November Story - Thanksgiving Stuffing (Ch. 1) (Patreon)

A little late on the Thanksgiving story but here is chapter 1.

I was five years old when I first met Beth Hargrave. Back then, she was dating my uncle after he divorced, and they were engaged. I was too young at the time to know why but my uncle had an awful toxic relationship with his first wife. I didn’t really know the details until much later in life. But that doesn’t matter for the sake of this story. This is about Beth Hargrave.

I still remember the first Thanksgiving I met her. Everything from the way the kitchen smelled to the video game I was playing in my room (Super Smash Bros. for the N64). My mom told me that we would be meeting Uncle Joe’s fiancé. I remember being bored in my room having unlocked every secret in the game but nobody to play with. I heard a car lock beep outside. I looked out my window and spotted Uncle Joe walking towards the front door holding hands with a very pretty woman. I didn’t understand why then, but I felt excited to meet her.

I opened the door for them and was the first to meet her. Beth wore thick square-rimmed glasses that made her eyes much bigger than they were. She must have been blind as a bat without them. Long blond wavy hair, bit of a wide forehead. Tight faded blue jeans. Lovely cream blouse. She always smiled. Not a crazy smile that warded off children, but a gentle smile of content. She and Uncle Joe were in their late thirties at the time, but she looked like a decade younger.

“Hey there,” she said, beaming down at me. “I’m Beth! What’s your name?”

I stared, and my knees buckled.

When I thought of Uncle Joe I thought about the smell of whiskey, wood, and cologne. He took care of himself more than my dad, more metropolitan and worldly. He dressed nicely no matter the occasion, and exuded a friendly fatherly vibe.

Uncle Joe rubbed my hair and said, “This is Tommy. He’s a bit quiet for his age but he’ll warm up to you.”

I happened to sit right next to Beth when we ate for dinner. Usually, Thanksgiving dinners were quiet for me, in the sense that nobody bothered me and I kept to myself. My family was always chatting around the house but, being an only child, I had my peace of mind in my room.

I did this weird thing when I was kid where I couldn’t stop touching things. I played with my food more often than I ate it. I would stare at my plate and had an impulse to dip my finger into the cranberry sauce or mashed potatoes and make spirals. Mom always yelled at me in public to not touch things or else I would break something and we would have to pay for it. When I used to sit in the shopping cart, I sometimes caused a scene by reaching out and toppling over something from the shelf. The worst was when I broke a jar of raspberry jam. My mom spanked me for that.

So, I played with my food as usual, and Beth took notice. The rest of the family was usually warped into gossip during Thanksgiving dinner. Or into politics. Since Beth had just been introduced to the family, she probably felt a little lost.

“Are you in kindergarten?” she asked me.

I stared at her, realizing that she had asked me a question.

“Yeah,” I said, lightly.

“How is it?”

I hesitated before opening up. I briefly mentioned how I was scared one time thinking I had to write a paper. I don’t know where I got this impression of school but I thought that once you started you had to write papers all the time. On my first day of kindergarten, my teacher showed us a box to put our papers in. I panicked, thinking it had to be those dreaded ten-paged papers I had heard about. The box was just to put our homework in. But man, I will never forget how my heart raced and I nearly fainted.

Beth laughed at my story. “Well, not to scare you but later when you grow up you do have to write a lot of papers. But that won’t be for a long, long time. And when that happens, you’ll be ready!”

Her playful voice made me feel better about it.

 One very important thing about that night became seared into my memory, and was the earliest instance of me being attracted to this.

Beth ate the most out of anyone in the family. My mom made a comment about how appreciative she was that somebody finally ate everything on their plate (my dad sometimes lied about what he thought of her food, and my uncle was a picky eater).

Beth laughed and leaned back in her chair. She patted her belly and revealed that she had been hiding the fact that she had to unbutton her jeans.

Her belly looked so perfectly round, poking out past the waistline of her jeans. It didn’t look natural. Like almost cartoonishly big? That could be my childish memory playing with me. Some things back then were probably exaggerated. But damn, it looked huge. There didn’t seem to be any chance of zipping up those jeans again. She kept rubbing her belly and said, “Whew! That was a lot! Thank you so much!”

The family laughed about it. I kept staring at her belly and wanted to touch it. That deep need to be tactile kept nagging at me. Maybe that’s where it came from. Kids always want to touch things. Maybe I missed a step in my development and still had a need to feel tight round surfaces.

I had stared so much that Beth noticed and said, “I'm pregnant! It’s a little food baby. Look. Want to rub it?”

I did rub her belly. It was hard and very taut. It grumbled when I poked it. She grunted and covered her belly with her blouse. “Ow. Okay. Wait. Maybe don’t do that. Hahaha!”

I withdrew my hand suddenly, like I had done something dangerous. I think I imagined my mom ready to yell at me, but she didn’t, so I went to rub it again.

“Haha, okay, that’s enough.”

Little did I know, that moment sparked something huge in me.

I couldn’t wait for next Thanksgiving.