Chapter 2
It wasn't easy for Sugar to accept the things her mother had told her that night in her drunken anger. While she had listened to all those horrible stories told about her mother at the trial, had even seen what happened with that strange man in the living room, it was a shocking, shattering thing to actually hear it from her mother's own lips.
Not that Sugar wasn't appreciative or more than grateful for the way her mother had fought, the only way she knew how, to keep the two of them together after her father left. It was simply that she knew that none of the things her mother was doing were morally right.
For a while Sugar thought seriously of quitting school and getting a full-time job, so she could supplement the money her mother earned as a cocktail waitress and make it unnecessary for her to do the other things. But Sugar knew that if she dropped out of high school before graduation, she'd probably wind up living the same sort of sordid existence as her mother.
It didn't take long for her to discover that no one would hire a fifteen- or even a sixteen-year-old girl, especially one without experience, on a full-time basis. The best she could manage was a part-time job as a stock girl in what used to be known as a five-and-dime store, after school hours.
To Sugar's dismay and disappointment, this added money she was bringing into the house in no way curtailed her mother's drinking or promiscuity. If anything, the woman drank harder, and since Sugar went directly from school to work, it gave her mother an opportunity to entertain her gentlemen friends at home during the afternoon.
Even though the men were always gone by the time Sugar got home, because her mother herself had to go to work, Sugar would find unmistakable stains on the bed sheets and even a used condom or wad of soiled tissues on the floor beside the bed that her mother had overlooked.
This unsavory home life continued for Sugar until she was seventeen and a senior in high school, looking forward eagerly to graduation. Then she planned to go to business college and take a secretarial course, so that she could get herself a decent job, meet the right kind of people, maybe even the right man and make something of her life.
It was while she was seventeen that she came home one night from the five-and-dime store, where she was still working after school. As usual, she changed into a nightie and negligee, sat down at the table in the kitchen and busied herself with her homework, waiting until her mother came home, as she often did, so they could discuss each other's day.
She had no idea how long she'd been sitting there, engrossed in her studies, when the doorbell rang. Instinctively, she drew the negligee tighter around herself and looked up at the kitchen clock. She hadn't realized that it was well past midnight. Occasionally, when things were slow at the lounge and she had no business to attend to afterward, her mother would come home this early. But she had her own key, unless, of course, she'd mislaid it.
Sugar got up and barefooted through the living room to the door. She unlocked and opened it as far as the chain would allow. She frowned at the man standing in the shadows in the corridor.
"Yes?"
The man frowned as he tried to peer through the slight opening of the door. "I got the right apartment?" he asked. "Is this where Ella Kane lives?"
The breath hissed out of Sugar as she caught a glimpse of the man's moon face and recognized his voice. "Uncle Ben!" she exclaimed as she removed the chain from the door and threw it open.
"Uncle Ben?" he echoed with profound surprise as his eyes raced over her, from her bare toes to the top of her brown-thatched head. "You ain't... I mean you can't be Ella's kid?"
Sugar smiled and wagged her head and helped him remember her name.
"Sugar ... of course! How could I ever forget that?" he exclaimed, his steely gaze frankly admiring her loosely contained breasts, and there was plenty to gaze upon now.
In the past year or so, Sugar's body had reached delightful young womanhood. Gone was the baby fat from around her middle and upper thighs. Now her exquisitely shaped legs were long and slender, smooth as polished ivory, whiter than milk, ending in the hard, chiseled mounds of her girlish ass. With an abdomen as flat as rolled metal, no statue could boast of being a more perfect work of art. Her rich, brown hair had grown longer, too, reaching well down past her shoulders while her breasts had grown to the beauteous, breathtaking proportions of her mother's that, as a growing girl, she had admired so much and wished that one day she would inherit.
"Come in, Uncle Ben," Sugar said as she ran to him impulsively and kissed him on the lips. He tasted and smelled of liquor. She remembered how, as a small child, she'd climb into his lap and hug and kiss him whenever he came to visit. Sometimes Uncle Ben would be embarrassed, especially when Sugar's father was home and she ignored him and showered all her attention on Uncle Ben. Her mother said it was her father's fault because he never showed Sugar any affection.
Whatever, Uncle Ben never kissed her as a child the way he did now as he hugged her to him, squashing her tits against his barrel chest, a hand moving down her back for a feel of her well-defined asscheeks. But it wasn't until Sugar became aware of the hardening lump in the right leg of his trousers that she felt a slight twinge of embarrassment and alarm.
She drew back from him quickly. But immediately forgot her concern, because after all, he was Uncle Ben, her mother's brother. There was nothing to fear from him. It was probably just her imagination, the phobia she'd developed against all men. After all, her experiences with them during her brief lifetime hadn't been very pleasant. First, her father leaving them and then, wittingly or unwittingly, the way men had degraded her mother.
After she helped her uncle into the apartment with his two suitcases, they both stood for a moment in the living room, staring at each other.
"Ella's daughter!" he kept repeating as if it were impossible for him to accept. "I never would have believed it. I never would've known you in a hundred years. You were just a skinny kid."
"Kids have a way of growing up, Uncle Ben," she reminded him.
He nodded and kept eyeing her. "But in just five or six years? You've changed so much."
But he hadn't changed. Not in appearance, at any rate. He still looked exactly the way Sugar remembered him. Not much taller than she, stockily built with a pleasant-looking, moon-shaped face, thinning hair on top and unblinking, steel-gray eyes. Since her mother celebrated her thirty-seventh birthday during the summer, that would make him about twice Sugar's age, since he was two or three years younger than her mother.
Suddenly, his slow perusal of her charms brought a strange uneasiness to her stomach and she found herself shyly clutching at the bodice of her fragile gown. She said, "Mother will be so glad to see you, Uncle Ben."
He wagged his head perfunctorily and lifted his eyes from her boobs to meet her gaze. "She working?"
Sugar told him where and what time she'd be home. Then she asked him, "Can I get you something to eat, Uncle Ben?"
"Hey, that'd be real nice," he replied. "I ain't had nothing in my stomach since I left Cleveland before noontime."
"You drive all the way?" Sugar wanted to know, feeling more and more uncomfortable in the flimsy negligee and nightie she was wearing. After all, she was no longer a little girl, as his expression and his eyes told her.
He shook his head in answer to her question. "Rode the bus."
She began to move toward the bedroom. "You sit down, Uncle Ben, and rest. I'll be right out and fix something for you to eat."
He frowned. "Where are you going?"
"To change," she told him. "I won't be more than a few seconds."
"Change?" he exacted. "What d'ya want to change for? You look okay to me as you are."
She hesitated and pulled her negligee closed tighter around her. She didn't want him to think for one moment that she was afraid of him, not her own uncle. Besides, unless the negligee came open, he couldn't really see anything. Even when she was fully dressed, there was no hiding the size of her breasts, the outline of her figure, or the shape of her legs. She guessed it was only the idea of her being in her negligee and nightie that made her feel uneasy. So rather than offend him by making him feel she had the slightest qualms toward him, she decided to stay the way she was dressed and not change.
He followed her into the kitchen, never taking his eyes off her for a second as she went about preparing bacon and eggs, and a mess of frozen hash browns for him. She tried not to feel self-conscious or be aware of his eyes on her, especially when she stooped or bent over and showed him a flash of her naked thighs or the rising swell of her knockers.
"I don't suppose your mother's got a drink hidden away anywhere?" Ben asked as the bacon, eggs and potatoes began to sizzle on the front burner of the gas stove.
"I think she keeps a bottle or two in one of her dresser drawers in the bedroom," Sugar replied. "If you'll watch the bacon and eggs, I'll go get it."
He wagged his balding head, and she could feel his hot eyes watching the backs of her legs and the wiggle of her thinly clad behind as she hurried out of the room.
When Sugar got into the bedroom and turned on the light, she paused to look at herself in the mirror. In her heart, she couldn't blame her uncle for ogling her luscious body so lustily exposed in the thin negligee and the even more revealing nightie. After all, he told her quite frankly he couldn't believe she was that same little girl who used to crawl all over him. He probably couldn't make himself accept the fact that she was his niece.
However, she decided it would be wiser for her to put on one of her heavier robes. So she stripped off the negligee and tossed it onto the bed. The baby-doll nightie she had on was little better than nothing. The pinkness of her nipples and areolas as well as the outline of her entire titties showed through the gossamer material that barely covered the rich, dark-brown pelt between her legs.
She turned and took a step toward the closet when she saw Uncle Ben standing in the doorway that led from the living room. She tried desperately to steady her jumpy nerves and quiet the cold fear crawling in her stomach as his eyes raped her gleaming flesh so inadequately veiled by her nightie and hands.
"I... I was just getting my robe," she stammered as she backed toward the closet. "I ... I felt a little chilly."
He took a step into the room. She could see that horrible swelling in his trousers that seemed to reach halfway down his right thigh, throbbing violently.
"If... if you want the bottle, Uncle Ben," she got out, visibly trembling now, "it's in the bottom drawer of the dresser ..."
He began to move toward her, very slowly, his mind obviously on things other than booze.
Sugar shivered in a paroxysm of fear. He was her uncle. She kept reminding herself of that fact. But he was also a man, and it was clear that, niece or not, to him she was a very beautiful and sexually attractive young girl.
"Please, Uncle Ben...no," she kept begging him as she reached the door of the closet.
"I wouldn't hurt you, Sugar baby," he said. "Ain't that what I used to call you when you were little-my Sugar baby?"
She was too terrified to even wag her head, let alone answer him as he began to close in on her.
"That means you're still my Sugar-baby," he murmured. He started to reach out to grasp her wrist-when a voice from the doorway behind him boomed out shrilly.
"What the hell's going on here?"
Uncle Ben froze, then turned quickly to face the doorway. Standing there was Sugar's mother. She recognized her brother in a glance.
"Ben!" she cried out excitedly.
"Ella!" he returned, and the two of them met in the center of the bedroom in a warm and enthusiastic embrace. They kissed a lot differently than Sugar had ever seen brother and sister kiss before. But now that she recalled, they were always very demonstrative toward each other. In fact, her mother had always showed him a great deal more affection than she had her own husband.
In a child's innocent eyes such displays of devotion were beautiful. But now, as Sugar watched the way her mother opened her mouth when she kissed him and how she pressed and ground her belly against his, she felt quite disturbed. It didn't ease the situation any when they finally drew back from each other, and Uncle Ben held his sister at arm's length with one hand, while the other hand went to her tits which he weighed tentatively, then declared, "You've still got the knockers-big and hard as Gibralter."
That was Ella's cue to drop her gaze to the enormous protrusion still in his trousers. "Speaking of things being big and hard ..." She wasn't drunk, but she'd been drinking, and it looked for a moment as if she might drop a hand to his stiff cock. But apparently she remembered her daughter's presence, because she moved Uncle Ben aside and appraised Sugar critically. "Well, what the hell are you doing walking around like that in front of your Uncle Ben? You still think you're seven or eight years old, or something?"
"It ain't her fault," Uncle Ben spoke up gallantly. "She came in here to get a robe and I wanted a drink."
"Oh," his sister said. Then she ignored Sugar, walked to the dresser and opened the bottom drawer. She selected a full fifth of gin and tucked it under one arm. Then with the other hand she took her brother's arm and hugged against it, so he could feel her big tits against his bicep. "Let's you and me go out in the kitchen and talk over old times. Okay?"
"Okay."
Sugar watched them leave the bedroom but made no attempt to join them. Instead, she stayed in the bedroom, changed from her baby-dolls into a pair of more protective pajamas, turned out the light and got into bed.