Charlie and Mindy Bk. 01 Ch. 01

This is the first chapter of seven in Book 1 of Charlie and Mindy, which is a story of forbidden love between a brother and a sister.

The early chapters of the book chronicle the early stages of that love. It takes time for the chaste love of a brother and a sister for each other to transmute itself into erotic love between a man and a woman, so the book is not a quick read.

There is sexual activity in every chapter, but what you will find in the first few chapters may not be what you're looking for.

I value your comments and your feedback. When circumstances permit, I will respond to each—usually within a week.

—CarlusMagnus



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Saturday, August 1, 1987:

"Charlie, that was Dave," said my sister Mindy as she hung up the phone. "Their mother broke a leg in an auto accident this morning. The doctors say she'll be OK, but she's in the hospital. Dave and Carol want to be with her, so they can't make it tomorrow."

It was just about lunchtime, and Mindy and I had spent the morning inventorying food and gear. The four of us had planned a week-long backpacking trip into the Wind River Range, with the next day as the date of departure from Fort Collins, Colorado, for the Meadow Lake trailhead near Pinedale, Wyoming. We had planned a meeting later that day, after supper, to finalize our plans and go over our gear. This could mean canceling the trip.

"I'm glad she's going to be OK," I said, and I was. "But I don't think we should go to the Winds without them." About that, I wasn't glad at all.

"Why?"

"Well, there'd be just the two of us. If one of us should get hurt, there'd be nobody to take care of the injured person while someone went for help."

Her lower lip was sticking out. She was 18—a little more than a year younger than my 19. She'd been looking forward to this trip—her first into real wilderness—for quite a while. "You said that the part of the range where you'd be taking us was pretty well used. That there should be people around to help in any emergency."

"It's still pretty dicey—we couldn't be sure of help if we needed it."

The Island Lake area where we planned on going was rather heavily used—for the Wind River Range in 1987. But it was possible, then, to spend a week there without seeing anyone other than members of your own party.

"Well, nothing's sure," she allowed. "I think we'll be fine and I want to go."

I wanted to go, too. I'd been on several long trips into wild country, not least of which was a National Outdoor Leadership School course two years earlier. I loved being in the backcountry. And Mindy was determined to overcome my reluctance. So even if I had already decided not to go, I'd've been doomed. I'd long since learned the hard way that once Mindy gets it into her mind that she's going to do something, she will do it. She had decided that she was going to go for a week-long hike in the Wind River Range, and even if I had thought it was an awful idea I'd probably have had to tag along just to keep her from going solo.

"I think you've talked me into it, Little Sister. But we'll have to be extra careful," I finally said. "And we'll both have to work on convincing Mom that we'll be safe so she won't renege on lending us her car."

That earned me a big hug—a front-to-front full-contact "Oh, Big Brother! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" hug. Feeling her trim little female body against me made the extra risk seem worthwhile.

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It was a body I knew well—almost as well as I knew my own. Because we'd lived in a very small home, the two of us had shared a bed until I was ten and our family's circumstances had changed. Beginning when I was about six or so, we'd taken the opportunity to satisfy our childish curiosity by exploring each other's bodies. Late at night, we'd both get naked and use flashlights under the covers for visual exploration. We didn't need flashlights to explore each other by hand. By the time I was eight, each of us was very familiar with the anatomy of the opposite sex—at least, as it is to be found during childhood. I think it was about then that we started calling our mutual examinations "body checks".

It was all pretty innocent. We did know, somehow, that Mom would disapprove, but we didn't really know why—so we were very careful to keep our "hobby" a secret. Of course, that it was a shared secret made it even better.

In spite of the way we checked each other's bodies out, we never slept without our pajamas on. Mom had impressed upon the two of us that it was "uncultured" (one of her most disapproving words) for a person to sleep with nothing on. To this day, I'm not sure whether she intended to keep us from sleeping naked with each other—or if she simply intended to keep us from sleeping naked. At any rate, she certainly got a message through: I now sleep naked, though never without remarking to myself how uncultured I've become.

In that shared bed, we sometimes slept in each other's arms, sometimes "spoon" fashion. Mom probably thought the way we snuggled together in our jammies was "cute". I am sure she was right, because, at our ages, it was, could have been, nothing more than an expression of our childish affection for each other. Moreover, the family finances being marginal at best in those days, she unwittingly encouraged us by turning the thermostat down to 55° during those cold Colorado winter nights.

It was during those years of childish love and intimacy that we invented our secret slogan, our private, sacred liturgy. It was how we expressed our love for each other, how we cheered each other when one or both were sad. One of us would say to the other "Big brother and little sister," to which the other replied, "Best friends." And then, in unison: "Now and always."

And during those years, too, we made a solemn pact with each other, our own Code of Honor: We could lie for, but never to, each other. We simply called it The Code. If either of us invoked it, each of us was bound to tell the truth and, just as importantly, to believe that the other was telling the truth.

For reasons Mindy and I did not understand, our father was not a part of our family picture—and hadn't been at any time either of us could remember. When I was ten, Mom found a man who loved her. She loved him and married him. He was a successful attorney, and our standard of living improved immensely. We moved into our new stepfather's large home, and Mindy and I each got our own bedroom and bed.

Initially, Mindy and I didn't think that particular change an improvement. For a few weeks after the move, Mom would frequently find one of us in the other's bed late at night, both of us fast asleep and snuggling up close with each other. There was nothing sexual about it. Nor was body checking the issue; we were just lonely trying to sleep apart from each other. After all, we'd spent most of our young lives sharing a bed. Slowly we adjusted, and after several weeks we were able to spend, reliably, the whole night alone in our own beds.

Nighttime body checks were then pretty much out of the question, as was sleeping in each other's arms. But we still could avail ourselves of daylight opportunities. Our new stepfather had managed to get my mother a secretarial position in another attorney's office, so both of our parents were usually gone during the days. They thought us mature enough to handle being without adult supervision.

You must understand: Although we had come to regard our bodies as mutual property, we weren't obsessed about our body checking. It had much the same place in our lives as any other childish hobby might have had, being something we might choose to do when we weren't otherwise occupied. It was driven almost entirely by innocent curiosity, with, maybe, just a little of the spice of the forbidden thrown in.

Before the man we soon came to call "Dad" joined it, our little family had never been very private about our bodies. I think that fact made it easier than it might otherwise have been for Mindy and me to share our bodies with each other. In our little home, Mom had almost never closed the door when she used the bathroom, and in consequence neither did we. If Mom happened to be naked when she wanted something in a different part of the house, she had no reservations about going and getting it without first covering up. And so we had none either. As Dad integrated with our family, he, too, stopped concealing his body around the house. So we were used to seeing the naked bodies of all four members of our family. Mindy and I simply carried it a little further.

We did know what people do to make babies. We knew that it was called "fucking" (a word we also knew to be extremely uncultured), but we didn't know that there was any reason to fuck unless you wanted a baby. And we then thought that a baby would always be the inevitable result of that activity when grown-ups engaged in it.

We tried it three or four times to see how it worked. At least, we thought we had. Those trials had been clinically scientific—at least as far as we knew how to be clinical or scientific—experiments, which we'd carried out in dispassionate quest for knowledge. This is supposed to fit into that. We've got one of each here; let's see how it works. In retrospect, I can see that all of those efforts were pretty lame—with one exception. Or, more precisely, such was our knowledge of sexual matters that most of our efforts were pretty limp.

The last of those experiments was different. As we approached puberty, we both took a more determined interest in our own bodies—and in our siblings'. We knew that soon our bodies would change, and, determined little intellectuals that we were, we wanted to follow those changes.

And each of us wanted to follow them, not only in our own body but in the other's as well. And our growing determination extended to trying to pierce the mysteries of adult sex, of "fucking".

We performed our last experiment along these lines on a snowy day in February of 1980. Mom's and Dad's offices had not taken the day off, but our school had. Late that morning, after the children's television programming had turned into boring (we thought) game shows, we engaged in a daylight body check. I can't give here the details of either that or what it led to—such a description might be considered child pornography, which could make me and anyone who merely possessed it guilty of a felony, subject to arrest and other inconveniences. Suffice it to say that this effort was not limp and we achieved partial success. It was only partial because it hurt her, and we didn't carry the experiment past her pain. But it is worth noting that neither of us experienced any hint of the compelling urgency so characteristic of adult sexual activity.

Why didn't we try again? For a while, at least, we thought it would hurt her. And we were slowly becoming aware of the meaning that the grown-up world attaches to fucking—especially where siblings are involved. Most of all, probably, we were afraid that we might then be old enough that a single fuck would inevitably get her pregnant.

On the other hand, we were gradually becoming aware that men and women fucked all the time because they liked it (even the women, for whom it must therefore not be painful—or, at least, for whom any pain must be eclipsed by something else), and that pregnancy didn't result every time. We were not sure what had occasioned Mindy's pain during that long-ago experiment: Youth, perhaps, or lack of lubrication, or both. So our "knowledge" of this subject, like so much childhood knowledge, consisted of many isolated, sometimes mutually contradictory, "facts".

Shortly after that last experiment, we both entered puberty for real. We continued our body-checking hobby, made then even more interesting by the accelerating (and fascinating) changes in both our bodies. We gained height. Acne troubled us both—her in particular. We saw whiskers begin to sprout from my upper lip, and then from my chin and my cheeks, while the hair on my chest, arms, and legs changed its quality from fine and downy to coarse and dark. We watched the boringly parallel lines of her body change, ever so slowly, into the subtle, alluring curves of womanhood. We also observed, in detail, more intimate changes. But, again, I defer to criminal law, and I will not describe those changes. I doubt I have readers who do not know what they were.

As we began to mature physically, we each learned from peers of our own sex how one brings oneself to orgasm. We traded this information and we practiced assiduously—often watching each other out of curiosity regarding both structure and technique. But for some reason, it never occurred to us that either of us might do the other. No matter that we allowed one special observer, it was indeed to us a solitary vice.

Her first period came in early 1982, when she was nearly 13. Late one afternoon that spring, when Mom and Dad weren't home, she proudly displayed the bloody wreck of a Tampax she had just drawn from her body. I could've done without that. But it was all part of watching ourselves grow up together—and I now know that she could, much more than I, have done without that as it recurred again and again in her later life.

When I was sixteen, she started calling me "The Big Person With The Muscles," and I in return called her "The Soft Little Person". Not that she wasn't strong; she packed a lot of strength into her little body. But, still, she was small, and she was female. Small people aren't generally as strong as large people, while girls aren't generally as strong as boys.

We'd both been looking forward to this trip into the Wind River Range as a way of reconnecting with each other. For most of the last year, I'd been away for my first year of college at Mom's alma mater (where Mindy was to begin her freshman year not long after we returned from Wyoming). And we'd both been busy with summer jobs—which we'd quit a couple of weeks early in order to make this trip. I had had a good first year away from home. But I had really missed my little sister, who was still my very best friend.

In August of 1987, at the age of 18, The Soft Little Person had grown as tall as she was ever going to, although, of course, we didn't know that then. She was about 5 feet tall, and weighed 100 pounds when she was fully clothed, dripping wet, and someone put a couple of rocks on the scale beside her. I thought that her breasts were just right for her small body, and they were so firm that she rarely wore a bra. Her feminine curves were gentle and subdued, and she had a cute pair of tight little buttocks. Her figure was slender and athletic, without being either bony or skinny. She had blue eyes, a pleasing face, and she wore her dark brown hair in a short bob. No one would ever think of her as a stunning beauty. But she liked living in her own skin: For the most part, she enjoyed being what she was—a pretty, sexy, intelligent young woman. She wasn't so fond of being small; in fact, she was a little bit sensitive about it.

The Big Person With The Muscles, on the other hand, then stood 6 feet tall, and weighed 190 pounds. I'd thought I was a little overweight, but the doctor said I was pretty solid and I shouldn't worry about it. I didn't know it, but I had the broad shoulders and muscular body that women find attractive. I still had another inch or so to grow, and I would put on more muscle mass as I filled out during the next few years.

During the last year I'd been at home before college, the difference between the two of us had meant that we'd often heard whispers of "Mutt and Jeff" from folks who thought we were out of earshot. We had never paid any attention to the comics in the papers, so we had no idea what that meant. We'd had to ask Mom, and when she'd told us, we'd thought it uproariously funny. We'd addressed each other as "Mutt" and "Jeff" for a couple of weeks thereafter. Of course, she was "Mutt" and I was "Jeff".

As we prepared for this trip into the wilderness in each other's company, we had last practiced our hobby about a year earlier. I'd been away at college from August until May, and we'd both been busy with jobs and other summer activities. But old habits die hard, especially when we don't see much reason to change them, and so we'd often seen each other around the house in various states of undress—including complete nudity.

We knew now that body checks reliably produced, in both of us, that sense of compelling urgency for union that I mentioned earlier. We'd successfully defused that urgency, but it had frightened our younger selves. It had frightened us, because we thought ourselves "good" children and we had gotten the message: We knew that it would be wrong—deeply wrong—for brother and sister to satisfy that urgent need with each other. And so, by unspoken agreement, we'd pretty much put aside our old hobby, though we both now found it even more interesting than ever. But I don't believe that either of us ever meant to give it up for good.

However, our old hobby was so far in the backs of our minds that it did not occur to either of us that opportunities to renew it might await us on our trip into the Bridger Wilderness Area. At least, neither of us was conscious that our old hobby might be one of the things that contributed to the new sense of exhilaration we felt in knowing that we would have no company in the backwoods other than ourselves—big brother and little sister, best friends, now and always.

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Sunday, August 2, 1987:

The drive to the trailhead was uneventful. My sister Mindy and I had gotten up pretty early, but we'd spent more time than we had thought we would bagging our food and getting everything into our packs. On that account, we'd gotten a late start, and then we'd taken our time. Mindy didn't like driving, but I did (and do). So I drove all the way. At 19 years of age, I hadn't done much cross-country driving, and the eight hours or so that it took seemed long and tiring. From the west side of Fort Collins, where we lived, we drove up Taft Hill Road to US 287, which we took to Laramie. We stopped there for lunch, and went on to Rock Springs on I-80. At Rock Springs, we turned off of I-80 and went north on US 191 to the turnoff for the Meadow Lake trailhead. (Even now, almost 25 years later, it's still a lightly used trailhead. Anyone who is determined to can find out how to get to that trailhead, but I'd like it to remain lightly used—so I won't give directions. I'll also be vague about how to find some of our less-overused campsites.)

On the way, we chatted about this and that. We talked about my experiences during the first year of college I had just completed—including my failure to get my first fuck. I hadn't failed for lack of trying, but because I hadn't found a willing partner. She talked about her thoughts and hopes for the first year of college she was to begin in a few weeks. And she confessed that during her senior year of high school she, too, had failed to get her first fuck—not because she hadn't tried, or even because she hadn't found a willing partner. She'd kissed a few boys, she said, and she'd even let a couple of them touch her breasts through her shirt. But she said that she hadn't liked any of them enough to let them go any further—let alone to fuck with them. I have to confess, myself, that needing to like someone in order to want to fuck with them was a foreign idea to me—and that she took it for granted that she would like a guy before she would consider fucking him gave me a new perspective on the female mind. Otherwise, we touched on nothing of any real importance beyond the joy we shared at the prospect of spending some time together.