Chapter 1

When I was a young and starving college student, my older brother had a comfortable house, with a wife and two boys in it. I liked all of them. Well, as much as you can like rug-rats before they can talk and will obey you and such like that. But even when they were at that stage, I spent a lot of my time at their house. Getting free meals had something to do with it. Okay, a lot to do with it, but Jill was a great cook, and any guy would like to eat as much of her cooking as possible. Plus, she was easy on the eyes.

Not that I ever tried anything. I mean a little fantasy about your sister-in-law is one thing, but actually trying to do anything about it would have been the height of stupidity. I really did like them all, and fooling around would have screwed things up for at least two of us. That’s what fantasy is for, after all, right?

But I learned a lot, hanging around them. Take, for instance, the time I was there when the boys were about one or so, and it was bath time.

“Want to help?” asked Jill.

I said “Okay,” more out of a sense of duty than because I really wanted to, but it was actually fun. They each had a rubber ducky and they liked throwing them so we could fetch them. That kind of thing. Then we were back in the nursery, with the boys laid out side by side, drying them off. Jill had Dennis, the older one, and I was astonished to see her grab his little pecker and give it a wiggle. When she took her hand away, I saw he had a tiny little erection! I was amazed.

“Did you just give him a boner?” I blurted.

She laughed. “No. They get hard all by themselves, but they don’t last long. Sometimes it just means they’re about to pee. But he likes it when I tickle it.”

As if to punctuate her comment, Dennis’ little peter became a geyser while she snatched for a cloth which I later found out she’d put there intentionally, just for that usage. Dennis, it seems, liked to pee after taking a bath.

Two years after having the boys, Jill had a daughter, who they named Cindy. And, when she was a little older than a year, I got asked to change her. I knew that girls needed extra good cleaning, because, as it turns out, their labia look pretty much grown up from the start. Shaved, grown up, but if you’ve ever changed a little girl’s diaper, you know what I mean.

And in the process of cleaning her up, I learned that even at that age, there’s a little clitoris in there. When I ran the baby wipe over it, she kicked and giggled. So I put a fingertip on it, just to see if that reaction was real, and wiggled it just long enough for her to kick and giggle again.

I was astonished.

I felt a bit like a pervert, but I wasn’t trying to produce any sexual pleasure, either in her or me. I knew my actions had been based on purely curiosity. And I never intentionally did that again.

Well... actually that’s not true, but that jumps too far ahead in the story, too quickly. For now, let’s just say it was never my intent to molest my niece.

Of course life is never black and white. And as she grew up, little Cindy took a special liking to her Uncle Bob. Perhaps that’s because I was always willing to read her a book, or make up a story to tell her. The boys were involved in boy things, which were usually loud and raucous. And I got involved in that too. But parents rarely have the time to read Princess Talula Tames A Dragon eight times in a row, with sound effects and turning the pages only at exactly the right time. And heaven help you if you leave out any words, or try to change them, to make things go more quickly. Between the ages of one and five, they may not be able to read, but their memories are quite good.

Except about the rules. But that’s a different story.

The point is that it was entirely normal for Cindy to crawl on my lap and cuddle with me, for entirely non-sexual purposes, for the first decade of her life. At that point, the lap sitting began to slack off, happening only a couple of times a week, usually during TV time between bath time and bedtime. Cindy always took a bath first, before the boys, and sometimes sat with me (or on me) to watch whatever was on, until somebody made her go to bed. And, because the kids were growing up, and I was needed less and less to help ride herd on them, I spent more time doing other things.

But I need to be honest here. When a girl nears puberty, especially in America, since the culture there demands it, the little girl gets gussied up and made to look older than she is. And she almost inevitably appears to be more sexually mature than she actually is. It’s a very complicated mix of things that determines just how that comes across.

For one thing, some girls learn how to tease men before they fully understand what they are doing. They learn it from a variety of sources. In some cases their mothers even teach them how to tease. I do not know why they do this, because it’s pretty rare for a girl between ten and, say thirteen, to be genuinely interested in things sexual. There might be some curiosity in there, but nobody is capable of having any kind of meaningful sexual relationship before fourteen or fifteen. Even then it’s too early for a successful relationship, meaning one that isn’t fraught with emotional danger and disappointment. But girls in their mid-teens at least have a chance of understanding things. They got married and started families for thousands of years in early adolescence. But not at ten and eleven. Not successfully. I could be wrong. There isn’t a lot of historical data about that issue.

All that is just to preface the comment that it’s fairly normal for males to perk up and take notice when a little girl starts to look like a young woman.

And all that is just to say that I don’t think it was perverted for me to notice that little Cindy was growing up and was going to be a real heart-breaker someday quite soon.

This is not to say that I had some wish to be her sexual partner later on. She just had potential, and I appreciated that. It’s like when you see a good looking girl walking confidently down the street, and you think, “Some lucky bastard will get to tap that some day. I sure hope he knows how lucky he is when it happens.”

Of course things can happen that cause complications, and which lead to later consequences. I’ll give you an example.

When Cindy was twelve, I went camping with the family. We had gone swimming in the lake for a couple of hours, and I laid out on the dock for half an hour in the sun to dry off and get a little tan. I heard the rest of them take off on a hike, after which we planned to have supper. I was the assigned cook that night, so I didn’t go on the hike. What I didn’t know was that Cindy had also stayed behind to help me cook. So when I got up and went into the big cabin tent to change clothes, I didn’t know Cindy was already in there changing too. She was stark naked, bent over, getting ready to step into a pair of panties when I threw back the flap and walked in. She looked up at me, stood up automatically, and squeaked as she tried to cover all parts of her naked body at the same time.

During that split second, I saw budding little breasts, with puffy nipples. I was almost amused to see that her adolescent vulva looked almost the same as when I had last seen them, a decade previously, except now there were a few sparse dark hairs scattered across her mons.

And do you know what I thought? I thought she was cute. Not sexy. Not ready for sex. She was just cute and adorable and I was really sorry I had scared her, and hoped it wouldn’t ruin anything between us. So I said something to try to make it less traumatizing.

“Oops. Sorry. No big deal, though. I’ve seen it before. After all... I used to change your diapers.”

Then I turned around and left. I got the fire going, and got the pans out and then she came out dressed. All she said was “You’re supposed to knock!” but that was all. I took my turn changing clothse and we cooked supper and everything was just like it had always been. When the family got back, we even told them about it, and everybody had a good laugh.

But what I did not know, at the time, was that Cindy saw that appreciation in my eyes when that happened, and I didn’t tease her or reject her, and that was something fairly pivotal in her sex life, at the time. A grown man... a man she liked... had seen her naked. And he hadn’t laughed at her, or called her a little girl. His eyes had told her she was pretty, and that made all the difference in the world to her.

That’s what makes all this stuff complicated. It’s like shifting sand. Sometimes it changes right under your feet.

It got more complicated when her father, who worked for the university in the nuclear radiation lab, somehow got exposed to enough radiation that it fried his bone marrow, or whatever it is that causes leukemia. They didn’t catch it soon enough. There was a big scandal, because none of his radiation badges showed the contamination, which meant either one was defective, or he hadn’t been wearing it when it happened. Plus they never found the leak. I only tell you this because all that made it even harder on his family when we lost him.

So my role changed a bit, and I went from being a once a week visitor, to missing a night or two a week. Dennis and Mark, who were then sixteen, traded off being the man of the house. For a month, whenever I showed up, Cindy burst into tears and hugged me, not wanting to let go for an hour or more. Then she’d wipe her nose and dry her eyes and ignore me for the rest of the night. I offered to stop coming, but Jill said it was actually helpful, and that they’d work through it all.

So I got used to being on that shifting sand, where my role changed a bit, depending on what the family needed.

Which is what happened, I suppose, when she was fifteen.

Of course, by then, I didn’t read her books any more, or let her serve me tea in tiny cups, or play frog prince to her princess or any of that kind of thing. By then, the way I supported her was by going to her softball games and track meets and the plays she was in and that sort of stuff.

Which is why I went to her last softball game of the season. Her team had a seven and eight season. And, while most of the girls were in it for love of the game, not winning, the fact that they won that last game was exciting for them, and they partied hard at the pizza place afterwards. There was lots of improvised singing along with the songs coming from the speakers in the joint, and dancing and the like.

Did you ever notice how healthy young women, who are singing and dancing, just can’t help but look sexy?

Of course you have. What am I thinking?

Anyway, Cindy had volunteered me as taxi driver, to take some of the girls home whose parents hadn’t come to the game or whatever, so after a long and exhausting celebration, I made the rounds, dropping girls off until finally Cindy was the only one left in the car. It was after nine, but the next day was a Saturday, so it wasn’t a problem.

We got to her house and got out. I had planned on staying the night, so I could get an early start at removing their old water heater and installing a new one. Inside, on the kitchen table, was a card and some helium-filled balloons, taped to the surface. It was from her mom, who had been at the game, but had not gone to the pizza place, seeing as how parents, in that situation, were embarrassing to girls of that age. Apparently I was exempt, not being an actual parent.

“Awww,” she said, as she read the card. Then she bounded off to find her and thank her. She came back a few minutes later and said, “My mother is a geezer! She’s already in bed, can you believe it?”

“You have to cut her some slack,” I said. “She’s raised you, and that’s a terrifying and exhausting job.”

She stuck out her tongue at me.

I have no idea why her sticking her tongue out at me caused me to drop my eyes to her breasts, but it did. She had big ones, for a fifteen year old. I admit I had watched them flopping around a bit as she ran the bases. Of course I had watched all the other girls’ breasts doing the same thing, some more, some less. I mean... I’m a guy.

It probably would have helped if I hadn’t been between girlfriends. I have this problem where my upbringing kind of made me believe that sexual intercourse is a very serious and important thing, and you don’t just hop in the sack with any old body. Foir me, if it gets to the point where sex is involved, then it’s time to start thinking about commitment. Serious commitment. The marriage kind of commitment.

Chapter 2 »