It's the nature of kids that they often learn by getting their fingers burnt or their butts warmed or their psyches embarrassed. If you're relatively new to parenting, you may not yet have learned that when you ask your child why he or she did something amazingly stupid and they say "I don't know", they may be telling you the truth. Until they're somewhere in their mid-teens, the brain connections are still being developed; in particular, the connection between that area called the limbic system where reactions to perceptions are generated and the prefrontal cortex where those same reactions are considered for possible consequences. It's your job as a parent to point out inappropriate reactions and to mete out appropriate consequences until the developmental processes are complete, or nearly so. The little darlings may not appreciate your sagacity at the moment but it'll help to get them on a much smoother path through life.

OK, these comments on neural anatomy and child development are my way of getting my excuses out early and in the best light. From time to time I recall something from my youth that makes me blush all over again. Right now, I'm recalling a time when I was just short of fifteen and spending the summer with my Aunt Willie, Uncle Gene and cousins Arnold and Sarah on their farm in eastern Colorado. My parents had assured me that it wasn't their intention to unload me (wink, wink) for nearly three months; rather, it was a chance for me to get out of the big city and experience another way of life.

My name is Jeremy Prescott, Jerry for short, and back in those days ten years ago, I suppose I was often perceived by grownups as being a precocious little shit. Referring to the first paragraph, I didn't go out of my way to annoy people. It's just that I knew I was smarter than most and tried to employ it to my advantage whenever I could. What possessed my aunt and uncle to take me in for a summer is beyond me; perhaps they hoped to score karma points toward the next life. By the way, Uncle Gene and my father are brothers so their last name is the same as mine.

I don't mean to say that I went out of my way to be a pain in the ass. I got along with nearly everyone pretty well but I found it impossible to refrain from pressing for an advantage if an opportunity arose and since I wasn't particularly adept physically, I stuck to whatever intellectual advantage I could muster since that was my strength.

Arnold and I are the exact same age to the day and Sarah is about a year and a half older. At the time, her social life had no room for two creepy boy relatives and that was just fine with us. From the day I arrived on the farm, between daily chores every morning and freedom to explore literally miles of territory in the afternoons, we had more than enough to keep us occupied.

We kids all worked four hours a day, five days a week for which we were paid five bucks an hour. As far as Uncle Gene was concerned, on a farm, there was always something that needed to be done and nobody got a free ride and that included Sarah. Allowances were not in the picture so you either worked for your money or did without. If Aunt Willie didn't have Sarah busy doing something in the house, she'd be out working with Arnold and me on something or other. She could be really nice and really funny when she wanted to be and her rapier wit left me without a comeback more than once. I didn't resent her for it, though; in fact, I was in awe of that kind of mental facility. I was also in awe of the well-developed sixteen-year old body she took pains to display in tight jeans and tighter T-shirts.

Uncle Gene worked too hard to allow his body to go to fat. He had one of those movie star bodies and the looks to go with it. I'm sure he was an object of lust for many of the ladies in town. Aunt Willie was no slouch, either. In today's parlance, she might be thought of as a MILF. If Sarah looked that good at the age of forty-four, she could thank her mom for the genes.

I looked forward to every meal at their house. Aunt Willie was a fantastic cook and dinner in particular was a special treat. If I hadn't still been growing and burning calories at a phenomenal rate, I'm sure I'd have grown fat from the sheer volume of food I stuffed down my gullet. Processed foods simply didn't find their way into the household. Every thing was fresh and cooked in a way that brought out the most flavor. It only took me about two meals to decide my mother didn't know the first thing about cooking. As far as she was concerned, if it wasn't microwavable, it was useless.

So on with the story.

One afternoon about three weeks into my stay, Aunt Willie told Arnold and I that she'd cook up a nice rabbit stew if we'd go out and shoot three or four cottontails. The idea of actually eating a cute little rodent that never did me any harm and that I'd have to murder to boot didn't excite me but Arnold assured me I'd love it. We took two .22 rifles out of the gun cabinet and headed across the fields toward the river on ATVs. I say river because that's what they called it but it really wasn't much more that a very small stream that meandered around the prairie like it was going absolutely nowhere in particular.

Arnold set up some targets in a stand of cottonwoods near the stream. As a city kid, I'd had very little experience with guns of any sort and suggested he'd need to give me a couple of lessons before we went on safari. Turns out he was a very good instructor and had me shooting inside the circle within one box of shells. When he thought I was ready, we headed upstream to a place that was supposed to be thick with rabbits.

During our trek along the stream, we talked about stuff fourteen-going-on-fifteen-year-old boys talk about; namely, girls and their attendant tits and asses. Of course, each of us wanted to know what the other had accomplished by way of physical contact with the opposite sex. I believe we were being surprisingly honest with each other considering a teenager's natural penchant for erotic fantasy. He told me he got a boner once when he was dancing with a girl at school and she let him rub it up against her leg. She wouldn't let him grope her boobs, though.

I was envious. The closest I'd gotten to anything even vaguely erotic was seeing my mom naked once and I thought that hardly counted as a sexual experience. He looked at me as if he were considering something and said, "If you can promise to keep a secret, I'll show you something real hot when we get home."

"I can keep a secret." I promised. "What is it?"

"Just wait and see." He snickered with the knowledge I'd be impressed.

We got back to the house that afternoon with four dead cottontails, all of which had been shot by Arnold. I just couldn't bring myself to do the deed. I didn't get off scot-free though because I had to help cut off their heads and clean them before we handed the corpses over to Aunt Willie.

"Come on!" Arnold said and we went out the back door and headed toward the barn. Inside, we climbed a ladder to the loft and scrambled over bales of hay to the farthest corner. There were several bales stacked high making a kind of wall. On the other side of the wall, Arnold had created a separate little room where he kept private stuff he didn't want his mom to find as she snooped through his room. He knew she snooped because he intentionally took note of where he left things in his bureau drawers and often saw that they had been moved when he checked again.

He took a key out of his pocket and opened a small, brass trunk that looked like it had been through two wars. Inside, he kept an amazing collection of pornography. There were little green books of dirty stories, magazines, even videotapes. I didn't know where to begin. I picked up a glossy mag with a picture of a woman with huge tits sucking on a dick the size of my forearm. The guy must have damn near passed out every time he got a hard on from the blood draining from his brain. Arnold took it out of my hands and said, "That's not what I wanted to show you."

At the bottom of the trunk underneath everything else was a large manila envelope. Arnold reached into it and pulled out a stack of photographs printed out on regular printer paper. They weren't super high quality but they were certainly good enough that I didn't have any problem recognizing that they were of Sarah in various stages of undress.

"Holy crap! Jeez, man, how did you get these? They're awesome!"

"It wasn't easy. I'll show you how when we go back to the house. So, what do you think?"

There were twenty-five or thirty pictures in all. Down near the bottom of the stack were three showing her lying on her bed playing with herself, clearly enjoying what her fingers were up to buried in her thick, black bush. Sarah didn't have big tits like those in the porn mags but she had nothing to be ashamed of. "I'll tell you what I think," I said, shaking my head. "I think if she ever finds out about these, your life is going to suddenly take a turn for the worse. When she gets done with you, there won't be enough left for your dad to beat senseless."

"Oh, she'll find out about them alright. I'm going to show them to her."

I looked at Arnold wondering why I hadn't picked up on his obvious insanity before this. "So, you have a death wish, right?"

"No, listen! Wouldn't you like to get your dick into that? I figure she'll agree to have sex with us if I promise not to show them to Mom and Dad. I should be able to talk her into a blow job at least, don't you? I bet she'll do both of us."

"You're talking incest here, Cousin. Arnold, if it was me you were blackmailing, I suffer the embarrassment of my folks seeing the photos before I give in to a cheap trick like this. You can't really believe she'll go for it!"

"She'll go for it. Sarah is Daddy's little angel. She'd die before she let him see her getting herself off."

I looked at the pictures again and squirmed as my shorts got tighter and tighter. The thought of actually touching that body made it hard to breathe. I didn't doubt that doing Sarah would be the high point of my life but it was just too sleazy, even for me, the precocious little shit.

I handed them back to him. "Well, good luck. It was nice knowing you. You can count me out on this one."

My cousin looked disappointed. "Jeez, Jerry! I never thought you were such a wuss."

"Call me whatever you want but Sarah's never done anything bad to me so I don't see why I should feel good about treating her like a slut. I'm not going to rat you out but I don't want anything to do with it." I left the barn to go to my room and think about it.

The more I thought about it, the more I knew I couldn't sit passively by and let this thing happen to Sarah. I mean, I liked Arnold and everything but hormones were fucking up his ability to think rationally and what he was planning was just wrong in every way. I lay on my bed listening to music and tried to figure a way to get him to change his mind. Before dinner, I had a plan but I wasn't feeling particularly good about it because it involved betrayal and being a snitch. I'd lied to Arnold; I was about to rat him out.

I looked out the window and saw him shooting hoops on the driveway. I'd heard Sarah in the shower so I knew she'd be in her room in a few minutes. I knew if she didn't go along with my plan, the whole thing could blow up in my face and everybody would hate me. When I heard her door close, I took a deep breath and stepped across the hallway to knock. When she opened it just a crack, she was wearing a terry robe and her hair was wrapped up in a towel.

"Um, Sarah, I wonder if I could talk to you about something important. It's kind of sensitive stuff so we'd need to be somewhere we couldn't be overheard."

She smiled, "My, it sound awfully mysterious. Do I get a hint?"

"I'm serious, Sarah. We really need to talk."

I guess she could see I wasn't joking because the smile dropped off her face. "Well, OK. I'm going to a movie with some friends after dinner so why don't I drop by your room when I get home later tonight? It might be late, like after eleven."

"Yeah, I guess that'll work, but don't let anybody see you."

Aunt Willie called up the stairs that dinner would be in fifteen minutes so I went down stairs to help her set the table. The rabbit stew smelled wonderful.

I tried my best to act normally during dinner but it wasn't easy to look Arnold in the face. I volunteered to help Aunt Willie clean up after dinner and begged off watching TV, saying I was feeling a little tired and wanted to read for a while.

The hard part about my plan would be convincing Sarah to hear me out before she went ballistic and went after Arnold to tear his head off. I figured if everything went the way I hoped it would, Arnold would have to give up his plan and Aunt Willie and Uncle Gene would never be the wiser.

I drifted off to sleep waiting for Sarah to get home and awoke when she shook my shoulder.

"Wake up, Jerry. Sorry about just coming in but I didn't want my knocking on your door to wake up anyone else." She sat on my bed as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. "So, tell me what's the big mystery."

"Look, Sarah, you need to let me tell you the whole story before you get all pissed off and make a big stink about it, OK?"

"What are you talking about, Jerry? Come on, out with it!"

I carefully explained in as much detail as I could remember what Arnold and I had been doing and what he told me. I could see the color rising in her face when I got to the blackmail part. As I expected, she stood up to leave but I grabbed her arm and begged her to please listen to my plan. She was having a hard time keeping her anger in check but she sat and listened to what I had in mind. The more I talked, the more she liked it. It would teach Arnold a lesson and keep her mom and dad completely out of the picture.

When she stood up to go to her room, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and said, "Thanks for the heads-up, Jerry. I really owe you one for this. I'll be around all day tomorrow so let me know when you're ready to do it."

I drifted off to sleep thinking – no – hoping my scheme might garner some unsolicited rewards. The next morning after breakfast, Uncle Gene assigned Arnold and me to do fence and gate repair around the farm. We took one of the ATVs and hooked a small trailer to it loaded with tools and a spool of barbed wire and rode along the perimeter looking for problems to fix.

As we worked on a gate hinge, I asked, "You still planning to show Sarah those pictures?"

"Yeah, sometime. Why, did you change your mind?"

"Nah. You never did tell me how you got them, though. It might be something I'd want to try someday."

"What? You want to take pictures of Sarah?"

"No, dummy! There's a lady who lives next door to my mom and dad that I'd sure like to get some shots of. She's really hot and she's got the biggest tits I've ever seen. I'd sure like to see them uncovered."

"Well, you're gonna have to spend a few bucks. I bought a tiny little video camera that I used to get the shots you saw. I'll show you how it works after lunch."

"Great! Thanks, Arnold. Um, could we go up to the loft and look at some of you mags later?"

"Sure if you promise not to cum on the pages," he laughed.

We got back to the house and washed up as Aunt Willie was putting lunch on the table. I looked across the table at Sarah and gave her a little nod to let her know the plan was underway. After lunch, Arnold and I went to his room. After closing his door and locking it, he went to his closet and stood on a chair to lift one of the ceiling tiles to retrieve a small box. He opened it to show me a tiny little video-cam that wasn't much bigger than a small box of matches.

"Wow!" I said. "How much memory does it have?"

"Four gigs. Pretty amazing, huh?"

"Yeah, so how did you get the shots of Sarah?"

"Easy, once I thought about it. Come here and look."

He went to his window and opened it, then unlatched the screen. "Look out to the left and tell me what you see."

I followed his directions and leaned out the window. There were two windows to the left, the first one to the bathroom and the second one to Sarah's room. When I looked back at Arnold, he was on his hands and knees reaching under his mattress. He pulled out a thin piece of wood about six feet long and hinged to extend out to twelve feet. He'd attached a metal clamp to the end and he showed me how the video-cam snapped into place.

"See?" he said proudly, "When she's in the bathroom taking her shower at night, I just open the window, snap the cam into place and extend it out to shoot through the window. When she's in her bedroom, I just do the same thing from the bathroom window. She never draws her curtains so there's always a clear shot. Pretty cool, huh?"

"I love it! Where can I get one of these cams?"

"I had a friend order it from Amazon. He's got his own account there so I just paid him the cash. He'd probably order one for you if I asked him. Should I?"

"Uh, let me think about it some. How much was it?"

"Well, they aren't cheap. This one was about sixty bucks."

"Ouch! That'd clean me out." I glanced at my watch and figured Sarah had had enough time to get into place. "Can we go look at your mags now?"

"Yeah, let me put this away."

As we climbed the ladder to the loft, I looked around for any sign of Sarah but, wherever she was, she was well hidden. In his little room behind the hay bales, Arnold produced his key and opened the locker. There was so much to look at, I hardly knew where to start so I just grabbed one off the top and started flipping pages. Arnold searched through the treasure trove and found one that I guess was his favorite. In a matter of a couple of minutes, we were both engrossed and rubbing at our crotches. Just knowing Sarah was around somewhere and recording us was kind of a turn-on.

I needed to get him out of his jeans and jacking off to make sure Sarah had something worth trading for the pictures. "Um, do you ever come up here with any of your friends?"

"A few times. There's only a couple of guys who know about it though and they're sworn to secrecy."

"Do you ever uh, you know, do stuff?"

"What kind of stuff?"

"Come on, you know what I mean. Like, do you ever jerk off and stuff?"

"Of course, dummy! Why would I have all this porn if it wasn't to jerk off over?"

"Well, have you ever done stuff to each other?"

Arnold looked at me warily. "Why do you want to know?"

"I don't know. It just seems like it would be kinda hot to do that. I think it'd feel better than doing it yourself, don't you?"

"Well I'm not gay if that's what you're asking."

"You're missing the point, Arnold. I'm not talking about falling in love with anyone. I'm just talking about sex. Guys do stuff to each other all the time without being homosexual. I've read about it in books. It's just making each other feel good. Shit, they do it in prison all the time. If you called most of those guys gay, they'd cut your throat."