Chapter One

Her Naughty Secret

No one would believe what happened that summer in the Forrest's barn or that Andie Forrest could be the center of anyone's life for those three long and languid months. When the trio of young libertines insinuated themselves into her private pastimes, they opened up a world of secret sexuality none of them understood, though none was willing to shun. On the surface, Andie seemed the most unlikely girl to engage in freakish erotic activity, but then, she was slightly odd. Everyone knew that, although no one dared say so.

Andie Forrest's exterior demeanor was shy, prim, and blatantly unassuming. Throughout her four years of high school she went about, carrying a mountain of thick textbooks in her arms, while tucking her head down to avoid the eyes of her classmates. She stuttered over words when asked to speak, and shrunk back in the corners of classrooms, allowing her thick, unmanageable hair to fall over her face. Hidden away, no one noticed her; she hoped. Except Harper Montgomery, who sometime during freshman year took it upon herself to comb Andie's shoulder-length tangle of ash-blonde hair into soft curls, just so she could peer into the wide dark eyes that Andie hid.

"There," she said with some satisfaction, smiling. "You'd be a whole lot prettier if you just let people see you!" Because Harper said that, it had to be true. She spoke with authority and no one doubted her. The tall auburn-haired beauty was destined to be Snow Princess, Prom Queen, Girl's Soccer MVP and academically at the top of her class from freshman Honor's Circle to her valedictory address at graduation. She nabbed a scholarship to Yale without breaking a sweat. While the rest of her world looked on in awe, Harper took the world by storm, expecting success and getting it, knowing that she could have everything she dreamed of just by dreaming it.

As confident as she was, Harper was not stuck-up and haughtily remote as some overachievers are. In fact, she was Andie Forrest's savior, willing to stoop beneath her station in a gracious act of goodwill that would forever alter Andie's luckless life. The fact that the slightly backwards farm girl was treated with respect in school rather than scoffed at behind her back was due to Harper's cloak of protection.

"Andie may be shy, but she's the smartest person on this planet."

Harper's pronouncements oozed from her tongue, delivered like honey dripping off a silver spoon, while her green eyes snapped with conviction. No one doubted her; no one crossed her; no one had the guts to confront her.

In the face of Harper's bold compliments, Andie would manage a half smile-looking just a little bit pleased, then bashfully draw her lips in and lick them nervously because she was so uncomfortable with the attention. She never understood why Harper picked her as a friend...that they were intellectual equals never crossed her mind. Of the one hundred twenty-five students in their class, Harper and Andie were the girls with the brains. It didn't matter to Harper that the orphaned Andie wore the same dress three days in a row, or rode to school in her grandpa's dusty truck and ate lunch out of a brown paper sack. She could think. She could banter about Roman history, chemical equations and microbiology at the same rate of speed as Harper's razor-sharp mind, which made Andie Forrest Harper's intellectual equal. That mattered to Harper, and what mattered to Harper was noticed by everyone else in their class... in particular, Zooey French.

A blowsy blonde with a mass of natural curls as untamed as Andie's long ones, Zooey was the pair's funky foil. While she was a good inch shorter than Andie's five-foot-six frame, Zooey always seemed enormously bigger. She exuded abundance; abundant breasts-better than D size-abundant hips, abundant vitality, charm and easy wit. She didn't have her friends' intellect, and didn't even try to keep up with their erudite repartee, but she was loyally in their corner, smoothing over dicey moments with a ready quip when Harper was a little too abrupt in her judgments, or her syrupy tongue turned bitter, or when the self-conscious Andie was nearly in tears.

The three girls were different as night and day in outward appearance and temperament.

Zooey was happily uncontained with her bounteous body and effervescent charm, while Harper was as contained and perfectly formed as a model in a magazine-hair, eyes, lips, chest size, trim waist and long muscular legs all in proper proportion.

In contrast to them both, Andie's body was average, unspectacular...all the right features appropriately placed, B-sized breasts, a slim waist and nicely rounded hips. At the same time, she was innately awkward as if she felt out of place inside her own skin.

For reasons only Harper understood, Andie Forrest was her chosen best friend. The cattier girls would say she didn't want the competition of a prettier, more popular girl, and that might be true, but there was also a genuine affection in her adoption of the gawky farm girl. As for Zooey, she latched on to the Harper and Andie as if she belonged with them, turning the twosome into a trio, whether they liked the fact or not.

While the three young adolescents seemed to be unlikely companions, by the end of sophomore year, they were as sure of each other's fidelity as sisters. Even Harper accepted the need for Zooey in her world at County High School, knowing intuitively that three were better than two.

Although inseparable at school, when the school day was over, they parted going in different directions. Andie and Harper studied-usually on their own-while Zooey played with boys two years ahead of her in grade. She was sexually precocious, a fact that everyone accepted and no one judged. Sex would get her as far as Harper's self-assurance, and where Andie's lack of confidence barred her.

After four years of high school, graduation came and went in a blur of emotion. Harper went to the final parties with her boyfriend, Billy Mercer, who had graduated two years before, while Zooey went with Junior Brinkman-an ox of a man five years her senior-best fuck she'd had so far, she said with a mischievous grin to anyone who'd listen.

But no amount of urging, cajoling or prodding could get Andie to step out of her grandfather's farmhouse that night.

"I'm not going and nothing you can say will change my mind!" she adamantly declared when Harper confronted her on the farmhouse steps. There was such grit in Andie's dark eyes that the usually cool Harper was noticeably rattled. She softened, as Zooey might have had she been there.

"Hon, you know how much we're going to miss you."

"No, you won't. You and Zooey will be with the guys and I'll be bored on the sidelines. I'm not going," she repeated flatly. She turned to walk back in the house, leaving Harper speechless.

With graduation, their high school world came to an abrupt halt. For days after, life seemed at a standstill. No one knew exactly what to do with their time as a three-month stretch of lazy days extended before them. This summer came upon them unprepared for and without purpose.

In the mornings, Harper went to her father's newspaper office and edited copy for the next edition. She was quickly bored with columns about farm futures, square dances and 4-H competitions-all insufferable small town trivia in the mind of a young woman who vowed she would someday be editor-in-chief of a big city paper such as the New York Times or the Washington Post.

Zooey was equally as unengaged with her newfound freedom. She figured that after a week or so of summer vacation, she'd finally mosey down to the diner and waitress at the ice cream counter, but she was in no hurry to get started. Life moved in slow motion and fucking Junior seemed like more fun than work. Even that, however, was getting a little tiring after her first few days of uninterrupted sexual activity. Sure, Junior's dick was the biggest in the county, but he had little expertise in making love. Zooey wasn't exactly looking for love, but she was yearning for something more than Junior was giving her, even though she couldn't quite put her finger on what that something was.

Life for Andie was hardly different from what it was before school let out. Just like every other summer, she stayed home and worked the farm with her grandfather. His most recent fall played havoc with his aging bones and joints, making most of his chores too difficult for him to try. He could climb up on a tractor and plow a field, but could hardly walk, even with his cane. While his hired help, Rip, tended to the things that Andie couldn't handle, he was only part-time and Andie was needed to handle the rest. She'd be exhausted by the time the season came to an end.

In the late afternoon after Rip left for his factory job, her grandfather would hobble to the second floor of the house, the thump, thump, thump of his cane on the stairs, the first indication of his plans. He'd lie down for a long nap, which was Andie's cue to sit down and rest. She sat in the swing at the far end of the porch where the trumpet vine and wisteria tangled together in an intricate, arcane pattern, surrounding her in a cocoon where she could vanish for an hour. She listened to the sound of the rusting chain as it creaked with even a subtle movement, and every day vowed to oil the hook so she could swing silently.

The air seemed to stir with uncommon intensity at that hour. Not the air that rustled the leaves in the maples above, but the air that tickled between the thighs and made her tummy grow warm. She would press her hand to her jeans and rock against it, wondering, why now? Weren't these feeling meant for the nighttime hours in the safety of her bed?

The feelings strengthened as each minute passed, as the sound of her grandfather's snoring floated down from the open window above, as the air grew thick with heat and moisture, as she languidly brushed the hair off her face and sighed. She would feel the heat on her brow and the moisture gather high between her thighs, then she'd rub her legs together with the subtle friction scratching the private nub she played with late at night.

Then, as if compelled by a force outside her, she would rise from the creaky swing and make her way across the yard to the barn. Looking over her shoulder, she furtively scanned the hazy landscape for potential interruptions into the private moment, then feeling safe, slip into the barn, sliding the door behind her with a heavy clang. Andie normally moved into a far corner of the barn where she'd stored several important items under loose floorboards. The most important was the bundle of switches she tied together with a length of leather cord. The day she cut them from the vines and scrub trees behind the barn, she was panting with desire by the time she made the perfect implement of punishment. Back inside the barn, she slipped out of her jeans and T-shirt. Wearing just her bra and panties, she leaned into a thick pillar and spread her legs to either side of it, and like a nun doing penance, she reached back and beat herself with the bundle of lean sticks as best as she could, awkwardly, but effectively, reaching her thighs, her ass and her back. She sting was heaven to her wanton body, showering her skin with sensation, better than the touch of hands.

Her mind flooded with crude pictures of herself beaten in rough, cold dungeons, or against tree trunks or even in fancy manicured gardens with genteel folk looking on in amusement. After five or six minutes of self-flagellation, the enormity of her desire became acute, centering on that potent spot between her legs. She rubbed her pubis frantically against the wood, hastening toward an end.

She was about to explode into orgasm, but there was one last step, one last indignity before she allowed herself the pleasure.

She dropped the switches and quickly pulled her panties down so she could rub her bare pubis against the wood. Opening her labia wide, she pressed herself to the hard surface, then grabbed on with her hands, fucking the wood to that final moment of climax, when she fell into the thing like she would fall into a lover's arms. Gasping for breath, she quickly appraised the innocuous world around her with a feeling of intense shame. After blushing with embarrassment to the empty barn, to the rooster perched in the rafters and the field mice that scampered in the straw, she hastily dressed, tossed the switches in the hiding place and exited the barn for the house.

Desire leaped on her like a lightning bolt striking out of a cool blue sky; the moments came and went like a hot brush fire. This was obsession, not a reasonable act or fantasy. She knew it was sexual, but she had no context in which to understand why she hurt herself to find pleasure. If only she were like Zooey fucking Junior, or even Harper with Billy Mercer. If only. She'd think of boys, wanting their attention, but the boys she knew weren't interested in her, and even if they were, they certainly wouldn't be interested in her private games in the back of the barn.