Storiesonline.net
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                               Tumblr MILF
                               by Lubrican

Copyright© 2013 by Lubrican


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Description: Remember when you were a teenager and there was that gorgeous neighbor lady you wished you could see naked? What if you found pictures of her naked, online? Maybe participating in an orgy even? Wouldn't that pretty much fill the bill? But then what if she found those pictures on your computer? Say, on New Year's Eve, while drinking? Something like that could get a guy laid! But we all know life just isn't that simple. Something like that could also end you up in The Army!

Codes: MF cons 1st oral mastrb pett slow
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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.

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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.

"Well bless your heart! Okay ... Bobby," she said. "You go on ahead, then. But you be careful ... y'he-ah?"

I could feel my face flushing, and I suddenly felt as stupid as she thought I was. So I just pushed the mower into her yard and paid attention to mowing the lawn, instead of looking at her.

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It was an inauspicious beginning to a relationship I neither expected nor would have believed possible. While I mowed the lawn, the mover guys kept going in and out. Sometimes she was out there watching them and sometimes not. Every time I saw her she was holding the baby. When I got finished, she wasn't outside watching the movers. I didn't know what else to do, so I waited until the movers went in, and followed them.

I'd been in Mr. Zimmerman's house before, lots of times, in fact. But of course all his furniture was gone, and everything looked different except for the wallpaper. It was pretty strange.

The mover guys were taking stuff into various rooms, based on what was written on the outside of the box. Mrs. Prater (whose name I did not yet know at that point) wasn't in any of the regular rooms. There was only one other place she could be, and that was the walk-in pantry off of the kitchen. So I figured she had to be in there, and it never occurred to me that she might be hiding from the men, so I just opened it to make sure she was in there, so I could get my money.

"Ma'am?" I called out as I opened the door.

She has blue eyes. Did I mention that? Those bright blue eyes turned on me just about the time I realized she was feeding her baby.

Breastfeeding her baby.

"Oh!" I blurted.

The baby, who I later found out was almost a year old, turned his head and a fat, brown nipple popped out of his mouth. It was kind of like I was in a dream, because I saw a thin stream of white arc up and off to one side. I realized it was falling right on the baby's shoulder, and wondered if it felt like rain to him.

"I'll be right out, Bobby," she said, her voice calm. "I'm just feeding Timmy. Would y'all please close the door?"

I closed it, except that I was so rattled that I stayed inside when I did it. Then her, "I'll be right out" comment sank in and I realized I was supposed to be outside, waiting for her there. Timmy had blue eyes too, and he kept looking at me. I kept looking at that fat, stiff nipple.

"Oh man!" I sighed, and managed to turn around and get the door open. I went out and closed it. I was panting like I'd run a mile.

I felt like leaving. I was pretty embarrassed. But just as I was about to do that, her voice came through the door.

"Don't leave, Bobby!" she called.

So I stayed.

About five minutes later, she came out. Timmy was back on her hip and she looked normal.

"I'm really sorry," I said.

"No harm done," she said. "I take it you're done with the yard?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

"You mustn't call me Ma'am," she said. "You make me feel like an old lady."

"Sorry," I said again.

I followed her outside and she walked around the yard.

"You do good work," she said. "I think it's worth at least fifteen dollars, don't you?"

"Yes Ma'am," I said. The I followed that up with, "I'm sorry, Mrs..." I stopped.

She turned around and those blue eyes landed on me again.

"How rude of me," she said. She stuck out a hand. "Veronica Prater. And it's Miss, not Mrs. But you can just call me Ronnie. Everybody does."

"Oh," I said. "Okay."

"Okay what?" she asked, raising one beautiful eyebrow.

"Okay, Ma'am," I said automatically.

She sighed. "Do you ride the special bus, Bobby?"

I had to think about that, which shocked me when I figured out what she meant.

"No!" I said, outraged. "Why would you think that?"

She smiled.

"You seem a little ... um ... I don't know ... maybe slow? I'm sorry if I hurt your feelins'. My mamma always said that it was our duty to treat God's special children kindly, because they didn't choose to be that way."

"I'm not slow!" I complained. "I'm just not used to seeing... " I stopped. I had been about to finish with "a woman as pretty as you," but I realized that would be entirely unacceptable, should it ever get back to my mother.

"A breast?" she asked, completely misunderstanding my intent. "Surely a big, strapping young man like yourself has seen a breast before."

"No!" I said, meaning to correct her misinterpretation of events. She didn't give me time to explain.

"Well, as I said, no harm done. They all look pretty much the same. And now you've seen one. But how about let's not advertise that fact. I just got here, and that's not how I want my introduction to the neighborhood to go."

I couldn't let it go. I didn't want her thinking I was thinking about her breast. Of course now I was thinking about her breast. But I had to set her straight.

"I wasn't talking about that," I said. "I meant I'm not used to seeing such a pretty woman."

I realized I'd said what I wasn't supposed to say, and covered my eyes with one hand.

"I gotta go," I said. "You can pay me later."

I turned and hurried toward the mower, which was parked by the gate. She called, "Bobby!" after me, but I didn't stop. I felt pretty embarrassed. I just got my mower and pushed it home. That took all of twenty seconds, seeing as how we lived right next door, but at least I was out of sight quickly.

Actually, to be honest, I wouldn't have even gone back to collect. Well, maybe next time it needed mowing or something. But I wouldn't have gone over there the next day or anything like that.

At supper my dad filled my mom in on the goings on next door. Mom was on swings, and had slept all day. On days like that he sometimes brought work home so he could make sure her sleep wasn't interrupted. My supper was her breakfast.

"We have a new neighbor," my dad announced. He said it like it was big doings. Actually, I suppose it was. It was always a slow news day in Hanley.

"Really?" asked Mom.

"Yes. I guess Frank's nephew, or whoever inherited the house finally got rid of it. Seems to be a young woman with a child. Didn't see her husband." He turned to me. "I saw you mowing her yard. What's she like?"

I know I blushed. I couldn't help it. How do you answer a question like that? Well, come to think of it I suppose it depends on who's asking. If it had been any of my buddies from school, I'd have said, "She's a stone fox with a body to die for and eyes that make you want to drop trou and jerk off right in front of her."

Of course parents frown on being that honest.

"She's okay, I guess," I said.

Then began the interrogation. I had seen her up close. I had talked to her. I had valuable information, and they were going to get every bit of it, whether I tried to keep things secret or not.

I was saved by the doorbell. You'll never guess who it was.

My dad got up and answered the door. We could hear his deep voice, and a higher female one. I heard the word "y'all" and my penis stood up, stretching to get a look. Dad brought her into the dining room. Timmy was welded to her hip, as usual.

"We have plenty," he said. "Please, join us. It's the least we can do for a new neighbor." He looked at me. "Bobby, set a place for Mrs. Prater."

"Miss," she said. "And please just call me Ronnie." She looked at my mom. "Hi. I didn't realize y'all were eating or I wouldn't have bothered you."

"Nonsense," said my mother, who had that frown on her face that meant she had not yet made up her mind about Ronnie, but was working hard on it. She stood up, even though it was me who was supposed to be getting a plate and silverware. I thought it was to get a better look at this new woman who now lived next door, but she went to an empty chair and pulled it out.

"Please," she almost begged. "Moving is stressful. Sit. Eat something. Relax." She went into Grandma mode, then. My older sister has a baby a little bit older than Timmy. "And who do we have here?" she asked in that singsong voice adults use with all children.

"This is Timothy," said Ronnie. "He's about to turn one year old," she added proudly. Timmy gurgled and cooed, on cue.

"We must have a party!" gushed my mother.

My dad, who had been staring at Ronnie, looked at me and said, "Bobby!" I jerked and hurried to the kitchen. I came back with everything needed, balanced on my left arm and held to my chest. I almost dropped the glass, but saved it with what I thought was a great catch.

"I neglected to pay Bobby for mowing my lawn," said Ronnie, sitting down. My mother hurried to the space between the china hutch and the wall, where she kept the high chair we used when Cathy was here with my niece, Tiffany.

My dad was looking at me oddly. He knew how eager I usually was to collect from my customers.

"She was busy with the movers," I said. "I figured I could collect later."

"Shall I fix something for Timothy?" asked my mom. "I have a variety of baby food in the pantry. My daughter has an eighteen month old."

"I just fed him," said Ronnie. Of course the first thing I did was think of that fat, brown nipple, spurting milk, and looked right at her chest.

If all this sounds like it was a little awkward, that's because it was. At least it seemed that way from my perspective. Everybody was acting a little stiff. But that didn't last. While my parents had been in interrogation mode where I was concerned, they were not as pushy with Ronnie. Of course she didn't seem to mind supplying them voluntarily with the kind of information they would have asked anyway.

She had moved to Hanley from Atlanta, Georgia, to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city, and slow down her life. Nobody asked her why it took moving a thousand miles to get away from Atlanta. She owned her own web development business, which she explained meant she designed websites for people and then did the maintenance on them. If people wanted her to, she would also be the webmaster. My parents were all agog. My dad uses a computer every day, but I doubt he understands how it works. My mom's the same way. They have a whole tech support office at the hospital, and it has like ten people in it.

I know they wanted to know about Timmy's father, but they were too polite to ask. Instead, Mom offered to take Ronnie around town and introduce her to various people, and show her various places where she might want to shop. Of course they invited her to church, and I was pretty astonished when she smiled and agreed to go. All in all, things got pretty relaxed. Of course my dad's a great cook, so I'm sure that helped.

But finally Ronnie said, "I should go. I have unpacking to do. They're supposed to be here in the morning to hook up my broadband, so I can get back on line."

"Surely you have time for just one glass of wine," said my dad.

"Can't," she said, smiling. "I'm nursing Timmy."

"Excellent!" gushed my mother. "I'm a big fan of keeping a child on the breast. Too many people stop nursing much too soon, in my opinion."

"I agree," said Ronnie. "I want him to have the best start possible."

That set Mom off again, and she recommended doctors for both Ronnie and Timmy, and said she'd talk to them both if Ronnie wanted her to, because she wasn't sure they were accepting new patients. "I'm a nurse," explained my mother hurriedly, which explained why she knew all the doctors and was entitled to an opinion on how long Ronnie should breastfeed her baby and all that.

It was amazing, really.

There was a flurry of "Y'all are so nice," and "Think nothing of it, you're welcome any time!" and grins all around and nodding and bobbing of heads, and those blue eyes swept across the room and hesitated on mine for a few seconds.

Dad escorted her to the door and closed it, only to open it again as she knocked again and hurried back in and stood in front of me. I had stood when she rose from the table, of course. That goes without saying. Except I just said it, didn't I? Goes to show you how much this woman unsettled me. But there she was, with those blue eyes pinned on my face again. Her hand went into the pocket of her jeans shorts and pulled out a small wad of cash. She extended it to me.

"I'm sorry you had to wait for this," she said.

"It's okay," I said. "It goes in my college fund anyway."

"Well bless your heart!" she said. "I heartily approve."

Then she patted me on the shoulder and turned around and left.

My dad came back in and sat down.

"How about that," he said.

"She can't be more than twenty-two," said my mother. "Alone with a baby. How sad."

"Seems like a nice girl," said Dad.

"She does!" said my mother. "I should introduce her to Cathy. With children so close to the same age, they might have a lot in common."

My dad said, "What do you think of her, Bobby?" but I know he didn't mean it. He says things like that when his own mind is going a mile a minute and he wants somebody else to fill in the empty spaces so he can think.

"She thought I was a retard," I said.

"Well," said my dad, clearly distracted, "so do we sometimes. So do we."

Before I could respond (angrily) to that he turned to my mom.

"You'd better get ready to go," he said.

It was my mother's turn to show that she was also thinking furiously about things other than the fact that her husband had just called her only son a nitwit.

"I have plenty of time," said my mom. "I wonder what happened to him?"

"Don't ask," said my father, his voice stern.

"I won't!" complained my mother, sounding hurt that he thought she might even contemplate being nosy. "I just wonder, that's all. Did he die? Why didn't they get married? It's so mysterious!"

"It's not mysterious," said my dad. "Single mothers are a dime a dozen these days."

"But she seems so nice!" argued my mother.

"There's no reason a single mother can't be nice," said Dad.

And that was my introduction to Ronnie Prater, the woman who would change my life forever.



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Chapter 2


Now, if you're a guy, then I don't have to explain what happens when a guy in high school meets a beautiful woman who is only four or five years older than him, which means he could think of her as a girl, instead of a woman. But I'm not sure women understand that. Actually, I have very plain evidence to suggest women don't understand it. That is, in fact, what this story is about.

It's a lot like fishing. I know that might seem odd, but again, if you're a fisherman, you probably already get where I'm heading.

A fisherman is among the most hopeful men in the world. He puts himself in lonely, sometimes uncomfortable, or even dangerous places, where he sits for hours and hours, maybe even days, all the time hoping for a bite. His anticipation can keep him on a razor's edge for hours at a time. He's patient, because he knows, deep in his heart, that there will, in fact, be a bite and that he will, in fact, make the catch.

And in all that time he sits there being hopeful, the fisherman doesn't think about the fact that a hundred other guys have tried to land this monster fish, and failed, and that it's quite possible he doesn't have what it takes to lure it from the depths so that he can make it his. He doesn't think about that because there is so much hope in him that there isn't any room for doubt.

So when a boy meets a girl like that, she's a little like that elusive monster fish out in the lake, and that boy's level of hope rises to the point where catching her is about all he can think about.

Except the age difference, and little things like maybe her having a child, are the kinds of things that strip him of his gear. He has no rod, and the only line he has is two pound test. There is no bait and no boat. He doesn't even have a hook, for that matter. To drive this rather bizarre analogy into the dirt ... er ... water ... the fact of the matter is he knows he can't possibly catch her. He can glimpse her gliding serenely along, just under the surface. He can see the swirls she causes in the water as he watches her tail flick carelessly. He yearns, with an impossible hope to feast on her flesh one day...

Okay. That got a little weird. Sorry. But you get my drift.

She lived right next door, rather than out in the middle of the lake, and I saw her all the time. And, being a woman, she had no idea what she was doing to me. She just saw me as that nice young man who mows her lawn, or carries the cans of paint from her car into the house, or who climbs the ladder to clean the gutters because his father sees her getting ready to do that and says, "We can't have that, now can we, Bobby?"

The cheery words, "Hi, Bobby!" rang out frequently, usually followed by "What y'all doin'?" and my body would react and I'd get embarrassed and have to figure out a way to adjust things before she saw what was happening. I got to be an expert at that, by the way.

It might not have been so bad, except my mother took her under her wing and they became friends.

And I'm not talking "wave-at-each-other-over-the-back-fence-and-exchange-a-recipe-or-two" kinds of friends. Oh no. That would be too easy on Bobby. No, they became the "I-have-something-you-just-have-to-see!--I'll-be-over-in-a- minute," kind of friends. My mother crocheted stuff for Timmy and Ronnie un-fucked years of unintentional abuse on our PC. Then she worked on the firewall and advised them on a virus protection program and installed a router, so suddenly there was wireless in the whole house. Stuff like that. She even gave me her old laptop, because she said it was a dinosaur and useless for what she did these days.

So she was over a lot, and I got sent to her house a lot. And the next thing I knew, she was treating me like her little brother and smiling at me, and I was in the kind of agony that leaves permanent mental and emotional scars for life.

I guess it wasn't that bad. Not really. It's just that I was pretty sure the lake was empty of fish at that time in my life. I wasn't buff, or popular. I didn't have any special skills or talents. I was just a regular kid in a small town who was insanely in love with an unattainable woman who was actually six years older than me and thought of me as a boy who was so harmless that, if I showed up on one of my mother's errands and she was breastfeeding Timmy ... didn't even stop.

Of course, now that I'm a little older, I can look back on all that with glasses that aren't fogged by Ronnie Prater. There were fish in that lake. Lots of them. There were dozens of them my own age. But they were as minnows compared to a twelve pound Big Boob ... er ... I mean Big Mouth Bass. She put every other woman to shame. And, of course, that wasn't true either. I did actually ask Cynthia Johnson to the Prom, and we had a good time, except she tripped over her dress, which was a little too long, and when she fell her glasses flew off and somebody stepped on them. So she was blind for most of the night and didn't want to go to the after party. So I took her home and I even got a kiss. Trouble is Cynthia's eyes are blue...

So you get my drift.

Ronnie was very good for my hormone levels, meaning she gave whatever makes hormones in teenage boys a pretty steady workout. And I bled those hormones off in the time-honored tradition of flogging my log practically every single night. I'd lie there and stroke slowly, thinking of the last time I'd seen Ronnie nursing Timmy. She had just pulled up her T shirt to get to the front of her bra, which had these little doors on it she could flip open, revealing a milk-packed nipple. Truth be told, you couldn't actually see anything if Timmy's cheeks were working. But then there was this little baby, sucking like crazy on a nipple you wished you were sucking on like crazy.

And then one night, I forgot to get the old torn underwear I used to catch my spunk with. I kept it on top of my dresser behind a trophy. So I got up in the dark to get it, and as I passed my window I glanced out and there, in the window across our yards, was Ronnie's silhouette through the shade she'd pulled down. She was in the bathroom, and she was facing the mirror, taking the pony tail she always wore out and combing her long hair.

It was just her shadow, but I knew she was naked.

And I stood there and masturbated, looking at her, until I spurted right on the wall.

I got so weak I had to put my left hand on the wall and lean there. And I felt awful. I was looking right at her! Peeking ... sort of! I felt like I was a pervert.

And that's why I sat down at my laptop and decided to go check out a list of tumblr sites I had made that I hoped would have the kind of pictures I liked.

It wasn't that I just wanted to see a bunch of naked women. I mean I did, of course. I was seventeen, after all. But the primary reason I wanted to look at all those naked women was that I wanted to try to get Ronnie out of my mind so I didn't feel like such a pervert while I beat off.

And it worked.

The "average" tumblr site is basically just a mosaic of thumbnail pictures that fill page after page. They are sorted by the month that they were posted, and each month might have thirty pages of thumbnails. If you click on one of those thumbnails, it takes you to a page with a full size picture and a list of other tumblr members who "follow" that poster, and may have left comments about the picture.

So if there are thousands of pictures posted, there may be thousands of comments, and each comment is a link that leads to another tumblr site, where there is another collection of photographs and sometimes videos.

In other words, once you find a tumblr site, you have unlimited access to free porn of every imaginable stripe. Not that I like them all. I saw one where this chick was riding this guy in a video, and took a shit, right there on film. And the camera zoomed in on that turd being expelled. And somebody thought that was sexy!

But you can generally tell right away what a tumblr site is into, so you can go on about your business if it isn't quite your thing.

It's endless porn. You could literally sit there for hours, days, weeks, months or even years just clicking on one more picture of somebody naked, doing something associated with having sex.

And the best part of it was that a lot of it was amateur stuff, sent in by the woman in the picture. And that meant she didn't mind me looking, right? I mean it was right there for everybody to see, so it was okay to look, right?

Some of those women were getting fucked too, which meant that if I wanted to pretend it was my penis that was doing the fucking, she wouldn't care either. She actually did that stuff! So it wasn't perverted for me to imagine doing it with her.

So that's what I did. I sat up in the dark, and looked at tumblr sites until I found the right picture. Then I wanked like crazy until I spurted. And then I could go to sleep with a clear conscience because I knew I had not soiled Ronnie's sweet nature by imagining it was her warm, luscious pussy I was fucking when I spurted.

As you can see, I was only partially successful in avoiding fantasizing about Ronnie. But Tumblr helped, so that's what I did.

Until, one night, as I clicked through pictures, one expanded and there she was ... right there on the screen.

-------

I didn't believe it. I know I stared at that picture for at least five minutes, thinking, "It can't be her."

But it was. There was no doubt.

Her hair was down, and her eyes were closed. She was facing the camera, and sitting on a guy, whose cock was up inside her. Her left hand was holding another rigid penis, and her mouth was open as she leaned to her left. It was just as fucking obvious as possible that she was about to suck the cock in her left hand.

Whoever was fucking her had his hands on her breasts, but they weren't covering her nipples. Those nipples were not as dark as the one I had seen Timmy let go of, but I know it was still her. Something told me she was younger in this picture, but no matter how I tried to squint my eyes and make her look like somebody else, I knew it was Ronnie.

Of course she was gorgeous. Her breasts were big and round, but with that bastard's hands on them it was hard to see them properly. Her pussy, above where that prick entered her body, was bare. Her pussy lips looked purplish and thick, even though they were stretched pretty wide by that guy's penis.

I saved the picture.

I was stunned. I was also hard. And I felt confused. How could she do that? How could she put herself out there like that and let every-fucking-body see her like that?

I closed that picture, and stared at the page of thumbnails. Like a magnet, another picture nearby drew my eyes. I clicked it, and there she was again.

This time she was on her hands and knees, and the guy fucking her was gripping her hips. She was looking over her shoulder at him with this look like, "Don't you ever stop, you son of a bitch!" Her breasts were hanging down, and they just looked fucking perfect!

I saved that one too.

This time, when I minimized that frame, I looked for more.

I only found one more. It was of her, lying on a bed with rumpled sheets. She was on her back, and one leg was cocked, opening up her pussy for view. She looked like she was asleep. Her pussy was running with thick, white sperm ... just like I jerked out of my own penis on a nightly basis.

I felt hollow.

But I saved the picture.

I felt awful as I looked at all three pictures again.

I felt even worse when I beat off to them.

-------

Maybe for some of you, this would have been no big deal. Maybe for a lot of you, it would even have been a dream come true! But not for me. This woman came over to our house for supper at least once a week. I saw her every day. She sat in our pew at church! But every time I saw her, now, all I could think about was her lying there on that bed, well fucked and sleeping.

It almost drove me crazy, because suddenly everything was very complicated.

Before this, she had been this really nice, really beautiful woman who had a cute baby, and who was good for a bang-up fantasy.

Now, she was a party girl, who did threesomes.

Now she was a ... MILF.

Except she didn't act like a party girl who did threesomes. She didn't even go out on dates! By the time I was halfway through my senior year, I would have bet a thousand dollars that she hadn't gone out with a single guy since she moved to Hanley.

My mom knew it too. She kept saying things like, "You need to get out more. You know I'd be more than happy to take care of Timmy while you go out and have some fun. There are dozens of men who'd love to take you out."

But she always said something like, "I'll think about it," or "You're so sweet, Nancy." And she never let mom set her up.

At one point I even wondered if maybe she might be a lesbian.

But all it took was going back to look at those three pictures again, and it was pretty obvious she was no lesbian.

The other reason it was confusing was because while I couldn't resist looking at those three pictures ... I stopped looking at tumblr sites. I think I was afraid I'd find more shots of her. And while I felt bad looking at her pictures, they were the only thing I beat off to any more. I even had them arranged in a special slide show that cycled through them so I could just double click an icon on my desktop and then I didn't need my hands for anything but coaxing the spooge out of my balls.

I found those pictures in July. Between then and January, I was at war with myself as I used them for my own sexual pleasure. The Ronnie I knew wasn't the woman in those pictures. She wasn't the debauched slut I beat off to. But the pictures proved otherwise. Pictures don't lie, and regardless of how she acted now ... she had acted like that in the past. It was a moral dilemma, a dichotomy that haunted me. I think it was maybe the first thing that truly threatened to make me jaded, like so many adults are. Suffice it to say I understand the moth, who is drawn to the flame it knows will destroy it.

So actually, I suppose what happened on New Year's Eve was probably the best possible thing to happen to me in my entire life.

Part of that was because, at the stroke of midnight, Ronnie Prater kissed me ... on the lips.

True, it was just a long peck, but her arms were wrapped around me at that moment, and those big, soft breasts were pressed against my chest. And true, as soon as she had kissed me, she kissed my father and mother, also on the lips. It was just part of the moment of bringing in the new year. My mom kissed me too, except on the cheek, which was good because at that point I might have kissed her back out of sheer hormonal ecstasy.

Except it all went to shit shortly after that.

That's because, about twenty minutes after the ball dropped, while my parents were getting mildly soused on wine and dancing in the living room ... Ronnie Prater found her pictures on my laptop.

-------

I never actually learned exactly what she was looking for. All I know is that, in their conversation about the new year, she remembered something she'd had on that laptop that she thought would still be there for some reason, and which she wanted to retrieve to show my mom and dad. So, being 'one of the family' now, she just went to my room and flipped the laptop open to do her thing.

Meanwhile, Timmy had been sleeping, but I guess the noise or excitement or something had wakened him. Ronnie had decided to nurse him until he was two years old, and he was at that age right then, so she was trying to wean him off her breast. So he was hungry and was complaining. And I picked him up to comfort him until I could find Ronnie and give him to her.

I found her in my room, staring at the PowerPoint presentation of her, flickering in the semi-dark of my room.

I stopped, frozen in horror.

Timmy saw the object of his desire, which was his mother, who had the breasts he currently wanted to fondle and suck from. He voiced that desire.

She turned and stared at us.

"Where did you get these?" she whispered. She was clearly in a panic. I had never seen her face look like that. She was in pain!

"I'm sorry!" I gasped. It was just a natural reaction, I guess. I hadn't actually done anything wrong, but I felt like I should apologize anyway.

"Bobby!" she said, her fact pale. Her voice had an urgent quality to it that almost scared me. "Where did you get these?"

"Online," I said, automatically.

"Show me!" she replied. She reached for Timmy, instinctively, I think. He held out his arms to her happily.

I didn't think I could find the site again. I mean it had been six months since I'd even been there. And I had looked at so many different ones. I had a list, though. I had scanned the default page that came up on a number of follower's sites, and it looked like it might be what I was interested in, I had copied the link to a file I made on WordPad. So I took a chance and clicked on the last one I thought I might have looked at.

When it came up, I clicked on the area where you could select a month, and went back to August. I glanced up at her as the page filled with thumbnails of naked women. I felt like I was about an inch tall.

"I'm really sorry," I said. I meant it too. But all she did was look once at me with those icy blue eyes and then back at the screen.

"What is this?" she asked.

That confused me, because I had always thought she was the one who sent these pictures to the guy who posted them on his tumblr blog.

"You didn't send these pictures to this site?" I said. My voice cracked a little bit which, when you're a senior in high school is pretty embarrassing.

"I didn't even know these pictures existed!" she snapped.

I was rattled. It wasn't that I tried to argue with her. I was just rattled, and my assumptions were under extreme assault. So I just kind of blurted out what was on my mind as I scanned down the pages.

"How could you not know about them?" I commented. "You were looking right at the camera."

About then I found the one of her on all fours. I clicked on it by instinct, and the screen was suddenly full of Veronica Prater getting her pussy stuffed from behind.

She gasped.

Then her knees gave way, and I reacted, reaching for Timmy. She wilted, and I sort of took him away from her, which might be why he started crying.

"Hey, little buddy!" I said, right into his face. That actually helped, so I put him on my bed and went to help her up. She was sitting, sort of leaning and trying to get up on her hands and knees. I think she had fainted, or almost fainted. I tried to help her up, and she lurched against me. Suddenly my hands were full of what Timmy wanted and she moaned, shaking her head. She was conscious. She just wasn't hitting on all eight cylinders, if you know what I mean.

As her knees firmed up, Timmy started in again, so I took her to my bed and sat her down. She picked him up, again on autopilot, I think. Her eyes were kind of glazed.

"He's hungry," I said, uselessly.

She pulled up her shirt, exposing her bra. It wasn't the nursing kind of bra, and she just pulled it up off one of her breasts. She rolled Timmy into her arm expertly, and he just as expertly found the jutting nipple and latched on.

Her eyes cleared. She saw me standing there with my mouth open, and looked down. Then those blue eyes came up and locked on my face. I had closed my mouth by then, but was still remembering that breast, completely bare, before Timmy hid it. It had been perfect, white and soft looking, with blue veins like little lightning bolts striking across the surface in places.

I looked away.

"Based on what else you've seen, I don't suppose I should lose any sleep over this," she said. She pronounced the I as Ah, her accent particularly thick at that moment. I figured it was just because she was upset.

She got up, holding Timmy, who was noisily sucking away and making happy sounds. She walked over to stand in front of the laptop, which was still happily displaying her looking over her shoulder at the man fucking her from behind.

"He's why I left Georgia," she whispered.

"What?"

"Jack. My so-called boyfriend," she said. "He took me to a party and put something in my drink. Or somebody did. The next morning I woke up in that place, naked. There were bruises all over me. There were three women still passed out, and a bunch of guys too. Jack was..." She stopped, and tears leaked from her eyes. She suddenly looked so helpless that I wanted to cry with her. Then her face went hard. "He was on top of a girl, who was passed out. He didn't even care that she was unconscious."

"Shit," I whispered. "I didn't know. I thought..."

She looked at me and wiped her eyes with the heel of the hand that wasn't holding her son.

"You thought I did that on purpose?" There were more tears. "How could you?"

To be honest, I was already so messed up, concerning this MILF ... I mean this woman ... that what popped into my mind at that point was, "What was I supposed to think?" But, of course I didn't say that.

"I guess I didn't think at all," I said, searching for some way to make her feel better.

She threw up a hand. "You're a boy. Of course you thought I did it intentionally."

"Honest," I pleaded. "I really am sorry it happened."

She sighed. "I couldn't remember much of what happened. I mean it wasn't all that hard to figure out it had been some kind of orgy, and I was humiliated at the bruises and marks on my body. But I didn't know somebody took pictures!" More tears rolled down her cheeks. "And now they're on the fucking web" she growled, "where everybody can see them." Her face hardened. "Fucking Jack!" she howled.

"Easy!" I whispered, hushing her. I looked at the bedroom door, which was wide open. "My parents don't know." I know that sounds like a silly thing to say, but I was so shocked that the F word had come from that mouth. I'd never heard her say so much as a shuck-darn.

Her reaction to that was more intelligent than mine. She reached out and closed the laptop.

"I got pregnant that night," she said softly. "And I've been trying to get away from Jack ever since."

She pulled Timmy off her breast, and the shirt fell and got caught on the nipple. She said, "Take him!" and held him out to me. As soon as I had him she tugged the shirt down and reached underneath to adjust things.

Then she turned to the laptop, opened it again, and started tapping keys. Her body was in the way, so I couldn't tell what she was doing. I just assumed it was erasing those pictures so that I could never see them again. I couldn't blame her for that.

Finally she gave one savage tap, like you do sometimes when you hit the "enter" key. Then she closed the laptop and turned to take her child from me with one arm, while she wiped at tearstained eyes with the other.

-------

Of course my parents noticed something was wrong right away. Ronnie's eyes were all red and her cheeks had that signature look that there have been tears on it recently.

"What happened?" asked my mother. She looked at me. "What did you do, Robert?!" she barked.

"He didn't do anything," said Ronnie in a rush. "I was looking for something on the computer and Timmy got fussy, so I gave him a little snack, and he bit me."

My mother oohed and ahhed and wanted to know if Ronnie needed any bandages. My dad just looked at her, and then me. It didn't take a genius to figure out he was putting one with one, meaning her giving Timmy "a snack" in my room, with me in there too. He opened his mouth, and I expected to be invited to step into the other room for a chat with him.

But Ronnie was saying "I'm fine, really. It was silly. I'm just frustrated because I wanted to show you and Dan that poster, but I guess I erased it before I gave the laptop to Bobby. I think I'm just tired too, and I know Timmy is."

And that was her excuse to get the hell out of Dodge. My dad gave me another close look, but didn't say anything. About ten minutes after she left, my Mom said it was a new year, but that didn't mean we could be lazy the next day, and announced it was bedtime.

-------

I lay in bed, thinking furiously. Ronnie was a completely different woman than I had thought, since I had met her. I had always seen her as a very sweet, very beautiful, somewhat mysterious nice woman, who was fun to be around, and who my mother was fast becoming best friends with. In reality, she had been drugged and raped, maybe gang-raped, even. She had been impregnated and didn't even know who had done that. So she had run away, landing next door to us.

I tried to think of a scenario in which that fit. I mean Timmy was coming up on two, so all this had happened almost three years ago. That explained why she looked younger in the pictures. My assumptions about those pictures had been completely wrong. All those times I had beaten off now seemed like the kind of thing the preacher talked about that would land me in eternal damnation. I had a little heart-to-heart with the Big Guy at that very moment, in fact, and apologized to him too. But what had she been doing for that two years and nine months since all this happened? Obviously she'd had the baby and raised him for almost a year before moving to Hanley. Where had she been then? Who had she been with? How had she found Mr. Zimmerman's house?

I fell asleep, eventually, and slept in the next morning, despite what my mom had said the night before. When I woke up it all came rushing back, and I wasn't hungry, so I stayed in bed. About an hour later Phil Mahler came by to see if I wanted to go tubing over on Washington Hill. It was cold and the snow was only a few days old, so it could still be used for that. But I told him I didn't feel like it. He winked and said "Got you a snootful last night? You lucky dog." I let him think what he wanted.

I didn't know what to do. I was worried about Ronnie, but our relationship, up to last night, had been kind of amorphous. I mean she was over at our house quite a bit, and I saw her a lot, and she said hi and things, but I didn't think she had paid all that much attention to me, to be honest. I was just the kid who lived next door, you know? And she was an adult, and I wasn't.

But I couldn't forget that look of pain on her face. And by that evening, I couldn't take it any more.

So I went over to see her.



-------

Chapter 3


When I got to Ronnie's house, I thought she wasn't there at first, because I knocked and nothing happened. I was about to leave when the curtains moved, so I waited. Finally she opened the door about a foot. She had on a thick robe, but it wasn't closed tightly, and there was a lot of cleavage. I knew it wouldn't be anywhere near acceptable to stare at that, as delicious as it looked, so I got my eyes off of that and put them on her face. She was just staringt at me and I thought she was going to yell at me, or tell me to go away, but eventually she opened the door wider, in an unspoken invitation to come in.

It was hot inside, and I wondered about that thick robe until I heard the click-clack of her wind up swing and saw Timmy sleeping in just a diaper as the swing rocked him endlessly.

"What do you want?" she asked, as I walked farther into the house.

I had no idea what I wanted. I didn't even know why I was there. What had been on my mind all day dithered in my head.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

She didn't answer at first, and when I turned to look at her she was looking off out a window, like her mind was somewhere else. Then those blue eyes swung to me.

"I'm a big girl," she said. "I'll be fine."

"Oh," I said. Now what did I do? I had no idea. "I just want you to be okay," I said, kind of uselessly.

"Thank you," she said. "You're always so polite."

I know you're supposed to feel good when an adult pays you a compliment, and I knew if my mother had heard that, she'd be beaming. But all that did was embarrass me.

"I'm sorry," I said. One of her eyebrows rose just a fraction. "That I ... um ... looked at your pictures," I explained.

"My pictures," she murmured, looking away again. Then she looked at me. "They're not my pictures, Bobby. They might be of me, but they are nothing I'd want to claim."

It was pretty obvious she was still down in the dumps. Of course that seemed perfectly normal. You didn't just get over something like she had been through like it was a broken fingernail. And I could imagine how hard she'd been trying to forget it, even moving away and stuff. And now it had all been brought back. I remembered her comment about them being where everybody could see them.

"It might not be as bad as you think," I said, without thinking it through first.

Now that eyebrow went way up.

"And just how is that possible?" she asked. Her voice sounded so cold that the robe seemed perfectly natural.

I got jittery, and when I get jittery I kind of run off at the mouth.

"I'd been looking at sites like that for like a year before I found those," I said. "So they're pretty old. I didn't look to see if they had been reblogged, but I haven't seen them anywhere since then." It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't been looking at tumblr sites for probably four or five months. Once I had those pictures, I didn't need any others. "But maybe not..." I finished lamely.

"What do you mean ... reblogged?" she asked.

So I had to explain how each picture usually had comments about it, and some of those comments were about who had reblogged the picture at some other site. That's how pictures became popular. They got copied all over the place. You saw the same pictures at lots of sites.

"It's kind of like going viral," I said, artlessly and without thinking. "Those are usually the best pictures."

I realized she was staring at me as I said those last words.

"Sorry," I said, automatically.

"Come with me," she said, imperiously. She cranked the winding handle to Timmy's swing and then started for the bedroom she had turned into her office, and didn't look back. By the time I got moving and actually followed her into the room, she was already sitting at her computer tapping keys.

Her doggy style picture suddenly filled the screen.

What the fuck?!

"Show me what you mean," she said.

"What?"

"About the reblogging," she said.

I stared at the screen. Then I realized she must have found that picture herself, and bookmarked the page it was on.

"How'd you get that?" I asked, confused. She must have sifted through days worth of thumbnails to find that.

"I sent it to myself in an email from your computer," she said. "Show me!"

Suddenly I understood. I had bookmarked that page, and the other pages with her picture on them. Then, to make the PowerPoint presentation, I had just selected the pictures on those pages. She had decoded all that, found the original page. She had then sent the link to that page's location to herself in an email.

I reached for the mouse and moved the slider down, revealing the list of people who had liked this picture, or reblogged it.

It was a long list.

It was a very long list.

There were literally dozens of lines that said, "(insert stupid name like '12_inch_dick@tumblr.com') reblogged this photo." I didn't have to explain again. She caught on quickly. Even as I stood there, leaning over her shoulder and breathing in how good she smelled, her hand knocked mine away from the mouse. She copied the link for 12_inch_dick.tumblr.com and opened her browser. She pasted the link into the address bar and, much faster than my computer would have, the site popped up and the screen was covered with thumbnails.

This particular guy was into anal.

"This is disgusting!" she growled.

"Yeah, I stay away from places like this," I said, like that would get me off the hook for masturbating to her pictures. I realized she didn't know I did that, and reminded myself to watch my freaking mouth so as not to give that fact away. I was already in enough trouble.

She abandoned the mouse and her doggy page popped back up.

"July fifteenth," she muttered.

Her fingers tapped again, and suddenly the new site was back. She knew some kind of keyboard shortcuts to do things that was lots faster than the mouse. Again, she showed how quick a learner she was by finding the month tab, which displayed the last year's worth of months. She clicked on March, and a new set of thumbnails showed up. She moved the mouse to hover, and the date of the photograph was displayed.

She paged down, checking a photograph now and then, until she got to the middle of the month. Then she just paged down, slowly scanning each one.

There it was! It was in the upper right corner of the page.

"Shit," she muttered.

"Go to August," I said, on a hunch.

"Why?"

"Because if he really liked that picture, he'll keep moving it from month to month, to keep it current."

She looked up at me. I realized her robe was gaping open, and I could see a heck of a lot of the inside of her right breast.

I got caught staring.

She snorted and pulled her robe closed.

"Sorry," I said, automatically.

"Sure you are," she said. "You're a male. I should expect this from you."

"Look," I said, a little more loudly than I should have, most likely. "I really am sorry your feelings are hurt. I can't help looking, but I'll try not to from now on, okay? I really will."

"Feelings got hurt," she muttered, looking at the screen again. "Like he has any idea."

I realized she was talking to the monitor, and just kept quiet as she found August.

"Now page down slowly, like you did before," I said. "You're looking for the same picture."

It wasn't there. She tried September, October, November and went through December too. That picture wasn't in any of them. Neither were any of the other two.

"See?" I said. "The last time it was popular was six months ago. Plus there are tens of thousands of these sites, and the likelihood that anybody you know even looks at these sites, is next to nothing!" I said, filling my voice with hope.

"You did," she pointed out, turning those blue eyes on me.

"I'm a pervert," I said before I thought it through. "You don't know any perverts."

"I didn't think I knew any perverts," she said, but it was clear she was arguing with me. "But I was obviously wrong!"

It was pretty clear that she wasn't going to forgive me. I felt a little sick that I had hoped she would. I didn't really deserve her forgiveness, after all.

"I know," I said. "I wish I hadn't found them, or used them. But I can't wish that away. I'll just get going. I just wanted to see if you were okay."

"What do you mean 'used them'?" she asked, swiveling the chair to face me.

"What?" I felt panic seize my chest.

"You said you shouldn't have used them," she reminded me. "What did you use them for, Bobby?" She stood up. "Did you show them to somebody else, Bobby?" I saw what could only be epic rage gathering on her face. I had never seen her really angry about anything before, but I suddenly realized that I never wanted her really angry with me, because my instincts told me she was the kind of woman who would go to any lengths to even a score.

"No!" I yipped. "I'd never even think of letting some other guy see them!"

She stopped, and stared at me. Her face calmed.

"You're telling the truth," she said, examining my face. Her hand came and impossibly strong fingers gripped my chin. "You didn't show them to anybody else."

"No!" I agreed, happily. "I wouldn't do that."

Slowly she removed her hand. I felt like working my jaw back and forth, but resisted the impulse.

"Why not?" she asked, suddenly.

"What?"

"You're a boy. A teenager. I'm sure you have lots of horny teenaged male friends. Most boys in your position couldn't show them around fast enough!" She peered at me. "So why didn't you?"

The answer to that was that I was jealous as hell of those pictures. She was mine! And nobody else was about to see her like that.

Of course I couldn't very well tell her that.

"Um ... it wouldn't be right?" I suggested, hopefully.

Her eyes, which had gone a little glazed for a few seconds, cleared up and got back to freezing me, deep down inside.

"You never answered my question, Bobby. What did you use those pictures for?"

I didn't answer.

"You had them in a looping slideshow," she murmured, her eyes going out of focus again. "It was actually going when I activated the laptop."

That was because, earlier in the evening that New Year's Eve, she had danced with me while my mom and dad danced. And I had gotten a monster boner, of course, so I had slipped off to my bedroom to take care of that. And I had used the obvious (and my favorite) pictures to do that with.

But it was actually unthinkable to tell her that!

Her eyes cleared. That eyebrow went up.

"Of course," she whispered.

She folded her arms under the breasts she had only moments ago covered securely. The robe gapped open as her arms squeezed her breasts. I managed to only glance at the deep cleavage and then look away. I knew, deep in my heart, that she knew. I don't know how I knew that she knew, but I knew that she knew and there was no getting around knowing that.

"I'm sorry," I whispered, automatically.

"You need to go home now, Bobby," she said. Her voice was level and calm. There was no pain in it, but I knew she was masking that. She knew I was a pervert and she would never talk to me again.

"Okay," I sighed. My shoulders slumped. I felt real loss for the first time in my life. I've actually compared later losses to that moment, and I was able to get through some pretty rough times because I realized they didn't really mean all that much to me. Not compared to feeling like she would never trust me or speak to me again.

She escorted me to the door, and put her hand in the middle of my back, shoving me a little... helping me leave her house ... where I was no longer welcome.

"Bobby," she said.

I turned.

"We'll finish talking about this another time."

She closed the door.

I stood there ... confused.

-------

Believe it or not, that was my first real lesson in how incomprehensible women can be. I had a sister and a mom, and of course I knew lots of other women, but I had never felt so helpless in terms of feeling like I had hurt someone, and wanted to make that hurt go away.

What made it even worse was that she came over the very next day to show my mom something she bought on sale at Karminski's, downtown. Since we were still out of school, I was just being lazy, reading a book in the overstuffed chair in the living room, and as she walked through she looked over at me.

"Bobby," she said, acknowledging me as if nothing had happened.

But she didn't smile. And she always smiled at me whenever she saw me.

And it went on like that. She came for supper, later that week. My dad called her and asked her to show him how to do something on his computer. Mom got a movie from the library and called Ronnie to come over and watch it with us.

And every time, she nodded at me and said my name ... but didn't smile.

Almost a month went by and I finally couldn't take it any more. One Friday night I told my folks I was going for a run, but went over to her house instead and knocked. She came to the door.

"Can we please talk about what happened?" I begged.

"Why?" she asked. "Talking can't change the past."

"Well would you at least yell at me, or scream or something?" I moaned.

"Why, Bobby?" she asked. "You didn't drug me, or take those pictures."

"Yes, but I downloaded them, and I... kept them. And I know I hurt your feelings," I moaned. "I didn't mean to do that. I didn't want to do that. I wish it hadn't happened, but I can't take it back. I can't stand it that you hate me now. And I'll do anything you say to try to make it up to you. If you want to tell my parents about it ... then fine. I'll take the punishment. Just please don't hate me any more."

I had gotten a bit distraught, and maybe a little weepy. I was really at the end of my rope. I had never been in any really bad trouble, and while there were lots of kids who didn't seek me out, I didn't know anybody in town who actively disliked me. And it really bothered me that I had done something to ruin that.

She looked out the door, as if she thought somebody might be watching, or might have heard my pleading.

"Come inside," she said, tersely. "And get a grip, Bobby."

I took a deep breath as I went in. I really was willing to be raked over the coals. Anything to resolve this horrible feeling.

"What on earth makes you think I hate you?" she said. "I don't hate you, Bobby."

I thought about that. I could think of all sorts of things I had interpreted as her hating me. But as I thought of them, I realized how much it was possible to misread into such things. It was a very good lesson in overreacting to innocent stimuli. But there was one thing I knew was important.

"You never smile at me any more," I said. "You haven't ... since New Year's Eve."

She was wearing jeans, and she put her hands in her pockets, but only halfway in.

"I haven't had a lot to smile about, Bobby. But it's not your fault." She bent her knees and leaned, because I was looking off to the side and down. She put her face in my line of sight. "I don't hate you, Bobby," she said. "You have to believe that."

"But I hurt your feelings," I said.

She stood back up and didn't say anything until I actually looked at her face.

"You mean because you had those pictures and you ... looked at them sometimes."

I had to look away again. "Yeah," I admitted.

She turned around and took a few steps away. Then she whirled, hands still in her pockets and faced me again.

"Let's sit down," she said.

We were already in the living room, so I sat on the edge of the couch. She didn't sit. She paced instead. But I wasn't about to remind her of what she had just said.

"This is complicated," she said. "And I haven't had as much time to think about it as I usually like to take. But you are obviously distressed by all this, so I guess we need to talk about it now."

"You said we'd talk about it later," I said. "But then we never did."

"That's because, as I said, I like to think things through thoroughly before I decide what to do," she said. "I learned to do that the hard way. When I was with Jack, I didn't think about things at all. If it seemed like it would be fun, I just went with it. I trusted him. And, as you know, I should not have."

All I could think of to say to that was, "Yeah."

She stopped and looked at me.

"This might not make any sense to you, Bobby, but I'm going to tell you anyway."

"Okay," I said.

"I like you," she said.

I stared at her. She was right. It didn't make any sense at all.

"I've always liked you, ever since the first day I met you and you mowed my lawn." She started pacing again. "You were polite. You were helpful. You were a gentleman. You were cute. You were the first male I had met since Jack who I actually felt good being around."

"I don't get that," I said.

"I know," she said. "That's part of your charm. You don't realize what a nice guy you are."

I had an epiphany at that moment.

"And then I blew it!" I said.

She stopped in front of me.

"In a manner of speaking," she said.

I frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I'm fully aware of your age, and the way men are at your age," she said. "I'm not all that much older than you, in the grand scheme of things. So I was aware that you, shall we say, enjoyed looking at me?"

"That's putting it mildly," I said.

She smiled, and it was like a huge weight came off my chest and I could breathe again.

But then the smile faded.

"Here is where it gets complicated," she said. "You're a nice guy. Your folks are nice people too. I told you I couldn't remember much about that night, and that's true. But I do remember some things. And the thing is, Bobby, that even if you give somebody a drug, they won't do things like that, unless on at least some level ... they want to." She folded her arms. "I don't remember wanting to do any of that," she said. "But I can't look at those pictures, and not see that nobody was holding me down. Nobody was forcing me, Bobby. Some part of me wanted to be the slut in those pictures. And that makes me not a very nice girl, Bobby."

I thought about that. I thought about it seriously. I knew what she was talking about. I had stared at her face in the two pictures where she didn't look asleep (drugged?). And I had read into that look the eagerness of a woman wanting to be fucked. That had been part of my own fantasy, that had let me substitute myself for the guy in the pictures. But her reaction to those pictures put the lie to what she was saying. If she had liked it, then she wouldn't have fallen apart after seeing them. Even if she was embarrassed about it, all she would have said was, "If you show these to anyone, I'll cut your balls off!"

"Can I ask you some questions?" I asked.

"Okay."

"Did you ever do any of that ... stuff ... with Jack before that party?"

Her face turned red slowly, but it turned red.

"He was my boyfriend, Bobby," she reminded me, as if I had a girlfriend and understood perfectly all that entailed. I decided not to remind her of that either.

"Did you love him?"

"I thought I did."

"So ... and I'm not trying to take his side, or say you did anything wrong ... but if you'd done it before, why did you think it wouldn't happen again?"

"Well," she said, frowning, "Let's see. We had never done it in front of anybody, much less three other couples. We never did it without a condom. I told him that would never happen unless we were married. I certainly never told him I was eager to let any of his friends have me. I guess that will do for starters."

She had spoken sarcastically, but she had said what I hoped she would say.

"So he didn't just fuck you," I said. "He fucked you over."

She looked shocked. She'd never heard me utter a curse word at all. In my house, that was a surefire way to get yourself in hot water. But that didn't mean I wasn't familiar with such words. It rolled off my tongue like I had used it many times ... which of course I had. Just with my friends.

"Isn't that true?" I asked. "He took advantage of your trust. He knew how to get you going, and he used that against you. But he also knew you'd never go along with what he wanted. Why use the drugs otherwise? He knew he'd have to drug you to get you to do more than you really wanted. He used you, plain and simple. You thought you loved him. You liked having sex. Who doesn't? All you did was trust a bastard who put you in a bad place where that was used against you."

I sat and waited. I felt like she'd been a little hard on herself, and I'd tried to tell her why I thought that. I didn't know what else to do, so I just waited.

She paced some more, putting her hands in her pockets sometimes, and clasping them behind her back at others. At one point she turned to me and said, "I need to check on Timmy. Be right back." When she came back, she sat in a chair across the room from me.

"Thank you," she said.

"Now you're thanking me?" I know I sounded shocked. I was shocked.

"It actually seems a little less complicated now," she said. "I did like sex. I liked it a lot. And he knew that."

"That doesn't make you a slut," I said.

"I know. I just feel like one when I see those pictures."

"Well, you can get over that," I said.

"Maybe," she said softly. "But maybe not. That's part of what complicates all this."

"You lost me," I said.

She paced again, and again her hands were in her pockets up to the fourth knuckles.

"I told you I liked you," she said.

She seemed to be waiting for a response. "Okay," I said.

"You were kind of my shining knight," she said. "When I met you, I had finally found a man who treated me with respect. And that's sexy, Bobby. Just like you had some little fantasies about me ... I had some about you, too."

Did I mention how confusing women can be?



-------

Chapter 4


When you're a teenager, and a beautiful older woman says she's had some sexual fantasies about you, it's sort of a big deal.

I realized I had stopped breathing when I kind of leaned, and almost fell off the couch. I was lightheaded, but I could focus enough to keep from falling on my face. Her hands were suddenly on my shoulders, stabilizing me.

"I told you it was complicated," she said softly.

"That's not complicated," I said. "That's just crazy."

I was thinking about how women ... grown women ... don't have fantasies about boys. But that "fact" that my brain kept insisting on, was being jostled by the news stories I had seen about teachers having affairs with their students, and the word "cougar" was running around in my skull ... like the animal itself ... dashing here and there. Except she wasn't anywhere near being a cougar. That was just ridiculous.

In fact, I think "ridiculous" was the word of the day at that point.

She sat down next to me on the couch, and put her arm around me.

"You okay?" she asked.

"It's complicated," I said.

I swear it wasn't planned. It wasn't a play on her words. What was going on in my mind just really was complicated.

But she laughed, and it was a delightful laugh, the kind of laugh that in a dark and dismal environment, is like a burst of sunlight that banishes shadows and fears and stuff like that.

Except she kept laughing, harder and harder, until she fell off the couch and rolled around on the floor by my feet, gasping and laughing and shaking her hands like she was frantically trying to wave to every person in the parade.

She went through a series of calming down, and panting, "I'm sorry ... I'm sorry," but then she'd start laughing again. I just watched her. It was still complicated, but I couldn't help but smile as she laughed like that. Actually, it was one of those silly grins, but she was distracted by her own problem, which was getting enough air to stay conscious.

Finally she flopped onto her back, her arms outstretched. She just breathed for a while, gasping and drawing huge lungfuls of air into her body.

You can just imagine what that did to her breasts.

About five minutes later she held out her hand to me, and I pulled her to a sitting position. She sat there, kind of loose and slumped. It wasn't quite Indian style, because her lower legs weren't on top of each other. Her hair had come partly loose from her ponytail, and wisps of it were hanging in her face. Her hands came to pull the scrunchy out of her hair and it fell to her shoulders. Now I couldn't see her face at all. Then she looked up at me, and her hand automatically brushed her hair behind one ear and then the other.

"When you have a baby you didn't plan on, by a man you no longer want anything to do with, you fall into a very dark and unhappy world," she said.

All traces of levity were gone. The change was astonishing, and a full hundred and eighty degrees from what had been there only a few minutes before. Her head went back down and again her face was covered by her hair.

"You feel like a slut," she said. "And people help you do that by judging you. I told people what happened. I even told the police. But nothing happened. Some people even said I asked for it, because Jack had a reputation before I went out with him. And, of course, he denied the drugs. His friends did too. One of the detectives even told me that when you gamble with sex, sometimes you roll snake eyes! My parents didn't know who to believe. I think that's what hurt the most."

There was nothing I could say that would help. I knew that by instinct. So I just sat there.

"So I had the baby, and I tried to adjust. Timmy was actually good for me in one sense, and that's when I knew how complicated all this was going to be, because I love Timmy with all my heart and soul, and yet I can't abide the thought of his father. I hate the man, but love his son. And so finally I left, to try to start over somewhere where the surroundings wouldn't keep insisting that I was a slut, and got what I deserved."

She looked back up at me from down there on the floor ... where sluts are supposed to be. I couldn't stand it, because while there had been a time I thought that way, I was ashamed of that time, and I couldn't fit her in that category again. I reached for her hands and stood. It was awkward, pulling her up, because her feet weren't in the right position. But she didn't argue. She stood. I put my hands on her shoulders and sat her down on the edge of the couch again. Then, just to show her I wasn't like the others, I sat down next to her. I didn't think all this out or anything. It was just done on instinct. It was just the way I had been raised.

"And then I came here and met you," she said. "And you were a breath of fresh air. You were exactly what I needed. It was like I had come out of a dark, smelly cave, into a field of flowers in the sunshine."

I got embarrassed, primarily because, like she couldn't forget her belief that part of her had enjoyed that party ... I couldn't forget how many times I had jacked off staring at the pictures of it.

"I'm no white knight," I said.

"I know," she said. "But at that time, you were. I made you be that white knight. You were what I needed, because you made me believe I really could have a new life."

"Well, I'm glad about that, I guess," I said.

"But it was also complicated from the very beginning," she said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Do you remember that very first day, when you had finished mowing my yard and came looking for me?"

I did. "You were hiding out in the pantry, feeding Timmy."

"But you didn't know that then, did you."

"No," I said. "It was just the only place I hadn't looked, so I looked."

"And do you remember what you saw?"

The time for being embarrassed around this woman was gone. I hadn't had a conversation like this with an adult before, and it felt important.

"Yes," I said.

"Where I come from, a man would have stood there, looking at me, trying to see more. He might have said something like, "You got a little taste of that for me, sweet thang?" Her drawl was enhanced, and I suddenly realized she had worked hard to get rid of that accent since she'd come to Kansas.

"Well that's not right," I said.

"And that's my point." She leaned into me with her shoulder. "You didn't act like that. You didn't try to exploit the situation. You didn't try to exploit me. And that's attractive to a woman in my situation."

"That's what I don't get," I said. "You're grown up. You have a baby. You're beautiful. Women like that aren't interested in boys like me."

"First off, you're a young man, not a boy. Your eighteenth birthday is just a couple of months away ... right?" She didn't wait for me to confirm it. "Second, if I were to compare you to your father, who is also a gentleman, and one of the nicest men I know, I'm much closer to your age than his. But most importantly, Bobby, I can't just decide I don't like you because you're five or six years younger than me. That's not how it works. If it worked that way, you wouldn't have decided to masturbate while looking at pictures of me."

It sounded really different, right out there in the cold light of day. Alluding to what I had done had been bad enough. But when it was on the table, rearing its ugly head, right there in front of her. Well, I felt bad.

"I'm really sorry about that," I said.

She looked at me. "I need to tell you something else ... about the complicated part."

"Okay," I said.

"When you feel like a slut, and you meet the White Knight, it's nice that he treats you with respect. It's wonderful, in fact. But it also hurts, because you know he's the kind of man you really want and need, but you also know you can't have him, because he's too good for you."

I took a breath but she put her fingertips up and against my mouth.

"Especially when he's too young for you, too," she said. She took her fingers down, but went on before I could say anything. "And then the White Knight does something that tells you he isn't quite as pure as you thought. I knew it anyway, down deep. I knew I had put you on some kind of impossible pedestal. I knew that wasn't fair to you. But I needed you to be that man, at least long enough that I could catch my breath and build a foundation of hope to take me forward.

"And when I found those pictures running on your computer, once I got over the shock of even seeing them, I knew that you were just a normal guy, a guy who wanted the same things that every other guy wanted from me."

She put her hand on my knee, and those blue eyes on my face.

"The White Knight had fallen off his horse," she said.

Again I took a breath to say something. But then I couldn't think of anything to say.

"But he was still the White Knight," she whispered.

"What?"

"When I had time to think about it, I realized that it's normal for men to think about those things. And you were still the nice guy I had always known. You hadn't put a move on me. You hadn't tried to get in my pants. It was obvious you'd like to, but I had never known that. Oh, I knew you looked at me, and all that. But that just made me feel pretty, because you weren't vulgar about it. And now I knew you weren't perfect."

"That's for sure," I breathed, finally able to contribute something to the conversation.

"Like I'm not perfect," she said.

She stopped then, just looking at me. Her hand was still on my knee. I was too young, at that specific point in time, to realize the implications of what she had just said ... about how I had gone from being the unattainable White Knight, to a flawed human being like herself. A flawed human being ... who she could now look at as being attainable.

I didn't understand that fully ... but I had a feeling she had just said something important.

"So what does that mean?" I asked.

She leaned closer to me, until her face was only inches from mine.

"It means I don't hate you, Bobby. It means that if it hadn't been those particular pictures, I wouldn't even have minded what you had been doing with them. It means things keep getting more and more complicated, Bobby, because you're still my best friend's son, and the boy next door, and I really shouldn't want to kiss you as much as I do."

Then she did just that. She leaned in and closed those blue eyes and pressed those warm, pink lips against mine.

-------

I'm really glad she kissed me. I know that sounds like a stupid thing to say, considering all that has gone before. I mean, when the gorgeous woman you've fantasized about and jerked off to kisses you, it's obviously a good thing.

Except it's complicated, of course.

But we'll talk about that later. I was glad she kissed me because I had been about to open my mouth and spoil a really wonderful moment. The words "You can't kiss me" were on the lips she kissed, and she stopped me from saying them. I have relived that moment many times over the years, and I'm convinced that if I'd gotten those four little words out, she would have said, "I know," and gotten up and it would all have been over. She would have forgiven me for this and that, and I would have been smitten with her from afar, and life would have gone on.

But she kissed me. So I sat there, dumb and happy, and she pulled her lips away from mine and sighed and said, "See how complicated it is?"

I would, eventually, fully understand how complicated our relationship had become. But being older and wiser than me, she didn't push things. Instead she stood up and asked, "Do you still have those pictures on your laptop?"

I shook my head. "I couldn't stand looking at them any more," I said.

Her smile looked tired, but it also made me very, very glad I had deleted those pictures.

"Come with me. I want to show you something," she said.

She left, and it was like I had to oil my joints, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, when he first starts moving again. But I finally got up. I found her in her office, sitting in front of the computer again. She was tapping keys. She pulled up an email.

"Read that," she said.

I leaned over her shoulder. She smelled good again. I read the email.

To whom it may concern. Please be advised that the photographs you have displayed on your site, identified as tumblrly3thv38ay1qh72yao1500.jpeg; tumblrly645jEzNy1qh9rk5o1500.jpeg and tumblrlyiiuzGXt91qh9rk5o1500.jpeg are proprietary photographs which I retain exclusive rights to. You are hereby notified that you do not have the right to display them, and, under copyright law must remove them from your site immediately. Failure to do so will result in legal action. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

She had signed it with the name Jack Watkins.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"I sent that to the site where you found my pictures. They removed them."

"You're kidding," I said.

"Nope."

"Would you have taken legal action?"

"Probably not." She smiled thinly. "But they won't take the chance on that. None of them will."

"You sent that to others too?"

"The rebloggers ... yes," she said. "I sent it to three hundred, fifty-two, to be exact," she said. "So far," she tacked on.

"You're kidding me!" I gasped.

"I work on that project about an hour a night," she said. "I have been since I realized they were out there."

"And everybody takes them down?"

"They have so far."

"Do you think it will work?" I asked.

"No," she said, straight-faced. "But every place that I find, and which takes them down, is one more place your mom and dad won't find them."

"My mom and dad would never find them anyway," I said. "The day they look at a site like that is the day the world starts spinning the opposite direction."

"I might have thought the same thing about you, Bobby," she said, lightly. "Will you help me continue doing this?"

"You're not Jack Watkins," I pointed out. "Neither am I."

"You think I care about that?" she said.

"Guess not," I grinned. "Me either." I looked at the screen. "Sure. I'll help you. I have a lot of experience at following trails like this."

She stood up and faced me. She was very close to me.

"Thank you," she said. I could smell her breath, and it was fresh, like she'd just brushed her teeth. I wondered what mine smelled like. "I'll make it worth your time."

I had already learned a lot, being around and talking to this woman. And one of the things I had learned was that it paid to ask questions.

"How?"

She blinked slowly.

"You gave up the pictures of me you have spent so much time ... enjoying. This only proves you are the gentleman I have always known you to be."

Her eyelashes went down halfway, and those blue eyes looked through them at me.

"The least I can do is find some way to replace them."

-------

It would take years before all the bits and pieces of what was happening in my life would come together into a finished puzzle, that I could look at and fully understand. It was a bit like watching a tapestry being made, where I recognized the threads, but didn't understand how they would fit into the grand design.

It was complicated.

Part of that complication was that Ronnie was a healthy young woman, with the same dreams and wants and needs of any healthy young woman. She was jaded by her experiences, but at the same time, she still wanted the kinds of things that had led her to those experiences.

In other words, she still got horny and she still wanted to have sex in her life.

Unknown to me, she masturbated almost as much as I did. That would have been hard enough for me to believe, but what would have blown my mind completely was that sometimes, she thought about me while she did that.

All the things about me that made me attractive to her fantasy mind - and that's really all it was, at first - were the things she wished she could find in a man who was available to her. Of course, I wasn't that man. That lingering self-doubt she was plagued with, convinced her that I was too good for her. The fact that I was too young and the son of the only woman who didn't treat her like the slut she presumed herself to be, just made it easier for her to keep me at arm's length.

When she discovered I wasn't so pure, it broke down the walls she had built between us. She wasn't happy about that. Not initially. She was disappointed that I wasn't the White Knight any more. That's why she had been so cold to me, even up to that night when I went to her house to beg her forgiveness.

And it was the White Knight falling on his sword, that reminded her that, tarnished as his armor was, the man wearing it was still the sweet, attractive young man she had always liked so much, and wished she could have. And instead of feeling like she had pulled me down into the gutter with her, she let me pull her up out of the gutter to where I was.

Of course, where I was, was a misty place where you couldn't see very far, and you might run into a tree without warning. But it was a place where she felt safe in giving me that first, tentative kiss.

And her admittedly ultimately doomed-to-failure quest to eradicate the photographs of her shame was just a way for her to fight for the normal life she felt had been denied her. Eventually she'd give up on her legal notices. At one point she told me, "From now on, if somebody comes up with one of those stupid pictures, I'll just tell them it was before rehab."

But for three months, the two of us donned our semi-legitimate armor and tilted at windmills. And as best we could determine, we actually slayed every one we took on. Every time I checked, the page and date where there had been a picture of Ronnie getting impregnated had been replaced with a little notice that the photo had been removed for copyright reasons.

I guess it might have even gone on like that longer, had I not been required to decide what to do with my life.

I turned eighteen, and got another kiss from Ronnie.

Oh. I forgot to tell you that part. That first kiss? It was really our only kiss. The tension was gone, and she was back to smiling at me again, and our secret collaboration on expunging her photos from the internet made us friends of a deeper and more intimate nature. But that kiss hadn't opened up a world of debauchery between us. She didn't pull me into her bed to sate the ongoing lust I had no idea she suffered from.

There were more little touches. And to be truthful, I did still think about her when I masturbated. I just thought about her as I remembered her in some situation. Like sitting there on that couch, leaning toward me ... closing her eyes.

But I didn't get to lose my virginity to her, and then wallow in her soft curves, night after night.

So that birthday kiss was kind of important to me.

It happened at my birthday dinner, which of course my mother invited her to. It being my eighteenth birthday, I didn't get the usual kind of presents, like a video game or something like that. My mother got me a really nice, expensive looking watch, saying I shouldn't go off to college with a ratty old plastic digital watch on my wrist. My dad got me a briefcase, of all things. I didn't tell him college kids don't walk around with briefcases. Ronnie produced a little box, and when I opened it, there was a Sterling Silver ring inside. It was a beautifully made miniature dragon, that wound around with the head being on top, lying there with its forked tongue sticking out.

"It's beautiful!" gasped my mother, as she peered at it.

"It's nothing, really," said Ronnie. I could see her cheeks were tinged with pink. "It wasn't expensive or anything."

"It's gorgeous," argued my mother. "Put it on, Bobby!"

I took it out of the box and it slid onto the ring finger of my right hand perfectly. I held it out. It looked like the dragon was coiled around my finger, and the head was staring at the observer.

"Why a dragon?" asked my dad. He was looking back and forth between Ronnie and me.

"I guess I've always thought of Bobby as being the kind of man who would go out into the world and slay dragons some day," she said.

"Well, let's just wait a while before taking on any dragons," my mother said. "College first. Dragons later ... maybe."

Then, maybe half an hour later, while my mom and dad washed dishes together, something they had long ago decided was one of the things that kept them grounded and in love, Ronnie pushed me up against the wall beside my bedroom door, and kissed me again.

She did say, "Happy birthday" before she did it. But it wasn't a birthday kiss. It was the kind of kiss I'd never had in my entire life.

First off, she kissed me hard, pressing her lips against me hard. Her body pressed me to the wall, and then her hands pulled me off the wall and her arms went around me and suddenly we were in an embrace that was about a zillion times more intimate than anything that had happened to me before. Her lips were hungry, and her head moved back and forth, making her lips move on mine. I think it was the surprise of this that kept me from doing what I would have normally done - given her closed lips. And when the tip of her tongue teased between my partially open lips, the shock of that made my jaw get weak, and the next thing I knew her tongue was inside my mouth, darting around like a chipmunk, trying to hide from a hawk.

It was over much too quickly, for going on as long as I suspect it did. As I would replay that kiss in my mind later, it had to last at least thirty seconds. But it felt like it was all over before I could take a single breath. Then she was pushing me away, and those blue eyes were wild and she said, "I have to go!" and she literally ran back toward the kitchen. I heard her saying something to my parents, and went closer. She sounded a little winded, maybe, but otherwise normal as she said she needed to get back home.

"I thought you got a babysitter," said my mother.

She had. It was the first time she'd done that.

"I'm worried he'll be upset," she said.

"He'll be fine," said my mother. "This is good for him."

"I know," moaned Ronnie. "But I can't help worrying. If everything is fine, I'll come back over, maybe."

She didn't, but all my mom said was, "Remember? I was like that with Cathy the first time we left her with a sitter."

My dad just grunted, from where he was reading a magazine.

I went and laid down on my bed, already reliving that kiss.

I found myself playing with the ring, twisting it on my finger. I took it off and peered into the face of the dragon. It looked like it was mocking me, with that tongue sticking out.

I saw some change of the light on the shiny inside of the band, and peered at that. There was an inscription!

I had to get up and hold the ring under the light at my desk to read it.

The kiss hadn't made me horny. But the inscription inside the ring did.

It said, "To my White Knight".



-------

Chapter 5


Ronnie had taught me how complicated life can be. That was good, because my life got more complicated.

It wasn't that birthday kiss. Not really. At least I don't think it was the kiss. I had been looking forward to going off to college. I had an acceptance letter from K-State. I had been accepted into the engineering program. It was a five year program, so maybe that's part of what complicated things. And I had been looking forward to the girls at college. Except I was pretty sure that none of them could compete with Ronnie.

Not that she was mine or anything. But she liked me. That much was clear. We had never talked about this new ... thing ... there was, that we seemed to reach out and touch, now and then. We hardly ever touched it at the same time. Just twice, in fact, had we done that.

But it was there, and it made it hard for me to imagine some girl at college being able to top.

So maybe it was the kiss.

All I know is that I went to Manhattan, Kansas, where the university was. And I walked around and looked at things. And it was great, and all. There were lots of trees and the buildings were made of limestone blocks that looked a hundred years old. The town was nice too, and there were interesting people walking around campus.

So I have no idea why, when I was walking past this little strip mall and saw the sign that said, "Armed Forces Recruiting Center" that I turned off the sidewalk and went in.

Maybe it was this image I had of myself as that White Knight. Or maybe it was the fact that my dad had been in the Army. Being a kid, I hadn't paid any attention to what he actually did in the Army, but maybe it was the influence of his past.

The guys inside were nice. They weren't pushy. They had coffee and donuts, and there were posters all around. One of them had this guy hanging from a parachute. He had what looked like two hundred pounds of gear hanging off of him, including a dog strapped across his chest, wearing a muzzle.

"You ever thought about jumping out of an airplane?" asked a guy in a dark green uniform.

"Not once," I said, staring at the picture.

"Can't be beat," he said.

I looked at him. "You've done that?"

"Not with the K-9," he said. "But I have twenty-five jumps."

I looked him up and down. He didn't look crippled. I figured if you parachuted out of an airplane twenty-five times, you just had to come to grief during at least one of them. He seemed to know what I was thinking.

"You're trained to do it right," he said. "There's nothing like it. It's a sense of freedom you can't get any other way, especially if you do a HALO jump. That's high altitude, low opening." He grinned. "I recommend it."

"So why aren't you doing it now?" I asked.

He tossed a hand. "If you do a recruiting tour, it helps you get promoted," he said. "I'm a lifer. I've got nine years in, and I'm staying as long as they'll let me. So promotions are good."

"What about the war?" I asked.

His face went hard for a second, but then relaxed again. "I won't lie to you. It's part of the package. Especially if you go Airborne. At least for the next few years. If we really do pull out of Afghanistan, then maybe not, but I won't try to con you about that. Airborne isn't for the faint-hearted. They'll make a man of you, or kill you trying."

He suddenly looked shocked, and I suspected the words, "kill you" weren't supposed to be in his normal spiel. But there was something about him that seemed solid and calm and ... I don't know ... competent, maybe?

All I know is, that I said, "So what do I have to do to see if that could be me?" I pointed at the poster.

"Got time to take a little test?" he asked.

-------

I didn't tell my parents about that conversation, or the fact that I had taken the test, which wasn't so little. It had taken me almost an hour to complete. And when he graded that, he said it looked really good, but before he could make any promises there would need to be another one, administered in Kansas City, but that they'd take me there in a van.

So why didn't I tell them? I don't know. Especially as it applied to my father. I mean he'd already done this thing I was thinking about doing. His advice would have been the best I could get. But somehow, I just knew he ... they ... wouldn't take it seriously. They'd just say "No! You're going to college, and that's final!"

So, instead, I told my parents I needed to go back to the college to talk to a counselor, and that it would take me all day. I didn't tell them it was really to determine whether or not I was going to join the Army.

I didn't tell Ronnie either.

That was complicated too. I still had this lingering fantasy about her. The kisses had fueled that. But the fact that there were no more kisses, told me it was just a fantasy. I wasn't going to come riding home some day and have her fall into my arms, moaning, "Take me now!" and stuff like that. It was go off to Manhattan for five years, and keep my nose to the grindstone, or maybe go off and see the world, and have the kind of weaponry that could blast that grindstone to smithereens.

Still, I didn't have to be a genius to know that none of them ... not my folks, and not Ronnie ... would be excited about the opportunities the Army might be willing to offer me.

And I could still go to college after I tried it out.

Staff Sergeant Withers, my recruiter, had been more honest with me than was usual, as I was to find out later. And that was evident after I took that test in Kansas City.

"You have an open ticket," he said. "You can do anything you want. Your test scores are up there."

"So what does that mean?"

He pulled out a book and opened it. It was page after page of specialties they have in the Army. Each one had a letter and number designation. Like one of them was 51C, which was followed by the words: "AL&T Contracting NCOs will be assigned to the Army Sustainment Command (ASC)—formerly the Army Field Support Command—at Rock Island Arsenal, Illinois."

Some of them made even less sense than that.

I looked over at that poster again.

"What's that one?" I asked.

"Well, that's complicated," he said.

I smiled, but didn't tell him why.

"There are sub specialties within the Military Occupational Specialties. That guy might be an MP dog handler, which means his MOS started out as 95 Bravo, but then he went into the 31 series, which is dog handler. But you can have guard dogs, and bomb dogs and patrol dogs, all of which are different sub specialties. He could be an Eleven Bush with a patrol dog. Or he could be a bomb disposal tech. And he went to jump school, which throws more things into the mix. To get where he is in that picture would take at least five or six years, unless you did absolutely everything right and caught all the breaks."

"So you're saying it's not a sure thing," I said.

"Anybody who says it is, is blowing smoke up your ass," he said.

"How about just the paratrooper part?" I asked.

"That's a lot more possible," he said. "If you go infantry, it will be offered to you routinely."

"Infantry," I said.

"Not sexy," he admitted. "But if you like being out in nature, and you like a challenge, I can guarantee you'll get plenty of both."

And ... like the idiot both parents and Ronnie would later pronounce me ... I signed up for the infantry.

-------

My dad was speechless. He was also upset.

"Infantry?!" he said, like he was pronouncing my doom. "You let them put you in the fucking infantry?"

I had never heard my father curse. Not once. I would later realize he had the full vocabulary every soldier has. He just didn't use it. He had left that life behind, when he started a new one. That's when I found out he had been in Army Intelligence, and had one of those super top secret if-I-tell-what-I-did-I'll-have-to-kill-you jobs. But it was too late. I had already taken the oath, and even if I'd have wanted to quit, he wouldn't have let me.

My Army experience is worth a whole book. Maybe I'll write that some day. But you get the Readers Digest Condensed Version, because it was only preparation for the rest of my life.

I got yelled at before I left by more than my dad, of course. My mom cried too. I think Dad had something to do with helping her adjust, because on the day I actually left she hugged me and gave me a completely fake smile and said "Have fun!".

I also got a third kiss from Ronnie. And it was a very important kiss, because she gave it to me right in front of my parents. It was as I was boarding the shuttle that would take me to the airport on my first leg of the flight to basic training.

I had already been hugged by my mother, who still had that fake smile on her face. I could tell she was trying not to cry. And my dad had shaken my hand and solemnly wished me good luck.

Then Ronnie stepped forward and wrapped her arms around me and laid a nice one on me that made my knees a little weak. She didn't grind her body against mine, or anything like that. It was just a good, long fifteen second kiss, that was a complete surprise to my parents.

When she pulled her lips away, she said, "If you get yourself killed, I'll never forgive you!"

"Well, then, I won't," I managed to say.

And then she gave me a second kiss, and there was a little tongue with that one.

When it was over, I glanced at my folks, who were both standing there with their mouths open. My dad closed his, and he got this glint in his eye that told me if I didn't leave right quick he was going to say, "I knew it!" And since I didn't want him to say that just then, I said, "I'll be careful" and jumped in the van. Thankfully, the guy was already late, and took off fast.

It was my first airplane flight, and it was fun. I couldn't imagine jumping out, looking down at the patchwork of green and brown and the little lines that were roads, and the little glints that was the sun glancing off of windshields. It looked a long way down.

Basic wasn't that bad. I think that's because I was already in better shape than a lot of the other guys, who had played more video games than I had, and eaten worse than my mom, the nurse, allowed us to eat.

Being in the infantry was boring, mostly. All you did was train over and over to do the same things, and clean the same equipment, and stand the same inspections.

There was one thing that made life less boring. I had written to both my folks and Ronnie on a pretty regular basis. About all I had to talk about was my training, which I didn't figure would be very interesting to those back home. So I told the folks I missed them, and I told Ronnie I missed her too. I might have waxed a little poetic about those kisses too.

And one day I got a letter from her, which caught some attention from the guy in the mail room, because it was perfumed. It had no return address on it, and there were only two things inside. One was a little slip of paper that said, "Better late than never. Wish you were here." The other was a four by six photograph of Ronnie, holding a camera, taking a picture of herself in a full length mirror.

Naked.

It brought back some memories of the time when this type of photo had been my favorite. And the reason I had lost interest in those self-portraits, was the reason this one electrified me. I knew how difficult it had been for her to take this picture, and print it on her printer, and then send it to me. The faith she had in me was something I'd never forget.

I must have stared at that picture for an hour or more. Her body was different than the ones I had found online. Those had been taken before she had Timmy. Actually, they were taken as she was being impregnated with Timmy. She had been in cheerleader shape back then. Now, her breasts were heavier, and larger. Her hips were wider. But her waist was still small, and her legs were still long and shapely. She had taken her hair down, and it was a mass around her face, lying on her shoulders. Her nipples were dark brown and erect. And her pussy was still bald, with a deep cleft that was a magnet to the eyes.

The problem was I was in a barracks room, and I had a roommate. So while I got to look at that picture until I was afraid my eyeballs would wear it out, I didn't get to do much to deal with what it caused.

So ... when the Special Forces guys came around recruiting, I jumped at the chance, just as a change of pace.

And that's when things got interesting.

-------

I almost didn't pass the Q course, which is short for the Special Forces Qualification Course. I thought I was in shape ... but I wasn't.

Once I got selected, then I went through the four phases of SF training, which included jumping out of airplanes. A bunch of times.

And it changed me. There came a time when, looking at my ring, I knew I really could slay a dragon ... if I needed to. Part of that was the photograph, now dog-eared and creased, that I kept in my billfold. I'd had to trim it to make it fit, but she was still there, in all her glory.

Suffice it to say my confidence level was significantly improved.

And I loved every minute of it.

Until, just one week before I was due to reup, we were training for an upcoming mission. I left the airplane on a static line, during a LALO exercise. That's a low altitude, low opening, which means under 500 feet. Depending on the actual altitude, you have a maximum of eight seconds before you hit the ground. And if your static line doesn't deploy your parachute, you have roughly one second to pull your reserve chute before it's too late, and you die. A static line is sort of like one of those ratchet straps that are so popular nowadays. It's made of woven nylon and it's incredibly strong. A military static line is made to take 3,660 pounds without breaking. I know the average paratrooper with a full load of gear only weighs a fraction of that, but when you leave an airplane, you're flying the same speed as that airplane, and the static line basically tries to stop you instantly. The chute, deploying, mitigates that jerk, which would probably kill you otherwise, but you can still effectively weigh five or six hundred pounds ... at least as far as the static line is concerned.

Anyway, that line is attached to the airplane at one end, and your chute at the other, and when you jump out, it pulls your pack open so the chute deploys ... and you don't die five to eight seconds later. At least in a LALO situation.

Unless that indestructible static line breaks.

Which mine did.

And I honestly believe, even to this day, that the only reason I pulled my reserve in time was because the handle was already in my hand, and the jerk of the static line, as it took the strain and broke, flipped me upside down, which I instinctively knew was wrong ... and I just jerked my arm instinctively.

But that took a second or two.

So there was maybe three more seconds before, just as the chute fully deployed and jerked me almost to a stop, I slammed into the ground, unprepared to do that. Somebody told me later that they estimated I was doing about 50 mph when I hit the ground.

It broke my right leg in four places. It actually bent my rifle!

So, three months later, my involuntary extension expired, and I was medically retired from the Army as a Sergeant, E-5.

I had to walk with a cane, but they said that if I kept working at it, I could eventually dump that. I'd probably limp all my life.

But I wasn't dead.

-------

When I was in SF, the missions we got tasked with meant something. We did good things, that often saved lives. We found bad people and dealt with them. We were valuable to our country.

Now all that was gone. It wasn't gone in a flash, but it was gone. While I was in that hospital those three months, I lost my body tone, and I felt like I lost my edge.

I was going home ... but I didn't know what that meant. I didn't have a job, and had no idea what kind of job I could even do. I had the GI Bill, and could go to school, but engineering had lost its glamour, and I was depressed enough by the turn of events that I wasn't much interested in looking at other fields.

And then there was that picture.

While I had been be-bopping around the world on classified missions, that picture had represented a familiar, comfortable fantasy. It was easy to believe that, if I was actually there with her, I might get to see her in person ... like that. It was easy to assume there would be more kisses ... and maybe even more.

But as I sat in coach for twelve hours, winging my way back to Kansas, all I could see in that photograph was a woman who had had four years to move on with her life.

Oh, we had written letters to each other. But long stretches had gone by while I was in some South American Country, or Africa, or other places I shouldn't be mentioning. I'd get back to the world and find four or five of her letters, which I would read eagerly, but only answer with one of my own.

So the truth is, I didn't expect my MILF to be there, waiting for me.

My dad picked me up at the Manhattan Regional Airport. I had to do my final out processing at Fort Riley, but all that involved was turning in my final travel voucher and checking in with the retirement people there. I had told Dad to bring a book, which he did. My flight got in around noon, and it was five when we drove off post and headed for home. He was used to the cane by then.

My mom wasn't, however, when I got out of the car. She came running out and when I got out and leaned on the cane, she burst into tears.

"Come on, Mom," I said, hugging her. "You're a nurse. Get a grip. I'm fine. It's just a little limp."

She actually recovered quite nicely, but there was still some background tension that didn't seem to be associated with me.

"What's wrong?" I asked. I'd been trained to read people and gather intel from my surroundings.

"Ronnie missed you," said my mother.

I didn't know quite how to deal with that. My own feelings were still in turmoil, and then there were obviously going to be feelings that my parents had too.

"I missed her too," I said, carefully.

"There's been a man bothering her," said my mother. The way she said that made me sit up and take notice.

"Bothering?"

"He says he's Timmy's father, but he's a horrible man. He's vulgar. I think she's frightened of him."

"When did he come around?" I asked. Ronnie had said nothing about this in any of her letters.

"Only a few days ago. She was at our house, watching a movie with us, and her babysitter called because this man came to the door and wanted to see Timmy. Your father went over there with her."

I turned to my dad. He looked sheepish. He hadn't said a word!

"I knew you had things to finish up," he said, shrugging. "I also knew that if I told you, you'd go AWOL. Besides, she said it's okay ... that she can handle him."

"Tell me what you saw," I said, looking at him. I might have used my NCO voice, because he looked startled.

"This guy was an as-..." He stopped and I knew he'd been about to say "asshole." That, in itself, told me how worried he was, because that was another word I'd never heard my father say - ever. "He was a jerk," said my dad. "She told him to go away, that she had nothing to say to him. He said Timmy was his son, and he had a right to see him. She said she didn't know who Timmy's father was, and that his claim was no better than anyone else's."

I looked at my mother, who had that look on her face of someone who has been through the war and survived. I wondered what her conversation with Ronnie had been like after she heard that. Ronnie had never volunteered anything about Timmy's father before, and my parents had been too polite to ask.

"I told her to call the police," said my dad. "Right in front of the guy. He called me a bozo, and said he had a business proposition for her and to get rid of me."

"What'd you say then?" I asked.

"I started to yell at him, but Ronnie took me inside with her and told him to leave. She said she was going to call the police."

"And did she?"

"No," he said. He shook his head. "She said she had everything under control. I tried to argue with her, but she wouldn't listen to me."

"When was that?" I asked.

"That was Tuesday," he said.

"And since then?"

"She brought Timmy to our house the next morning ... yesterday," said my mother. "She asked if he could stay with us while she talked to this man. I called in sick, of course." My mother actually wrung her hands. I'd never seen anyone actually do that before. "Bobby, she had been crying when she came to get him. She said she might have to leave, but she wouldn't talk about it. She told us not to worry, but I am worried!"

I went to the window and looked out. Her car was there. I turned to my parents.

"I know I just got home, but let me pop in to say hi to Ronnie."

"Yes!" gushed my mother. "Go see her!"

"You want me to come with you?" asked my dad. He looked uncomfortable. He was looking at my cane.

"Nah," I said. "I got this."

I went straight over. I had gotten used to hopping up stairs, because it was less painful than bending my bad leg. The physical therapist had yelled at me about that, but I was in a hurry. I knocked on the door.

"Go away!" came her yell from inside the house. "You can't have my baby!"

"Hey!" I called back. "Surprise! It's just me."

The curtains moved and suddenly the door was flung open. She was holding Timmy, who was huge. He was a little boy, instead of the baby I remembered. He was too big for her to be holding, but she hugged me anyway. I hugged them both. She was bawling, and couldn't talk. I moved them inside and closed the door.

"You're hurt!" were the first intelligible words she said, staring at my cane.

"I wrote to you," I said. "I told you about the accident."

"Yes, but you said you were all better! That doesn't look all better!"

"Let's worry about me later," I said. "What's this about Jack showing up. It is Jack, right?"

Then she was bawling again. It took me ten minutes to get her calmed down. I took Timmy from her, which didn't make him happy. He looked scared. I talked to him, telling him I knew him as a baby and things like that. Ronnie was working on calming down.

"Are you Bobby?" asked Timmy.

"Yes, I am," I said, setting him down on the floor.

"Mommy missed you," he said.

"I missed her too," I said. "Can I talk to her now? We have something important to discuss."

"Can I go to Nanny Nancy's?" he asked, looking hopeful. It felt strange to hear him refer to my mother as "Nanny Nancy."

"Maybe in a little while," I said. "For now, could you stay in your room for a little bit?"

"No!" gasped Ronnie. "I can't let him out of my sight!"

"Okay," I said.

I waited, until finally she could talk.

"Jack found out where I was," she said. "He sold Timmy to a couple who can't have children, but don't want to adopt an infant."

I stared at her. "Sold?"

"It's an adoption contract," she said. "He says I have to sign it or he'll show all those pictures to everyone in town."

"The pictures I found?"

She nodded, wiping her eyes.

"He sold Timmy," I said.

"For twenty thousand dollars," she said. "But I can't give him up!"

"Well duh," I said. "My dad said he told you to call the police."

"I can't do that, Bobby!" she moaned. "If I do, he'll spread those pictures all over the place. People will treat me like they did back in Georgia. I'll have to go somewhere else and start over. I don't want to do that. I like it here!"

"So we'll tell him the deal is off," I said.

"We can't do that either," she whined. "What am I going to do, Bobby? I thought I was finished with him. I thought he was out of my life!"

"He will be," I said. "I promise you."

"How can you promise me that?"

"Don't you worry about that. Where is he?"

"He said he'd be back today for Timmy. I thought you were him."

"Okay," I said. "Here's the plan. You take Timmy over to my folks house. I'll stay here and negotiate with Jack."

She looked at me. "I don't like that idea. He's mean, Bobby. If your dad hadn't been here, he would have slapped me around. He used to do that a lot. I didn't want to tell you that part, because I was so ashamed. But I finally got away from him. Except now he's back." She groaned and started to tear up again.

That's when the pounding came on the door.



-------

Chapter 6


"I'll get it," I said.

"No!" she hissed. "Don't answer it. Maybe he'll go away."

"Maybe you should take Timmy to your bedroom," I said. "I'll talk to Jack."

"Nooo," she said again.

The pounding came on the door again. "Open up, bitch!" yelled a male voice.

"Move it!" I snapped.

She grabbed Timmy's arm and headed for her bedroom.

I went to answer the door. I opened it. There was a pretty boy standing there.

In the Army, there is a type of civilian male that is sometimes called a "pretty boy." Another name for them is "Jody." These are the guys who come on to the girlfriends and wives of guys in the military, and take advantage of their circumstances. Like being lonely, or afraid, or in need of money.

We don't think much of pretty boys. They, on the other hand, think their shit doesn't stink. A lot of them are bullies, and they like pushing people around.

"Who the fuck are you?" said this pretty boy.

"We gave at the office," I said, and slammed the door in his face.

He started beating on the door and cursing up a storm, so I opened it again.

"You need to leave," I said. "You're trespassing."

He saw my cane, then.

A man with a cane is assumed, by many people, to be harmless. He is infirm, for one thing ... or looks infirm. His range of motion is limited, which people think means he can't move quickly. All in all, people disregard someone with a cane as being no threat.

He pushed past me, roughly elbowing me to one side. I let him.

"Out of my way, shithead," he said. "I come for my kid. Where is he?"

"Your kid isn't here," I said. "Your kid, assuming you ever actually got any woman pregnant, was aborted as soon as that woman figured out it was your kid."

He turned on me, his face red.

"Nobody wants to have your baby," I said, as if I was explaining it to a five year old.

"I'm going to kick your ass, you fucking cripple," he bragged.

"I don't think so," I said. I smiled. "But I guess you can try."

He came at me and I whacked him upside the head with my cane. He fell hard, and shook his head.

"Sorry," I said. "That's how we cripples roll."

He got up, and as he did so, he reached into his boot and pulled a knife. It looked like it might be a double edged eight inch blade. He waved it low, weaving it back and forth, and I realized he might actually know something about fighting with a knife. I didn't smile, but I felt like it, because now I had at least a minor challenge.

"Stop!" That was Ronnie. Timmy was standing behind her. "Just leave, Jack. I'm not going to sign anything. You can't have my baby."

"I'll deal with you later, after I give this piece of shit a lesson in manners," he said. He looked at me. "What are you doing here anyway, cripple? You her boyfriend? Is some wimp-assed cripple the best she can do?" He grinned with what I'm sure he thought was an evil grin.

"Jack!" wailed Ronnie.

I looked at her. "Ronnie, I sure would like it a whole lot more if you took Timmy into the bedroom, so he doesn't have to see the blood that's about to be spilled."

"No way," crowed Jack. "Let him stay and watch a real man in action."

"Ronnie?" I said, softly. "Trust me, Ronnie."

She froze for a few seconds, and then turned, picked Timmy up and disappeared. I heard a door slam. I looked at Jack.

"Jack, I'm going to tell you a little secret. I'm not nearly as crippled as I look, and if you don't haul your ass back to Georgia right now, and leave Ronnie alone, you're going to find out coming here was a terrible mistake. You hear me, Jack? You've had fair warning."

"Like you're going to do anything to me," he laughed. "I'm gonna cut your fucking dick off, cripple."

"No ... you're not, Jack," I said, shifting my center of balance. I wasn't going to use the cane this time. "You're just going to make the biggest mistake of your life."

He rushed me then. I swiveled on my good leg, and grabbed his knife arm, pulling him through the thrust in a simple Judo move. Then, with my other hand, I crushed his windpipe.

He flopped on the ground, dying, as I took the knife out of his hand.

"Having a hard time breathing, Jack?" I asked, smiling. "Want me to help you?"

His eyes were wild. He knew he was dying, because he knew he couldn't get any air past his crushed larynx.

I got down over him and held him down. "I'm going to have to do a tracheotomy on you, Jack," I said. "If you lie very still, I'll save your life. If you move, you're going to die."

Then I used his own knife to open his windpipe, between his Adam's apple, which was misshapen and already bruising, and the inside ends of his collar bones. I'd never done it myself, but had watched it done in training. It went just like in the film. I didn't have anything to hold it open, so I used my fingers. His chest expanded and the incision whistled as he breathed through it.

"I'm going to go find something to hold that open, Jack," I said. His eyes panicked. "Just take it easy," I said. "I'll be back before you suffocate. Just don't move around and use up all the oxygen in your lungs."

Then I left him there. That slamming door I had heard had apparently been Ronnie closing Timmy up in a bedroom, because she was was standing in the hallway, looking properly horrified, her hand up to her mouth.

"Quick!" I whispered. "Something hollow, like a straw!"

She ran into the kitchen, and I followed her. "I don't know! I don't know!" she moaned, opening and closing drawers. "I don't have anything like that!" she wailed.

I saw a plastic thing used to make melon balls, and grabbed it. It had a handle on it that was half an inch wide and was tapered. I took it back to where Jack was floundering, his fingers pulling at his new wound. I had to hold him down again as I inserted the handle of the melon thing and twisted it sideways. That spread the slit and got him breathing again.

"Hold this just like it is," I said, bringing his fingers to the device. That, he did, and I watched his chest move up and down. His eyes were still rolling, but he could breathe.

I stood over him. Ronnie was standing to one side, her hand up to her mouth again. There wasn't all that much blood, really, but it was more than she was used to dealing with.

"Here's the deal, Jack," I said, looking down at him. "I just got out of the Army. Special Forces." I looked and his eyes met mine. He was listening. "I didn't kill you, Jack. I could have, and nobody would have cared, because you were using a knife to attack an unarmed disabled man. The cops wouldn't even have arrested me. I am, in fact, going to call the police as soon as we're finished with our little talk. Ronnie's going to make a complaint of a home invasion. I'm going to make a complaint of attempted murder. We're going to tell the police about you trying to sell a five year old little boy that was the product of a rape."

His eyes jittered back and forth.

"So I don't expect you to be able to cause Ronnie any more trouble for a good long while," I said. "But they might only put you away for four or five years, Jack. Hell, who knows? They might not even put you in prison at all. So here's what you need to understand about Ronnie, and Timmy, and this house, and me."

I made sure his eyes were on mine, and moved, to see if they followed. They did.

"I love Ronnie," I said. "I love Timmy too. And what you really need to listen to and understand is that if I ever see you again, I'm not just going to crush your windpipe. You won't survive that meeting, Jack, and that's a promise."

I heard Ronnie's gasp, but ignored it.

"Now I'm going to make one exception to what I just said," I told him. "I'm not going to kill you if I see you in court, when I testify against you. I'll only kill you if I think you're a threat to Ronnie or Timmy. So you need to be careful not to ever come back here. If you want to apologize to her, or something like that, then you need to send a video, or use the mail or whatever. But don't come here in person, because that would be fatal, okay?"

He stared at me.

"I need some feedback here, Jack, or I'm going to take that thing away from you, and let you die."

He nodded, frantically, which made him move his hand. His fingers were bloody and slippery, and the movement made him lose his grip. The slit closed on the implement as it twisted. He flopped. I held him down and got him breathing again. When he calmed, I picked up the knife he had attacked me with.

"I need to make dead sure you know I'm serious," I said, calmly. "Don't move, because I'm not fixing your breathing hole again. I'm not actually going to hurt you right now, unless you move. So don't move. And don't lose your grip on that thing that's letting you breathe, because, like I said, I'm not going to fix it again. If it slips again ... you die, Jack."

I cut through the cloth of his pants in a big circle around his zipper. It was difficult because the knife was almost criminally dull. Then I pulled his underwear away from his body and ripped through that too. That left his dick and balls hanging out. He was like a statue as I did this. I stood up.

"You said you were going to cut my dick off, Jack," I said, conversationally. I tested the edge of the blade against my finger. "It's dull, Jack! I can't cut your balls off with this. It would be more like tearing them off with a knife this dull, Jack. But tell you what. If you can convince me that you understand the seriousness of your mistake, today, I'll let you keep them. Can you do that, Jack?"

He tried to speak, but the air just whistled out of the cut in his throat. His eyes got wild again.

"Blink twice if you understand me, Jack," I said.

He blinked a dozen times. He was still blinking when I turned to find Ronnie looking at me like I was an alien from Mars.

"We need to call the police," I said. "I don't have a phone on me."

She got her cell, and extended it to me as if I had the plague, and she was afraid of catching it. I called 911 and told them there had been a home invasion, and that the intruder had been subdued, but needed an ambulance.

Within minutes there were sirens. My mother, of all people, burst through the door when the ambulance pulled up. She took in the scene and went to Jack. She got on a knee and examined him. She looked up at me.

"Who did this?"

"The tracheotomy?" I asked. "We saw a film in training."

Then the police were there, and they ran around like chickens with their heads cut off. This was big doings for Hanley. Nothing like this had happened in decades. I told them what had happened, and I assume Ronnie did too. My dad showed up to retrieve my mother. It turned out she was in Ronnie's bedroom, entertaining Timmy. Ronnie had asked her to look in on him. Mom and Dad took him to their house.

Then the State Troopers showed up. It turned out there were a dozen warrants out for Jack in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. Three of them were felony warrants. Suddenly, our version of events had a lot more credibility. Arrangements were made for formal statements to be made the next day, down at the courthouse. The state investigators put up yellow tape and said Ronnie would have to go somewhere else that night.

So I took her to our house.

I expected it to take an hour to satisfy my parents as to what had happened and all that. But all that happened was my dad asked, "Are you two okay?"

I told him we were, and he said mom was playing with Timmy, but would have questions in the morning.

"She can't stay at her house tonight," I said. "It's a crime scene."

"So your mother informed me," he said. "Of course she can stay here. If you'll help me get the things I've been storing in your room out and to the basement, you can use your room."

"I can sleep on the couch," I said. "She and Timmy can use my room."

He looked at me with that same look I remembered from when Ronnie had kissed me goodbye, when I was leaving for basic training.

"That's up to you," he said.

Only then did I have time to turn, and see if Ronnie still wanted to have anything at all to do with me.

-------

She looked nervous, to be honest.

"You want to go check on Timmy?" I asked.

She looked towards where my dad had pointed, when he said Mom was with Timmy. Then she looked back at me.

"Just for a second," she said.

"I'll go help my dad," I said.

"Please wash your hands first," she said, looking down at them.

I held them up. They were covered with Jack's blood. I hadn't even noticed.

There was a bathroom right across the hall from my room, so I went there. My dad was carrying a box toward the stairs to the basement. When my hands were clean, I helped him take the rest out. There wasn't as much as his words had led me to believe. The adrenaline had leached out of my system, and as usual I was starving. I went to the kitchen and got an orange. Peeling it got my hands juicy, so I washed them again. As I was drying my hands, Ronnie came in. She looked a little better, but leaned up against the counter ... five feet from me. I looked at her, and leaned against the counter where I was.

"I told you to stay in the bedroom," I said.

"Did you know you were going to do that to him?" she asked. "Hit him there, I mean?"

I nodded. "It was the best way to subdue him without killing him, and make sure he was harmless."

"It looked like you just reached out and touched him," she sighed.

"He was threatening you," I said. "He was threatening me."

"I know," she said. "And I don't blame you. Not really. I know what he can be like. It's just that..."

"You're not used to me being this way," I said.

She took a step closer, and stopped.

"You even scared me, Bobby!" she said. "I mean I knew you meant it. I almost peed my pants!"

"I did mean it," I said. "And I needed him to believe it. Guys like that only understand one language. I had to convince him that I'm badder than he is, and that it isn't worth the risk of messing with me. Fear is the only thing they understand, because that's the only tool in their own tool box."

She was quiet for a while. "Did you mean... all of it?"

"All?"

"What you said about how you felt about ... us."

"About loving you?" I said.

She nodded. She looked nervous again.

"I missed you," I said. "And I know we never talked about this. I didn't want to write about it. And I'm not good with words anyway. But yes. I've loved you for a long time ... longer than I've been gone. And I know I don't have any claim on you, and that I'm too young and all that. So don't worry. I'm not like him. I'm not going to try to force myself on you."

She took another step closer, just looking at me.

"You were too young," she said.

"I know," I admitted.

She took another step.

"But that was then. Now ... I'm not so sure you're too young any more, Bobby."

My mother came in, just then, with sheets and a blanket and handed them to me. I hugged them in my arms.

Ronnie turned to my mother, and said, "Nancy ... how unhappy would you be if I said he didn't need those?"

My mother stared at her for six or seven seconds, just long enough to create what I believe is called a pregnant pause. Then she hugged her best friend, and whispered, "I'd be delighted." Then she turned around and hurried out of the room. She almost ran, but not quite. I was still processing it when Ronnie said, "Let's go to bed. It's been a long day."

In the bedroom, Timmy was already in the bed, sleeping where my mother had put him. Ronnie went over to lean over him, and kissed his forehead. I closed the door.

There was an other-worldly kind of feeling in the room. The last time we had been in this room together had been when she found the tumblr pictures on my laptop. But now, she acted like this had been her room forever. She didn't look at me. Casually, she pulled her T shirt up and off of her body. She folded it loosely and laid it on top of the chest of drawers. Almost too quickly for me to register it, her arms went behind her and loosened her bra. She hunched her shoulders forward and it fell down her arms, to be folded loosely and placed on top of the shirt.

I swallowed, because my mouth was suddenly dry. She was already working on her jeans, opening her belt and the top button, and then pushing them down over those hips I had stared at for hours in the picture she'd sent me. Her panties went down with the jeans, and she plucked them apart. The panties just got tossed on top of the bra. The jeans, she folded.

Everything she did looked so casual and normal that I felt like I was waking up from a coma, or a dream, and that what she was doing was what the real world looked like ... but I had been somewhere else.

She opened drawers in the chest of drawers and found the T shirts I had left behind. She pulled one out.

"Can I wear this?" she asked, finally turning those blue eyes on me. Her eyes ranged down my body, and then back up.

"Sure," I said, after I swallowed twice.

She looked over at the bed, and then back at me. "Then again, I think I'd be more comfortable without it. That's how I usually sleep. Is that okay?"

I nodded. It was easier than clearing my throat and swallowing again.

She went to the bed and pulled the covers back. She walked around it and moved Timmy closer to the edge. It was a king-sized bed. I had always liked to sprawl, back then. Now I could sleep in a twin and there'd be room for somebody else. She got in, lying on her side, facing me. She propped her upper body up with pillows under her arm and rested her head on her hand.

She just watched me, standing there, still fully clothed.

"Are you coming to bed?" she asked, softly.

"Yes," I said. "Yes I am."

I left a trail of clothing between the door and the bed. At one point I was hopping on one foot while pulling the pants off the other leg. She giggled.

But when I actually got to the bed, I slowed down. I actually eased into the bed, as if someone were sleeping in it and I was trying not to wake them. All the time those blue eyes were looking at me, drifting all over. I was hard as a rock, and there had been no way to hide that. I remember thinking I shouldn't hide it, because she obviously wanted to see it. But that was hard to believe, even under those circumstances.

I ended up lying on my side too, facing her. There were about twelve inches separating us. I couldn't reach the covers, because she had put them back toward her side. I didn't want to cover that body up anyway.

"You're beautiful," I said.

"Thank you," she replied.

"Better than your picture," I said. I felt silly. Here I was, a grown man, a trained killer, and I was tongue-tied in front of a woman I'd known for years ... a woman who had sent me a nude photograph of herself!

"A girl likes to hear that," she said.

I realized, suddenly, that she was nervous too. It was in her eyes, and her voice, even if her actions had looked normal. I thought about how she had seen the violent side of me, and not all that long ago.

"I'm sorry you had to see that," I said. "But I couldn't let him get away with that."

"I don't want to talk about Jack," she said. "I want to talk about us."

"Is there an us?" I asked, finally voicing the biggest question of my life.

"There had better be," she said. "We're lying here naked, about to make love. Despite what certain photographs might have indicated, I do not decide to go to bed with a man merely on a whim."

"I'm glad I'm not a whim," I said.

She leaned closer to me. "You're my knight in shining armor," she said, softly. "You saved me from the dragon."

"I did," I said. "Don't I get a reward for that?"

"Most assuredly," she said.

"And what might that reward be?" I asked, leaning toward her. That foot had been reduced to three inches.

She leaned again and brushed her lips across mine.

"You get the girl," she said, as she pulled back. "It happens that way in all the stories."

-------

We were both too excited. We were too horny. She had been without for as long as I had. She knew what she had been missing. All I knew was that everybody said the real thing was ten times better than your hand, and I'd been looking forward to it for ten years. Oddly, while I was in SF, nobody gave me any grief about not picking up women. Some guys had girlfriends, but most did not. That's because women were trouble, and trouble could keep you off a mission. Most of us were married to the job.

So when we finally stopped talking and got down to serious business, we were both too excited for it to last very long. We were like one of those cheap firecrackers, that you light in your hand to throw, and the fuse is instantaneous, going off as you cock your arm. To be completely honest with you, what I remember about that first time was heat, surrounding my penis, and skin against mine that was so soft I wanted to wear it like clothes.

We spent vastly more time kissing after that, and just touching each other, than we did having intercourse. I had always heard people call it "making love" and I thought that meant being inside her and moving in and out, and if you made love for an hour, then that's what you did for an hour. I learned that night that making love might not even involve intercourse. And even when it does, the actual intercourse isn't the most important part of it.

I'm not saying it isn't fun. I'm just saying I learned there is a lot more to making love than the old in and out.

Of course, all those touches, and whispers and kisses, led me right back to being rigid as a piece of wood. This time, when she pulled me on top of her, her hands guided me. I never told her I had been a virgin until that night. Not that night, anyway. I did tell her later, only to have her say, "I knew." And that's why her hands taught me now to love her that night, showing me how to move, both in terms of direction, speed, and force. Her voice urged me too. She announced each orgasm, which was good, because they all sounded different from each other. Sometimes it was just a high pitched whine. Sometimes she bucked and thrust up at me, and she groaned like I was killing her. Another time it was a series of staccato, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" yips. Once, it was, "Oh please, don't ever stop doing this, Bobbeeeeeee."

Ronnie took me to sex school that night, and I loved every minute of it. Watching her, and knowing that I was responsible for all that pleasure, was actually the best part of it. I loved the kisses. I loved sucking her nipples. I loved spurting in her. But what I loved the most, was her excited announcement of, "I'm gonna cum, Bobby! You're making me cum again!"

About two in the morning, we fell into an exhausted sleep.

The last thing I thought about was the noise I knew we had made ... and wondering if my parents had heard it.

-------

In the morning, she had to dress in the same clothes she had been wearing the night before, and had to be a mommy again. She got Timmy up. I was still in bed, and Timmy sat up and looked at me.

"Hi," he said, rubbing his eyes and stretching.

"Hi," I said. "You hungry?"

He nodded.

"Well then, let's go get some breakfast!"

I jumped out of bed and realized I was naked. So I faked it and just leaned over and picked up my underwear from where I'd dropped them, and put them on.

"I'm beating you!" I told him. "You better get dressed, or I'm going to beat you to the kitchen and eat all the food!"

"No you won't!" he said firmly. "Nanny Nancy won't let you."

"She might not be there!" I leered at him.

I saw Ronnie shake her head, and she helped him get his shirt on.

"Why did we sleep here?" he asked his mother.

"It's a long story, and we don't have time for it right now," she said. "I promise to tell you about it later, though, okay?"

"Okay," he said. He looked at me and pointed. "I have a freeze ray in my finger. You can't move."

I froze while he got his pants on. Ronnie told him he didn't have to have shoes. He came around the bed and stood, looking at me.

"Now I'm gonna get all the food," he said. He ran for the door.

I caught him just as he entered the kitchen, where my mother had cooked enough food to feed my whole platoon.

-------

That morning was full of explanations and interviews. When I got to the station, where the local police had given one office to the state guys, and I sat down, there was a detective sitting behind the desk, looking through what I figured was the case file. He flipped a couple of pages and then looked up at me.

"You want to tell me about his pants?" he asked.

"Before he attacked me, he told me he was going to cut my genitals off," I said.

"Genitals," said the man. "He use that word?"

"He said dick."

"Go on."

"First, he rushed me, trying to take a swing at me. I fended him off with my cane."

"Was that when he got the concussion?"

"I don't know about that. He was coming at me, so I knocked him away with my cane. He got up, pulled the knife, said he was going to emasculate me. He appeared to know something about knife fighting, so that's when I decided a higher level of self-defense was called for."

"What did you use on him?" asked the detective. "During this self-defense."

"My hand."

"You sure? He spent four hours in surgery."

"Just my hand," I said. "I guess I got lucky."

"If you call crushing his windpipe lucky," said the man.

"It stopped him from attacking me," I said, shrugging.

"So then you did surgery on his throat and his pants," suggested the detective.

"I suggested that, if he survived the night, and prison, he might not want to make the mistake of threatening to cut my dick off again," I said.

He almost smiled, but then frowned instead.

"I understand you just got out of the Army," He said.

I nodded.

"What'd you do in there?"

"Special Forces."

"So you could have killed him, if you'd have wanted to kill him."

I nodded again.

He leaned back.

"Well next time, how about you just do that. It would save a ton of paperwork, and as things are right now, that worthless fuck will live off the taxpayers for the next ten years. You want some coffee?"

-------

I guess that Ronnie decided the best way to deal with a blackmailer is to render his threat harmless. She had copies of the pictures, and she showed her dirty little secret to the detectives. Turns out that the law enforcement community in Kansas takes a much dimmer view of that sort of thing than the cops in Georgia did. They also weren't too impressed with his plan to charge twenty grand as a fee to allow someone to adopt the son he'd never actually seen until he came to Kansas. That, plus our testimony, convinced the prosecutor to take the case forward in Kansas, rather than just ship Jack back to Georgia on the warrants. They would still be there when he got out of prison, and then everybody else could have him. No charges were brought against me. In fact, nobody even brought the subject up after my interview with the detective that morning. I was willing to buy him a new pair of pants ... but nobody asked me to.

We did have to get some blood tests, because Jack had hepatitis. Turns out he contracted it after he raped Ronnie, thank goodness, and I didn't have any open cuts on my hands when I got them all bloody. So that was fine. But that meant only an authorized company could clean up the crime scene, so it was three more days before Ronnie and Timmy could move back into their house.

I moved back in with them. My mother, when it came time for Ronnie to leave, stood in front of me and said, "You belong there, now." Then she hugged me and cried and hugged Ronnie and cried, and hugged Timmy, who told her not to cry and asked her if she needed a band aid.

And I took my duffle over there, and started living my dream. We got married as soon as we could jump through the hoops that all the regulators held up for us.

I adopted Timmy. In the process of doing that, there had to be a paternity test, since his birth certificate listed no father. Turned out Jack wasn't his father after all. And Jack wouldn't cooperate and tell them who the other men at that party were. So we were in limbo for a while, as lawyers argued and public notices were put in papers and more regulators got to call the shots.

And, of course, while everybody talks about confidentiality like it's the Holy Grail, the process of the court case, and the adoption and all that put information out there which some people reacted to badly. Some people in our church, for example, snubbed Ronnie, and me, of course, for taking up with the harlot. I didn't care what they thought, though. They were dickheads.

By the time Timmy became my son legally, his little brother was kicking at the gates, trying to get out of her belly and into the world. Grandma Nancy took care of him while that happened, and when we brought the baby home, Timmy solemnly went around the room, touching things like the crib and the bassinette, and all the things that had been his, saying, "And you can have this, and this, and this."

It took me ten years to make my fantasy come true. Funny, how it's possible to look at dirty pictures, and find one of a MILF, and have fantasies about her, and end up marrying her! Pretty wild, huh? It was as strange journey, and it wasn't anything like I imagined it might be, that first time I saw our neighbor, and my mom's best friend, naked, getting banged doggy style.

But it was her dirty little secret ... and mine ... that brought us together and gave us the chance to work things out.

For all four of us, come to think of it.


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The End
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Posted:  2013-02-25
Last Modified: 2013-03-01 / 08:22:36 am
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