Chapter 4

A week later Jennifer had a dream. In it someone was rubbing the cream on her back. It felt fabulous, and made her back feel wonderful. She had been required to learn to sleep on her stomach when she stopped taking the pain pills. Her back had been too tender then to allow her to sleep like she usually did. And, since then, she had just gotten used to it.

But in her dream she did turn over, to find that it was The Hermit who had been rubbing her back. And now he rubbed her front too. It was one of those ridiculous dreams, because while he rubbed her breasts, it was in circles, and he said “Wax on ... wax off” over and over again until she writhed under his attentions. Then she experienced an orgasm in the dream that was so real, and so powerful, that she actually woke. She was shaken to find that she was actually having an orgasm, just as if she had rubbed herself, but her arms were firmly wrapped around her pillow. It was so disturbing that she actually got out of bed and walked around her room for a few minutes before going back to bed.

Then, to her utter amazement, as she drifted back to sleep, she wished she could have the dream again.

The next morning she spoke to her mother about it at breakfast.

“I had a strange dream last night,” she said.

“What was it about?”

“It was a ... um ... it was a sort of sexy dream,” she said, a little uncomfortable. She suddenly wished she hadn’t said anything.

“I love those kinds of dreams,” said her mother.

“Really?”

“You may have noticed there is no man in my life,” said Mindy, her voice droll. “Those kinds of dreams are the only sex life I have.”

“Mom!” Jennifer was astonished her mother would say something like that.

“What? You’re growing up. And while I may not have a sex life any more, yours is out there somewhere, waiting for you to come along and find it. There are perils involved with that, but it can also be one of the most important things in your life.”

Jennifer sat, stunned. She wasn’t used to being taken seriously, or having conversations that involved adult things. Combined with the feelings she had been having recently, this was all kind of dizzying.

“So dreams like that are okay?”

“A dream is a dream. There’s nothing okay or not okay about dreams. I know people say dreams have meaning, but there has been debate about that for thousands of years. If I were you, I wouldn’t worry about the fact that you have them. Like I said, I love having mine.”

“Wow,” said Jennifer. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Her mother beamed. “Now ... what was your dream about? Give me all the details!” She leered at her daughter.

“I can’t do that!” gasped Jennifer.

“Sure you can,” laughed her mother. “When it comes to sexy dreams, we’re sisters, not mother and daughter. All women have them, and all women love to share them. I’ll tell you about one of mine if you tell me about yours.”

“Really?”

“Cross my heart,” said Mindy, making the required motions with her index finger. Then she took a bite of her food and let Jennifer think.

“You promise not to laugh?” Jennifer looked nervous.

“Absolutely,” said her mother.

It was another full two minutes before the girl finally decided to go for it.

“It was about The Hermit,” she said, tentatively.

“Really!” said her mother, smiling.

“Is that weird?”

Her mother crossed her heart again. “I swear this is true. I have had a dream or two about our mysterious hermit as well.”

“Honest?” Jennifer was astonished.

“He’s handsome. He’s polite. He’s a gentleman. He’s hunky. He’s mysterious. Did I mention he’s gorgeous? What woman wouldn’t have a hot dream about him?”

“Lots of women,” said Jennifer. “They’d have nightmares, instead of dreams like mine.”

“That’s because they don’t know him like we do. Their loss is our gain. Go on.”

That part was hard. So she eased into it.

“Remember when you asked me about his shirt, and I told you he saw my breasts?”

Her mother nodded.

“There was more. Not a lot more, but more than I told you.”

“I understand how difficult it might be to talk to your mother about something like that,” said Mindy. “But right now we’re sisters. And you said he didn’t touch you. That’s right ... isn’t it?”

Jennifer nodded. “He didn’t do anything wrong at all. At least I don’t think so.”

“Go on,” urged Mindy.

“So anyway, while he was driving me to the hospital, I couldn’t lean back, and I sort of put my arms on the dashboard and then lay my head on them, you know?” She got another nod and went on. “And I didn’t realize it at first, but the shirt was hanging straight down and wasn’t covering anything. And he kept looking over at me.” She looked away nervously and then back. “And I sort of let him look.”

“Why?” asked her mother. To Jennifer, she actually sounded curious.

“I don’t know,” said Jennifer. “Actually, I told him not to look and he apologized. And he tried not to look. I could tell he was trying. But sometimes he looked anyway. And he apologized again. That’s when he said I was pretty. So I sort of let him look after that.”

“And how did that make you feel?”

“It didn’t bother me,” said Jennifer, sounding a little confused. “I mean I didn’t mind. And the other day, when I took him the cookies, I didn’t have on a bra, and while I was talking to him my ... um ... nipples ... um...” She looked away.

“They got erect,” said the woman who claimed to be her sister, but still looked a lot like her mother. But she didn’t sound judgmental. If anything, it was like she was trying to be helpful.

“Yes,” said Jennifer.

“And he saw that,” said Mindy.

“Yes,” said Jennifer. “He stared at them.”

“And how did that make you feel?”

“I told him to stop again. And he apologized again, and I’m sure he meant it. But then we talked and somehow it ended up with me telling him it was okay for him to look!”

“I see,” said Mindy.

“Do you really? Because I don’t. And then I had this dream where he was putting the cream on my back and I turned over and this time he did touch me.” She closed her eyes, unable to watch her mother’s face. “It was pretty intense.”

“I can imagine,” said Mindy, softly. She wasn’t sure how to feel ... for a number of reasons.

“Your turn,” said Jennifer, wanting to hurry things along and get past her own confession. She wasn’t sure it had been such a great idea to be that open with her mother.

“Not so fast,” said Mindy. “Did he say anything to you in this dream?”

Jennifer blinked. “Well ... sort of. But it was really silly.”

“What was it?”

“He said, ‘Wax on ... wax off’ over and over again.”

Mindy couldn’t help it. She laughed.

“You promised!” moaned Jennifer.

“I know. And I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you. I can just picture it in my mind and it’s ... funny.” She grinned. “Did he say anything else?”

Jennifer’s voice was a bit surly when she answered. “No.”

“Did he touch you ... um ... everywhere in this dream?”

Jennifer looked confused at first, and then her eyes widened.

“No! Only up here!” Her hands came to cup her breasts ... cover them, actually. When she realized she was squeezing them, she put her hands down hurriedly.

“I won’t ask you if anybody has touched you there ... or anywhere,” said Mindy. Actually she wanted to know ... except she didn’t.

“They haven’t,” said Jennifer, oblivious of what her mother had said.

“How about kisses?” asked Mindy. “You had any good kisses yet?”

Jennifer felt her face heat up. “Not really.”

“What do you mean not really?”

“A guy named Henry asked me to dance at the Freshman Mixer. And when the dance was over he kissed me. I didn’t know he was going to, and he did it so fast I didn’t even realize what he was doing until it was over.”

“So sad,” sighed Mindy. “Kids these days have no idea how to...” She didn’t finish. She didn’t want to get into details about what she’d been doing at Jennifer’s age. All the girl had to do was some math to figure out her mother got pregnant with her at seventeen. After she had the baby she finished high school, but college had passed her by long before she was left alone with her little girl by a cowardly and selfish husband.

“Never mind,” she said. “What kind of dream do you want to hear about?”

“What kind? There’s more than one kind?”

“Oh, trust me, honey, they come in all flavors. Some of them will make you have to wash the sheets.” Her hand slapped over her mouth and her eyes got huge as she realized what had just popped. “I’m sorry,” she said through her fingers. “That was indelicate of me.”

“I wanna hear one of those kind!” said Jennifer, perking up visibly. Then she frowned. “Or do I? Will it gross me out? I mean you are my mom and all.”

“I’ll take it easy on you. How bad is your crush on our mysterious Mr. Higginbotham?”

“I don’t have a crush on him,” said Jennifer.

“Oh,” said Mindy, smiling. “So that’s why you let him look at you topless, and later say you’re going to marry him, and then dream about him giving your boobies a nice rub?”

Jennifer just blinked at her mother, trying to process the rush of feelings that had suddenly deluged her.

“But he’s your age!” she objected. She also sounded a bit horrified.

“Does that mean I can have him?” Her mother looked at her interestedly. “Because, if you recall, I said some of my dreams have been about him too.”

Something swelled up inside Jennifer, something unhappy, but also confused. Her initial impulse was to yell “No!“ But she didn’t, and thought about that instead. It was during those thoughts that she identified her previous gut reaction as jealousy, and that astonished her.

“This is too weird,” she said.

“So I can’t have him,” said Mindy, grinning.

“What kind of dreams?” asked Jennifer. “About him, I mean?”

“You sure you want to hear them?”

“Yes.” She blinked. “How um ... dirty are they?”

Her mother sobered. “First off, nothing you dream is dirty. Sex isn’t dirty. I know there are people out there who think it is, but they have a mental illness. They wouldn’t call it that, but I do. So don’t ever think that sex is dirty, or that thinking about it is dirty, or dreaming about it is wrong. It’s not. You can have stupid sex, but it’s not dirty. Got that?”

Jennifer nodded.

“No you don’t,” said Mindy. “But stick with me and you will some day. It took me years to figure it out. Just understand that it doesn’t matter how strange or weird a dream is ... it’s only a dream. And dreaming about sex is neither dirty nor wrong. It’s normal.”

“Okay,” said Jennifer.

“Now, that said, and despite what you say, it’s obvious you have some kind of feelings for our lovable hermit. I understand that. I like him too. He’s a very attractive guy on many levels. But I don’t want there to be tension between us, so how about I tell you about one of my other dreams instead?”

“Why would there be tension between us?” asked Jennifer.

Mindy sighed. “I’m going to put this in your language, okay? Just remember what I said earlier. The reason there might be a little tension between us is that the dreams I’ve had about Mr. Higginbotham are reaaaally dirty.” She winked, and smiled, hoping that her daughter would respond in the same way.

But Jennifer wasn’t plugged into the humor of that situation. Instead, she was curious.

“Dirty like how?” she asked.

“Wow,” whispered Jennifer, when her mother had finished.

Mindy looked at her daughter closely. She had decided not to hold anything back. Jennifer was, after all, seventeen, and only a year from emancipation. She was fully formed, and fully capable of entering into a physical sexual relationship. And despite what she thought, there were plenty of men out there who would happily bed her. So Mindy had told the dream just as it had happened.

“You okay?” she asked.

Jennifer nodded slowly. “I wonder what the telephone that turned into a chicken meant?”

“That’s all that has you worried?” Her mother almost laughed. She had just delivered a tutorial, for all intents and purposes, on how to give a man oral sex that would blow his mind. She had always loved sucking a man’s penis ... well, the one penis she’d ever sucked, anyway. And, of course, Mark had loved having her do it. It was all about him, after all. But in the dream she’d told Jennifer about, it hadn’t been Mark’s prick she sucked. And it hadn’t looked like Mark’s prick in her dream either. Mark had a garden variety, pretty ordinary circumcised penis. It was maybe five inches long at his best hardon, but that fit nicely into her mouth. And he had known how to get her off while he fucked her.

She hadn’t mentioned all that to Jennifer, of course. But she had drawn a distinction between sucking Mark’s cock, which is what she had always done back then, and making love to The Hermit’s penis. She actually used those words to describe how the dream was so different than her real experiences. And she wanted Jennifer to know the difference between cocksucking and oral lovemaking. Mindy hadn’t known the difference, back then. And even now, she only thought about the differences in a philosophical sense. She’d never made love to a man’s penis before. She’d sucked Marks cock lots of times, but she was convinced it could be so much better than that.

So she had described how she had gone, in her dream, to check on The Hermit, only to find him asleep on his bed in his little A-frame cabin. He had been naked, and Mindy had described in detail what muscles bulged, and how delicious he looked.

She had only looked at first, but then she touched his skin with a fingertip. And while she watched, his penis grew and thickened, until it was so long she started thinking of hand spans instead of inches. It was impossibly long, and the tip was covered by his foreskin. She knew what that looked like because she had a brother, and when they were young, before they reached puberty, she saw his uncut penis all the time.

He woke up, and lay there, not making a sound, but just looking at her. He didn’t yell, or tell her to go away. So she reached for his penis.

It was at that point that Mindy’s courage began to fail her. She felt like she was being pornographic, somehow. And her description of where she had touched his penis, and how and with what, had gotten her own pussy wet, just remembering that dream. Finally she couldn’t go on any longer. So she ended by simply saying “So ... I kept sucking it until he was happy, and I was too.”

She had looked away, unable to meet her daughter’s eyes. That’s when Jennifer had whispered: “Wow.” She gave a heavy sigh and spoke again. “That sounded so beautiful,” said the girl softly. “Are the others like that? About him, I mean?”

Mindy felt immense relief that her daughter hadn’t collapsed in the throes of mental illness at hearing her mother’s dream.

“Some. In others we do ... other things.”

“Like have sex?”

“Yes.”

“Some day I want to hear about one of those,” said the girl.

“Really?”

“Yes, but not now. I think I’ve had all I can take for now.”

“I hope I didn’t do something stupid today by telling you this,” said her mother.

“It’s okay,” said Jennifer. “I was jealous of you at first. But it sounds so beautiful, I can’t possibly hold it against you to want to do that with him. And he is your age. And you do deserve to be happy and have a good man in your life.”

“Whoa, girl,” laughed Mindy. “Dreaming is one thing. Doing is something altogether different. I don’t think there’s a hermit in my future.”

“Oh,” said Jennifer. Her brow creased. Then her face relaxed.

“So does that mean I can have him?”

There had been further discussion.

Mindy had tried to impress on her daughter that, while she was on the cusp of womanhood, she still had a year to go in high school, and that she should probably experiment with boys her own age, rather than a full grown man who (though she didn’t say this to Jennifer) she suspected was well-versed in things sexual. He was a veteran, after all, and everybody had heard stories about randy soldiers.

Jennifer had nodded, and said “Uh huh,” several times. But she got the distinct impression her daughter was thinking about other things ... quite possibly the things her mother had just described to her ... which might not have been the best idea she’d dreamed up recently.

So, just to make sure she stayed in the loop, she dreamed up another crazy idea.

“Maybe I’m interested in him after all,” she said.

Jennifer stared at her. Her face was flat and emotionless. “You just don’t want me to have him,” she said.

“I don’t think you’re ready to have that kind of relationship,” her mother corrected. “You need to take things a little slower than he would probably want to go.”

“So you’re going to hog him, because you’ve done all this stuff before, and if you flirt with him he won’t pay any attention to me.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” said Mindy. Actually, that was exactly what she had in mind, but she didn’t want to admit it to her daughter.

“Oh come on,” snorted Jennifer. “You’re beautiful, and you have big boobs. Once he gets his hands on you he won’t even look at me.”

“That’s not true,” said the mother part of Mindy. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Lots of men would love to be with you. You just haven’t met them yet.”

“I can’t compete with you,” complained Jennifer.

“Then let’s not compete,” she said. “We’ll both be friends with him.”

“What does that mean?” asked Jennifer.

“It means we both be nice to him and spend time with him, but neither one of us goes whole hog.”

“You want to share a boyfriend?” Jennifer’s face showed her incredulity.

“Boyfriend is probably the wrong word,” said Mindy, weakly. This wasn’t going at all like she wanted it to. “Remember. He has a say in this too. He may not be interested in either of us claiming him for a boyfriend. He may not want a girlfriend at all! He’s a hermit, for Pete’s sake! Let’s not count our chickens before they hatch.”

Jennifer stared at her mother for a long half minute.

“Well, we are both dreaming about him,” she said.

“Yes ... but remember they’re just dreams, sweetheart.”

“Yes, but he said I was pretty ... and he’s seen my breasts.”

“Does that mean I get to show him mine?” asked her mother, trying to show how silly that would be.

But Jennifer was on another plane of existence.

“No,” she said. “Yours are bigger and prettier than mine. Everybody knows guys like big boobs. That wouldn’t be fair.”

Mindy just stared, unable to comprehend how her daughter could have taken that comment seriously. It got worse when Jennifer kept speaking.

“You have the advantage in bigger boobs, and you’re prettier than me. So you don’t get to show him anything until I’ve kissed him. And you don’t get to kiss him first. I deserve a fair shot at this.”

Mindy was astonished that her seventeen-year-old daughter was wheeling and dealing with a man’s affections ... a man who didn’t even know he was being parceled out. It would have been laughable, except that Jennifer was so serious about it all. The problem was that she couldn’t just shut her daughter down. Not after getting her to open up about the dream, and how she felt. She could ruin everything if she went into “Because I’m the mother! That’s why!” mode.

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