My First Valentine
by Lubrican
Chapters : 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Chapter One
You know how particular memories get kind of stuck in your brain, and they hang
around for your entire life? You don't think of them all the time, but
something happens and that memory pops into your mind?
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.
Of course the clothes didn't fit, but you could roll up the pants legs, and
pull up the sleeves and put rubber bands around the wrists. In her case, she
didn't care if the skirt was too long, because she loved walking around with
the dress dragging behind her like a train.
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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