I don't know why it is but if you're a person living alone all during the year, whatever family you have suddenly feels sorry for you at Thanksgiving and wants to invite you for dinner.
I had been living alone for many years. I had a very nice luxury apartment in New York City overlooking the lights of the West Side and had been able to earn my living comfortably as a freelance writer. Nevertheless, my bother Dan, who lived out at the end of Long Island with his family, felt sorry for me and invited me to join them for Thanksgiving dinner. Naturally I felt obligated to accept and told him I would bring the wine.
But also I was looking forward to seeing Andie again. Andie was their daughter, now 19 and enrolled as a drama major at New York University. I had invited Andie to visit me at my apartment when she first started school at the age of 18, and that encounter was described in an earlier story here, "Caught in the Rain." As a result of that encounter, Andie and I had become "special friends" during most of her first school year. Now, she was in her second year, but I had seen her only once since the semester started.
The usual greetings were exchanged when I arrived at their home. Handing Dan the wine, I looked around. "Where's my favorite niece?" I asked.
"Oh she's up in that stupid treehouse of hers in the back yard," Dan's wife Gloria replied. "I don't know what she sees in that place. It's just a shack in a tree, but she says she likes it because it's nice and quiet so she can read. She even ran an outdoor extension up to it so she could have a space heater there."
I laughed. Dan had built the 12-foot square treehouse for Andie when she had been only 13, and she certainly had gotten a lot of use out of it over the years. It was her favorite place to be, apparently because of the privacy and quiet, away from her three brothers.
"Can I go and see her?" I asked.
"Of course. Tell her dinner will be at six, but she ought to be down here by five," Gloria replied.
I walked out through the kitchen door to the backyard. The treehouse had been built about 15 feet up in a large old chestnut tree. You had to get to it by climbing a rope ladder, and when the ladder was up, that was supposed to be an indication that Andie did not want any visitors. But the ladder was down now, so I climbed it.
The treehouse had a three-foot deck around it, so I crawled along the deck to the one door, which was sort of shut but partially ajar. I wanted to surprise her, so I kept quiet as I gently pushed it open.
But the surprise was on me. Her father had furnished her treehouse comfortably with some old furniture they had in the garage, so it had a small table with four chairs around it and a bottle of wine, two glasses and a box of Kleenex on top, a settee, a lamp, a heater and a magazine rack. Andie was lying face up on the settee and propped up with some large soft pillows. Her eyes were closed and a book was open but face down on her stomach. She appeared to be wearing some kind of a little girl white-and-blue pinafore. Then I remembered that it was her "Alice in Wonderland" outfit that her father had purchased for her 16th birthday, since Alice in Wonderland had been her favorite book. And with her shoulder-length natural blonde hair and her blue eyes, she really did look like an Alice in Wonderland. It seemed strange that she would be wearing the dress now, at the age of 19.
But what was more unexpected was the unusual activity in which she was engaged. The skirt of her fluffy white dress had been pulled up to her waist, her white panties with the blue ribbon trim had been pulled down to her ankles, and her slender forefinger was slowly sliding in and out of the little blonde tuft between her thighs. She was masturbating.
She had once told me on a visit to my apartment in New York that when she was younger, she often used to masturbate thinking of me—which I found to be very erotic. I wondered if she was thinking of me now?
Obviously this was one of life's rare voyeur moments to be enjoyed, so I remained as quiet as I could until she finished. And that was easy to tell: her body started trembling, and she moaned softly until she apparently came. Finally, after a minute, she reached over, took a Kleenex from the box and wiped herself. But she made no move to pull her panties up, so I thought it was time I made my move.
"That must be some book," I said, getting up and walking in.
She quickly sat up and swung her legs around to the floor. "Don't you ever knock?!" she asked indignantly.
"I didn't think it was necessary, and as it turned out, it afforded me the opportunity of watching one of the prettiest sights I've ever seen: Alice in Wonderland masturbating."
"Well at least I'm glad it was you rather than some other member of my family. It's not like you haven't seen me masturbate before," she said with a smile.
"That's right I have. You should have locked your door."
"There's no lock on it. Plus no one but me ever comes up here."
I looked around. "It's very cozy."
She took my momentary distraction to quickly pull her panties up. "You won't tell daddy, will you?"
I smiled at her. "I think you can buy my silence with the proper tender. And you've got the tender to do it."
"In that case, would you like a glass of wine? We could call it my Mad Tea Party."
I sat at the table. "Who came to the Mad Tea Party?
She sat opposite me and poured two glasses of wine. "I think the Mad Hatter was there—among others."
"Then I'll be the Mad Hatter—as long as you can guarantee that I'll come again."
She smiled. "I think I can guarantee that you'll come." She raised her glass, and we clinked them together. "Cheers, I said "Who were you thinking of when you were doing it?"
"You only asked that because I once told you that I used to think of you when I did it."
"You're right."
"Well, I have a boyfriend now, so I was thinking of him. Sorry."
"That explains why you haven't visited me recently. You're getting your sex somewhere else."
