When you're young, everything matters. Everything leaves an impression. You may not realize it at the time, but each new experience leaves its mark on you, and those marks can last into adulthood, even your whole life.
Say you're playing in the yard with a neighbor kid, and she steps on a bumblebee in the grass. You've never been stung before, but she screams and cries and carries on so much, you figure getting stung must be the worst agony a person can experience. And so you're secretly terrified of bees, always alert when you're outside, on the lookout for nests, going tense and pale at the sensation of anything landing on your skin. Until you finally put your hand where you shouldn't one day when you're sixteen and doing yardwork for your elderly neighbor, and ZAP! It's not so bad after all. You feel silly.
Or maybe, one day in school, you have to write a story. Afterward, nobody volunteers to read their assignment aloud for the class, and the teacher picks you, a normally shy kid, at random. You get up and read your story, and have them rolling in the aisles, the teacher frowning because you didn't follow the directions. And you realize you have this ability, this talent, for entertaining people. You learn how to use that talent, maybe to draw people to you, or maybe to keep them away, to wriggle out of uncomfortable situations. And all of it because one day you wrote a story from the perspective of a booger.
And then there's sex.
When you're young, sex is shrouded and mysterious. You hear people talking, just not talking to you. Sex. Having sex. That's sexy. Sexual healing. Sexual abuse. What does it mean? What is sex, how do you have it? Even when you learn the Facts Of Life, it only deepens the mystery. The man inserts his penis into the woman's vagina and releases sperm, which swim into the uterus in search of the egg to fertilize. Well, yeah, but what else? But you know not to ask.
And so, because of this not knowing, but wanting to know, when you do stumble onto something that quickens your pulse and makes your eyes pop, you remember. Maybe you don't realize it, but your subconscious does.
It is said that our sexual identity is formed in the earliest stages of puberty. Whether we become tit-men or ass-men. Whether we like skinny girls, tall girls, short girls, Italians, Asians. That first stack of dirty magazines we come across. The first porn video we "accidentally" access online. If it's something hardcore, fisting or watersports or a gang-bang, our wiring may be fried for life. The time we walk into the master bedroom on a Sunday morning because we need a fresh tube of toothpaste, and find Mom straddling Dad's hips, bouncing up and down, and they both try not to act mad but tell you firmly to leave. We're just wrestling, go on now.
It all adds up.
Summertime, sunshine and swimming pools have always been my triggers. I've made love on a bearskin rug next to a roaring fire, had sex in the parking lot outside a rock concert, gotten a blowjob in an airplane lavatory, gotten laid during violent thunderstorms, blizzards, and once in an unused conference room at work. All great experiences. But get me around a swimming pool, and my motor gets running without fail.
And it all has to do with my Aunt Rhonda.
Rhonda was fourteen years older than me. She married my mom's older brother Jim, when she was barely twenty, and he was already in his mid-thirties. Right away, she was my favorite aunt. She was the fun aunt, who took you places your parents didn't want to go: to the state fair to ride the rides, out for ice cream just because, out of school early to do some secret Christmas shopping. She was young, cool, less of an authority figure.
And Rhonda was good-looking, in a strawberry-blonde country-girl kind of way. She was short, about five-foot-two, and a little on the plump side, so when you got a hug, it felt like a real hug. Her breasts squished against you, and there was that awkward phase when I was just the right height to bury my face between them when we hugged. Which I thought nothing of at the time, of course.
Uncle Jim and Aunt Rhonda had a pool in their backyard. Not a big one, but big enough. Summer days, Mom off work from the high school where she taught math, we would often find ourselves over at Jim and Rhonda's, in the pool. Mom had helped Rhonda get a job in the school system too, so it would usually be just the three of us, while Jim was at work, or off on one of his many fishing or hunting trips. He and Rhonda never had children.
Mom would float around on a raft with her eyes closed. Rhonda would splash around with me, race me to the other side and back, knock a beach ball around. But eventually, she'd get up on a raft too, and she and Mom would float and talk about stuff I didn't understand or care about.
You probably did it too, when you were young. There'd be grown-ups in the pool, drifting along on their inflatable rafts, while you swam around them. And the devil would get hold of you eventually, you couldn't stand it anymore, and so you would creep up on them and flip the raft over, dumping the unsuspecting adult into the water. Women worked best. They weighed less, so it was easier for a kid to flip them. Uncle Jim was a big bear of a guy; you had to work to capsize his raft, and it was at your own risk too, because he played rough right back at you. A woman would shriek and flail and scold you, "You've messed my hair up!"
Then one lazy summer afternoon, I discovered the added benefit of choosing female victims for my swashbuckling antics.
Mom had just told me that if I dumped her one more time, she'd make me get out of the pool for ten minutes. Fuck that! So that left Aunt Rhonda as the only available target. I bided my time, practiced crawling along the bottom of the pool. I'd come up for air catch bits of their conversation while reconnoitering her position.
"I told her one of these days, she's gonna need him ..."
"Mmm-hmmm ..."
After what seemed like half an hour, I decided the time was right, and headed for the bottom again. This time, when I sensed the shadow of Rhonda's raft above me, I sprang up, my hands under her, using my momentum to flip the raft and send her splashing and squealing into the drink in one smooth movement.
Only this time, she lost her bathing-suit top. She stood up out of the water, not realizing it, and there they were, two big, round, snow-white breasts, streaming water and capped with erect, pink nipples.
I realized it first, and turned away instinctively. Aquatic shenanigans aside, I was a polite kid, and it was polite to look away from someone without all their clothes. But my mind was reeling, the image etched on my brain, the startling white of her breasts next to her summer tan.
Mom saw it a split second later, and let out a guffaw. "You lost your top!"
Finally, Rhonda looked down at herself. "Oh, shit!" she yelled, but she was laughing in spite of her irritation and embarrassment. Her top was already several feet away.
I was doing my best to pretend I hadn't noticed anything and was engrossed in watching a grasshopper moving along the edge of the concrete. But I was dying for another look. The curtain had been yanked aside on The Mystery just a little bit.
"Whoooo," Mom hooted, "you've got the goods, girl!"
"Thirty-four D's," Rhonda called back, "all natural."
I turned part of the way around, just in time to see Rhonda, standing in the shallow end of the pool, putting her hands behind her neck and shaking those amazing, pale breasts from side to side. She and my mother both laughed again, then Rhonda put her top back on. Passing by on her way to reclaim her raft, she slapped a handful of water at me. "You're rotten!" she said, and gave me a shove. I laughed, and she laughed with me.
Life went on, and that day was buried under the weight of all the ones that followed. I kept on tormenting her in the pool, not so much because I wanted to see her tits again (I knew there was something shadowy and taboo about that), but because it was fun, and also it was expected of me. But even as the larger events of the day faded into obscurity, I never quite forgot the sight of her wet, wobbling boobs in the summer sun. And when I got older, without realizing why, my sweet, fun-loving Aunt Ronnie became an occasional star in my sexual fantasies.
I was smart enough to know that sometimes having sexual thoughts about family members was normal. Even so, after I'd masturbated, I would still feel a little creepy and wrong about it. I would rationalize. It's okay, it's not like she's my mother or something. She's not even a blood relative. And I wasn't the kind of guy who turns to his female relatives because all other women are unattainable, due to some fatal flaw in his game. I had a handful of girlfriends through high school, did my share of fooling around, and lost my virginity at a perfectly respectable seventeen. I didn't even fantasize about older women more than the average guy. I mean, like most guys, I fantasized about pretty much everybody, but I wasn't a milf-lover by any means.
Still, it made me wonder about Rhonda. Uncle Jim was a nice man, but gruff, and much older than her. He made a decent living as a mechanic, but wasn't rich. I couldn't figure how a girl so young and open-hearted would wind up marrying somebody like him. It was hard to imagine the two of them having sex.
All these seeds, planted long ago and germinating for years, finally bloomed one day when I was nineteen. And when they bloomed, the flower was sweet-smelling and beautiful, but poisonous, and surrounded by thorns. And once again, it involved the pool at Jim and Rhonda's house.
I was working part-time at a warehouse that summer, home from my first year of college. On one of my days off, I found myself hanging out at the pool with Rhonda, who had the summer off. Mom was teaching summer school, so it was just the two of us. We had fun, talking and kidding around, listening to music, which always sounds good blaring from a cheap boom-box on a hot, yellow summer day next to a cool blue pool. I felt like it was a last little bit of my childhood that I could still hang onto and enjoy.
It was late July, and the entire region was sweating through another heat wave. It was ninety-four degrees, but Jim had added climate controls to the pool, so you could keep the water at a comfortable eighty-five. He bitched about how much it cost to run the thing, of course, but it was definitely worth it, the way I saw it. In the old days, after about a week of ninety-plus days, that pool was hardly refreshing.
Rhonda was thirty-three that year, still looking pretty good, her reddish-blonde hair short and curly, her skin clear. Her figure was maybe a little more rounded than it had been, but not in a bad way. She was wearing a two-piece swimsuit, white and lime-green polka-dot. "Want to get my belly baked," she said, patting it. She didn't have the typical body for it, but somehow, she made the suit work for her, and I had to admit, those big boobs didn't hurt.
Even then, there was that faint buzzing in my mind.
After we'd been in the pool for a couple hours, Rhonda got out and fetched us Popsicles from Jim's garage refrigerator. "For old times," she said. We ate them in the pool, the juice running down our wrists into the water. I watched her licking away at her purple Popsicle, and the voice whispered a little louder in my ear, words of lust and lechery.
We finished our Popsicles, and Rhonda got up on an orange inflatable raft, to resume baking, only this time, she was on her stomach, her top unfastened to get her back tanned evenly. "I'm watchin' you," she warned playfully, and then rested her chin on her folded arms, obviously not watching me.
I swam around aimlessly for a while, dusted off all my old favorites. Belly-crawling, handstands, backflips. I swam laps. I floated on my back. The butterfly, the African crawl, the freestyle, all the different strokes Jim had taught me when I was young.
Once, I swam over to where Rhonda was floating near the deep-end ladder, and splashed cool water over her back and legs. "Mmmmm, feels good," she murmured.
And through it all, there was that voice becoming louder in my head.
Dump her. What? Flip her off that raft. Nah. Come on, for old times. That's kid's stuff. She wants you to. I better not. Her top's untied, you might get a good look. I don't want to look. Yes you do.
And so, I slipped quietly through the water, in stealth mode. Watched her there on her raft, her straps untied and trailing in the water, just a hint of pale flesh visible at the sides of her breasts. Saw her generous butt, looking soft and squeezable in the tight, polka-dot fabric of her suit.
Like a shark, I glided through the water toward her. Swerved off, made a wide loop around her. Did a couple more smooth, quiet laps, then swung in for another approach. Stopped using my arms, and coasted up next to the raft.
Held my breath underwater.
It's just kid's stuff. I'm just playing.
Using the trusty old maneuver, I popped up out of the water, my hands reaching, grasping the edge of the raft, lifting and turning at the same motion, Rhonda starting from her semi-doze, "HEY!" rolling her into the water. Her top came loose, a flash of lime-green on the surface in the corner of my eye, and without thinking, I grabbed it and flung it to the other end of the pool.
"You little shit!" Rhonda wailed, but she was laughing. She was hunkered down in the shallow end, the water up to her neck, her hands covering her boobs.
Okay, so no peep show today maybe. I grinned. "It never gets old," I said.
"You little shit," she said again, still smiling. "I bet you thought you were gonna see my tits, didn'tcha?"
I felt my heart begin to beat faster. "Who, me?" I said.
"You know you did," she said. She pointed a finger at me, still holding her hands over her breasts.
I took a deep breath. "As a matter of fact," I began.
"Uh-huh," she said.
