We'd been best friends all our lives, Mindy, Kit and I, born within days of one another eighteen years and a month and a half ago. Well actually, Mindy was literally "the girl next door," the daughter of my mother's college roommate, while Kit was my cousin, living down the block. When we were about eight, we started calling ourselves "The Three Moosekateers," because that was hysterically funny to a trio of eight-year-olds.
Could we even survive apart? Well, we'd have to try, since we were all leaving for college in a few weeks, in different parts of the country.
It was a hot late afternoon in mid-July. Mindy and I were in her house, having walked home from the lake in just our bathing suits, "air-drying" under the hazy sun. Mindy took a pitcher of lemonade out of the refrigerator, placed it on the kitchen table, and looked across the table at me without speaking.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing."
I hadn't dated all that much, but I was familiar enough with the female of the species to know that "nothing" was seldom nothing.
"Spill it, Mins," I said, using the nickname she allowed only me to use.
"Steve," she said thoughtfully, "why do you suppose we never dated?"
"What do you mean? We hang out together all the time."
"I don't mean like that. I mean, you know..."
"But that's not what we are. We're friends."
"Of course we are," she said. "But friends date."
"I don't know... I guess we just don't think of one another, you know, in
that
way."
"You don't think I'm sexy?"
"I guess. I mean sure." To be honest, this was making me more than a little uncomfortable. Of course I'd noticed. Mindy was a petite girl, long dark hair past her shoulders, certainly very pretty, and she was sitting across from me wearing only a bikini. But Mindy was a pal, always had been, and I'd always been able to think of her in that way.
She leaned in toward me, and I was looking straight down at her cleavage. "Just wondering, that's all."
"Are we done with the conversation?"
Obviously not. "So what you're telling me," she said, "is you can look down my bikini top and nothing? No erection?"
I almost spit out my lemonade. We'd never discussed our sex lives before. Part of me was in denial that she even know the
word
"erection."
"We're done talking about this," I said sharply.
"Okay, fine," she said, "don't get angry." She got up to put away the lemonade pitcher, and made a point of glancing down at my crotch as she passed by me.
"Stop it," I told her. She shrugged, and continued over to the refrigerator. Now I couldn't not notice how nice her as looked as she bent over.
She seemed to get over the weird mood she was in, and we went outside to sit on the sun porch for a while, reading magazines and enjoying the weather. For about fifteen minutes, and then she suddenly put down her magazine and said "But I could make you hard as a rock if I wanted to, no matter what you say."
"What the fuck!" I said. "Will you stop with that already?"
She shrugged again, and picked up the magazine. "Okay, fine. Sorry. But you know I could."
And now I guess I was the one who couldn't let it go, because a minute later I said, only half out loud, "You couldn't."
She threw down her magazine. "Is that a challenge?"
"Will you stop it already? What are you looking for, validation? You're sexy. You know you're sexy. But you're like a sister to me. You know that."
"Ooh," she said. "Incest! How kinky!"
I shook my head. "Okay, now you're just being impossible on purpose."
"I'm serious, Steve. I think there's more to how you feel about me than 'sister.' You give me... five minutes to prove it. If I'm wrong, I'll never mention it again."
"And by 'prove it," you mean...?
