I stumbled onto this site last month and thought the readers might enjoy a true story of incest that happened to me nearly thirty years ago. The names are changed and quotes are not quite word for word, but they are pretty close, as events such as these are not easily forgotten.
"Hi ya Squirt!" Those three words were the prelude to the most bizarre weekend in my life. The voice on my college dorm's hall phone was my first cousin Melissa. She was going to be in town the following weekend and wanted to take me out for dinner and maybe check out some schools in the area, she explained. I was shocked that she had apparently called my family to get the number. I hadn't seen her in a couple years and was puzzled as to why she would suddenly want to drive to Charlottesville from two hours away. I didn't believe her sudden interest in college; she wasn't the scholarly type. She must have been planning a road trip with a boyfriend-of-the-week, financed by daddy's gold credit card, I assumed. I resigned myself to playing the role of tour guide, not that I would mind free food, beer and maybe even some pot for the weekend. Hell, maybe she would bring an extra girl for me. I hoped that during her visit she would call me Johnny, my name, not 'Squirt'. In the back of my mind, I assured myself that she would tell her boyfriend that nickname was bestowed on me because I was short at one time, and not because of our little secret. It was hard to concentrate on classes for the next five days, as I had no idea what to expect. Finally it was Friday afternoon. As I sat in the lobby waiting for their arrival, I thought about that damn nickname, and how it came to be.
It all began on a cold winter weekend when I was in the eighth grade. My older brother Terry and I grew up on a small dairy farm in western Virginia. Now, as an adult, I can appreciate its rural tranquility, but as a teenager I felt it was a prison camp, with dim early mornings in the frigid air, trudging through the mud out to the barn. This frustration was compounded by my older brother's relatively charmed life, and worsened as I realized Melissa apparently had a schoolgirl crush on him.
Melissa's mother and mine are sisters. My mother married into a conservative farm family here in the valley. My aunt, however, met a plumbing contractor of Italian descent from Philadelphia while down at the beach. After a short 'courtship', and against the approval of her bigoted mother, they got married. They ended up living a few hours east of us in Richmond, where Melissa's dad made a fortune from the suburban housing boom.
'Princess' Melissa, as we called her behind her back, was an only child, and spoiled rotten. When we were in grade school, she was bratty and downright mean to both me and my brother. But by the time we were in our early teens, our hormones had kicked in to a degree and things changed. I found myself being nice to her. She responded for the most part with indifference, a contrast to the flirtatious way she acted around Terry. She had learned how to wrap her father 'around her little finger' as the expression goes, and she would work on my brother the same way, grabbing his arm and flashing her braces and green eyes at him when she wanted something. She looked kind of like a petite Jennifer Connelly by this time, except she had a fairly flat chest and wider hips.
To look at us, no one would know Terry and I were brothers. I was the short chubby kid with acne, bad teeth and freckles, while he looked like Dolph Lundgren, the blonde boxer from the Rocky movie. He lettered in two sports, was in student government, head of the youth group at church, and wanted to be a minister. He tolerated Melissa's flirtations, but since he was four years older, considered them amusing but harmless. At the beach, if no adults were around, she would do things like trying to snap the front waist band of his swim trunks, and he would grab her arm and they would wrestle around briefly as she giggled. She even managed to sneak up behind him and yank his trunks down a few inches once, exposing his crack. Terry countered by grabbing the back of her bikini top, but quickly let go and apologized before it unhooked and revealed anything, much to my disappointment. I came close to yanking on her bikini myself many times, but chickened out, fearing she would tell my parents.
Our families would usually meet once or twice at the beach during the summer and one or two times at our house in the winter, when everyone would go skiing. This one particular weekend, however, the adults went skiing and left the three of us alone at the house, with responsible Terry in charge. Melissa had sprained her ankle in gymnastics; Terry had to work at his part time job early each morning. I had to stay home to feed our livestock, as the man we usually hired to do it when we were out of town was sick.
It was pretty late Saturday night, and we had been in our basement family room playing Atari and watching TV since dinner. I was in a recliner and suddenly heard giggling behind me. Terry and Melissa, dressed in their pajamas and robes, were on the sofa wrestling for the TV remote. Terry wasn't holding back this time, maybe the lack of adults in the house had loosened his inhibitions. I watched them as their arms and legs flailed around. Terry was on top of her and Melissa had put the remote down the front of her green oversize Eagles football jersey, and her fuzzy white robe had opened and ridden up, revealing her bare thighs above her rainbow-colored knee socks. Terry was threatening to reach down her shirt to retrieve it. Her legs kicked and pushed against the sofa cushions. This went on for another minute or so, when Terry suddenly recoiled, started to stand, and lunged for a throw pillow. He turned bright red with embarrassment, holding the pillow against his pajama bottoms. Melissa's eyes widened and her braces flashed a huge smile.
I'm limited on how much more I can say in this forum. I'll just say my cousin possessed an especially inquisitive curiosity about a nocturnal habit attributed to teenage males.
Terry got pissed at her comments and turned away. He mumbled something about "sinful and immoral behavior" and decreed that is was time for everyone to go to sleep. It was midmorning the next day before I finished my chores and was having a bowl of cereal in the kitchen. My brother was at his big shot fast food job. Princess Melissa shuffled into the room, apparently fresh out of the bed, hair frizzy and in the same robe, green jersey and multicolored knee socks she had worn the last night. She started a mundane conversation as we ate, talking about how she disliked school and homework. She worked her way around to mentioning the personality differences between my brother and me. I was scared, but deep down I was hoping she would make the same warped request of me that she made of my brother the previous night. I guess it was a compliment being asked because it put me on the same level as Terry. This was the first time she ever flirted with me. I got so nervous as I answered her questions, that I spilled my cereal.
Whereas my brother refused her request, I didn't.
The occasional family visits continued. She loved to tease me. Sometimes I would be greeted by a cotton or spandex slap in the face as Melissa, giggling incessantly, had tossed a pair of panties or a bra at me. Once in a while I would get to enjoy a quick flash of her underwear as she lifted her shirt or dress, sometimes in dangerous proximity to our parents. After my brother went away to college, it was especially easy for Melissa and I to sneak away to the woods on ATVs, and we were often left alone in our rented beach house in Carolina when our parents went out drinking after dinner. My cousin made a habit of removing her bikini top from under her T-shirt in front of me, adding to my insanity. Our family never suspected what was really happening. They were glad to see us getting along, although we sometimes engaged in mock disagreements to keep up the façade. Unfortunately, Melissa eventually began dating and stopped going on family trips.
After that I would get an occasional phone call, usually with her crying about some guy or how she had to go to summer school because her grades were terrible. She got a used Thunderbird for her sixteenth birthday, and as 'punishment' for plowing it into a tree a few months later, Miss Princess was forced to drive a brand new Mustang. I felt bad for her overall, since she didn't seem to have that many close friends. My mother always spoke negatively of her as a party girl who was lazy and didn't 'apply herself' to her studies. It turned out she had to repeat her senior year, which may have led to her phone call to my dorm and this road trip, since most of her friends were away at college, or so I thought at the time.
As I stood outside my dorm waiting for Melissa and her date, I heard some jerk around the corner squealing their tires as they rounded a curve. A moment later I realized the 'jerk' was Melissa in yet another new Mustang. An '81 convertible, it was white with a black top; it still had the temporary license tags. I assumed it was a gift from her father for her eighteenth birthday, which had recently passed. She downshifted as she pulled into the parking lot, and she was alone. I didn't get my hopes up, because her date could have been back at the hotel. The Mustang came to a stop and Melissa took off her aviator sunglasses, waved, hopped out and dashed over to me.
"Hi sweetie!" she said before she gave me a big loud smack on the lips and long hug. She smelled great. Her gymnast's body looked great in a short denim skirt, red heels, red leather bomber jacket with a preppy white button down shirt beneath that. She wore several rings, bracelets, and long dangling earrings, and I could make out at least three gold necklaces beneath her open collar. She had a great tan, the result of a recent trip to Bermuda, I was told. Her long wavy brown hair was pulled into a pony tail through the back of her Phillies baseball hat. I watched her shapely behind as she walked back around the car. I halfheartedly tried to remind myself she was my cousin and we were both mature adults now, and our juvenile curiosity had long since passed.
"Where's your boyfriend?" I asked. "Thought you were on a road trip with one of your hunks."
"No stupid, I came to see you." She replied with a huge smile. Her braces were gone and her teeth were white and perfect. It looked as though this was going to be an unusual weekend, to say the least.
