DINNER WAS A miserable and contentious affair. Caroline had failed to perform any of her assigned chores, which earned her a lecture from her mother. Even the one thing she did remember to do, put some clothes on, became a source of stress because her mind got its wires crossed and kept sending her these false warning signals that she was still naked. She spent the whole meal squirming in her seat and touching her clothes in a panic thinking they weren’t there. She also spent the whole meal dodging uncomfortable questions about her day. But the worst moment came at the very end.

“May I be excused,” she asked, punctuating her words with a yawn, “I need to go take a bath and I’m really tired.”

“…I thought you took a bath earlier,” said her mother in an accusing tone. Busted!

“I was, but…” Caroline replied, trying to come up with some viable excuse, “I got busy.”

“Busy doing what,” her mother demanded to know, “it couldn’t be your chores, because you didn’t even do those. And if you weren’t about to take a bath, then what were you doing in the dining room earlier without your-“

“-now, now, dear,” her father interrupted, standing up to come around the table and diffuse the situation, “I’m sure she’s sorry for forgetting her chores. Everyone deserves leniency from time to time. Isn’t that right, Care Bear?”

He leaned over to kiss his daughter on the top of her head but stopped when he caught a whiff of something.

“Have you been smoking?” he asked.

Caroline was quick to explain, letting the truth slip out in the process, “No! That was from my shirt.”

“…Your shirt? what shirt?!” asked her mother, standing up and rushing around to smell for herself. Uh oh!

“I-I meant the shirt of one of my teachers…Mr. Tharson!” scrambling for an alibi, she threw out the name of the first teacher she could think of. “I think he’s a smoker because his shirt-his whole classroom-smelled like smoke. And…and, that’s why I was going to take a bath earlier, but I decided to wait until closer to bedtime. and…and, I’m sorry!”

Seeing her daughter on the verge of tears, Diana softened her stance. Of course, her perfect Caroline would never do drugs! She apologized for even considering such a thing.

To lighten the mood, her father added, “Tharson…hmm. I think we went to school with someone named Tharson back in our day. A huge math nerd, if I recall.”

Eager to change the subject, Caroline stood up and gave both her parents a hug before leaving to take her bath. But as Diana watched her daughter exit the room, she could not shake the uneasy feeling that lingered over her like…well, like cigarette smoke.

Upstairs in her bathroom, Caroline stripped off her play clothes and dumped them into a hamper then turned on the hot water. Standing naked, she watched the steam come off the slowly rising water. For once, it was nice not having to worry about all the warning bells going off in her brain. A bath was one of the few activities that you were supposed to do naked.

Measuring out a capful of soap, the perfect amount for bubbles without going overboard, she giddily poured it into the porcelain tub. Impatiently, she dipped her dainty toe in to test the temperature then decided it was good enough to take the plunge.

“A girl is never too old to take baths,” her mother used to assure her. Caroline heartily agreed with that sentiment, always preferring baths to showers. She was a bathing expert by now, washing all the important parts of her body quickly and efficiently before massaging her faintly flowery shampoo into a lather. Leaning under the faucet, she thoroughly rinsed out her hair, which was now supposed to be “Soft as Silk”, if the bottle is to be believed. Since her straight black hair was currently waterlogged and plastered to her head and neck, she wouldn’t know until she had given it a chance to dry.

In no hurry to exit, she turned off the faucet and laid back for a soak. This was usually the most relaxing part of her day, resting her head against the angled porcelain while the warm water drew out all the stress from her body. But tonight, with her shoulders tense and worrying thoughts filling her brain, relaxation eluded her.

She still hadn’t had a chance to figure out how so much had gone so terribly wrong with her first day of school. Teenagers can be incredibly cruel, and she feared what tomorrow would bring. Surely rumors about her were already spreading among her peers. What were the boys of that math class telling their friends about her? She tried to tell herself that there was nothing she could do to change the past and that she needed to just hold her head high and ignore any comments and everything would work out tomorrow. But the tension in her shoulders was proof that her body was not ready to let anything go.

“Why do so many things have to change at once?” she thought. Her school, her schedule, herself. She slipped lower into the water to try and hide her changing body under the bubbles. When she was a little girl, her whole body easily fit inside the boundary of tub. She could lay flat with her legs extended and her whole body underwater and pretend like she was a mermaid. But now, her stupid legs were too long, and she had to fold her knees up into the open air just to get her head below the surface.

The drain stopper didn’t form a perfect seal. For a while, she lay perfectly still, with her mouth and nose sticking out above the water to breathe. Trying to take calming breaths like her mother had taught her, she listened to the sound of the water slowly draining from the tub. But her thoughts remained troubled. Her brain kept forcing her to recall the three naked incidents she had experienced that day. It demanded to know what she intended to do to prevent any more. She was bothered that she could provide no such assurances.

The bubbles were starting to dissipate, leaving what should have been a glassy plane of water. Caroline frowned when she looked down and instead saw two new peaks of flesh rising steeply from the surface and ruining the effect.

Her mother had spoken poetically about the myriad blessings of womanhood; promising that, like every young lady, Caroline would gradually grow into her body and come to cherish its new curves and qualities. “It doesn’t happen overnight, though. You can’t rush God and you can’t rush perfection,” she had joked, encouraging her daughter that she was a beautiful young lady and to have patience with the process of becoming a woman.

At this stage, Caroline wanted a refund from God. It was like someone had tied invisible strings to her nipples and was permanently tugging on them so that her chest was constantly stretched into two steep mountain peaks. Her skin was already pink from the hot water, but instead of being snow-capped, these peaks had bright pink caps, just a little lighter than a clown’s nose – how fitting for a circus freak!

Her frustration boiling over, Caroline reached up with both hands and tried to smash the tiny mountains on her chest back into flat plains. If this was becoming a woman, she would happily stay a child, thank you very much! But she didn’t make it very far. As she yelped in pain and removed her hands, her stubborn peaks reformed, and her little pink nipples were thrust back into the air. Her breasts had grown especially tender lately. But she didn’t know it was because she was on the verge of a growth spurt.

Cursing mildly, Caroline sat up. She kicked her legs and smashed the water with balled up fists. Some water even splashed out onto the tile beside the tub. Her tantrum faded quickly, but she remained frustrated. She desperately needed to settle her nerves before bed, or she feared she would toss and turn all night…

There was one thing she could try…

She didn’t even understand why but having recently discovered it by accident and only done it a couple times, the act of petting her kitty seemed to have a soothing effect on her. She saw no reason not to at least give it a chance.

Settling back into the tub, she slowly let her right hand trail down her narrow torso and into the water. The freshly washed skin just below her rib cage was unbelievably smooth. She found her belly button – a rather cute indentation marking the middle of her otherwise flat belly area – and felt her heart rate increase. But there was no reason to linger there. Her fingers were needed elsewhere.

Her legs and knees stuck out of the water in a V shape. They formed two navigation stones, guiding her hand should it stray from the proper course. But she hardly needed a map to find where she was going. Her destination was so perfectly nestled at the apex of her legs that she couldn’t miss it. She merely had to part her thighs slightly and her hand would automatically find its way.

She reached a small rise, the bone marking where her stomach ended, and her abdomen began. She was in an awkward stage where she had already lost her baby fat, but new muscles and flesh were not ready to fill the void. So instead of a gently curving abdomen, hers matched the flat contours of her pubic bone, sloping inward and gradually narrowing where her skinny legs joined it

Less than an inch from her destination, the texture of her abdomen changed as she reached her newly growing pubic hair. She stopped to tickle the thin layer of downy fur, delighting in the novel sensation.

Moving lower, her little hand fit perfectly within the narrow gap between her thighs. When she formed her palm into a cup, the shape exactly matched the little protruding mound of flesh between her legs. It was time.

When she was in pre-school, one of her classmates had approached her and proudly boasted that he had a weenie between his legs while little Caroline didn’t.

“Boys have weenies and girls have kitties,” he had exclaimed over and over until one of the teachers overheard and made him stop.

Caroline obviously knew what a kitten was but had never understood why the boy would call the little hairless slit between her legs a “kitty”. But the most convincing evidence came when she performed a hesitant first pet.

Immediately, her troubled mind became vacant as, much like a cat, the very core of her being moved down between her legs to give her hand an encouraging nuzzle. When she obliged, giving herself another experimental caress, she was surprised how even the tiniest follicles on that part of her body could detect and so vividly transmit her fingers’ precise location and direction of motion. She made an excited noise which resembled a meow. Now the label was really starting to make sense.

For the first time all day, Caroline felt the tension in her shoulders ease as she settled in to continue the strange, but surprisingly effective action of soothing her own body by petting it like she would an eager kitten. A few seconds later, another audible “coo” of contentment escaped her open mouth. She would have been embarrassed by the rather childish sound, having not made a noise like that since she was a baby. She was glad to be in the remote privacy of her own bathroom where no one could hear her.

Gradually, her knees drooped until they were resting on either side of the tub. The position gave her even more interesting areas to explore. She did so eagerly, petting in ever larger circles and savoring the precious areas of tender skin where her kitty and her thighs met. Ok, she had to admit, this was one perk of her changing body that she didn’t totally hate.

For several minutes, the only movement came from gentle ripples on the surface of the water as her hand repeated its comforting motions. Whenever one of her fingers accidentally slipped too far into the cute little cleft at the top of her kitty, her eyes would flutter, and the bottom of her toes would tingle and curl. But it didn’t occur to her to spread those outer folds of tightly pursed flesh and explore further inside. If she had, she almost certainly would have discovered her body’s full capacity for pleasure and unlocked the key to ultimate ecstasy. But having never masturbated before, she didn’t even know about the possibility of an orgasm, much less how to achieve it.

She was just happy to have a distraction from her disastrous day for a little while. A sensation much like a balloon inside her abdomen had been slowly expanding this whole time. It had kept her warm even as the bathwater around her cooled. But after several minutes of constant petting, and countless sighs of contentment, it was time to wind down her little cuddle session.

She was happy that the warm feeling stayed with her, taking very long to fade over the rest of the evening. Unfortunately, her troubling thoughts did not stay away. They rudely intruded as soon as she exited the tub. Grabbing a towel to wipe her body, she couldn’t help but start worrying about what another day at school would bring. Was there any way she could possibly live down what she had done?

Each time she tried to make a plan, she would get distracted thinking about one of the embarrassing encounters that day. If it wasn’t standing in Mr. Tharson’s classroom in just her panties, she was showing her neighbor what a pretty kitty she had while she retrieved his frisbee. Then there was the awkward encounter with her own mother where she had been forced to pretend like it was no big deal for her to be naked around the house.

She ran a blow dryer over her head then lovingly brushed her hair over and over until it looked as soft as her shampoo bottle had promised it would. Then she picked up her toothbrush and started to brush her teeth. She was growing so anxious by that point that she couldn’t stand to watch herself and had to turn away from the mirror. Rushing to spit out the residue, she rinsed her mouth without looking up and fled from the bathroom into the hall to avoid another panic attack.

“It’s ok,” she tried to tell herself, “you’re safe in your own house and nothing else can hurt you. You made it to the end of your day. There’s only one thing left to do, go to sleep.”

But for some reason she couldn’t stop her legs from wobbling as she made her way downstairs to tell her parents “Goodnight”.

She found them in the living room watching the ten o’ clock news. Well, neither one was watching the news very closely. Her mother had a book in her lap and her father was pouring over some case files, as usual. But at least the tv was on.

“I-I’m going to bed now,” Caroline called from the edge of the room with a surprisingly shaky voice, “goodnight.”

Her mother looked up with a serene smile and started to say something pleasant in response, but when she saw her daughter, her eyes went wide and no words came out.

“Goodnight! Love you, Care-Bear,” called her father, not even bothering to look up. If he had, he would have seen his teenage daughter standing there completely naked, freshly bathed, and ready for bed.

In shock that her daughter would so casually be showing off her naked body to her own father and didn’t seem embarrassed about it in the least, Diana failed to utter anything until the naked girl had left the room and was headed back upstairs.

Turning to her husband, she asked, “have you noticed something’s off about Caroline lately?”

Caroline’s father looked up, about a minute too late to see anything interesting, and shook his head. “She seems fine to me. Maybe a little tired. But she did have a long day.”

Diana reluctantly let the issue go again. But seeing her daughter naked twice in the same day did give her the chance to notice something that needed attention. She made a mental note to take her daughter shopping for a training bra as soon as possible.

Naked Caroline walked right past her closet, where all her pretty nightgowns were hanging, and climbed into her bed. Snuggling up beneath her warm blanket, she did her best to shut off her still complaining mind and focus on the warm feeling in her stomach. Her confusing thoughts kept returning to the three…or was it four…embarrassing episodes she had endured that day. A final thought passed through her head as fatigue slowly caught up to her. It was a silent hope that she would not repeat any of the mistakes from her second day of school that had led to so much embarrassment on her first.

The End