Chapter 1

Brother-in-law.

Uncle.

Both are titles that don’t mean all that much when they are first awarded to you. In both cases, you have no experience at being one, so you usually have few, if any preconceptions of what is expected.

I suppose becoming a brother-in-law is the easier of the two, in the sense that you understand romantic relationships, and you can be happy for your brother when he finds a nice girl. Unless you wish you had the nice girl and he had a wart on his nose. But if he met her at college while you were going to a trade school to become a computer guru, then you never had the chance to lust after her while he was dating her as, I am told, sometimes happens.

Now the uncle thing, if you have kids of your own, is probably no big deal either. But if you don’t have a wife and kids, and have been a confirmed bachelor all your life, then being an uncle can be a wild and crazy ride.

Of course, if your brother found himself a genuine ‘keeper, ‘ and she bore him a daughter who was cute as a button, and who wrapped her uncle around her little finger by the time she was five or six, all those questions you had way back when it all first happened seem far away and inconsequential.

But they’re not.

When my brother Kit died, it was hard on all of us. I suppose, as his brother, the fact that he died serving his country made it a little easier for me to deal with. By that I mean it was better than some random, senseless thing like a drunk driver, or a tree falling on him, or lightning striking.

Of course it wasn’t that way for Beth, who had lost her partner, lover, and life mate. They say there are five stages of grief, and she did them all with a vengeance. Actually, her grief made mine a little easier, because my motto was, “Anything to help,” and I was sort of distracted a little bit by taking care of things while she fell apart.

One of those things was Heather, my niece.

We lived next door to each other, and I’m self employed. So, when we first got the word, it was relatively easy for me to just sort of stay there for the first two weeks. Heather was six at the time, and knew something bad had happened, but not what. I didn’t feel like it was my place to tell her, but I did feel like I should give Beth time to get through what she was going through, so I just concentrated on that. Heather was scared, because her mom wasn’t acting right. So that first night, when she fell asleep on me where we sat on the couch, that’s where we both slept that night.

As it turned out, I did end up explaining to her why Daddy wasn’t coming home, after Beth asked me to. She didn’t want to bawl in front of her little girl.

“Anything to help,” I said.

So I cooked, and ran errands, and they eventually got through it. I tagged along for that part, and sort of just stayed there. Well, I was next door, but sometimes it was hard to tell who lived where. At least when it came to Heather and me.

A few years went by, and Heather and I became buddies in a different sense. She saw me so much that she got to know me inside and out. It was the same for me. I knew Beth pretty well too, but it was different, somehow, with her. Beth was gorgeous, and blond, and built and sexy, even when she was trying not to be. She called it her curse, because men who didn’t know about her past were always very interested in her, even though she still wore her wedding ring. She worked, because she said she’d go stark raving mad if she didn’t. Kit’s insurance would have let her stay home. She wouldn’t have lived like a queen or anything, but they could have gotten by.

By the time Heather was eleven, I was her buddy, co-conspirator and partner in crime whenever she wanted to spring a surprise, or play a prank or whatever. She knew my motto, and she freely said, “I need your help with something.” But I was also the peer pressure that kept her on the straight and narrow. We could - and did - talk about anything, which included how much she hated having her first period and the pads she had to wear. I learned a lot about the problems women have that night.

When she turned fourteen, I got her an artist set with a couple of hundred colored pencils in it, along with charcoal and who knows what else. It was a fancy set, but I had seen her pencil sketches, which were really doodles, and they showed significant promise. She kissed me on the lips. It was the first time that had happened, and it rocked my world. It was the first time I realized she was more than a child now ... not quite a young woman ... but distinctly desirable as a female of the species ... instead of just my buddy.

Her art got better and better. She went to the art institute in town and took classes on weekends and the next thing I knew her pieces were being included in shows. It was amazing, and yet, no more than I expected. I’m not an art critic, though, and to me, her pictures of apples in a bowl, or flowers in a vase, just looked like ... well ... apples in a bowl or flowers in a vase. It was a bit like being best friends with somebody who would later win the Nobel prize. To you, she was just your pal, while everybody else was in awe of her.

Of course it wasn’t that simple. Beth was a realtor, and often worked late, so the general routine was for Heather to come to my house after school. She would do her homework, or text her friends, or fix herself a snack in my kitchen. If I was working in my computer room she never bothered me. But if I wasn’t working, she’d tell me how her day went, or ask me about something she’d heard in the news. She was very comfortable and casual at my house. She’d even brought clothes over and stashed them in the spare bedroom so she could change after school.

And if school wasn’t in session, she was usually in my back yard, where I had an in-ground pool, either swimming or sunning herself in bikinis that got increasingly smaller, while her girly parts got increasingly bigger. In fact, it was one day last summer, when I stood staring at her lithe, young ... and very sexy body, that I realized she spent almost all her free time with me.

“How come you don’t have a boyfriend?” I asked her.

She took off the sunglasses she was wearing and looked at me with her wolf eyes. Did I tell you about her wolf eyes? She had her mother’s eyes, which were blue, except they were weird blue. The outsides of the irises were blue, with yellow centers, in the middle of which were her black pupils. When she was mad at you, those eyes looked like she was thinking seriously about taking a bite out of you. They reminded me of some of the wolves I’d seen on the Discovery channel.

“Who says I don’t?” she asked, staring at me. She was lying on a chaise lounge, soaking in the sun, but somehow she also looked dangerous.

“I do,” I said, confidently. “If you had a boyfriend I’d know about it. You tell me everything.”

Her gaze didn’t waver. “Do I?”

Now this was interesting. This was a side of Heather I didn’t think I’d seen before, and it was fascinating. She sounded like this threatened her, but very few things threatened this girl. Or her mother, for that matter. The world had already thrown the worst it could at them, and they’d survived.

“Of course you do,” I said. “We have no secrets.”

“Everybody has secrets,” she said, quite seriously.

This was no little girl I was talking to. Suddenly she was philosophical and wise beyond her years. I realized, in intuitively, that my question had struck something ... maybe something painful.

“Let me start that over again,” I said. “As your friend, I’m worried about you. You don’t spend all that much time with girls your age. You don’t appear to have a boyfriend, or a romantic life of any sort. Now the vast majority of girls your age do both of those things. It’s part of growing up, and I want you to be as happy and healthy as possible.”

I was proud of myself for presenting my concerns in such a succinct and caring manner.

“You’re such a sweetie,” she said, the serious side of her all gone.

I thought I was going to get some information from her, and that we’d have a dialogue and growing and learning would happen. It turned out I was wrong.

“So, how come you don’t have a girlfriend?” she asked, instead of answering my question.

I thought I’d answer the question in a way that would encourage her to share in a similar fashion.

“Well, there are several reasons. For one thing, when I fall for a woman I fall hard. That means I’m ready to commit pretty quickly, and a lot of women need more time than my psyche wants to give them. That makes it a relationship with sand in it, rather than grease, if you get my meaning. For another thing, because I’m committed in a very serious sense, I like to have dangerous sex.”

I stopped, horrified that I’d let my mouth run on without thinking about what I was saying first. I thought frantically, trying to think of a way to minimize the damage.

“Having sex just for fun is great.” I stopped again and stared at her. “When you’re an adult and understand the consequences.”

Having brought up the C word, I was stuck. I had to go on.

“You see, part of sex is for the making of babies, and a lot of women don’t want to think about it that way. I just don’t get very turned on when I’m with a woman who knows she doesn’t want children and takes all the steps necessary not to have them. It’s like lighting a firecracker and seeing it fizzle instead of popping.”

“I get it,” she said, before I could go on. “The kind of women you like are few and far between.”

“Exactly. So... ?”

Wolf eyes stared into mine. She took a breath. I wondered when in hell her breasts had gotten that big. And those nipples, poking through the top of her bikini. When had those gotten so prominent?

“Boys - whether they’re my age or a few years older - are only interested in the recreational sex thing. All they want to do is play with my tits and try to get into my panties. And while I haven’t had any ... um ... relationships, to speak of, I suspect I’m more interested in something that goes beyond the sex too.”

I wondered how she’d picked up on the fact that I wanted much more than sex from a woman. I hadn’t said it. She’d cut me off, in fact, as I’d been about to say it.

“And I do have girlfriends,” she said. “We talk at school.”

“How come you don’t hang out with them after school?” I asked.

“What’s with you?” she asked, sitting up. “Where is all this ‘I care about you, Heather’ crap coming from? I like my life. I’m happy. I’m well adjusted. What’s your problem?”

“I just worry about you,” I said, surprised at her vehemence.

“That’s my mother’s job,” she said. “Your job is to be Uncle Bob.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

“This is where I come to get away from the world, not confront it,” she said. “This is my safe haven. This is where I feel relaxed. This is the only place in the world where when a man puts suntan lotion on me, I don’t have to worry about what he’ll try to get away with.”

I was stunned. I had never seen her like this. It suddenly popped into my mind that she was a teenager, and that her body was probably flooded with hormones that were wreaking havoc with her system. So what would her friend do in a situation like that? I decided to tease her.