is hanging open, and you haven’t breathed for a while because some part of your body decided you needed to hold your breath. And I’m not trying to make excuses, or put it all on her. I was a fully mature man, and I should have taken control. I could have stopped her. I know that. But, as a man, faced with a willingly naked, nubile young woman who was not only completely comfortable with the fact that I had an erection, but approved of that erection ... I didn’t want to stop it.

Again, it’s not her fault. It was never her fault. I was the adult in the situation, and I didn’t act like one.

Come to think of it, maybe I did act like an adult. The problem was that I acted like she was one, too.

Since I didn’t (couldn’t) answer her, she went “looking” for the camera. By that, I mean she went around the living room and bent over to search for it. She bent over each end table, and then she bent over to search the couch. She moved to the TV stand and bent over to search the opening under it where we kept DVDs. She knew the camera wasn’t in any of those places. All she was doing was making sure I got to look at her pussy.

I remember she turned to face me at one point and that V she had shaped her pubes into seemed like something on a pirate’s treasure map. What that treasure was was obvious. There was so much treasure that it was leaking out through a split in the container. Now those bulging lips looked shiny ... damp ... as if she’d neglected to dry off after her shower. Except any idiot would know it wasn’t water making them look like that. She was excited. Her body had already produced lubricating oils to protect her tender tissues from some errant, rough, unthinking penis that might try to plug that leak and put even more treasure in her box.

From the back, she displayed the quintessential split peach image of a vagina ready and willing to do the first part of what it was designed for. It was prepared for that rough, unthinking penis to deposit a load of sperm inside her body. If it took root, and made a baby, then her vagina was ready to open to expel said child.

And she was doing all this on purpose.

I know the counselors and social workers all said I seduced her, and that she was too young to understand what she was doing, that I pressured her into doing things, that I used my authority as a care-giver to manipulate her emotions. I know my sister bought into all that.