Chapter 7

There were two problems with the pictures.

The first was, that when I dropped them off, and asked for eight by tens of all of them, on matte paper, they said it would be overnight, instead of the hour they advertised all over the place. Well, the fact that they would take 24 hours wasn’t the problem. The problem was that, when I went back, they wouldn’t give them to me. In fact, they hadn’t even done them. All there were, were two pages of contact prints. The woman at the counter looked down her nose at me.

“We don’t print pornographic pictures here!” she said, loftily.

“It isn’t porn,” I said, reasonably. “It’s for my college class.”

“As if you were in college,” the woman snorted. “Go away, or I’ll be forced to call the police and turn you in.”

I didn’t know what to do. I thought about going to see Cat, and asking for her help, but then I thought about her, with her half bald head, and crimson hair, with her pierced nose, looking like she was only eighteen, though I knew she was much older, approaching that woman. I just didn’t think that would go down all that much better.

So I asked my mother what I should do.

Remember how intent she was to “have a talk with” Aunt Christy? I barely got the passenger door slammed, before the car was screeching out of the driveway.

“I told him,” said the same woman, “we don’t print pornographic pictures here.”

“They are just breasts,” said my mother, whose voice did not transmit the tension I could see in her body. “You have a pair, yourself, if I’m not mistaken.”

The woman was incensed. She did call the police. I watched in horror as my mother did battle with the bureaucracy of conservatism. I had to explain, again, that I really was taking a college class, and that this was for research, not prurient satisfaction. The nice policeman took an exceptionally long time to examine the contact sheets, holding them so close to his eyes that I thought he might have left his glasses in the squad car.

“I’m going to have to take these with me,” he said gravely. “I might need them for evidence,” he added.

“Are you going to arrest them?” asked the irate counter woman, hope in her eyes.

“That remains to be seen,” he said. He turned to my mother, which put his face where the counter woman couldn’t see it. He winked. “I need you and your son to come with me,” he said.

My mother was rigid with anger, but relaxed, when she saw that wink. It was pretty obvious, even to me.

The cop asked for the negatives too, and we left the store. We were watched by dozens of people as the cop had us follow him to his car. He handed me the negatives.

“Is this really for a research project?” he asked calmly.

“It most certainly is!” said my mother, avidly. “Some of those pictures are of me!“

“Really?” asked the cop, glancing at the contact sheets again. I swear he was going to ask which ones, but he didn’t. “It’s not porn,” he finally said.

“Of course not!” agreed my mother.

“But you’ll never get any of these outfits to print them,” said the man. “They’re too worried about bad publicity. You might be able to get a regular studio to print them.” He looked at me. “What kind of research is this, anyway?”

I gave him the scaled down version of my theory, about how breasts might be important from an evolutionary view, or only a cultural view, and how I planned on having men choose which ones they liked best.

It all turned out pretty well, considering the circumstances. I didn’t have my eight-by-tens, when it was all over with, but I did have my first participant - Officer Charles Dalton - for the group of men who would eventually view them ... if I could get them printed.

My mother was so upset that she drove around, until she saw a photographic studio. We took the negatives and contact sheets in.

That didn’t go all that well either. Getting past the receptionist was an exercise in itself. When the photographer finally held my precious materials in his hands, and had been told what they were for, he glanced over them and frowned.

“They’re black and white, which isn’t going to give you the kind of realistic look you want for what you’re planning. Without color, you’re missing the kind of contrast you want for something like this,” he said. “Plus they’re grainy. If I blow these up, they’ll look snowy. Your light control was non-existent, and some of these are so washed out that I don’t even know if I can print them. I suspect the film was out of date too.”

Of course he got around to suggesting that all the models come in and be shot professionally, in his studio. He could do the whole package. It would only be a couple of thousand dollars.

Both of us were deflated when we left. It appeared that it had all been for nothing.

Well ... not nothing. A lot of emotion had issued from this project. I’d had a heck of a good time, and there were some new relationships budding, which I was really looking forward to exploring further. I got all kinds of nervous, thinking about Aunt Christy, and what she might do, not to mention worrying about the next time I saw Uncle Danny, and whether he’d wring my neck or not. “Don’t worry, Baby,” said my mother, as we drove home. “We’ll think of something.”

I had learned a lot already from my first college project. Most of that was about the Turner women. I had learned, for instance, that they were all gorgeous. I’d known that, on an unconscious level, but many a man has looked at a pretty face, only to be somewhat disillusioned when a naked body was then unveiled.

I had also learned that the Turner women were all horny.

Now I learned that the Turner women were stubborn, and didn’t take well to failure, even when that failure was on the part of the only man in the family. Not counting Danny, of course.

The situation was discussed at the next Friday night confab. Apparently, the word had gone out already, because all of them except Aunt Christy came prepared to stay the night. That was pretty rare, mostly because it put a strain on finding enough places for everybody to sleep.

The next thing I learned was that, even though it was my project, I wasn’t in charge of it any more. In fact, the Turner women didn’t need any man to help them solve this problem. I got my first glimmer of that when Aunt Christy arrived, with Danny, and handed him the keys.

“I have been informed that you and I are going on another ice cream run,” he said, looking at me steadily.

I swallowed. “Oh ... okay.”

“Take your time, darlings,” said my mother. “We women have a problem to deal with.”

Aunt Christy kissed Danny goodbye, and I swear I saw her squeeze his butt while she was doing it. I knew we were being gotten rid of, when they didn’t even give us a list of what kind of ice cream they wanted.

“You want to tell me what the hell is going on?” asked Danny as he steered the car towards downtown.

“It was an accident!” I choked out. “Honest! I didn’t mean anything by it!”

He looked over at me. “That? We’ll talk about that later ... maybe. I’m talking about what’s going on back there, right now.”

I was stunned. If he’d have pulled a gun, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but this just about made me incapable of reacting.

“I don’t know,” I rasped.

“You have more information than I do,” he said. “You live with them. Something happened and they’re all riled up.” He looked over at me again. “And it isn’t that you creamed your shorts while my wife rubbed her tits all over you.”

He didn’t actually sound angry, though his words could have been interpreted that way. He sounded more curious, and worried.

“Give me a chance to think,” I said. “I thought you were going to kill me.”

“It’s complicated,” he said, staring straight ahead, through the windshield. “You’re young. I don’t know if you can understand it. But like I said, that’s for later. It’s not a problem. That’s all you need to know right now.” He sighed. “Well, it might turn out to be a problem, but not between you and me,” he added, mysteriously. “Right now I’m worried about what they’re talking about. When they get that secretive, I get worried.”

“Why?” I asked. “They’re just talking. What could happen?”

“Son,” he sighed. “Look what happened the last time they got together like this. You ended up staring at their naked boobs, and taking pictures of them. My wife almost lived out one of her crazy fantasies, and then fucked me half blind afterwards!”

This was a different Danny than the guy I thought I’d gotten to know. He almost never used words like “tits” and “fucked” and stuff like that. He was ruffled, and Danny was my role model for being calm in almost any situation. I realized he’d called me “son”. I wasn’t used to anybody calling me that. My mother didn’t even use that word. It felt kind of good, even though I knew it was just a turn of the phrase, so to speak. His comment sparked something in my mind, though.

“It might be about the pictures,” I said.

He looked at me, obviously waiting for more.

To read this story you need a Registration + Premier Membership
If you have an account, then please Log In or Register (Why register?)

Support the author's future writing by purchasing this book from Bookapy

How the Women got Plastered and Patrick got Busted

Lubrican

$5.25