My step-cousin Cindy and I never were the best of friends. Sure, we got along from time to time. We co-existed. But there was always something about her that bothered me. It was this sense of entitlement, this attitude that the whole world owed her something.
Let me give you some backstory. Cindy was adopted. Her biological parents abandoned her, and she was raised from an early age by my aunt and uncle, who already had two children of their own, although both of them were moved out by the time Cindy was ten.
My family is Asian. Cindy's white. Because of that, Cindy must have felt a natural disconnect from the rest of us. It wasn't exactly a cultural disconnect, but the kind that nobody wanted to talk about. The elephant in the room. That kind of superficial, but all too powerful disconnect that could only be attributed to a difference in skin tone.
I suspect it was this disconnect we have to blame for Cindy's sense of entitlement. She was always the baby. The outsider. The other. Thus, she became the recipient of much sympathy from our family. Everyone bended over backwards for her, especially my aunt and uncle. They spoiled her rotten. They let her get away with everything. They let her talk back to them in ways that would have not been tolerated by one of their two biological kids. Period.
But I always sort of understood that. I mean, I couldn't exactly blame her for the situation. She had demons, a lot of psychological scarring stemming from her abandonment. Still, I didn't like it, and there was always this subtle tension between us at family gatherings.
Cindy moved in with us recently (that is, my parents and I) because we happen to live closer to her home-school tutor, who also moved recently and would not have been able to continue teaching Cindy at her previous location. My parents weren't happy with the idea, but we had a spare room and a big house, so we didn't exactly have a good excuse to reject her. My aunt and uncle would be paying all of her expenses, so cost wasn't the issue. Still, an extra child was a lot to deal with, and Cindy was always a handful.
For the first month or two, though, she was actually pleasant to have around. She made sure to be on her best behavior, didn't cause anyone too much trouble, and contributed a lot in the way of household chores. As uncanny as it was, we actually started to develop a relationship, almost like sisters. I've never had a sibling, so it was nice.
Unfortunately, like all sibling relationships, it didn't stay that way. Especially with Cindy. By two months, she'd developed enough rapport to begin pushing the limits of what she could get away with, much in the same way she would take advantage of her foster parents. It wasn't malicious, it just came naturally to her. It was the lifestyle she was used to.
It was hard to notice at first. Despite her poor grades, Cindy is actually fairly intelligent. She knows how to play up her strong points to meet her own ends, at the same time picking up on the weaknesses of others, making her a truly potent manipulator. So when Cindy started to take advantage of my parents, it went right over their heads. They were falling into the same trap my aunt and uncle had fallen into, and despite their criticisms of the way they raised Cindy, they still couldn't see it happening to themselves.
It started with small things, like catering to her preferences over ours. My mom would begin to cook meals that only Cindy favored, and my dad would let it slide whenever Cindy came home late or made a mess in the house. Meanwhile, I was still being yelled at for those kinds of things, and I didn't necessarily like the same kinds of food she did.
But things escalated quickly. Before I knew it, my dad was driving Cindy around everywhere, spending an absurd amount of money on superficial things: stuff like clothes, makeup, nail polish... the kind of girly stuff I never got into.
Cindy complained that her room was too small, so my parents actually switched bedrooms with her, under the rationale that neither of them needed all that space, despite the fact that they clearly did, while Cindy clearly didn't. Not even my room was that big, and I've needed more space for bookshelves since I started going to college.
I would like to say that I was able to resist giving in to Cindy's whims, but I can't. I've actually found myself responsible for keeping her new room tidy, as she's terrible at cleaning, and somehow just helping her gradually turned into me doing all the work while Cindy sits there on her queen-sized bed, glued to her phone. I felt like a maid.
While my parents and I have always ate dinner together at the table, Cindy wasn't used to that, and gradually began to excuse herself to eat in her room. That was almost understandable, until it got to the point where she wouldn't even come down to get the food herself or thank my mother or I for cooking. She would text me to bring it up to her, and while I initially resisted, it was more effort to argue with her than to carry the food upstairs, so I just saved myself the trouble.
All in all, having Cindy around eventually became the burden that everyone expected it to be. But much to my... frustration, it wasn't all bad. Let me explain.
We're all in the closet about something. I just happened to be in there for the most typical thing. My parents are pretty traditional, and more than just slightly homophobic. Coming out to them would be a nightmare, so I've been careful to guard my secret as well as possible. But Cindy made that more difficult than ever.
I shouldn't have been attracted to her. We were practically related, and she was only eighteen; two years my junior. On top of that, she was honestly the type of girl I've always been repulsed by. The girly-girl type, the diva, the borderline skank. I've always been the nerdy, boyish type, but something about Cindy drove me crazy. Maybe it was the taboo that excited me, I still don't know. All I knew is that living with Cindy had its benefits.
As I've been telling you, Cindy is absolutely lazy. Despite her good looks, she has no boyfriend, almost no social life, and is extremely sheltered. Because of that, Cindy rarely gets changed. She spends a lot of time in her underwear or her pajamas. At first this wasn't the case, but eventually she became comfortable enough to roam the house that way, and nobody really protested because they didn't want to make her uncomfortable.
I didn't protest for a different reason, of course. If I haven't given you a description already, Cindy has long, brown hair, although she tends to dye it blonde. She's short, but not that short. She's not skinny, but she's not fat either. She does have some meat on her bones, mostly thanks to her eating habits, which are for the most part unrestrained, as she doesn't feel like she has anyone to impress. Despite all of this, Cindy is quite attractive. She's not a ten, but she's definitely at least a seven, and she's not even my type.
This is all extremely relevant, as it would become an Achilles' heel that Cindy could exploit.
You see, I would take a lot of pictures of Cindy covertly. The way modern cell phones are set up, it's no problem. I would take plenty of them while Cindy was lounging about in something revealing and use them to masturbate later. I got a rush out of it.
I got away with this for months, so I started to get confident and decided to push my limits one night. When everyone was fast asleep and I had finally finished studying, I wanted to relieve myself. Cindy had been walking around in her underwear earlier as usual, so I had that image fresh on my mind. I had a lot of pictures like that at my disposal, but I'd been desensitized to them, and got it in my head to get a little something more.
Cindy is an extremely heavy sleeper. It's almost impossible to wake her up, which is one of the reasons why she needed to be home-schooled. She also sleeps naked, so this seemed like a huge opportunity to my perverted mind.
It would be no issue, I thought. I would go in, turn on the light, snap a quick photo and be out of there. Cindy wouldn't notice. I've made more of a fuss in there trying to get her up in the afternoon and even that proved to be futile, so I had almost no hesitations.
When I went in there, I switched the light on and saw her fast asleep in her birthday suit. The problem was, she was covered by a blanket. But as I've said, Cindy doesn't sleep, she hibernates, so this was hardly an obstacle. Without thinking, I went to move it, and it still didn't faze her. So I took out my cell phone, positioned my camera, and...
FLASH!
...I had forgotten to turn the flash off.
I felt a pit in my stomach as Cindy's eyelids twitched open and she saw me there, hovering over her with a phone in my hands, the bedroom light on, and her blanket completely set aside.
"What are you doing??" she said, completely fatigued.
"I'm sorry Cindy, go back to sleep," I said in a panic. "I-I heard you talking in your sleep and my phone went off, I wanted to see if you were okay, I'm sorry to wake you!"
"I'm trying to sleep!" she whined, completely ignoring my phony explanation. I might have been off the hook. She was probably too tired for it to occur to her.
"I'm sorry," I exclaimed again, grabbing her blanket to cover her. She tugged it from me and aggressively pulled it over her head, burrowing her face in a pillow.
"Turn off the light!!" she groaned.
