Chapter 5

I thought I’d pull a fast one on Cindy, so I left a note on the kitchen table that I’d had to go out of town on a project and didn’t know when I’d be back, and for her to just go on to bed. Then, thinking I would outwit her, because she’d go get in my bed, I went to sleep in hers.

I was awakened by a naked body sliding into bed with me. Until, upon finding that bed occupied, when she thought I was at work, she shrieked. Apparently my bed wasn’t as attractive if I wasn’t in it.

I got her calmed down and then she got fired up again, yelling at me for scaring her half to death.

“Why are you naked?” I asked. She was standing there, shivering in the cold.

“I sleep this way!” she yelled.

“But what about your jammies?” I asked, truly flummoxed.

“Jammies are for certain people to see you in, not sleep in,” she said, as if that made all the sense in the world.

I blinked. I had no idea what to say.

“And why aren’t you naked?” she asked.

“This is how I sleep,” I said.

“Not any more, it isn’t!” she ordered. She came to me and started trying to pull my shorts down. I was trying to keep them up, of course, but all she had to do was tweak my penis and I let go. She neatly “pantsed” me, though I doubt she’s ever heard of the process, and bullied me into stepping out of them.

“Now, it’s freezing in here,” she complained. “Where do you want to sleep? In my bed ... or yours?”

“Mine,” I said.

“Then let’s go,” she said.

She led me to my room, pulled the covers back, put me in, climbed in with me, snuggled up to me, and rubbed her naked body all over me, no doubt to create friction, which was to generate heat.

It worked too. She felt like she was on fire against my skin.

She just wanted to cuddle at first. She was still shivering, her whole body shaking all over every so often. I told her about her mother and brother, and that Mark had been to the hospital. She agreed that I needed to take her there the next day.

Then she reached for my face and kissed me. I admit I enjoyed it. That’s probably why I got grumbly again.

“We have to stop this,” I said. “If we keep fooling around, we’re going to have an accident.”

“Accident,” she said. It was dark, so I couldn’t see her eyes. “It wouldn’t be an accident, Uncle Bob.”

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“I do,” she replied.

“That would be a very bad thing,” I said.

“A bad thing,” she repeated. She was rubbing her slippery pussy on my thigh now. “Hey!” she said, suddenly.

“What?”

“You know how I like to taste you?” Her hand moved to find Mr. John Thomas, who was standing tall, ready to be counted. “Down there?” she added.

“Yes.”

“Well ... have you ever ... um ... tasted one of your girlfriends ... like that?”

“You want me to suck your pussy?” I asked, calling a spade a spade.

“That doesn’t sound very romantic,” she complained.

“This is class, not romance, remember?” I reminded her.

“Right. So have you ever sucked pussy?” Her voice was grim.

“Lots of times. I love to do it,” I said. I did not offer to suck hers. I think I was trying to exert what little control over things I still had.

After a long, silent pause, she said “Well, do you think I’d like it if you did that to me?”

“Oh, you’d love it,” I said.

“Really?” She sounded hopeful, now.

“Guaranteed,” I said firmly.

Another long pause.

“So will you do it?” she finally asked.

“No,” I said, also very firmly.

“Why not?” She was upset now.

“Because when I say you’d love it, I am understating things considerably. You’d love it so much that by the time I was finished, you wouldn’t care that I was climbing up between your silky thighs, with my big, nasty, dripping prick hanging down, ready to skewer your virgin sex and put a cupful of baby makers in your sweet belly. And that’s exactly what I’d try to do, because I love eating pussy, especially the pussy of a woman I adore, and it always makes me want to breed the ever-loving fuck out of her, so no, I will not be doing that with you tonight.”

There was, what I thought was a shocked silence. But she didn’t get out of bed and go to her own room. She trembled, but I chalked that up to her still being cold. Then she whispered “I love you too, Uncle Bob. I promise I’ll be good.”

And she snuggled even closer, and went to sleep.

Things actually calmed down a little bit. She got up the next morning and gave me a long, sloppy kiss before she left to go to school. A friend picked her up again. When I got home from work, she was ready to go to the hospital, and that went well. While I visited with Dennis, she talked to her mother. Then we switched. Jill was a little weepy, but she said it was just the meds they were giving her, and that she was actually happy with what she called “the progress being made.” She asked me if everything perishable had been removed from the refrigerator and I told her most of it had, and she asked me to get the rest out so nothing spoiled before she got back.

Then, on the way home Cindy talked about various things, which I can’t remember, and we stopped at Sonic and had supper. She was quiet until we got home, so I was too.

She sat up doing homework and then we watched a made-for-TV movie with her snuggled up to me on the couch. When the movie was over and I turned the TV off, she sat up, but put her hand on my leg, to keep me from getting up. She turned to face me.

“I don’t have the words to tell you what you mean to me,” she said. “You’ve always been there for me, no matter what. You never get mad at me for doing stupid things. All I can ever remember coming from you was love. It’s like sunlight, and I want to bathe in it.”

No woman had really ever talked to me like that. I sat there, sort of stunned.

“And I know I’ve been asking a lot, and that I’ve made it hard on you.” She reached for my lap, which for once did not have a hard penis in it. “No pun intended,” she said, apparently not at all unhappy that I was soft. “And I promise that I’ll try to be good, and not so hard on you. But there’s something you need to understand. I’ve always had these feelings inside me, for as long as I can remember, that you were special. And when I started feeling ... things ... feelings ... strange emotions...” She paused for a breath.

“Hormones,” I said, gently.

“When I started feeling hormones, I knew, somehow, that I could only explore them with you. And I still feel that way. I like boys. I like going on dates and having fun with them. But when it comes to serious things, I’m not interested in doing them with boys.” She stopped to take another breath.

“That’s fine,” I said. “You’re growing up. You’ll go off to college and meet men, instead of boys, and things will happen naturally. You’ll love that too. You don’t have to be in a hurry to get there, though. And it’s good that you’re not in a hurry to get there.”

“Will you be quiet and let me finish?” she asked. She was frowning. “I thought about this all day long, and I had it all planned out what I wanted to say!”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“When I was little, I had a monkey that I took to bed with me every night.”

“I remember,” I said. I slapped my hand over my mouth, but she ignored me.

“Then, when I turned thirteen, I decided I was a grown up girl, and I threw him in the trash. I didn’t need him any more. I outgrew him.”

I remained quiet.

“And for years, I was miserable, because my bed didn’t feel right. I should never have thrown him away. I missed him so much that I cried ... not every night ... but lots of nights. It was especially bad when I was unhappy or mad, or afraid about something.”

She was quiet for so long that I almost said something.

“The other night, when I got in bed with you? That’s the first night I felt like I had my monkey back.”

“Thanks a lot,” I groused. I couldn’t help it. I had been reduced to the status of replacement, stuffed monkey.

“You don’t understand,” she said, patiently. “I felt complete again for the first time since I threw him away. I felt safe. I felt like the world was right again. I know you don’t want me to sleep with you, because it’s hard on you, but I need to sleep with you. I need you, Uncle Bob!”

I started to say something, but she held up her hand to stop me.

“But that’s only part of it. I told you, you were special to me. But you don’t understand that either. Whenever I dreamed I was a princess, you were my prince. Whenever I dreamed about taking a step towards adulthood, you were right there, holding my hand. When I thought about going to prom, I wanted to find a way for you to be my date.”

She stood up. Then she moved and sat down on my lap.

“I haven’t been practicing,” she said softly. “I’ve been living my dreams of being with a man who makes me want to do things I never wanted to do before. When you warn me that you might force me ... that doesn’t frighten me in the least, Uncle Bob.”

She kissed me. It was a very tender kiss.

“You wouldn’t have to force me at all, Uncle Bob,” she whispered. “No other man will have me before you do.”

She kissed me again, and because I had nothing to say now, I just let her. I mean how to you respond to that? Sure, you know she’s still dreaming, but you can’t just shatter those dreams and call her silly. She was too young to be injured... shattered ... that way.

I thought about it as she sat there and kissed me. I had no idea what to do. She finally stopped kissing me.

“Your mother is going to kill me,” I said.

“No she’s not.”

“You don’t know how a parent feels about her baby,” I said.

“Yes I do. And she’s not going to kill you.”

“And you know this because?” I admit, I said it a little nastily. This girl had put me between a rock and a very hard place.

“Because I made her promise me that, when I told her how I felt about you.”

I went cold. “You told your mother about us?”

“No, silly. I didn’t know if there would ever be an us then. I just told her I was in love with you, and that if I ever got married I was going to marry you.”

“And when was that?”

“When she told me I could start dating, of course,” she said.

For a year and a half, I had been sneaking around behind Jill’s back, fooling around with her daughter. I had felt bad about that, but not badly enough to stop doing it. Of course I had rationalized it in my mind as actually having the potential to be helpful to Cindy, as she threaded her way through the minefield that is youthful emotions and hormones.

And now, suddenly, I had learned that the woman I had been trying to hide all this from had been told, point blank, that I was the guy Cindy might want to fool around with.

To say I was puzzled and off balance was putting it lightly.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Maybe you should tell me exactly what you said to her.”

“I can’t remember exactly what I said. It was a long time ago!” she said.

“How did all this come up?” I asked.

“I told her a guy had asked me out on a date, and she said I couldn’t date until I was sixteen, and I said that was fine, because I loved you and didn’t want to go out with any boys anyway, and we had an argument and it ended up that she said I could be in love with you all I wanted to, but I still had to go out with boys my own age. So I said that was fine.”

“That’s it?” I said. “She never asked any questions after that?”