My First Valentine

by Lubrican

Chapters : 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Chapter One

Well, one of mine is of watching Valerie Carter running across the vacant lot toward our house. Part of that memory is the entirely silly aspect of it that I remember being amazed, and I always imagine that my eyes were bouncing up and down in their sockets as they watched her breasts bouncing up and down under the checkered shirt she was wearing.

As memories go, I know that's a stereotypical kind of guy thing, but I'm a guy. It's just the way I am and I don't feel at all guilty about loving the memory of her breasts wobbling around under that shirt.

I suppose I shouldn't have been amazed, seeing as how Valerie was within a few months of being seventeen, and was as grown up as I was. I was a week older than her, and I'd been feeling like I was a real man for some time.

But seeing Valerie as "grown up", back then, was something I still wasn't used to.

Valerie and I were best friends. It wasn't by choice, exactly. We lived next door to each other, if you didn't count the vacant lot between her house and mine. And we'd lived next door to each other since we were babies. Our parents played cards every Saturday night, which meant that Valerie and I were thrown together each week for a couple of hours to entertain each other while our parents entertained themselves.

Plus my mom and Valerie's mom spent a lot of time together during the week. While the husbands were off finding bacon to bring home, the moms got together and shared recipes, and watched soap operas, and who knows what else. Valerie and I didn't know, because we were always put together in the play pen, when we were young. When we graduated from the play pen, we were together in either her bedroom or mine, depending on which mother was hosting the other at a given time. As toddlers we had great fun chasing each other. I don't remember that, but there are home movies to prove it, and the moms thought it was cute, and told our fathers all about it when they got home.

Because our moms were both stay at home types, and because the school we were supposed to go to was twenty-five miles away, it was decided that we would be home schooled. I think it had more to do with them being unable to take the idea of watching their tender young five-year-olds get on a big yellow bus and disappear all day, than the quality of the school. But, of course, they taught us together, so we might as well have lived together for the first decade of our lives. We had two sets of parents, instead of only one each, and we didn't sleep in the same house, except for sleepovers.

Speaking of sleepovers, those started when a card party went late into the night, and they put us to bed in either her bed or mine. When the party broke up, if it was cold, or the father who lived next door had imbibed enough to be a little tipsy, they just left us where we were. The next morning we'd get up, wherever we were, have breakfast, and then go home. We even had clothes at each other's houses.

Later (or maybe earlier, for all I know) the excuse to leave us cuddled in the same bed was that whoever got to go home without their child had the house to themselves and could get frisky. Of course we kids had no idea about that kind of thing back then.

I suppose you could say we were raised almost like brother and sister, though we knew that wasn't the relationship. We also went to the same church, so we knew lots of other kids, and knew what real brothers and sisters were like. We even asked about that one day when we were six. Our moms were making cookies, which demanded that we stay near, because if you begged just right you got one that was still hot and bendy and the chocolate chips were still a little liquid. Those were the best.

We'd been playing dress up, using a bunch of old clothes that my mom had in a trunk. She said they were my grandparents', who didn't need them anymore because they were angels in heaven and wore pure white robes now. Valerie liked to play dress up more than I did, but we had long ago gotten used to trading off what we were going to do. She picked, and then I picked. And on this day she had picked dress up.

What that entailed was us stripping down to our underwear, which was underpants in both our cases, and then finding something in the trunk to put on so we could play imaginary scenarios. Like Beauty and the Beast, or The Little Mermaid, or one of the other stories like that. We were both rich in imagination.

On that particular day, we were pretending I was Kermit and she was Miss Piggy. I had on a green vest and nothing else, because that was the only thing in the chest that was green. She had on a blue dress that had a lace collar on it. She was lamenting the fact that we had no little sister or brother to be Gonzo. So she pulled me into the kitchen, where the cookies were still only a bowl of dough at that point, and marched up to her mother.

"Mommy? Where do babies come from?"

"Oh, good grief," said her mother. "I didn't expect this. Not this early."

My mother was laughing, which made me mad, because they weren't taking us seriously.

"We need a baby," I said, sternly.

My mother stopped laughing. That was a good sign.

"Well, we brought you home from the hospital when you were a baby," said Mrs. Carter, who looked at my mother and shrugged for some reason.

"Why haven't you gone to the hospital to get any more?" asked Valerie.

"Well, your father and I decided you were so perfect, we didn't need any more babies," said her mother.

I looked at my mother, who was looking at Valerie.

"Am I perfect too?" I asked.

She started laughing again, and it was Valerie's mother who answered my question.

"Yes, Bobby, you are just as perfect as Valerie. We're very thankful that we have two such perfect children."

"But we need a baby to be Gonzo," complained Valerie.

"Gonzo?"

"Yes, Bobby is Kermit, and I'm Miss Piggy and we need a little brother or sister to be Gonzo," Valerie explained, patiently.

"I wondered why Bobby wasn't wearing anything except that vest," said my mother in that voice that was almost a laugh. "Why doesn't he have on any underwear?"

"Because Kermit doesn't wear underpants," said Valerie, still patient.

"I see," said my mom. She looked at Valerie's mom. "I'm going to have to get Tim to play Muppets with me tonight."

That started both moms laughing. Valerie and I were both grumpy. There were no cookies yet, and it sounded like there might never be any little brothers or sisters. I thought about misbehaving, so I wouldn't be so perfect, but didn't want to have to go to time out just so my parents might go get another baby to be better than I was.

Anyway, that all blew over and the years went by. Valerie and I became pretty much inseparable, even when we weren't in "class" with one of the moms. We didn't think anything about it, back then. Like kids everywhere, once class was over, we tried to escape to go outside, or play video games or whatever. We just did all that stuff together. It was just the way things were.

Of course we didn't agree on everything, but when that happened we allowed each other (were taught to allow each other) some intellectual space to believe whatever, and there were no hard feelings. As a result, we could talk about anything, and that became important as we crashed into puberty.

She got there first, and it changed our whole world, if incrementally at first.

It started when we were playing slip and slide one day. Our mothers were watching. In the summer we played on the slip and slide and her bikini top always fell off. She didn't care, and tossed it on a chair. The moms tried to make her put it on a few times, and then gave up. Both our back yards were fenced in and nobody could see in there, so maybe that's why they didn't really care that much.

Of course that was back when we were eight or nine, or something like that, and our chests looked identical. I'd seen her topless hundreds of times. She'd seen me that way too. It was no big deal to us.

Anyway, on this day, Valerie's top had gotten loose, as usual, so she took it off, as usual. We had gone down the slide together, laughing and holding on to each other, and came back to the start, when I heard my mother say, "She's getting boobies, Judy." Valerie's mother said, "Do you think so?" And, of course, I looked at Valerie's bare chest. I knew what boobies were. I was all of ten years old and had found out just recently that babies weren't manufactured at the hospital, where parents could go to pick one out, to take home. I'd learned that from another boy, at church. He said babies grew inside of the mommy and they went to the hospital for the doctor to get them out. If the hospital wasn't involved, that meant the mother had to puke up the baby, and even at ten we both knew that puking up a baby would be a traumatic experience for a woman. He was also the one who told me that babies drink milk from the mother's boobs. So of course when the concept of Valerie getting boobs came up, I was interested in that.

Of course our moms had no idea what I was thinking, but I stared at her chest, and I think that fact started the end of our life as little kids, though I can't prove it. All I know is that, after that day, she wasn't allowed to go topless any more, and we weren't allowed to sleep in the same bed during sleepovers. We could still have sleepovers, but we had to sleep in separate rooms.

Naturally, we didn't understand it then. Well, we got it about her wearing tops. We had a long discussion about whether my mother was right or not. We had it in the woods, where she could take her top off and we could poke and prod her chest. We had already talked about what Randy Simms had told me about at church, but this brought new meaning to things. We had both looked at our mom's breasts, but they'd always had them and that seemed normal. The idea that those things might grown on Valerie's chest, however, seemed foreign ... impossible ... weird!

We compared nipples and then I put my chest right up next to hers as we stared down, trying to decide if the very slight swells on her chest were, in fact, boobs starting to grow.

In a while, a matter of just a few months, it became obvious. Those little starting boobies grew fast, and when her breasts undeniably started to swell out away from her chest, she was horrified. To her, they were alien bumps that hurt sometimes and which she couldn't get rid of. Her mother kept telling her to be proud that she was growing up and becoming a woman, but she was in no hurry to grow up. It took most of a year before they didn't intrude on her consciousness all the time.

She kept showing them to me, of course, even though we both knew, vaguely, that was probably against the rules. Together, we gauged their growth and examined the alien affliction. She'd find some private place and bare them and ask if I thought they'd grown since the last time I saw them. There was nothing sexual about it, either in her mind or mine. There also wasn't anything sexual about the wisps of hair that started growing between her legs. I didn't get to see those, but she told me about it.

So she got used to her boobs and the hair, only to have her world turned upside down by her mom bringing home a bra. She hated it (as well as all the others her mother kept getting for her), and when we could manage to get away from the house on some exploration of the woods behind our houses, the first thing she did was take her shirt off so she could take her bra off. She stuffed it in her back pack and didn't pay any attention to it until we were close to getting back home. Then she took her shirt off and put her bra back on, because if she didn't - and there were a couple of times she forgot to - her mother yelled at her.

Then one day she was sitting on the pot, and when she got up, the water was all red. She'd had the talk about how periods would show up pretty soon, but it still scared her. It scared my mom too, because it happened at our house. Maybe "scared" isn't the right word, but that's how it looked to my young eyes back then.

I didn't get it. She looked fine, but all of a sudden there was this emergency, and this flurry of activity as my mother called her mother, who was off somewhere doing something and couldn't get to our house for almost an hour. Valerie was upset, and I could tell my mother was concerned. But when I looked through the open doorway of my parents' bedroom, where Valerie was sitting on the bed with her bottom half wrapped in a towel, she looked fine. She and my mom were deep in conversation, but it didn't look like she was sick or anything.

Then they saw me looking through the doorway, and you'd have thought the world was coming to an end. Valerie yelled at me, and then my mom yelled at me and got up and slammed the door.

I went to use the bathroom, and saw the water in the stool, which nobody had flushed. I knew Valerie had been in there, and I suddenly realized all that red was blood. That was when I got scared.

Well, I wasn't having any of that closed door crap. My best friend was dying, and I had to say goodbye before she croaked. I'd seen that in a movie my parents were watching one night, where the woman was dying and the man held her and they said their goodbyes. My mother was crying her eyes out, and even Dad looked like he was trying to keep a cry in.

So I pounded on the door and got yelled at some more. Then Valerie's mom arrived and bundled her out, which left me even more frantic until my mother finally sat me down and explained what was going on. She said it had happened to her lots of times, and that Valerie was fine.

But Valerie wasn't fine. She didn't call me or come over for days. And when I finally did see her, she wouldn't look at me, and she acted like she was mad, except she didn't yell at me or anything like that.

If her boobs started our mothers to begin building a wall between us, her first period added to it. Neither of us understood it then. She was embarrassed, and couldn't explain that to me. I acted like nothing had happened, because my mother had convinced me that having periods was no big deal. And because I acted like I didn't care (which, in one sense, was true), her feelings were hurt. In the past, when I hurt her feelings, she yelled at me or threw something at me or whatever. But not this time. This time she sulked. And, because I didn't understand that, to a girl, her first period is a really big deal, the lack of communication between us caused that wall to grow higher.

Oh, we got over it in a couple of weeks. When her period passed and she felt normal again, she began to act normal again. She did, in fact, throw something at me. I only remember because she wouldn't explain why she threw it. The object she launched was an underinflated basketball and it hit me right on my left ear. Almost knocked me down.

"What was that for?" I complained.

"Because you're so stupid!" she yelled.

But then it was over and things were normal again.

Two weeks later she had her second period. She disappeared for five days, and when I went over to find out if she was sick or something, her mother told me she was "busy" with a project and couldn't come out to play.

When she finally did emerge from her house I asked her if she wanted to go into the woods.

"I don't know," she said, listlessly.

"Come on," I said. "It will be fun. I haven't seen your boobs in a long time. Maybe they've grown."

She got red in the face and, all of a sudden, she was yelling at me like I'd broken something and her parents were going to kill her because of it.

And more of the wall got built.

I didn't get to see her boobs any more.

She didn't stay mad, but she said we were getting too old to be doing that. I argued with her, of course. What did age have to do with anything? But she was firm about it, and put it in terms I couldn't argue with.

"You're my best friend, Bobby, but that doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want to. If we're going to stay best friends, then we have to respect each other's privacy sometimes."

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"I have private parts on my body, just like you do. We don't look at each other's private parts, Bobby."

Long story short, I didn't get to examine her growing breasts any more, and she didn't watch me pee in the forest as I tried to see how far I could make the stream go.

It was sad. I should say I was sad. I knew I'd lost something, but I couldn't have explained it to you back then.

Something else happened then, though, that was big enough that it consumed all my brain power for the next six months.

We finally got sent to public school.

We were twelve, and both the math and science were beginning to be more than our moms could handle. Or maybe cared to handle. And we weren't poor, helpless babies any more. Somehow, being swallowed into the maw of the school bus doors wasn't so scary for them any longer, and us being gone all day gave them a lot more time to do other things.

But when we got tested, they put us a grade lower than everybody else our age. I don't think it was fair, because when we finally got into classes, both of us already knew most of what they were trying to teach us, but that was the way it was. And, now that I look back on it, I think being a year older than everybody else gave us a mystique or something. The other kids looked up to us. At least a little bit.

That first year caused Valerie and me to drift apart a little. We were no longer in each other's company twelve hours a day. Everything around us seemed new and, for the most part, interesting. We had new adults to talk to and the school itself was a treasure trove of interesting places. Band, the gym, the library, even the lunch room were all places of wonder.

And then there were all those other girls.

Two years later I was thoroughly interested in them. I probably spent half my day staring at one or another and dreaming about this or that. A lot of that involved wondering what their breasts looked like. Like I said, I'm a guy. I couldn't do much about it, because, of course, I wasn't allowed to go on dates. I'd have been terrified to go on one anyway, to be honest. But I did surf the web and my parents, completely clueless, didn't think I'd actually seek out porn on their computer, so they hadn't turned on any parental controls. Come to think of it, if they had wanted to turn on parental controls, they'd have had to come to me to learn how. All they knew about a computer was how to spell it.

It was while I was staring at a picture of a naked woman when I remembered all those times I'd felt Valerie's budding breasts, and touched her nipples. Those breasts had grown a lot since then. I hadn't been able to keep up with all that growth, of course, because of the ban on seeing each other's private parts. I'd gotten used to it, but now I frequently wondered what Valerie's breasts might look like, up close and personal.

The libido of a fourteen-year-old boy is strong. His level of common sense is relatively low. Valerie was still my best friend, and we still hung out together almost all the time.

So one night, after homework was done and we were playing Call of Duty in my family room, I looked over at her. All her concentration was on the screen. I dropped my eyes to her chest, where her breasts were pressing the cotton of her T shirt out. I judged the distance to be six inches, and tried, in my mind, to translate that into a bra size. Guys at school were always talking about bra size. I didn't know squat about bras or sizes, but you never admit that when you're in the middle of a pack of your peers.

"What are you looking at?" she suddenly asked, about the same time I realized my character had died while I was paying attention to something other than his welfare.

I raised my eyes and realized she'd caught me staring at her boobs.

"Your boobs," I said, automatically. I winced immediately. I expected her to yell at me.

"Pervert," she said.

That was it. No screaming. She kept looking at me. I heard her character die, but she didn't look at the screen. It was like she was waiting for something.

"I'm not a pervert," I suggested.

"Yes you are."

"Why?"

"Guys who stare at girls' boobs are perverts," she said, calmly.

"Guys who stare at girls' boobs are normal," I corrected.

It was strange, because this was the first time we'd talked about her boobs, or any boobs, in years. But it felt like one of our normal conversations.

"Okay, best friends who stare at their best friend's boobs are perverts," she said.

"Why do I have to be a pervert just because I'm a little interested in your boobs?" I asked.

"Why are you interested in my boobs?" she asked. The game was forgotten.

"I don't know. Because I don't have any, maybe?" I suggested.

"You've never had any," she said.

"That's the whole point," I said. "Remember when you first got yours, and we used to look at them and touch them all the time? It was interesting. But then you made me stop doing that. I can't help but be interested in what they're like now."

"Nice try, pervert," she said. "You are so full of it. You know my boobs are private. All girls' boobs are private."

"Now who's full of it," I scoffed. "There are thousands of women who show their boobs online and in magazines. There's nothing even remotely private about their boobs."

"You look at porn?"

There was disapproval in my best friend's voice. I suddenly felt guilty. Even more, I was surprised. I was surprised she didn't know I did that. We knew everything about each other ... didn't we?

"All boys look at porn," I said.

"All perverts look at porn," she replied. "How long have you been doing that?"

"I don't know."

"When was the first time you did it?" she asked. I could hear both censure and curiosity in her voice.

"I don't know. A year ago, maybe?" I thought that sounded better than the truth, which was more like two years.

I was proven right when she said, "You've been looking at porn for a whole year?" She sounded like she expected me to keel over from some dread disease, all of a sudden.

"So what if I have?" Suddenly I was worried.

'"What if you go crazy?" she asked, sounding tragic.

"Oh, give me a break," I laughed. "Porn doesn't make you go crazy."

"It made you stare at my boobs," she countered.

"I'm not crazy for staring at your boobs," I said. "You just have a good pair, that's all."

I had no idea where that came from. I think I just tried to pay her a compliment to change her behavior or something.

"Really?" There was stark interest in her voice now.

"Sure," I said.

"How can you tell?" she asked.

So I stared at her boobs again.

"Um ... they're nice and round ... and they stick out pretty much ..." That was it. That was all I had.

She remained silent. I lifted my eyes to hers. She just stared at me. I tried to do better.

"They're better than Cindy Nelson's," I suggested.

"And you want to see them again," she said, her voice a little too smooth somehow. "Without my top on," she added.

For some reason my heart started thumping in my chest.

"That would be interesting," I admitted, hopefully.

It was very quiet, and I realized I was staring at her boobs again. I looked up. This time it was easy to see how she felt.

She looked mad.

"Well you can forget it, pervert!" she said, heatedly. "Go ask Cindy Nelson if you can see hers! Maybe she'll show them to you."

"Don't get all bent out of shape about it," I complained. "I was just curious, that's all. I don't want to see Cindy Nelson's."

"Then why did you mention her?"

"Because all the guys say she has the best boobs, that's all. Why are we arguing? All I'm saying is that you have interesting boobs. That's all. If you don't want to show them to me, I get it. They're private. Forget I said anything!"

She stood up.

"I'm going home now."

"Come on," I moaned. "Don't be all pissed off just because I'm normal."

She leaned over.

"I wouldn't be pissed off if you were normal ... but you're not normal. You're a pervert."

Then she turned and went up the stairs. What was weird was that I heard her yell goodbye to my mother before she closed the front door, and she sounded perfectly normal. Maybe even cheerful.

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