Chapter 1

I have to say, right up front, that I had no idea how unusual my life was until I was about fourteen. And I also need to say that I’m fully aware many of you may feel, at least initially, that this is a tale of abuse, or molestation or the like.

But what I want you to understand is that my life wasn’t anything like that at all.

And that’s why I want to tell my story. I wasn’t molested. I was loved. And I’ll always be glad that I was loved in the fashion I was.

So please, don’t frown, or grumble. This is a tale of joy and happiness. Besides. I didn’t actually lose my virginity until I was sixteen, which is a whole year older than the age of consent in a half of America and three quarters of the rest of the world. And even the phrase “lost my virginity” is not the right phrase for what happened to me. Not the way most women would mean it. So put your personal morals on hold for a bit. Uncle Bob did not molest me.

Even if he sort of practiced at it for years.

But let me just tell you how it all happened. Then you’ll see why I’m so happy about my very unconventional life.

My name is Kylie. I’m the youngest of triplets. My oldest sibling is Shannon and our brother is Brinn. We’re fraternal, which means that somehow mom squirted three eggs out of her ovaries about the same time our father(s) squirted several million sperms into her vagina. The reason I used the conditional plural for “father” is that we don’t actually know who our father(s) is/are. That’s because mom got pregnant at a beach party while she was on winter break down in Mexico when she was in her senior year of high school. She doesn’t remember much of it, except drinking something that was sweet and made her feel like she could fly. She also remembers seeing three naked guys standing over her, but that’s about it. She woke up naked on the beach, and could tell she’d had sex. Her “friends,” who had said they’d take care of her, were nowhere around.

We didn’t actually learn all this until we were fifteen, but I’m telling you now because it may help explain why she did some of the things she did, after that happened to her. Mom was pretty unconventional to start with, so it’s probably no huge surprise to some people that we triplets were raised a little weird too.

Anyway, when we asked about our father, as all kids eventually do, what she told us was that she couldn’t remember him, which was okay, but she also couldn’t remember the sex, which was sort of a tragedy. I mean a girl should be able to remember her first time.

Yes, I know that this kind of first time might not be the best memory. After all, she was gangbanged by (at least) three guys who didn’t really give a crap about the girl they were fucking. But what if she liked them? I mean they might have been the guys she dreamed of having a first time with ... right? See how complicated this can get?

Anyway, you might think that not knowing who our father was bummed us kids out. We would eventually find out that we were the result of what amounted to rape, both ethically and legally. Of course we didn’t find that out until we were fifteen, like I said, and by then we had already gotten used to the idea that our dad was stupid because he’d run out on us, and that meant he’d never get to know us, which made him a real loser. So we never really missed him.

Besides that, Uncle Bob was always there as a father figure. He was there from as early as I can remember anything. I have misty, hazy memories of him clear back to when I was four, I think, but it’s hard to tell because we’ve always lived in the same house and so has Uncle Bob. Mom got a job in the mill while she was pregnant. Our Grandma worked there, and got mom the job. Grandpa was a soldier and he got shot up and couldn’t work, so when we were born, he took care of us while Mom and Grandma were at work. I don’t remember any of that part, because that was while we were just babies. And way back then, the way Uncle Bob describes it, his job involved driving some important guy around in a big, fancy car, and he lived in a trailer house. There was more to it than that, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

I know this doesn’t sound very unconventional. That part comes next. It was sad, at least for the grownups, but it was pretty normal, I guess.

Anyway, where things started to get different was on day when Uncle Bob was driving his boss around and these guys tried to assasinate him. They had machine guns and hand grenades, or something like that, and Uncle Bob saved his boss, but got kind of blown up in the process. He doesn’t talk about that, or who his boss was, but it had to be somebody important, because he got to retire and they pay him a boatload of money to be retired on. He limps, but other than that you can’t tell he ever got exploded, or whatever.

So by the time I remember being around Uncle Bob, it was after he already had the ranch. He calls where he lives “The Ranch” even though there aren’t any cows or horses or anything like that there. There are barns and stuff, but no animals. It’s way out in the middle of a forest in Wyoming, and the driveway is like two miles long. I’m trying to describe it the way I remembered it back then. That’s because it was home to me, for all intents and purposes. We spent more time there than we did at our house, which was in Colorado.

Okay, so the very first memory I have of Uncle Bob is of him lying on one of those fold up bed thingies beside the pool, and he stood up with a smile on his face.

And he was naked.

I remember my mom running and slamming into him, and they hugged and made all these happy noises, and I looked at Shannon and Brinn and they looked back at me. It was pretty clear to me they didn’t know any more than I did about what was going on. So we just stood there, kind of pressed together while this naked man we had never seen was hugging our mother.

Then he kissed her. On the lips.

Now that wasn’t strange, in and of itself. We all kissed each other on the lips. It was just kissing. We did it every day at one time or another. Mom kissed us, and we kissed each other. Though sometimes Shannon and I kissed Brinn on each of his cheeks at the same time. That’s because people thought that was cute and they gave us candy and cookies and stuff when we did that.

But we’d never seen our mother kiss a man. She hugged and kissed Grandma and Grandpa, but no other adults.

Now, of course, we know that this was right after Uncle Bob got out of the hospital and had just bought the ranch with all the money they gave him. And the pool was brand new, because when he bought the ranch, it didn’t have a swimming pool there, and he wanted one and he had all this money, so he just had some people come and build one.

Anyway, we stayed there at Uncle Bob’s ranch for a while. I don’t know how long. It was probably only a few days, because Mom was still working then. But that was when we found out that we didn’t have to wear any clothes when we were at Uncle Bob’s ranch. Mom didn’t wear clothes either. Of course we had seen each other without clothes on lots of times. When it was bath time, we took baths together, and we had played in the sprinkler naked. That’s about the only other memory I have from back then. And we saw Mom without clothes on sometimes, but then she always dressed us and put clothes on herself too. So this was really different, that first time we went to Uncle Bob’s house.

The other thing I remember was that we still slept in the same bed at Uncle Bob’s, just like we did at home, but Mom slept in the same bed as Uncle Bob. That was different. Shannon was whiny at bedtime. She’s always been that way. And she was always getting out of bed and going into Mom’s bedroom and asking for a drink, or saying she had to go potty or something. Sometimes Brinn and I would go with her, but it wasn’t worth it, because Mom got mad about it usually. But this time, in this new place, when Shannon got up and went to find Mom, we snuck along behind her. And that’s how I know Mom was in Uncle Bob’s bed, because I saw them. I heard Mom laugh and say, “See? I told you she would.” And Uncle Bob laughed and jumped out of bed and caught Brinn and me and picked us up. I started to cry, because I was scared, but all he did was hug us and say everything was fine. He took us back to the room we were staying in and told us a long story. I remember it was a really great story, but I don’t remember what it was about.

Anyway, we went back home and everything went back to normal, meaning Grandpa took care of us while Mom and Grandma worked and we all wore clothes all the time again.

The next time I saw Uncle Bob was when he came to visit us for our fifth birthday party. He brought presents, Barbies for me and Shannon and a fire truck for Brinn. He stayed for a long time, which I now know was probably a week, but that seemed like a long time to us. He didn’t take his clothes off then, except at night when he got in bed with Mom. We just figured they liked to sleep together, like the three of us liked to sleep together. I loved snuggling with my brother and sister, because it was warm, and they smelled good and I felt safe. There was a monster who lived in our closet, but he wouldn’t come out if all three of us were hugging or touching each other.

The next summer we went to visit Uncle Bob again. Again he was naked when we got there and after she hugged him, Mom took her clothes off and asked us kids if we wanted to swim. Uncle Bob had these cool shirt things we could wear that were real thick. I know now they were life jackets, but I didn’t know that then. All we knew was that they were cool because they helped us float and we didn’t have to worry about getting our faces wet by going under water. He had this fence thing in the pool that kept us all at one end, and with the life jackets on, our toes could barely touch the bottom. We learned to bounce up and down to get around and I remember we played tag for a long time. Uncle Bob and Mom laid down on a towel on the outside of the pool. Actually, Mom sat on top of Uncle Bob and tried to squish him by bouncing up and down, like Shannon tried to squish Brinn and me when we were wrestling.

I know what you’re thinking. You know what they were doing. I do too, now. But I’m telling it to you like I remember it back then, because you have to understand how things happened, and how we felt about all this while it was happening.

Over the next few years we visited Uncle Bob lots of times and it was just like that. Mom taught us the word “nudist” and said Uncle Bob was a full time nudist and we were part time nudists. Brinn argued with her and said Uncle Bob couldn’t be a full time nudist because when he came to visit us, he didn’t take his clothes off.

“Unless he’s in bed with you,” said Shannon. “He’s always a nudist when he gets in bed with you.”

I remember this shocked look on my mom’s face when Shannon said this. We were eight, I think. I still remember how Shannon said this because of that look on my mom’s face. You know how a little kid says something that’s obvious, and says it in an obvious manner. It doesn’t actually mean anything special, they’re just pointing out how obvious something is. And Shannon (and the rest of us) still didn’t understand that Mom and Uncle Bob were having sex. It wouldn’t be much longer before we came to that realization, but we didn’t know it then. Of course now that I’m older, and remember how things sounded and looked that day, I know it sounded like Shannon knew they were having sex, and that’s why Mom got that look on her face. Her face turned real red, too.

Then she said, “Well ... we love each other!”

You know how an adult says something and the kids all look at each other like someone has just announced that the sun will come up tomorrow ... and everybody already knows that the sun will come up tomorrow ... so the kids are kind of confused as to why that was said?

That happened.

Then Brinn asked a question that would change all of our lives forever. We just didn’t know it at the time.

“Mommy? What does loving each other have to do with being a nudist?”

Mom looked around, kind of like she was looking for somebody, maybe, but of course the only ones there were us kids.

“What I mean is that since we love each other, it’s fine to be nudists together. But we wouldn’t want to be nudists with strangers,” she said. Her voice sounded funny, and if we’d been just a few years older we probably would have reacted differently to what she’d just said. But we weren’t, and she was our mom, so we just said, “Okay,” and went on with life, you know?

The point is that it became clear to the adults that we kids were getting old enough to notice things they hadn’t had to worry about before.

Now you might think that would have changed the way Uncle Bob and Mom acted when they were around us. You have to remember that I was just there, and being a kid, and probably not paying all that much attention to what was going on. But I don’t remember there being any big changes or anything. If we were at the ranch, and we watched a movie, we probably watched it naked and Uncle Bob and Mom sat together on the couch and cuddled, and us kids cuddled somewhere else. He had bean bag chairs for each of us, and we liked them sometimes, but usually we didn’t, because all three of us wouldn’t fit on just one bean bag. So usually we’d make a kind of fort out of the bean bags and huddle in the middle of that. We also liked to sit in the recliner, together. And Mom and Uncle Bob would smooch and touch each other.

It was the smooching and touching each other that eventually taught us what was really going on between them, by the way. Brinn figured it out first. We were nine and it was the end of the school day. For some reason the school decided it wasn’t a good idea for all three of us to be in the same classroom. But they only had two classes for the fifth grade, so they put Brinn in one class and Shannon and me in the other. At the end of the day we rode the same bus home, of course, and Shannon and I were waiting beside the door for Brinn when he came tearing up to us looking all excited.

I could tell you what was said, but I’ll just summarize. Some boys had dared him to “smooch” with Brenda Dickman, who was in their class. He was supposed to kiss her and put his hand on her “boobies.” And he asked, “Why?” and these guys laughed and said it was “having sex” and that they’d all done it and he should too. So, being stupid, Brinn went up and tried to kiss Brenda and ran his hand in a circle over her chest and she yelled and Miss Chambers got involved. So he told her what he was doing and why he was doing it and she scolded him and said gentlemen don’t try to take advantage of a lady. When he promised he’d never do anything like that again, she went and collected up the guys who had dared him and took them to the principal’s office. It was a really big scandal. For two weeks after that Brenda said Brinn was her boyfriend and that they were going to get married and all that.

Anyway, that’s when we found out that what our mother and Uncle Bob were doing when they kissed and touched each other was having sex.

This, of course, was a huge deal. You might think it was a huge deal because they were brother and sister. But that wasn’t the thing. What the thing was, was that while we knew that “people” had sex, we didn’t actually know anybody who we knew was actually having sex. Remember, we were little kids, with only part of the facts, and with only a smidgen of experience in the world. Of course we knew hundreds of adults who were having sex. We just didn’t know we knew that. We simply didn’t understand how all that worked back then. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. That’s what being a kid is like. It’s like living in a picture puzzle that hasn’t been all put together yet.

Besides that, there were other things going on at that time in our lives that were distractions. Take, for instance, the fact that Uncle Bob bought a horse. To us he was this huge, scary black beast, at least at first. But when he put us on the saddle, the whole world changed for us. Suddenly we were seven feet tall, and everything looked completely different. Even buildings looked different.

Of course when we rode him, we got dressed. We also got dressed when we went for a hike, or played games outside in the woods behind the house. We had never explored the vast pasture up to that point, but the horse was the perfect way to do that. Of course, if we wanted to ride him, somebody had to go get him and he was usually out in the pasture somewhere. Uncle Bob left a halter on him with a piece of rope hanging down and one of our favorite things became the “rescue the horse” where we went out into the dangerous world and brought him safely back to the barn. We wouldn’t know for years that that horse could have taken on a mountain lion and won the fight. But with us, he was as gentle as could be. That first year, all three of us would fit into the big saddle on his back. If Uncle Bob didn’t put us there, we could walk him over to the board fence of the corral and climb up on that to get to the saddle. Of course the only place we could ride without an adult along was in the corral, but we didn’t care. We were only nine. And those few times they hiked through the pasture while we rode were glorious.

It was the year we were ten that everything changed. With no warning whatsoever, Mom sat us all down and asked if we’d like to go live at the ranch all the time. There had been, as you can imagine (but we couldn’t at the time) a lot of discussion between Mom and Uncle Bob about ... things. They really were besotted with each other, though we kids didn’t understand that yet. Nor did we know that their love affair went clear back to the very first time Mom went out on a date (it was to a school dance) and the boy who took her out wouldn’t talk to her or look at her or touch her. She didn’t know he was scared half to death, just like she was. And when she got home she went to her room and cried because she thought she was ugly or something. Uncle Bob heard her and went to see what was wrong. He was sixteen, a couple of years older than she was, and he tried to convince her she wasn’t ugly. I guess she didn’t believe him and, being a boy, he thought one way to prove it was to show her his erection, which he said she was responsible for, because she looked so hot in her dress. Let’s just say that she was finally convinced. The point is that from that point on, if she was interested in some mating ritual, or curious about some aspect of teenage sexual exploration, she had a trusted male handy to work that out with. We didn’t get a whole lot more details than that, but you can just imagine what it must have been like to have that trusted male handy right next door to your bedroom.

Anyway, this history, though we didn’t know it then, was actually very important, because as we all know, history repeats itself.

You see, it was actually Brinn who had cold feet about moving to the ranch. And the reason he had cold feet was because of Brenda Dickman. She still thought Brinn was her boyfriend, and he’d kind of gotten used to that idea too, even though they rarely even talked to each other. Kids at that age just believe things, without empirical evidence to back it up, you know? But Brinn was pretty sure he’d never get another girlfriend if he left this one behind.

So Shannon and I said we’d be his girlfriends.

He made us promise we’d be his girlfriends forever, and when we did, he said, “Okay.”

It should probably be said, here, that this conversation about us being his girlfriends didn’t take place in front of our mother. When we hadn’t burst into cheers immediately (we girls could tell instantly that something was bothering Brinn) she had frowned and said, “Think about it,” and gone off to call Uncle Bob, probably in a panic, now that I think about it. Anyway, she was so happy when we all went to find her and said we wanted to move, that she didn’t ask any questions. Actually, as things have turned out, I don’t know if knowing why Brinn said he’d move would have made any difference. Who knows?

Chapter 2 »