My uncle and I have a very interesting relationship. When I was a teenager we drew very close. He lived across the country, but would call me at home in southern California at least twice a week. He was a night owl. He would sneak out of his house in upstate New York and take a path out through his wooded neighborhood, to a high point in the road where he could get a decent signal on his cell phone, and call me. I had my own private line, and would wait for him, lying in bed with a book, phone muffled under a pillow, until it rang.
We weren’t exactly related. His wife was my father’s sister, so there was no shared blood between us. They’d always lived on the east coast, and my father and I had always lived on the west. We saw each other at family reunions once a year, and the few times when my uncle would get sent out to LA for business meetings.
I’m not entirely sure when our relationship took its turn from innocent and detached uncle and niece to flirty, bawdy, unbridled desire. I do know that he was the first to notice this attraction between us, and definitely the first to mention it out loud. I was about eighteen when our nightly meetings began. Each secret phone conversation made us both more brave. We talked about a lot of things we’d never told anyone else. I spoke to him frankly about being a virgin with a body full of lust, and he told me intimate things about his wife and their sex life. Soon enough, he began complimenting me, making little comments about how he thought I was sexy. Finding the perfect word to describe me, ‘yummy’.
I have to admit, I was not the most beautiful teenager. Tall and skinny, I had olive skin and green eyes. My hair changed color constantly, usually just different shades of red, and I never wore makeup. I had a fondness for tight baby tees and big baggy jeans. My skirts were always too short, and my nose a bit too big for my face. My breasts were barely a B cup, and although I thought of myself as somewhat pretty, the boys at my school never seemed interested in me. My uncle’s confessions of lust gave me delightful boosts of self esteem. My heart would race when the phone would ring, and I’d giggle for no reason.
Yes, he had a wife. And he was my uncle. I understand that some people would frown on our relationship, but it began so innocently, and brought us so close together, that I cannot think of it as bad. I do not think my uncle was a pervert of any kind. He fell in love with me when I was just eighteen, with my body, my youth, and my spunky personality. In some ways I was in love with him too, in the romantic, forbidden feel of it, the secrecy, the confessional nature of it all. I spoke to him like I was writing in my diary. I told him of my fledgling attempts at masturbation, tried to convince him that marijuana was fun. When he visited on his business trips, a country-wide away from his wife, he would lavish attention on me. He’d take me on road trips, staying in beautiful hotel rooms (with two beds, of course), and spending as much money on me as possible. Never once did he touch me. Our conversations and manner around each other in person, even when we were alone together, was always friendly, but never more. Our attraction for each other and our honesty were left to our phone conversations.
I was young, shy and afraid of my feelings. I felt like I should be disgusted with him, but I wasn’t. I was egging him on.
When I finally lost my virginity, I couldn’t wait to tell him. Afterwards, he got quiet, and murmured, almost sheepishly, something about his fantasy ruined. I brushed the comment off with a light laugh. He’d never outright made a comment about us having sex, and it surprised me. It made me wonder how often he thought about me, what he thought about me. He had confessed once to having a fantasy where we both masturbated in front of each other, and I had brushed that one off too. I was too scared of where the conversation would lead.
Years went by and eventually our conversations tapered out. When they finally had stopped, I hadn’t really noticed. Other events in my life begged my attention. Almost ten years after our first talk, it struck me that my uncle was acting weird. He never called anymore. The few times I caught him on the phone, when he called to speak to my father about something or other, he was polite but not overly friendly. I spoke to him like I always had, cussing and telling dirty jokes to try to break the ice, but he was determined. He completely closed himself off to me. When he came out on business, he didn’t spend much time visiting with me. He never took me out anymore. His conversations were dry and boring. Strictly, ’How’s the family,’ type of talk.
This dramatic change really dawned on me at our family reunion. For some reason, this year I was particularly nervous around him. I couldn’t stop staring at him when I was sure no one was looking. I’d give him coy smiles when I walked past him, alone, on the lawn outside where everyone was staying. He smiled back, and I think I caught him looking at me a few times, but that was it. Whenever I showed up within three feet of him, he’d immediately leave, saying he needed to find his wife. We had a few starchy conversations, where he was polite as all hell, but for the most part he avoided me. For some reason, this was particularly maddening to me. I finally felt like I was brave enough to really take this bull of a relationship by the horns. I was a good match for him now, not shy and scared, but open and feeling some lust for him too, not just for his words. My stomach was in a queasy state all week, keeping me awake at night, lurching around during the day. Whenever he was near I could feel him, imagining his eyes on me, trying to make my every move cute and sexy. I was never obvious about it, but I imagined he knew it, that our bond was not completely severed.
When I arrived home from the reunion, I sunk into a deep pit of despair. It all hit me at once -- He didn’t love me anymore. Or maybe he did, but couldn’t show it for some reason. His wife? Did she find out about our conversations somehow? Did she have her suspicions, and force him to tell her everything we talked about? I felt a horrible wave of embarrassment, which quickly turned to anger. If he told her all the private things I told him, I swore I’d make him regret it. But maybe he was feeling guilty. Maybe he feels like our attraction for each other is wrong. I found a song that best described my feelings and listened to it incessantly. In it, the man is in love with a girl he knows can never truly love him back, that although he could make her miserable, he could never make her love him and stay with him, not for all the world. This was how I felt. I curled up inside my romantic anguish for about a week, then woke myself up and resolved myself to the situation. He didn’t care for me. He wasn’t even attracted to me anymore. He’d become his wife’s puppet, hiding his feelings inside himself. If this was the way he wanted it to be, so be it.
I tried to ignore my hurt for awhile. Eventually I began fantasizing about ways to trap him, to force him to feel that lust for me again, to make him act it out. When I learned that he would be coming to visit on business for a week, and staying at our house, I made my move.
First I assessed myself in the mirror. I was now twenty three. I was still tall and thin, but my bony body had filled out in the hips and thighs, giving me the most gorgeous pert ass. Besides my long legs, it was my most sexy feature. No one’s ass looked better in tight blue jeans. My breasts were still small, but there was nothing I could do about that. My skin was tan and smooth, my hair longer than it had ever been, shiny, thick and soft, the color of honey. My green eyes were bright, and a light spattering of freckles dusted my cheekbones. I’d taken to wearing a very small amount of makeup, a pale sparkle of eyeshadow, a touch of mascara to make my eyelashes stand out, and a kiss of lip balm.
In my own opinion, I looked much prettier now than I had my entire life. Feeling that I was armed well against my cold hearted uncle, I took one last stare in the mirror, smiling wickedly, and left the bathroom, deciding to ransack my closet.
The day my uncle arrived, I was in the kitchen, preparing dinner and sipping on my second margarita. I was wearing a short worn jean skirt and a comfy tight tee shirt. My feet were slipped into flip flops and my hair was tied down into two long girlish braids. The second margarita was taking its effect on my body, making my cheeks pink and my movements slightly clumsy. I was also giggling profusely at the rather mundane story my father was telling me about his day at work. He was sitting on a bar stool at the island I was cooking on, drinking a beer and pleasantly ignoring my tipsiness. As the doorbell rang, my dad got up and trudged out towards the front door, letting in my jet lagged uncle.
Throughout dinner I lavished attention on my father, coldly ignoring my uncle. The few times he said anything to me I gave him a short answer, never looking him in the eye once. I decided to see if treating him the short way he’d been treating me would affect him the way I had been. It seemed to be working. As I stood at the sink doing the dishes, (my father must have been wondering what had come over me, cooking dinner and doing dishes) my uncle came to stand at what he must have thought was a safe distance beside me, picking up a towel and drying the pots and pans.
