Chapter 7: Thanksgiving Dinner

"Well, hello" I typed back. "Happy turkey day to you, too!"

"I thought u said u were going to be offline over the weekend" Lissa sent.

"I snuck away to a Starbucks and I'm on wifi," I half-lied. "How are things going?"

"Fine, fine. Awesome, actually. This is Lissa btw" she typed.

I was hearing the telltale beeps as my responses popped up on her screen in the other room, fairly low volume, but audible. So weird...

Everything that had been happening, it was all confirmed, I realized. All real. There could be no doubts that both my sister and my niece were involved in this ongoing tasks game we were playing. Although there was still a possibility they'd "faked" one or more of the tasks they'd had, that they were both at least involved in the dialogue was incontrovertible at this point. It hardly mattered whether they'd actually done each and every thing exactly as they'd said. I felt both exhilarated and morbidly self-conscious at this sudden awareness.

"So what are you up to today?" I asked.

"Not much... " a pause. "We did the masturbation yesterday. We even did it together for a while."

"Really?" I asked.

"Yep me and mom were so horny last night we were on the couch talking about this weekend and the tasks you sent and we both just started doing it. it was soo hot."

"Wow," I said. "You didn't cum I hope."

"LOL no sir. were following the rules I promise," she typed. "I'm so horny this morning!"

"Sounds like fun," I said, not wanting to be the one to first mention their houseguest -- I wanted to see what she would say.

There were a few minutes of pause, so I sent "Whatcha doing?"

"Just, um ... finding the masturbation description I might use for the Saturday task."

"OK. might?"

"mom and me haven't decide who does which task yet," she explained.

"I see."

"So have to tell you what I did this morning," she wrote after another minute or so.

"What's that? I asked.

"Well, you know my uncle Jason is visiting, right? so and you said we could masturbate if we were really desperate as long as someone was within 10 feet. bonus activity, u called it"

"Yep," I prompted.

"LOL so I was desperate."

"I know how that is," I encouraged. "What did you do?"

"When I came out of the shower I saw uncle Jason sitting at the table. So I went over and sat across from him so he couldn't see my lap and I pretend to read the paper and I u-know-what"

"Awesome," I remarked. "You think he noticed?"

"Well he noticed I was in just a towel from the shower and I'm sure he was checking me out, but I don't think he knew what I was doing with my fingers under the table," she explained.

"You think he was checking you out?"

"Oh definitely :p" She'd included the "tongue out" smiley, teasingly.

"How does that make you feel?" I asked, daringly.

"freakin horny" she exclaimed immediately.

"I'm glad you're having fun," I sent back, inanely.

"Oh definitely."

I couldn't take too much more of this ... and I still felt compelled to keep stretching things out, prevent them from moving too fast. "Hey I've got to get going," I sent to her.

"Ok," she responded, but immediately followed, saying, "before u go can u give me a bonus task?"

"A bonus task?" I asked.

"Yah I'm bored and we have all day till dinner. Plus I'm horny too."

"Ok let me think a sec..." and think I did, furiously. I thought back to a story I'd read a while back, and it gave me an idea. "Ok, here's your task," I finally sent. "Within the next 2 hours, you have to get your uncle to say the words 'penis' and 'orgasm' to you. I don't care how you do it."

"OMG that's a twisted task."

"You think you can do it?" I asked.

"Not sure. :) but I can try LOL" she finally wrote back.

"Good luck. See you later," I sent. And logged off before getting a reply.

Lissa stayed in the den on the computer for another 10 minutes after that, while I plonked around on my work document, somewhat unproductively. Shortly, Lissa emerged and went into the kitchen to talk to her mom. I heard some very low whispered conversation, heard Denise say loud enough that I could hear, " ... Oh my... " and back to whispers again.

Finally Lissa emerged and went to her room. Denise, meanwhile, peeked around the wall from the kitchen and asked if I could help her with something. I locked the screen on my laptop and set it aside, and went to help my sister in the kitchen.

Denise was in a sweatshirt and jeans, very comfortable looking but not terribly revealing. I helped her prepare the turkey for the oven, getting the stuffing in and all that. We chatted about this and that, very low key and casual, a perfect antidote for the tension that had been building earlier.

Finally, she let me go. "I'm done with you," she said, "you can go back to your computer stuff."

Nearly an hour had passed, and still Lissa was in her room. I went and sat in the living room, but left my laptop alone and read a magazine for a while -- when I fetched it from the den I noticed the screen saver running on their computer, but left it alone.

15 minutes after that, Denise came out and announced she had to run to the corner store. "On Thanksgiving day?" I asked. "I'll go," I volunteered.

"No, no ... you stay here and relax, I just have to get some more butter and milk. It's always the basics you don't plan for..."

So she left, and it occurred to me that she was getting out of the house on purpose, to facilitate some plan Lissa had. I waited, curious to see what would happen.

Finally, with only about 30 minutes left on the time limit I'd given her, Lissa emerged from her room carrying some papers -- looked like school papers -- and one of those textbooks-in-a-paper-cover they issue you in high school, highly decorated with doodles and no indication as to what subject it was. She plopped down on the couch and began going through them, as if she was studying.

"Doing homework on Thanksgiving?" I asked. "That's pretty dedicated."

She shrugged and looked up. "Whatever. I'm bored and it's gotta be done." Long silence, me reading the magazine, her going through her papers ... doing some memorizing, is what it looked like.

Then, "Hey, um, uncle Jason?"

"Yes?"

"Can I ask, like, a really big favor?"

"What's that?"

"It's kind of embarrassing," she said. Ah ... here it comes, I thought.

"I promise I'll be nice," I encouraged her.

She grinned, shyly, and started to explain, in a rapid voice. "We're in, uh, sex-ed this semester for health class. And we have these vocabulary tests. Stupid Mr Anderson says there might be a 'pop quiz' on Monday and you know he will, too. So I'm trying to memorize the definitions for these words and I was wondering could you test me?"

Very, very clever, I congratulated her, silently. She was a smart kid, no denying that. I could already see how she intended to solve the task.

"Uh sure," I replied out loud, trying to convey the level of discomfort that seemed appropriate to the non-perverted-uncle role I was attempting to play, with only moderate success.

Lissa energetically leapt up from the couch and brought me her list, handed it to me. A set of words and definitions, written in her careful cursive. Such excellent improvisation, I thought, but said, "You might be less embarrassed to go over these with you mom," I suggested, which was roughly in character, and attempting to appear embarrassed, myself (which actually, despite everything, I was, at least a little).

"Oh no," she protested. "That would be MORE embarrassing."

"Oh, I see. Well ... um, ok. What do you want me to do."

"Just read off the word, and I have to give you the definition," she explained, perkily, sitting back down on the couch in her little sundress, facing me.

I won't go into the gory details. There were about 12 vocabulary words on the list, the definitions were completely plausible 8th grade sex-ed type definitions. I almost wondered if, coincidentally, she really did have sex-ed and had dug these out of her actual homework.

But no ... I remembered she had an old set of encyclopedias (made from actual paper!) in her room. I suspected she'd copied the definitions from there. The words included, obviously, "penis" and "orgasm," and it was charming to hear her recite the definitions of these words so effortlessly. She stumbled on a few of the others, and actually made me read her the definitions and coach her on them -- including "semen" and "clitoris." Utterly delightful.

Finally, she said "I think I've got them all," and came and collected her list from me, and I almost thought she was going to lean over an kiss me. But instead, she returned to the couch, and pulled out some other papers to work on. "Thanks a zillion, uncle Jason." And she smiled shyly at me.