Secrets ... We all have secrets, or “A” secret. Secrets have a way of coming to light, and in some cases with very serious consequences.

Our family, I would guess isn’t much different than any other family. Just about everyone in every family has a secret. At least that’s what I’ve come to learn. This is a story about secrets, and how their revelation affected our family, for good or bad. I guess you will be the judge.

Speaking of our family, there is our dad, Ronald Miller. He’s an aeronautical engineer at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center here in Florida. There’s my older sister, Stephanie, she’s thirty-four with a fourteen-year-old daughter named Zoey. Me, I’m Megan Miller. I’m a nineteen-year-old college nursing student. In case you’re wondering about the age difference between me and my sister, I was an accident, a menopause baby.

All families have their share of tragedy and loss, and ours is no different. Our mom, Natalie, died two years ago at the age of fifty-five from breast cancer. My sister, Steph, finally divorced her no good husband after twelve years of verbal and physical abuse. Poor Zoey, she was finally glad to see him gone and now living in a relatively normal, peaceful environment.

It seems that things in life, and in families can change in a heartbeat. The death in a family member, sudden good news like a free college education, or in my case, sudden bad news when I came out to my dad. My dad and I were pretty close because I was the baby girl, and he spoiled me rotten. We clung to each other when Mom died two years ago in my senior year of high school. But I was harboring a deep secret I had kept since I was ten.

When puberty started and when most girls start looking at boys as attractive and interesting instead of scum and yucky, I was looking at girls that way. I always preferred being around girls than boys. I never gave it much though until I started to feel sexually attracted to some girls that I thought were pretty. By the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I was 98% positive I was gay.

In my senior year of high school, my sister, Stephie, who is a college professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee, informed me that I had been approved and accepted to FSU tuition free. They were offering free tuition and fees to Florida students with a GPA of 3.7 or higher. All Dad would need to pay for was $12,755 for room, board and meals. Tallahassee is a little over 300 miles from where we lived in Cocoa Beach. At the time, my sister was still married to her cheating, abusive piece of shit of a husband.

Things seem to happen in a rapid sequence of events. Right after graduation, I finally worked up the nerve to break the news and come out to my dad. My entire world seemed to implode on me in one eventful evening. My revelation about being gay crushed my dad. He said that he just couldn’t accept it. He said he loved me with all his heart but could not deal with or tolerate looking at me knowing I kissed and had sex with another girl. I had to go. He said he would continue to pay for my college expenses, but that I couldn’t live there any longer. The Bible says the truth will set you free, but it sure didn’t feel that way...

I called Stephie, and she said, “I’ll call Dad. Me and Zoey are through with this abusive asshole. I’m getting ready to leave this prick and divorce him, but I’ll need help. Things will work out okay if Dad will help me out a little financially.”

I said to her, “Dad said I hafta go, but he will still pay for my living expenses at college. How about I move in with you and I pay you what the school would charge me. I’ll just take out a $100 a month for spending cash. That will amount to about $12,000 a year for rent and food I can contribute.”

“With that,” Steph said, “we could make it. That’s a great idea. But, let me find a place and then you come and move in up here with me and Zoey.”

So, that’s what she did. She found a three-bedroom apartment in a quiet section of Tallahassee that opened out into a courtyard. It was fairly cheap at $2,700 a month and close to the college. We’ve been living together now for going on two years. Dad still won’t talk to me, but always puts the money into my account.

Zoey seemed to be delighted her young aunt was moving in. Since I was only five years older than her and still pretty much a kid myself, she immediately adopted me as her “big sister.” I told Steph that I wanted to be the one to tell Zoey I was gay. She was twelve and a half when we sat down, and I told her that I was a lesbian and I asked her if she would feel weird or uncomfortable living with me. She didn’t bat an eye when I told her I was gay and said, “I don’t see any problem at all with it.” So, that was that.

After we settled into our apartment and newfound freedom, things evened out. In fact, life was pretty good. I was going to school tuition free, living in a quiet place away from the dorm and parties, and Zoey was doing better in school. And Steph said she was starting to love life and teaching again.

Zoey is a quiet girl, not reclusive, but not a type “A” either. She’s a bit of a late bloomer. At 5’ 2” and about 105 pounds, she’s not a stick. In fact, she’s got a noticeable flare to her hips, really nice legs and a shapely derriere. Her boobs are just starting to sprout, but if she is anything like Steph and me, she’ll be about a “B” cup.

One night she was going to the movies with some girlfriends, and she had on a cute black skirt with a lacy see-thru peasant blouse with a red camisole underneath and a red scarf around her neck. She also had on a hint of blush and lip gloss. I only mention this because when she looked at me as she was leaving, it put a slight, but unmistakable twinge in my clit. I don’t know if it was the clothes or her look, but I’d never seen such a sexy little girl.

Sexiness in a young girl that age is all very innocent, nothing more that the pleasure she takes in the way she looks and feels. There’s that element of make-believe of growing up and dressing like a woman with a little makeup on.

At least, that’s what the adults charged with their well-being would prefer to think. But even in kids, make-believe can take off in another direction entirely. I’d forgotten that lesson, if I ever knew it, until one afternoon when I came home from school early.

My two-thirty class had been canceled. Steph still had another hour to teach, followed by some faculty meeting or other, and she told me not to wait for her. I was looking forward to a snack and a hot shower. Zoey would already be home, and I was thinking we could surprise her mom by having her dinner ready when she finally got back.

As I said, our apartment opens directly onto a courtyard. I came up the walk and climbed the front step, books in hand, and found that the door wasn’t quite closed. Okay, I thought, Zoey might not have noticed that she didn’t shut the door completely. Her shoes and books were just inside, on the mat in the entryway, but the little living room was empty.

I locked the door behind me.

“Zoey?” I called.

There was no answer. I peeped around the corner, where the bedroom doors face each other across from the bathroom. Our doors were open. Hers was shut. I knocked quietly.

“Squirt, you alive in there?”

Still no answer. Just a sudden, violent noise that sounded like the bed banging against the wall.

Now, Steph and I respect Zoey’s privacy. We would never just barge into her room. If Zoey had said “yeah” or “okay”, or “be out in a sec,” I would have left her in peace and headed for the kitchen. But the weird noise alarmed me. If anything was wrong, and I didn’t help because of some rule of household etiquette, I would never have forgiven myself.

Before any of these thoughts were clear in my mind, my hand was on the handle and the door was swinging open.

At once, I knew I had been right to check — and I was sorry I did.

“My God! What happened?”

I sprang toward the bed.

Time slowed to a crawl, the way it does during a catastrophe. I can recall each piece of information as it presented itself, in order of perception. First, there were Zoey’s eyes, burning hot and gaping at me in terror. Then there was that red scarf — the same one she’d worn to the movies — stretched taut across her open mouth and tied in a great knot behind her neck. Next, there were her feet, raised behind her, and her arms, pulled back at a painful angle, as though they’d been wrenched from their sockets, and her ankles and wrists bound together in a beehive-shaped ball of brown twine.

And then I saw that, except for the pink gag and the tangled cords, she was naked. Her bare back was curved like an archer’s bow, lifting her tiny pink nipples an inch off the bedspread.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all right. I’m here. I’m here.”

I started picking at the knot in the scarf. Missy tried to talk through the gag, but all I heard was a cascade of broken, muffled syllables.

“Shhh. Shhh. I’ll have you out in a second, and we’ll call the police,” I said. “Are you hurt? Did they — oh, no.”

I couldn’t finish. I didn’t have the courage to ask what I thought — what I knew — they had done to her. Whoever they were.

The damned knot would not budge, and only seemed to get tighter as my panic set in. I tried tearing the gag from her mouth, but even that was hard, because the scarf was packed in solid, stretching her lips into a hideous grimace.

Finally, I managed to work it halfway down her chin, and the first thing she said was, “Don’t tell Mom!”

“What?”

“Don’t tell! Please!”

“Of course, we’re going to tell Mom,” I said. “She has to know. And we have to call the police—”

“No!” she pleaded.

“Wait. I’ll get you out, and we’ll talk.”

I went to free her hands and feet.

“Don’t tell anybody!”

I thought she had the presence of mind to worry about what the authorities would do to me and her mother. We had neglected her. We let her stay home alone after school, and she had been attacked. They were going to take her from us. Somehow Zoey knew what would happen.

“I was playing!” she said.

Playing. The word hardly registered, but then it dawned on me, in the same slow, piecemeal way that I’d taken in the rest of the scene, that something didn’t make sense. Missy’s wrists, I saw at last, were bound with nothing but slip knots, and the line that held them together was wrapped just twice around her feet. I was able to free her hands in a few seconds.

If I hadn’t come to the rescue so fast, Missy could have done it herself.

“Missy,” I said, “did you do this?”

“I was playing,” she repeated, like that somehow explained everything.

“Playing? Playing what?”

“Pirates.”

“Oh, God. Oh, God.”

“Don’t tell!”

“I won’t. I won’t.”

“Promise!”

“I promise. But... Jesus!”

I’ve never gave any thought to bondage or kink. I’ve always been a standard-issue, lick-and-trib sort of lesbian. It took my sister’s fourteen-year-old daughter to introduce me to the joy of watching a pretty girl struggle against her restraints.

My clitty was tingling again, the way it had on her movie night, only much more insistently. I forgot about alerting 911 and focused on the spectacle in front of me. There was one detail I’d missed in all the turmoil: Missy had a piece of cord around her waist. And I recognized it now — it was the heavy, 3/8-inch packing twine left over from my move. To that, she’d attached another piece, passing it front to back, like a manilla thong. What a creative little girl she was. I could just imagine how the bristles felt, scratching her asshole and her tender pussy while she pretended to struggle.

I mean, I tried very hard to imagine it.

I traced my finger across the small of her back, along the twine belt, and patted her smooth young buns.

“Do you do this a lot?” I asked.

“Not a lot.”

“But why, uh ... why with no clothes on?” I asked.

“They stole them.”

“Who did?”

“The pirates. I told them I’m a lesbian and don’t like guys. They kidnapped me, stripped me and tied me up saying they were gonna fuck me and make me love cock.”

“Oh, I see. So, if you get loose, you still can’t run away.”

“Right!”

“Well, as a lesbian myself, we can’t let that happen now, can we?”