Chapter 1

Have you ever looked at dirty pictures?

Of course you have. You're reading this at a site known for hosting dirty stories, so that begs the fact that you've also looked at dirty pictures. Nobody but you may know that. I mean we tend to keep things like that secret from those around us. But don't feel bad. We all have dirty little secrets. Most of us anyway.

And yes, I know that characterizing all this as "dirty" may offend your sensibilities. Nobody likes to think they have dirty little secrets. But if I had called them "aspects of my life I'd prefer to keep private" you'd have laughed at me and called me gay or something.

Not that I have anything against gay people. Only about half of them have that particular dirty little secret these days.

And that's because the world is finally being dragged, kicking and screaming, into admitting that there have been people for-practically-ever who liked their own gender better than they did the other. Big deal. Those people don't contribute to the gene pool, so they do no harm whatsoever. The ones who want kill everybody who isn't like them are the ones we need to worry about.

Okay. Let me take a breath here. I did not intend for this to get started on a negative or violent note. I think I'm a little tired of being judged by all those people out there who look down on me for my situation, when they are hiding dirty little secrets about their situation from the rest of the world.

Let me rephrase some things.

I believe that Mother Nature is a pretty smart cookie. She has regulated things for hundreds of thousands of years. Yes, some species have passed into memory, never to roam the earth again, or grow in the soil or whatever. But there is much beauty in this world, and I think we'd all be a lot better off if we worshiped nature, instead of worshipping money.

So I do not think that the naked body is "dirty" because the naked body is just part of the natural order. Clothes are fine for protection from the elements, but I think that's all they should be used for. There is much tension and distress created by those who characterize naked bodies, and sex, and eroticism as being undesirable or dirty. Those people are the ones that help things become extinct.

So from here on out, while I accept the fact that some people call the pictures I'm going to talk about "dirty" ... I'm just going to call them pictures.

I suspect you know the type of pictures I'm talking about. They're for sale at literally tens of thousands of sites on the internet. But if you're a poor sixteen year old, who doesn't have a credit card, you have to scrounge around, kind of like dumpster diving, lying to Google that you're eighteen when you put "Selena Gomez nude" into the search box. Of course all you get then are fakes, because Selena Gomez doesn't let anybody see or take pictures of her naked. Except maybe Bieber. Anyway, I didn't care they were fake, because they were all I could get.

Until I discovered what I call tumblr sites.

I got to my first one when a friend sent me a link to a picture that took me to this web page. I came to find out it was hosted by a web domain called tumblr.com. You can establish your own space hosted by tumblr and post your own pictures on it. They don't have to be pictures featuring nudity or eroticism and all that. You can post anything you want, in fact. But there are a lot of sites that feature naked men and women. And on almost every one of them there is an invitation for you, the average web surfer, to send them your picture, naked, of course, and they'll put that on their site too.

And I like those a lot.

Why?

Well, that's pretty simple. When you're a sixteen year old boy, who has no hope of actually getting a girl naked in bed, so you can do what nature intends for you to (someday) do, then the only recourse you have is to simulate. And, to be honest, I love to simulate, so I do it a lot.

Don't wince, please. If you are in a stable relationship that includes sexual intercourse, you know how much fun that is, and you know how often you want to engage in that pastime. Why wouldn't I want to have just as much fun, just as often? And I might point out that my hand never has a headache, and is never mad at me, and never sulks or pouts. So I might even be able to have more fun, more often than if I did have a girlfriend who wanted to fuck like a bunny.

Anyway, that was when I was sixteen. I had been masturbating long before then, of course, but it was when I was sixteen that that friend helped me stumble upon tumblr sites.

Like I said, each tumblr site is a collection of whatever that particular person likes, so there are usually a lot of the same kind of picture at a site. My own thrill, back when I was sixteen, was in finding a site that had a collection of girls who went into the bathroom and stripped down and then took their own picture in the mirror. There was often a bright flash beside their face or whatever, which kind of marred the image, but I liked these because I felt like they wouldn't do this if they had ever let a guy actually see their body. And if they hadn't let a guy actually see their body, then they were probably virgins. And then I could fantasize that they would let me be the guy who actually saw them for real, the first time, and so on and so forth.

Then I found a site that specialized in having what I call split pictures. That's where you have a picture of the girl or woman, dressed and looking completely normal on one side, and a picture of her naked and doing something sexy on the other side. The normal side usually looks like a plain snapshot some friend did. At least the best ones do. And then you see the "secret" side of her, being wild.

I know I've been rambling along here, but pay attention now, because this is very important to the rest of the story.

When you see a picture like this, it's easy to fantasize about her being wild with you ... because you know she gets wild. You have photographic evidence of that.

So I saved a bunch of the pictures from this guy's site, and used them to look at while I masturbated.

And since his seventy-three followers posted things like "studlytenincher.tumblr.com likes this" it seemed like those people might have pictures I'd like too. So I started visiting each of his follower's sites, to see what they had.

And that's how I found the picture that changed my life forever.

You'll guess who that picture was of, but I'm going to give you the background anyway.

We moved to Hanley when I was ten, but it's the only place I really know. I remember a few things about the other town, but not much. My dad had gotten out of the Army and started working for an insurance company in Hanley. My mom was a nurse, and she worked for the hospital in town.

I only had one sister, and she was five years older than me. Like a lot of sisters in that situation, she wanted nothing to do with a bratty little brother, so I was pretty used to spending time alone, and I read a lot. I mean a lot. When they tested me at my new school, they said I was on a ninth grade reading level.

My dad had regular work hours, though sometimes he had to work late. My mom was on a rotating schedule, and went from days, to swings to night shift. So there were days I got home from school and there was nobody home. Of course in Hanley, Kansas, there was no way to get into trouble, because there was nothing to do. There was a park near my house, and it had a tennis court that had basketball hoops at each end. You couldn't play full court because of the net, and if any adults were playing tennis you couldn't shoot hoops at all. The tennis players seemed to like evening and night play, though, so that left it open for us kids after school, and in the daytime in the summer. So I spent some time shooting hoops with some other kids, and playing H.O.R.S.E and like that.

When I turned twelve, I was allowed to start mowing lawns in the summers. It didn't actually start out as a business. An old man named Mr. Zimmerman lived on one side of us. He was retired, and used a walker. A lawnmower can sort of simulate a walker, and he had mowed his own yard since I moved there. But it took him forever, and when my dad offered that I'd do it for free, he accepted. Except he didn't make me do it for free. He paid me five bucks. And that was with me using his mower and gas. I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but I only got five dollars a week allowance, so it seemed like a lot to me. Plus the lady across the street, Mrs. Jackson, saw me doing his lawn and asked if I wanted to do hers too. And she paid me ten dollars.

By the time I was fifteen, I had twenty-five regular customers and a college savings account. I called it my "first car account" because my dad said he wasn't going to buy me a car. But my parents called it my college savings account, and I knew deep in my heart that that's what it would end up being spent on.

It was the summer I was sixteen that Mrs. Prater moved into Mr. Zimmerman's house. He had died of old age (that's what my mother told me) and his house had been up for sale for quite a while.

Mrs. Prater was a new kind of adult in my life. I knew lots of adult women. There was my mom, and all her friends at work, mostly other nurses. There were my teachers, and everybody we went to church with. But none of them were what you might call "fantasy worthy."

So I didn't know any beautiful women. Not like Mrs. Prater. I had seen beautiful women. I'd seen them on TV, and in movies, and in a couple of magazines guys I knew had. And there were some online, at the tumblr sites I had only recently discovered. But I hadn't met any, much less been able to talk to one.

And this one was kind of sprung on me. I had just finished Mr. and Mrs. Franklin's yard, which was pretty big, and was walking home, thinking about the cold bottle of Nehi Orange I knew was in the fridge. I turned the corner to find a moving truck parked in front of Mr. Zimmerman's house. He had died in January, so of course he hadn't hired me to mow his lawn all year. Neither had his son, or whoever had inherited the property, but wasn't interested in living in it. My dad told me to mow it once, in the hopes that would help it sell. I had been expecting him to tell me to do it again, but then the new owner showed up.

So there I was, pushing my mower past the house, and I had to stop to let two guys hump a great big piece of furniture off the ramp that went up into the truck, and up the sidewalk to the front door. There was a lady standing there, holding a baby in her arms, watching them.

She turned out to be Mrs. Veronica Prater.

"Hi," she said, smiling at me.

"Hi," I said back, staring.

The reason I was staring was because she was a stone fox babe. And what made that so startling was that it was obvious she wasn't all fixed up. She had this long, thick, honey blond pony tail hanging down to her shoulder blades, and eyebrows to match. There was no makeup on her face. By that, I mean I didn't see any eye shadow or dark cheekbones or any of that stuff most women wear. Her lips looked more red than pink, but it didn't look like lipstick. I guess it could have been, but it wasn't obvious. She had high cheekbones and her neck looked long, kind of like those busts of ancient Egyptian women in the museum.

Her face was just wonderful to look at, especially since she was smiling.

But her body took my breath away.

She had the baby on her left hip, kind of sitting there being held close to her by her arm. Her hip jutted out in his direction. It was a boy baby ... I could just tell that, but I couldn't see him that well. That's because she was standing sideways to me, and her chest blocked my view of him. She had, shall we say, rather large breasts? I found out later they were bigger than usual because she was still breastfeeding. But at that time, they just looked huge.

She was wearing a blue checked button down shirt, and cut off jeans shorts. Her legs looked like they were a mile long, and they were tanned and smooth. She had on tennis shoes with no socks.

"Do you mow lawns?" she asked.

She had a southern accent. And I mean the real deal, not Texas, or Oklahoma. She had that Alabama or Mississippi kind of drawl that makes a man stand up and listen.

I realized my mouth was hanging open. I closed it. I had to swallow before I could answer, because my throat was kind of dry.

"Um ... yes," I said.

"Mine needs mowing pretty badly," she said. "How much do you charge?"

I had never charged Mr. Zimmerman more than the five bucks he'd originally paid me. He was kind of special. I suspect that's why my mind just equated his yard with that amount.

"Five dollars," I said.

She stood, looking at me for a while.

"That doesn't seem like very much," she said. "Are you experienced?"

My brain started working again.

"Sorry," I said. That meant I was sorry for having just imagined her naked, but of course she didn't know that. Or maybe she did. "That's just what I charged Mr. Zimmerman."

"He used to live here?" she asked.

I nodded.

"Well, why don't you go on ahead and cut it, and then we'll decide if you should update your fee or not," she said. When she said "your fee" it came out as "yo-ah fee."

I'll be honest. She basically owned me at that moment, and I didn't even know her name.

"Okay!"

So I turned the mower through her gate and into her yard, even though what I really wanted to do was convince her to read me War and Peace, so I could listen to that voice until I was old and gray.

"I didn't necessarily mean now," she said, smiling.

"Oh." I stopped.

"But I s'pose now is as good a time as any," she went on.

I was still looking at her. Not being experienced at looking at a beautiful woman, I suspect I was rather blatant about it, but she didn't say anything. Eventually she just waved her hand at the yard and said, "Feel free..." Her pause made it obvious she was waiting for my name.

"Bobby!" I blurted. I pointed at our house. "I live there!"

She smiled again, and a look of sympathy came onto her face. I had seen that look before. There was a kid at church who had Down's Syndrome, and that's how lots of people looked at him.