Chapter 2

I was pretty miserable that night, because I was pretty sure I’d screwed up a good thing. Valerie really was my best friend, and the thought that I’d driven her away by being a pervert really tore me up.

The next morning, as I approached the bus stop, and saw she was already there, I slowed down. I was afraid to go up next to her. I was afraid that she’d tell me our friendship was over, and suggest that perverts should stand at least ten feet away from decent girls, or something like that.

So I stopped, ten feet away.

She looked at me for a minute, and then said, “What’s wrong with you?”

“What?”

“Why are you standing way over there?”

I was confused.

“I didn’t think you wanted me too close,” I said.

“What? Why not? Are you sick?”

“No. Last night.” It was all I could think to say.

She actually smiled. “Oh, you mean because you’re a pervert?”

I was getting mixed signals. Her smile looked genuine. But she was still calling me a pervert.

“Yeah,” I said, carefully.

“You know, Bobby, for somebody who is so smart, sometimes you can be so dumb,” she said.

I would have loved to ask her about that, but the bus got there, and once we were on board, sitting in the same seat we always sat in, she turned to talk to Judy Timmerlake and ignored me.

The wall between us was not insurmountable. What I just described is an example of a bump that made us aware of that wall, but we could still see over it most of the time. We still thought of each other as best friends, and we still hung out almost all of the time when we didn’t have family duties or school or whatever.

Our parents were still friends too, and we still had Bar-B-Qs and card parties. Now that we were older, Valerie and I got to play cards with the grownups. Before this, if they were playing spades, it was the men against the women. They played hearts, too. The men usually suggested Hearts when they’d been thoroughly trounced by the women in Spades.

But when Valerie and I joined in, the teams had to change. Now, for some reason, my dad and Valerie’s mom were always a team, and my mom and Valerie’s dad were a team. Valerie and I were a team, of course. That was just a given. I later found out that our parents split up during card parties because that made for fewer arguments later about who had caused who to lose.

Anyway, the bond between me and Valerie took on a different kind of feeling. Now we were teamed up against others, who were older and had more experience than we did. They taught us the tactics of the games, but at the same time I think they just assumed we would be easy marks.

But we weren’t. We were incredibly competitive. We didn’t win all the hands, of course, but the games were always close. And when we played Hearts, it was as cut throat as you can imagine. It was exhilarating. We worked together sometimes, like a mated pair, but at other times we tried to cut each other off at the knees, and crowed when we did it.

As odd as it may sound, I think that drew us even closer together than we had been. It was a little thing, but working together like that, and feeling confident enough in our relationship to have fun trashing each other too, just stepped things up somehow.

And so our fifteenth year passed as our relationship matured as well. It was almost like old times, but better somehow.

For instance, on the 4th of July, after the daytime fireworks were all shot up, and there was nothing to do until it got dark, Valerie said, “You know, we haven’t explored in the woods for a long time.”

Her inference was obvious, so I said, “I’m game. Let’s go.”

We raced through the woods, towards the place we had gathered odds and ends into, and built a sort of fort with. But that had been ages ago, and it had been at least two years since we’d been there, and we were both curious as to what the place looked like. As it happened, she was ahead of me and, as she ran, I realized she was shaped like a woman. Her hips were wider than her waist, which looked smaller than it had, somehow. She was wearing a halter top, which left her midriff bare, so I could see her skin. It looked like her upper body was being poured into her shorts or something. The strap across her back pressed into her skin. It looked very tight, and I wondered if she was wearing the halter top because she still hated her bras like she had back when she first had to wear them.

Of course that led me to think about what was making that strap so tight.

I knew I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about her breasts, so when we got to our fort I tried to think about that instead. It had been so long since we’d been there that everything was covered with a layer of dead leaves. Nothing had been disturbed in our absence. We were the only kids in our neighborhood, which was made up mostly of people who were about ready to retire. All their kids had already grown up and left home.

As I stood there, I had what my Language Arts teacher would have said was an epiphany. That sad pile of bits and pieces, odds and ends, which had meant so much to us in years gone by, now looked like a pile of junk. What in our imaginations had been the furnishings of our make believe castle was, in reality, just trash that belonged in a landfill. It was just like our lives. In years gone by, there was nobody I was closer to than Valerie, but in the cold light of modernity, there was a chasm between us that made my heart ache. Just as the things lying around our fort had, somehow, become worthless, I felt like our relationship had somehow become strained and difficult.

Oh, we were still friends. And she was still my best friend. But it just wasn’t the same as it had been when we built this fort, and danced around, yelling at imaginary foes, warning them not attack, lest they be vanquished. Back then we could have talked about anything. I could have looked at any part of her body. I could have touched her.

But now there were private things, that she would not share with me.

I’m not saying I broke down and cried like a girl or anything. But I was kind of sad.

I looked at her. She was bent over, pulling things out of a pile, separating junk from leaves. Her butt looked round and firm inside her jeans shorts.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Looking for something,” she replied.

“What?”

She looked over her shoulder at me. Part of her hair had fallen forward, having escaped her pony tail. It hit me like a ton of bricks that my best friend was also ... cute!

“Remember that butcher knife?”

“The one you stole and your mother searched for for months?”

“Yes, only it was my dad who kept looking for it. He said it was the best knife we’d ever owned.”

“Okay.”

“I thought it would be fun to put it back and see what happens.”

“You’re kidding.”

She stood up.

“No I’m not. Why would I kid you about something like that? Just think about it. It will drive him crazy! It will be so much fun!”

“You think the strangest things are fun,” I said, thinking idly about how much fun it might be to uncover those breasts and see how much they had changed, over the years.

“Help me find it,” she ordered. She’d always ordered me around when we were at the fort. She had decided she was the queen of the castle.

So I went over, as she bent over, to help her. But as she bent forward, her halter top presented me with a view that stopped me like I’d been hit by a linebacker. It had been a while since I’d stared at her breasts, because I knew she didn’t like that, so I had sort of trained myself not to look there. I snuck peeks, now and then, but not like this. The inner slopes of her breasts looked smooth and rounded, and the cleft between them looked big enough that my whole hand would fit in there.

And, just like that, I got a boner.

I know that doesn’t sound like such a big deal. Teenage boys get boners all the time. I was normal. I got them pretty much every day.

But I’d never gotten a boner for Valerie. Not for my best friend.

And, for the first time in my life, I actually felt like a pervert.

Except I felt guilty, and I kind of doubt that real perverts feel guilty. I mean that’s what makes them perverts, right?

Anyway, there I was, with what, under different circumstances, would have been a magnificent hard on. It was one of those kind that make you proud when you wrap your hand around it and it feels like iron. It was the kind that you know will only have to be stroked a few dozen times and it will erupt like Mount Vesuvius.And wouldn’t you know it, that’s when she looked up, to see what was taking me so long.

It was right in front of her face. I looked down at the bulge that was making my zipper show, and at her face, which were only inches apart. She couldn’t miss it. In fact, I saw her eyes go past it, and then stop, and go back. But it was only for a second, and then she was looking up at my face, which had to look like I had a sun burn, because I could feel the heat in my cheeks.

My mind warred between telling her I was sorry, and thinking that Valerie wasn’t the kind of girl who knew about boners, or at least the kind of girl who would recognize one in a guy’s pants. Not that I knew any of those kind of girls, but I knew they existed.

“Are you going to help me or not?” she asked.

“Uh ... yeah ... sure,” I stammered.

“You think it might be today?” Her eyes went back down my body and, just in case, I tried to make it look normal that both of my hands came to cover my crotch at the same time.

So I bent over, which was interesting. I don’t think I ever tried to bend over with a full born boner in my pants before. If you’re going to do that, don’t wear tight jeans, because it fucking hurts!

I started lifting things off of the pile, and she found the knife. It was in surprisingly good shape, considering how long it had been there, and how many times it had rained and all that. But I guess some of that other stuff protected it, because the handle looked fine. The blade was rusty, but not too bad. I knew it could be cleaned up with steel wool, which we had in our garage.

Happily, examining the knife distracted me enough that my boner softened.

And I made sure I took the lead on the way back home.

We cleaned up the knife in my garage. She wanted to sharpen it, but I told her not to, because if the edge was shiny, her dad would know it had been done recently, and would know something was up. My eyes kept darting to that awesome cleavage, but I made them look somewhere else as much as possible.

“My parents are in your back yard,” she said, taking the knife from me. “I’m going to go put it back right now. This will be so cool!”

She jumped up and down, like a little girl. Her halter top bounced. Not like a little girl at all. By the time she turned and dashed out of the garage, my cock was more hard than soft.

I went up to my room. I had to jerk off. It was the only way to take the stiff out of my cock and keep it soft. I didn’t foresee any difficulties with that. I was an expert at jerking off, having done it daily for a long time. I could probably figure out how long, but it’s not important.

The problem was that what I normally did was sit at the computer in my room, and open the folder that had my special photographs in it, that I had gleaned from the web. I usually did this at night, after my parents were in bed. I’d done it in the daytime a few times, usually after a run, while I was taking a shower. Anytime I was taking a shower, for that matter. But what I liked the most was sitting there, staring at a slide show, until just the right picture came up, and I could imagine that woman and me in a fantasy, where I got to do what I’d never done in real life.

And I didn’t have time right now. Nor could I take a shower for no reason. So I shoved my shorts to my knees and fell on my bed and reached for my cock.

It wasn’t really completely hard. I could stroke it, but it was too spongy.

So I thought about Valerie’s cleavage, and how, in my imagination she had actually looked at the front of my shorts in the woods. For some reason my mind came up with her saying, “Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” I know, it was stupid, but I’ve always thought that was funny.