Naked Girl Adventures 4

A collection by P.A. Choi

Copyright 2024 P.A. Choi

Cover design by P.A. Choi

Illustrations by P.A. Choi

Table of Contents

Naked Girls Are in the Attic!

Naked Ghost Story

Sea Angels

Seaside Grove

To Sail with Naked Girls Again

Naked Expedition

About P.A. Choi:

Naked Girls Are in the Attic!

Adam Weil's little writing retreat into the woods wasn't going as successfully as he'd hoped. First was the cryptic way with which the owner of the cabin he rented communicated with him. "You'll have plenty of amenities, bottom... to top." Adam could almost hear the man's suggestive tone through the e-mail, and sense a pervy smile. Bottom was no doubt referring to the hot tub on the lower deck, an amenity he wouldn't be using. And why did he say bottom to top, instead of the other way around, how people normally said it?

The second damper on his immersion was the location of the cabin. He had imagined something hidden in the woods. It was in the woods, alright, in a gated community, and the cabin was within sight of several other homes on the gravel street, hardly the isolation he desired when he had decided to take a long weekend and trek out there to work on his novel, the novel all his co-workers constantly made fun of him about for famously working on it for over eight years. But at least he wouldn't have to interact with the neighbors. It wasn't like they would be knocking on his door. But he did get a weird, knowing look from one of them, an older lady with silver hair walking her dog down the gravel road as he pulled into the cabin. She gave him the type of grin one gives to an ignorant child who is making a fool of themselves. It really troubled Adam for some reason.

Then, as he set out his laptop on a little round table off to the side in the kitchen against a plain wall, and reflected on how he suddenly felt like a self-insert character from a Stephen King novel, the third and ultimate disturbance stepped up to prevent his work: a knocking sound from upstairs.

It would have been the perfect mood and inspiration for him if he'd been writing a horror novel like King and so many of his protagonists, but he was writing a multi-generational family drama, and he had no time to be distracted by spooky noises.

And yet, they persisted. It was consistent and disrupting enough that Adam sighed, stood from his little writer's table that he had chosen, and went upstairs.

Of course, when he got to the second floor, he heard no noises. He inspected every room, from the bedroom that he would sleep in that night if he didn't fall asleep on the couch downstairs, to the drawing room which would have been the perfect place to write if he wasn't uncomfortable with the idea of a dark window at his back, to the bathroom, where there was nobody hiding behind the shower curtain as he feared, and then the sound came again.

Thump.

It was from the attic. For sure it was from the attic, right above his head, and the sound was too heavy and purposeful to be a critter up there, as would be expected.

Shit, he thought. I’m not Alan Wake, I don't have time for this. He didn't want to have to call the cops. But he sure as hell wasn’t about to investigate spooky sounds in an attic.

A minute later, he was opening the pull-down hatch and extending the rickety wooden ladder to take him up. It was probably just raccoons. Their sounds probably were just magnified by his fear. He was not looking forward to getting his face clawed off, but raccoons weren't worth calling the cops over, and he would not be able to write unless he dealt with this distraction. He'd run them down out of the attic and chase them out of the house with a broom if he had to.

When he reached the top rung, he pulled himself up into darkness and a sense of terror, and then he reached above him, searching for a chord to pull for light, and he found it, and when he pulled it, he almost jumped backward and fell down the opening behind him.

There were four of them standing there, standing as if waiting for him. They stood in a semicircle as if to invite him into the center of it; four young women, from the left a very tall and simultaneously intimidating and delicate woman with long auburn hair that hung in front of her spherical breasts, with a contrastingly dark and wide growth below. Her nude cohorts were of varying stature, from a shorter and fuller-chested girl with darker hair and a dark gleam in her eye, to a slightly taller and no less devious girl with pronounced canines that flashed as she smiled at him and his assessment of her bare body, to the girl on the right, with long, dark brown hair and a facial expression that communicated that she was in control of any situation. And in control of him they were, for their bare, naked bodies froze him still on the spot.

"Uh, excuse me..."

They moved towards him. First, the tall, intimidating woman on the left, and then the others, following her lead. Adam then did perform the potentially fatal stunt that he had feared, bumbling backwards and down the opening, landing flat on his back and winding himself. His head knocked against the faux-wood floor of the hallway, and the last thing he saw was the four pretty faces staring down at him before he blacked out.

*****

They were still staring at him when he came to.

"What the fuck," he muttered. The intimidating girl, whose long, brown hair streamed down from the entrance, upturned a smile at him. As did the others. He sat up and assessed his situation.

"Who are you?" he shouted up at them, but they only smiled down at him in response. He got to his feet, deciding he needed to call the police, for the owner of the cabin apparently was keeping girls locked up and naked in the attic, though the way they looked down at him didn’t betray any vulnerability. Instead, it seemed like they were pleading to him, so he climbed the ladder.

They made space for him as he climbed back up, and soon Adam stood in a semi-circle of fearlessly naked girls.

"So... what are you doing here?" he asked them, and then the intimidating, tall lady stepped forward.

She pawed at his buttoned shirt and trailed her fingers down to pluck at the waistband of his khakis. Adam took a step back in surprise, but made sure not to repeat his previous painful stunt.

"What are you doing?" he asked, and the woman seemed offended by his unwillingness to satisfy her curiosity. Then the other three girls stepped forward. They touched his shoulders, sliding the fabric of his shirt along his skin, as if investigating the boundary between artificial and natural. Breasts were hovering before his face as the girls crowded him and continued the investigation to his abdomen. Well, he thought. This ought to be inspiration for something. He almost stepped further back, on the reasonable intuition that something was very wrong here, at the possibility that the man he rented this cabin from was keeping drugged-up sex slaves up in the attic as favors. Lust won out, however, when the exploring fingers discovered the fly of his pants.

It had certainly been a while. The last time he had had sex was through an affair in the office, an affair with the cute intern that lasted one week and ended with her suddenly not talking to him. Echoes of that five-day-long excursion into erotic pleasures he hadn't experienced since high school came back to him, erotic pleasures that trumped anything that had happened in his loveless marriage. He panted as the bare beauties knelt and took down his fly, and to speed things along, he unbuttoned his shirt. The girls of the attic were delighted.

His cock was out before he had his shirt open, and already the faces of the girls dipped in to witness it, but not satisfied with that isolated nudity, he took his shirt off, backed up, and the patient girls watched with hungry eyes as he took his pants down so he could be as naked as them. It was an empowering feeling; his hours at the gym paid off as he revealed his reasonably toned body and elicited hunger from the four naked girls, who were ready to celebrate his undressing. Then, on the dusty floor of the attic, he stood with his fists on his hips as the four naked girls crowded around and descended on his urgent dick.

He didn't have to do anything; they jumped on him like his dick was the last chopper in 'Nam, lips instantly pursing and slurping on his crown, and Adam leaned his head back and accepted his supreme luck, as little sense as it made. His hands ran through their silky hair as they slurped and suckled him luxuriously slow, and he focused and reeled in all the pleasure, intent on making the moment last.

Perhaps their goal wasn't to excite him to the brink; their goal was merely to savor. Or so that's what he interpreted when he took a moment to enact a porno film fantasy and took himself into his own hands to rub his rawness over their cheeks, across pursed lips, and they grasped for him as if impatient with his theatrics. His dick was wrestled over and plunged into an eager series of mouths, and the first wave of many possible endings coursed through him.

He wanted more. He wanted to feel their bodies. He wanted to appreciate each soft curve and ripple of gooseflesh, each crisp hair on their deltas, each flawless inch of skin. But he was reserved to enjoy those delights visually, and all his direct senses centralized around his dick, which pulsed with the second surge of threatened release. He backed off to make the moment last, and the four young women panted up at him in impatience, so he rubbed his dick in their faces again, and this time, they seemed to like that, as did he. The soft give of each of their cheeks was like a pillow on his crown, the silky touch of their lips and the satin of extended tongues warming him to his third and final wave.

He couldn't take it. He took himself into his hands once more and masturbated furiously, and once again, the young women were excited about this development. It meant the delivery was coming. That was the apparent satisfaction of their curiosity.

And he came, he came with the force of an M1 tank and he splattered on their cheeks, on their lips, and elicited laughter from them, the first of their voices that he had heard, which he barely perceived as he gritted his teeth when their mouths came in to slurp up the flow.

He stumbled back then, and succeeded in falling backwards once again, landing flat on his back, his head dipping into the opening towards the second floor below, as the four naked girls descended not upon him, but on the floor where his errant semen had landed, lapping it up like dogs. He nearly passed out until they then migrated to him, accosting his dick and taking every last drop. The pangs of excruciating pleasure overtook him, and his head leaned back, dipping into that open space until his body began to slide, and he was dumped down onto the second floor once again.

He didn't pass out this time; he had sense and experience enough to raise his head to avoid hitting it on the floor. His heels rattled on the steps and remained pointed up as his shoulders hit the floor. Past his feet, the four youthful faces peered at him from the opening above like it was a portal into Heaven. The only thing keeping him connected to Earth was his throbbing pain, both on his extremity and throughout the rest of his body. He sat up and the women disappeared from the opening, back to doing whatever they were doing before he had come upon them, and Adam suddenly felt very terrified and picked himself up to rush, naked, downstairs.

The first thing he took in was how alien he felt standing in the middle of this strange kitchen completely naked. He had left his clothes upstairs, having fallen out of their reach and now too rattled to go up and get them. Not before he collected himself. What exactly had he just experienced? He thought again to Stephen King; were those girls succubi? Or some other type of demon? It was, strangely, the only explanation that made sense. Unless the owner of the cabin really did have a group of girls held in his attic, a group of girls that seemed to have no problem about being without clothes, or about pleasing a man with no provocation, and who, it seemed, were fully content staying in that dingy, dusty attic, held there perhaps by Stockholm Syndrome. No, he needed to call the cops. But first, he would need his clothes.

He had packed an extra pair, as well as a set of sleeping clothes, and it was that which he could change into before the police arrived, but he remained nude—and shaken—as he called 911 first. He knew they would take forever to send someone out, anyway.

"911, what is your emergency?"

I should close the attic door before they show up, he thought to himself as he spoke. All he told them was that he thought he had intruders in his attic. That would be reason enough to send somebody out. Detailing his experience was out of the question, and alluding to captives kept in the attic didn’t seem like a good idea.

"Okay, we'll send somebody out," the bored-sounding woman said. "Stay on the line with me."

Shit, he thought again. He would need his original set of clothes, anyway. If the police found them discarded up there, it would invite more questions than Adam was prepared to answer. So as he stood nude in the kitchen with the woman's questioning voice in his ear, as he stared longingly at his laptop on the pathetic little table and mourned the sacrifice of so much work time, he decided to go back upstairs.

"Everything okay, sir?" the woman on the other end of the phone asked as he got to the top of the stairs. No doubt she heard his movement and the wood creaking.

"Oh yeah, I just wanted to check..."

"Don't investigate it, better wait for the police to do that," the woman said. "Stay safe."

But he was already climbing the ladder, one-handed, the phone pressed to his ear, his breath shaky as he peeked his head above the opening and beheld the four nude young women sitting in a semi-circle, all with their legs drawn in, as if they were attending a sermon. They all turned their heads to Adam and he let out a surprised yelp, to which the woman on the other end of the line inquired: "Are you okay?"

"Y-yeah," he said, reaching out with his free hand to grasp for his clothes that lay just outside of his reach, between he and the girls. He grunted, and the woman questioned again, and just when he had his clothes in his grasp, he lost his bearing on the ladder and fell backwards.

"Oh shit."

"Sir?" he heard the woman's voice come, tinny, as his phone clattered down behind him. At least his grasp on his jeans and shirt was secure, and he took them down with them. He tumbled down the ladder for the third time that night, twisting his body to prepare for the fall he had by this point become accustomed to, and he succeeded in landing on his side, wherein his elbow stabbed into his ribs.

"Ah, fuck!" he screamed as his clothes fell over his face like a shawl.

"Sir?" came the squawking voice from his phone beside him. He grasped for it and swiped the clothes from his face.

"Yeah, I'm okay," he said. "I just had a fall."

"Please remain in one place, sir," the woman said. Adam stared up at the opening of the attic, but the women did not appear there. Instead, he saw the familiar red and blue flashes reflected on the ceiling.

"Oh shit."

"Sir?"

"I mean they're here."

He had gotten to his feet and hastily gotten dressed as he wrangled his phone and his conversation with the 911 operator.

"Yeah, they're here now," he said as he switched hands to feed his arm through his shirt sleeve. "I gotta let you go."

"Alright sir, well you have a good evening," the lady said, as if they were on a normal customer service call, and Adam stuffed the phone in his pocket and used both hands to fold the ladder and raise the door back up to the ceiling with a reverberating slam. Just as the noise echoed, the police were knocking on the door.

The cop who greeted him was tall and lanky, a regular young-looking Barney Fife.

"Good evening, sir," he said with a cautious look. "I understand you have a disturbance?"

Over his shoulder, his siren lights flashed and bathed the surrounding trees, and Adam knew the neighbors on all sides were probably peeking out their windows right then.

"Yes, in the attic."

"May I come in?"

Adam stepped aside and admitted the officer to enter. He explained in a low voice that he had heard footsteps upstairs, up in the attic, but he spared any details further than that.

"Probably just a raccoon or something," the officer said. "But I can check."

"I thought that at first," Adam explained. "But it definitely sounded like a person."

The landlord is keeping sex slaves up there, you have to take them out of here and go arrest him, is what he wanted to say, but there was no way to propose his theory without making himself look complicit. Best the cop find out for himself.

"Well... you stay down here and I'll go up and check," the officer said, withdrawing his side-arm and looking up at the stairs. Adam took a step back and fumbled his hands nervously as the cop ascended the steps, weapon out and pointed forty-five degrees towards the ground. Adam backed up, turned, and retreated to the kitchen, wishing he had a stiff drink. Instead, he let himself sit at the little table with his laptop, and he stared at the blank screen that had gone to sleep as he sat still and listened closely.

All was silent for a while, until he heard the groan of the attic door being opened, and then the thump of the ladder hitting the ground. Then the cop's slow ascent, one foot creaking on the ladder every other second. Then he thought he heard a surprised cry, though he could have been mistaken, and after that was all silence again. Adam strained to listen and his neck tensed. Suddenly he imagined the cop coming down and arresting him, taking him away for human trafficking. Was any of his semen leftover, perhaps a pearl on the floor, he wondered? Or had the strange girls lapped all the evidence up? Yes, he was fucked. He should pack up his stuff and run. Adam Weil, author cut down before his prime, he thought. On the lam. He stood, but realized he did not have the constitution to be a fugitive. Then he heard the scraping of feet, and a masculine grunt that he most definitely didn't imagine, and then soft rustling. He turned and walked slowly into the living room, walking alongside the stairs, until he stopped and listened. The cop's footfalls were coming down the ladder, and soon, he was coming down the stairs, hitching up his belt.

"Well, I don't think we have a problem here," he said in a chipper voice, landing his foot at the bottom floor with a springy step.

"No?" Adam asked, amazed.

"No, I saw no sign of anybody. Or animals. You know, this isn't the first call that's been made from this house. I guess it must be haunted or something."

"Haunted, huh?"

"That's my assessment. Not worth writing up a report on, though."

"I see. So that's it?"

"Yep. I'll, uh, leave you to it," the cop said, holding back an obvious grin. "If you get up the courage, you can go up there and see for yourself. I assure you it's safe."

"I see... well maybe I'm just a coward, then."

"Ah, don't beat yourself up. Don't beat yourself... anyway, you have a good night, sir."

"I will, and thank you, officer."

"No problem. Call us if there are any more... disturbances." He added the last word with a strange tone, and then he went for the door and Adam showed him out. When he closed the door, he turned and flattened his back against it and collected his breath. He wasn't sure what was real anymore. Had he imagined the encounter with the naked women up there? If you get up the courage, you can go on up and see for yourself, the cop had said. So he determined that he would. He climbed the steps and came up to the attic entrance, which was raised and closed shut, and he pulled the chord and let down the ladder and climbed.

When he pulled the light switch, the girls were still there, and they scrambled off the floor and came towards him as if eager for more of his seed.

Nope, I definitely wasn't imagining things, he thought, as they pawed at his clothes once again, and his zipper was taken down in short order this time. He admitted his hands to travel and press into soft flesh as the articles of his clothing were removed, and soon he was laying on the dusty attic floor, awash in naked bodies, his cock up and urgent and being flooded with flurries of tongue lashes and kisses.

He did not get much writing done that night, except for one paragraph, all by its lonesome:

I came here to focus, but my mind can’t focus now. Over five hours, and I don’t know how I managed to last, and still go back up. This desire is like filling a bottomless cup. My proboscis is sore, and my mind is static, all because naked girls are in the attic!

*****

Frank entered the community gate and his car climbed up the steep paved road and around the bend. It had been a month since his last guest, who had checked out early and left no comment, and he hadn't been able to get another rental when the police department gave him a call. It was only then that he learned that his guest had called them, and though an officer was dispatched and no report made, they insisted on visiting the property. All good, Frank had thought. Let them search.

In interest of keeping his business on good terms with the community, he let the cops inspect his home. They, of course, focused on the attic, and Frank was confident they wouldn't find anything. Enough time had passed, and they would be gone. The officers thanked Frank and left him to his devices. He would have gone up to the attic right then, but he wanted to let things cool down.

Now he was back, and after dusting things down for a while, he then dusted off his hands and traveled upstairs. When he pulled down the attic door, a thin beam of sunlight came in through the space underneath the intake vent. He turned on the light and walked to the center of the room, his head brushing the pitched area of the roof. Moving to the center, he reached down and undid his fly as if he were about to relieve himself.

He was, in another biological sense. But that was not his purpose.

He took his half-limp dick out of his pants. He had already gotten excited when climbing the stairs and imagining the return of the year-long guests of the cabin. Their only requirement for staying was a sustenance of seed. The attic was where they were first summoned, by the owner who he had bought the cabin from, and that was there they would remain, anytime they were called, and with his lust climbing towards the ceiling, Frank slipped his fingers around it and summoned.

It was a meditative moment; he focused on the feeling and urged up the swell, and let it subside, and let it climb again as the phantom images came to him, and their phantom touch, and when his fingers became slippy, he summoned harder, until the moment arrived, and he clenched his throat, and he came stripes onto the dusty wooden floor.

In the post-orgasmal window of time, he attained awareness of the layers of time, and he could feel the ripple that allowed the demonesses to pass through, not seen yet, but soon to take form, as the gelly, ivory rivers on the floor dissipated as if seeping into the floorboards, and in half-formed images, the quartet came into existence. Looming Lara, voluptuous Val, Enticing Evelyn, and Radiant Rene, each an echo of each other, fragmented and rearranged into different proportions, longer or shorter torsos, full or fawny breasts, wide or slender hips, each a representation of the perfectness of the body, and though Frank was spent, his signal of appreciation waved high, stringing the last remnant of his offering.

"Blessed is your return," he said to them, as he'd learned to do. "You will have more devotees soon."

Lara, the tallest, thanked him by shrinking her height to the floor and extending her tongue to catch the last string of semen before it fell, and followed it up to its source.

Naked Ghost Story

Holly wasn't sure which problem she wanted to approach first: which room would be best for her typewriter, or which room needed cleaning the most.

She figured the large, open sitting room to the left of the foyer would be best, though there was something constricting about the openness. She preferred a smaller room to write in, with a window and a nice view. There was the perfect space for it upstairs, but the upstairs rooms were where the previous owner's abandoned clutter had migrated to, or maybe even the clutter of the owners before him.

Holly had bought the house at a steal; she only paid one hundred bucks for it, and it was definitely at least three hundred times that in value by the space alone. At 7,000 square feet, it was more house than she would ever need (and more than she could ever clean), sitting on a few acres of grassy, fairly open land out in the boonies. The owner—or rather, the owner's son—just wanted to get rid of it to escape paying taxes on it. It was Holly's first house, which, at thirty, would seem like a delayed accomplishment in her parents’ eyes, but they were happy enough that she was working at a big tech company in Texas. Was working. They didn't know she had quit because of the office politics, the misogyny, and the unbearable Texas heat. She was glad to be back in the soupy humidity of Louisiana, and she was glad to have an abode and no rent or mortgage to worry about while she collected the money she had saved and focused on what would be the next chapter in her life: being an author. She just didn't know what her first book would be.

Distracting her from the next stage of her life was the sheer amount of cleaning and organizing she would have to do in this big house. There was a lot of dust in every room, and no matter how much she cleaned, the musty smell never disappeared, especially in the big, open sitting room, which would be a perfect place to entertain guests, if not to write. All the furniture was still there, albeit ratty and ancient. A big Native American-style rug covered the center of the rough wood floor. She would have to spend some of her savings to hire a professional team to do a thorough cleaning, she knew, and maybe then she could get rid of the smell of over forty years of habitation and abandonment.

She at least cleaned the room she had decided to make her bedroom, up on the second floor, at the end of a network of hallways and rooms, all crowded with junk. A small nook with a desk and a window looked like the perfect place to write. Currently, though, it was filled with boxes, old equipment (televisions, radios, and other old tech that she did not know the use for), and stacks of old books and magazines that she looked forward to flipping through. Another large room must have been a children’s room, because besides boxes, there were a lot of toys and stuffed animals. Walking the upstairs felt like navigating the abandoned refuse of somebody else's home, but the bedroom became hers. As much as she would rather sleep downstairs, she felt more secure in the upstairs bedroom. Out of the way, one entrance, not even a window, unfortunately, but secure. Living alone in such a big place, in such an isolated location, left her feeling spooked, especially at night. She wondered how long it would take to get over that uneasy feeling. She knew it would be a long time, perhaps never, when she saw the ghost.

She thought it was an intruder at first. Worse, a raving rapist, because of how he was presented. It was night, and she was coming back from the upstairs bathroom and heading through the twisting halls and past the central children's room, and as she passed its open door, a naked man was standing there.

She jumped from the fright of his sudden appearance. He was a very tall but very portly older man, with a barrel for a belly and a thimble for a penis. He was a villain straight out of True Detective, a mountain hillbilly with his eyes set on predation. But his eyes didn't seem to see her. They were panning the room, as if he was looking for something. Holly had the silly thought that if she just stood still enough... She felt strangely more naked than the man in her sleeping shorts and white tank-top. Please don’t look...

The man turned to the left and walked to the other side of the room and out of sight. The first thing Holly did was sprint down the hall to her bedroom and throw the door shut, locking it. Her next thought was to call 911, but with horror, she realized that she had left her phone down in the kitchen. Her heart pounded so furiously that there was no way to hear if the intruder was walking around outside the door. She stood at the foot of the little bed that centerpieced the small room. She could not sit. There was no way she could sleep, though the only feasible thing to do was to lie down with the security that the man couldn't get through that door and the hope that he wouldn't be there in the morning. But that was unacceptable. There would be no way she would be able to fall asleep, no way to assuage the fear that an axe might next split the door open. She had to act.

There was not much in the bedroom that was suitable for a weapon. She had her tote bag, inside of which was just odds and ends, some tampons, her iPad, and a notebook and pen. Her pen. She grabbed the bag from where it sat along the wall and succeeded in dumping out all of its contents as she took the fountain pen—her trusty G2 Pilot—into her trembling hand. She clicked it to withdraw the lethal, ink-laced tip and approached the door, where she stopped and listened. She listened long enough to reconsider her plan and perhaps instead get into bed and pretend nothing was wrong, but eventually bravery—or a lesser brand of foolishness—compelled her to open the door.

The hall was predictably quiet and motionless. Holly stepped out onto the carpeted floor and prayed that her feet wouldn't find any creaking floorboards, which were aplenty in the house. She tried to control her panicked breaths as she made her way down the hall with the shaking fountain pen held in front of her. Around the corner was the open door of the children's room, and the bathroom beyond it, from where she had originally come. It took every ounce of courage for her to approach the open door, and when she got there, the room was empty. Another door on the opposite side of the room, the door that the naked man was heading for, was closed. She was not about to open it. On the other side of the door was the landing that led down to the first floor, which could be reached by following the hallway that surrounded the central room. That would be the better route to go. Or would it be? Maybe the killer would expect her to come out from the end of the hall, and was waiting for her around the corner, just as likely as he could be waiting on the other side of that door. Wherever he would be waiting, she would plunge the pen into his big belly. That would be enough to stop even the most rabid rapist.

But what was a man doing wandering around naked in the middle of the night? Did he enter her house that way, or did he disrobe when he came inside? If it was the former, he could be out of his mind, Holly realized, out of his mind on fentanyl or something else. He might not react to being stabbed in the gut. In fact, it might make him more aggressive. Her vulnerability made her tremble, and then she saw a more suitable weapon.

Though the room was pooled with shadows, enough light from the hallway gleamed on the smooth, finished surface of a baseball bat propped in the corner. Holly was suddenly thankful for all the junk that had been inherited to her and she pocketed her pen and took up her new weapon, giving it a test swing that whooshed through the stale air. She was ready, and she even felt the tiniest bit more brave.

There was no naked man waiting for her around the corner of the perimeter hallway, only the railing overlooking the next landing where her would-be writing nook was, and the next set of half-stairs that led down into the large sitting room. She went slow, unable to avoid a creek on the first set of stairs, freezing immediately when she caused the sound, so as to make it seem that it was just the house settling. Then she continued. She ducked her head into the nook and saw no intruder, though it was filled with so much junk and darkness that he could easily have been hiding there. How well could one hide in the dark when they were naked and as light-skinned as that man was, though?

Holly experienced a small and odd feeling of relief when she got to the bottom floor and saw no sign of anyone. She made her way to the foyer, past the front door, which she checked and was securely locked. She moved on to the other side of the house, past the dining room and into the separate kitchen, where the light still buzzed above the sink (a waste of electricity, she knew, but a source of comfort). The back door was closed and her phone lay on the countertop next to the sink. With relief, she rushed up to it, but hated to free a hand from the baseball bat. She was beginning to think the man was just a hallucination. Through the kitchen window, she looked out at the blackness of her back lot. She shut off the light and was thrown into darkness, and as her eyes adjusted, she saw the dull glow of the moonlit and light-polluted sky in the spaces between the trees. Anything could be hiding out there, but all was still. She hurriedly turned on the sink light again and it lit up after a few flickers preceding its steady buzz. Then, before she did anything, she investigated the rest of the house. And there was a lot to explore: the narrow hall that led away from the kitchen to the downstairs bathroom, and the other back door that led out to an elevated deck, a central room with two entrances that was clear of clutter except for a large and out-dated flat-screen TV in front of a wide couch, and a strange, erotic framed picture done in marker, depicting a voluptuous woman's nude figure from the shoulders down, which Holly had taken down and faced against the wall. None of the windows outside that room were disturbed. All three doors (the front, and the two back ones) were securely locked. She was too afraid to step out even onto the closed deck, but there was no need. And there was no need to call 911, she was certain. It must have just been her imagination, a vision come to her because of her tiredness, though she certainly wasn't tired now. Her mind began working as she walked back through the sitting room, reluctant to go upstairs; maybe she would write a ghost story! Though she certainly would change the ghost's appearance. Why did her mind concoct an image of a naked man, and an old fat one, of all types? That was a question of the subconscious that she certainly wasn't ready to answer. She didn't really believe it was a ghost. That was, until she heard the flutter of a child's laughter coming from upstairs.

*****

She didn't call 911. She called the next most reasonable number she could think of: the number of her old college classmate Toby, who lived nearby. It was eleven o’clock (she typically went to bed early). He would be up, and he wouldn't mind hearing from her. He was taken aback when she asked if he wanted to come over.

*****

He arrived twenty minutes later. Holly could see the splash of his headlights through the front windows from the sitting room chair she waited in, and then they doused, and she got up. Toby looked surprised by her appearance when she opened the door to him standing there, his fist raised to knock.

"W-wow, Holly, you're looking... pretty good."

Maybe she should have put something on over her snug tank-top, she realized, but she had been too scared to think about decency.

"I was worried you were going to say I looked scared. Come on in." He stepped in and she closed out the chorus of crickets from outside.

"I didn't know you were back in town," he said, hoisting the strap of his backpack up on his pudgy shoulder, his eyes skittish and unable to look into hers. "Are you on vacation from Texas or something? Nice digs."

"No, I quit. And this is my house. I bought it."

His eyes widened.

"Really? No way."

"Yeah, I had to quit. It was getting to be too much bullshit."

"No, I mean the house. You bought this?"

"Pssh, it was only a hundred bucks. Come on, let's get out of the foyer," she said amidst his confused looks, and she led him to the sitting room before he could form his next question.

"So you heard giggling?" he asked her later as they sat in the sitting room. He was her first guest.

"Yeah, just when I thought it was all in my head," she said. "Maybe it still is. It sounded so clear, though."

"I guess I'll go up and look?"

"I can go with you," she said. "In case that naked man is... well, real. Do you have your spirit box thingy?"

"Yeah, in my bag," he said. "Let me get it out."

Toby's love of all things paranormal was the main reason why she had called him, less because of any close connection between the two of them. Really, they were just casual friends, though they continued to talk on the phone long after college, when she was living in Texas. Inviting him over, she knew, might invite ideas of possibilities in his head, especially with her breasts summoning up visible embossments under her tank-top. She didn't want to lead him along, but... who else was she going to call? Certainly not her parents, who would not be amused that their thirty-year-old daughter was calling them because she was scared of ghosts.

So they headed upstairs, Toby in front, Holly bringing up the rear with her baseball bat as they climbed the first half-flight of stairs, ready to clobber anyone after they clobbered her friend. The main door the to children's room loomed on the next landing, which they slowly headed towards, snaking around the tight pathway.

"That's where he was," she whispered to Toby, leaning in close so that her breath tickled the nape of his neck, and she could see him visibly tense. He kept his eyes forward, though, and clutched his walkie-talkie-looking device as if it were a weapon as capable as her baseball bat, and they ascended the second small flight of steps and came up to the door.

"M-maybe you should lead," he suggested. "You got the bat." Holly wrinkled her nose. I'm the one who called you for support, she thought, but she nodded and held up her weapon. Toby put his hand on the doorknob, looked back at her to be sure, and then opened. Holly rushed in with her weapon raised, and immediately swiped it downwards, hoping to clock anybody that might be there. But it cut through thin air and then thunked on the ground. She quickly righted her weapon again and swiped it in horizontal arcs in front of her, touching nothing. The light from the hallway coming through the other open door through which she had seen the naked man barely dispelled the shadows, and with a trembling hand, she reached behind her to feel for the light switch, not familiar enough yet as to where it might be, and pressed her fingers into Toby's soft flesh instead.

"Sorry," she said, and she bumped against him and found the light switch, and the room became blinding, and all the danger was gone. There was nothing except the stacks of boxes and discarded toys, the ratty bed stacked with magazines and coloring books, and pictures on the wall, nowhere for an intruder to hide. Except for the closet, which Holly headed for next, bat raised. Toby was walking around the room, holding up his spirit box while Holly tore open the folding slatted closet door and swiped her bat inside.

"All clear here, I guess," Toby said. Holly turned around and observed him touring the room, the box held in front of him like a gadget from Ghostbusters.

"Sense anything?" she asked.

"It doesn't work like that," he said. "This is to catch EVPs. We'll have to listen to it when we're done here. Be quiet a moment, let's just record."

Holly complied wordlessly.

"Is anybody here?" Toby asked to the room, then waited. "...If there are any spirits here, please let yourself be known." And again he waited in silence, and all Holly heard was the creaks of the old house that she wasn't completely sure weren’t footsteps.

*****

They retreated down to the sitting room after investigating the rest of the upper floor, and Holly went to the kitchen to grab them some Diet Cokes. They settled in their respective chairs, leaving the sofa—which Toby glanced at—unoccupied.

"Thanks," he said, accepting the sweating can of Coke while he fished some corded earbuds from his bag to plug into the spirit box sitting on his lap.

"So you hear anything on that?" she asked nervously, like a patient asking their doctor for a prognosis.

"Give me a sec," he said, and Holly leaned back in her chair, conscious again of the fullness of her breasts against the snugness of her tank-top in front of Toby’s eyes. Instinctively, she hugged herself, and it made her look more scared. She sipped her Coke and watched Toby's vacant gaze as he pressed one of the earbuds deeper into his ear.

"Nothing," he said, after an unbearable minute of silence. "Nothing at all."

Holly let out a sigh.

"You think I just imagined it?" she asked, and took a slurping sip of her Coke.

"Not necessarily," Toby said. He sat the spirit box down and traded it for his own drink, which he popped open. "Just because we didn't hear anything doesn't mean that nothing's there."

"I see..."

"You alright, though?" he asked. "Do you feel any better?"

"A little," she said. She did in fact feel a lot less scared, maybe because if there were ghosts, they might not be threatening. And maybe it was because she had company. It made her forget her isolation. But the way he framed the question seemed to be leading into the question of whether he was going to stay the night or not. She hadn't really thought about whether or not he would when she had called him. Thankfully, his next question was much more procedural.

"So how'd you get such a steal?" he asked. "I guess I can see why; the place needs some work." He paused, realizing that may have sounded insulting. "No offense."

"It's alright," Holly said with a wave of her hand, and she explained to him how she had come across it, the son of the previous owner, the listing on Zillow that she had to snatch up, but wary of what she might be walking into.

"It is an old place," she said. "It was built in the Fifties. The sale record online only shows back to 1999, though, and it's had the same owner since then."

"Were they just letting it sit here?" Toby asked.

"Yeah, I guess. I guess this was the seller's father's home, though it doesn't look like he did much with it. Some of this stuff sitting around is so old..." She thought about telling him of the pervy-looking painting, but then decided not to. "I don't know if it's his stuff, or some past owner's."

Toby thought about that and tipped back his Coke can, which was already almost empty.

"They say," he began in a thoughtful tone, "...that when you move around, and when you take your stuff with you, each house you live in ends up being a merging of all the other places you've ever stayed at. It's like time travel, kinda. Your old childhood house exists inside of your current house, say, with an old dining room table, or a couch." Again he glanced at the couch. Was he imagining himself and her cuddling on it? "Say... where's your bathroom?"

Holly blinked away her last thought.

"Oh, it’s at the end of the kitchen. Go past the front door and through the dining room and there's a little hallway that leads to it."

"Alright," he said, sitting his can down on the glass coffee table awkwardly placed before them in a way that neither of them could comfortably access it. "I'll be back."

Above the passage of time, all can be seen at once. What you are doing, what I am doing, what Holly is doing (sitting in her easy chair, nursing her Diet Coke and feeling anxious for some reason), and what Toby is doing: walking through the kitchen to the small hallway in back in order to use the restroom. And before he gets to the door at the end of the hall, an unexpected and startling vision walks in from the back patio door to the right without ever needing to open it.

Her hair flows long and dark down her back, her skin is pale but cooked on the edges, on her shoulders, and an infectious smile is on her face, almost as captivating as the rest of her, nude, her small breasts like white apples capped in pink, and her slim stomach leading down to a wink of femininity, shocking to him; it's just as he imagined her for years within the confines of his lonely room back at home. The girl crosses the room and towards the bathroom goes, until her rhythmic backside fades away with the rest of her, and she is just a memory, a memory that Toby will hold onto from here on out.

Holly was alarmed at the way that Toby limped back into the sitting room.

"Everything alright?" she asked.

"I... I just saw a naked ghost," he reported with a sober face. Holly sat forward in her chair.

"No way... really?"

"Yeah, except this wasn't a naked dude. It was, well... a naked girl."

Holly hugged herself again to shield the gaze of his eyes on her tightly-wrapped chest.

"So I have a host of naked ghosts in this house," she said.

"Y-yeah," Toby replied, his eyes passing up her body curled up in the chair. "Seems like it."

*****

Toby did not end up staying the night, apparently more spooked at what he saw than Holly had been. He seemed in a hurry to leave, too. So much for being her support. She didn't even get to theorize with him why both his ghost and hers were naked. But he, apparently, had had enough. Holly wasn't even really all that upset, and for some reason, she was less scared. It was around one in the morning when Toby left, and Holly was plenty tired now, happily marching upstairs to her bedroom, peeking into the children's room as she went, almost wanting to see the naked ghost. But there was nothing there, and she slept safely and securely in her windowless bedroom so that when she woke up, she was shocked at how bright the house was when she exited her room. She had slept until ten in the morning.

*****

She spent her days cleaning and organizing, first clearing out the nook that she decided would be her writing space. She was eager to use her typewriter, a vintage 1930s typewriter that looked straight out of the Resident Evil games, which she had bought at a pawn shop. She was eager to take notes and brainstorm, but she didn't need a typewriter for that; she would sit out on the porch and watch the sun set while she sipped on some mint juleps just as if she were Scarlet O'Hara. But first, she would need actual booze and mint leaves.

Cleaning out the nook—and the rest of the upstairs—was now something to be looked forward to, because now she could take her time sifting through all the old things left behind and maybe piece together the past lives of these naked ghosts that lived with her. So far, she found nothing illuminating, though there were some interesting things nevertheless. The stacks of magazines were all ancient, as far as she was concerned: old issues of Time, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, and even a few Playboys, which she sneered at. All of them had dates ranging from 1961 to 1964, though she could tell they were '60s publications just from looking at them. The books were less interesting, though, even older, almost all non-fiction, with topics such as plant identification, gardening, cooking, and landscaping. There were a few ancient fiction books mixed in, books with titles she never heard of, like "Anna and her Garden." Their covers were plain, faded green or maroon, and their spines felt like they would crumble when opening the first page. They must have been from the nineteenth century. Old books like that weren't an unusual sight for Holly, who loved going to old used bookstores that usually had a "vintage" shelf full of tomes that looked just like these, but she had never seen a vintage magazine before, so those were more fascinating. Especially since it put a place in time for her to wonder about. There was no doubt that those magazines were bought and flipped through in a relatively short amount of time, so that meant that whoever had flipped through them had done so in the Sixties. Touching the laminated pages made her feel connected to the people that had lived there. Had the ghostly man she witnessed flipped through those very pages?

*****

She had an interesting encounter when she went to the liquor store to look for booze. She already felt like an outsider there, since she didn't usually drink. She didn't know what the heck went into a mint julep and had to look it up on her phone before she left: bourbon, tonic water, and mint leaves. She was already confused about what type of tonic water to get. There was "tonic" water and "soda" water and "sparking water"... How many types of water did there need to be? She was trying to figure it all out when an old, scruffy-faced man approached her.

"Hey... you're at the old Novak place, aren't ya?"

Holly was startled and she instantly took a defensive posture. She was unfortunately used to dealing with pervy old men, especially thanks to her former job. This man was tall and dominating, stocky, with grey stubble on his sun-weathered and stern face. She took a step away from him and asked: "Huh?"

"That big old house out there. You moved in?"

Don't let him know where I live, she thought, clutching the bottle of bourbon she had chosen, ready to use it as a weapon if she had to.

"That place has been empty for a long time," the man said when she didn’t answer. "I don't envy the mess you have to clean up."

Yeah, she thought. All those boxes and books, not to mention the ghosts.

"That place seems to attract the wrong kind of people," he said seriously, studying her. "Let's hope you buck the trend."

And with that, the man stuffed his hands in his pockets, turned, and walked away, the whole conversation finished with Holly only saying one word. She stood there by the cooler, shaken, trying to process what the man had just said. The wrong kind of people... What did that mean? Suddenly her ideas for what the house’s story could be about took a darker turn. Shaken by that revelation as much as by the odd encounter, she opened the cooler and randomly picked out one of the various labeled bottles of water. If she ended up making a jank version of a mint julep, she wouldn't know the difference anyway.

She saw the man at the front of the store, paying at the register where a giant bottle of whiskey was being bagged by the clerk, and he looked over his shoulder at her and almost sneered before he took his purchase and walked out the door. The clerk was, in contrast, much more friendly, though as Holly was checking out, her increasingly nervous state put her head on a swivel and made her aware of an older woman standing at the end of one of the wine shelves, peering over at Holly, staring at her, with a slow-growing and open-mouthed smile spreading on her face. Holly tore her eyes away from her and returned her attention to the clerk, her neck and shoulders tense, and she finished her purchase, took her bag, and hurried out of the store without looking back at the woman or anybody else, worried that the surly man would be in the parking lot waiting to talk to her again. But he wasn't. She hurried to her car. There sure were some strange characters in this town...

*****

Novak. That was the name the man had said. The name wasn't familiar. She scrolled through her e-mails looking for the home warranty deed that was sent to her, in between looking up how to make a mint julep, as she stood in her kitchen with her ingredients on the counter before her. Through the kitchen window, the back lot was inviting, bathed in picturesque orange as the setting sun cast its rays through the thin conifer trees. Soon she was out there, on the back deck, with her fancy glass and the first cocktail she had ever made, her notebook open to a blank page close to the front, and a couple of the magazines she had found interesting: the National Geographic, with a picture of a grinning Tahitian girl on the cover, flowers in her hair and her pointy boobs nearly spilling out of her bikini top; and, for the hell of it, one of the Playboys, no girl on the cover, surprisingly, but a ratty-looking rabbit mascot in a suit, reclining by a fire.

Her drink was sweet with a severe bite, at first pleasant but then a struggle to enjoy. She had put too much bourbon in it. She made a mental note and sat the sweating glass on the little wobbly plastic stool next to her, leaned back on her rocking chair, and slid her notebook up her thighs, taking up the pen and gazing out at the flare of sunset painting her back lot.

The ideas weren't coming to her. She honestly had no idea what to make of this house's history yet. She tried to spin up a story, but based on how the man at the liquor store had talked to her, and the nakedness of her ghosts, her story was darkening. That, and the snapshot memory of the old lady gazing at her, put a scenario in her head of a troubled town, someplace haunted or possessed. She thought of the movie In the Mouth of Madness with Sam Neil. She grew uneasy thinking of creepy things sitting out there on her porch in the middle of the woods, so she put her notebook aside, pulled up one of the magazines that had slid between her leg and the armrest, and decided to flip through it while there was still light enough to read.

She flipped through the National Geographic cover article on Tahiti (after a front-loaded section of full-page advertisements), though her eyes already strained to try to get to the end of a paragraph, so she just admired the pictures, including several choice shots of pretty island woman, such as the girl on the cover, with the pull-quote: "The Women are finely Shaped," and a woman standing nude in the distance under the streams of a fifty-foot waterfall, and yet another woman swimming, her naked form rippled under the water as if she were a fish.

The article was so long to Holly. It seemed to go on forever, and she flipped more rapidly, slowing down at a feature on a backwoods Appalachian community, many pictures with haunting and quiet scenery, the people there living simple lives, though with much more clothes than the people of Tahiti, and with much paler skin.

It was getting too dark to read even captions or pull-quotes without staring at them, so Holly shut the magazine and then picked up the Playboy just to satisfy her curiosity.

She was surprised by page after page of dense text in the front of the book, and then page after page of advertisements, as with the National Geographic. Liquors, cigarettes, old outdated projectors, and fancy colognes. And more advertisements. Geez, she thought. Things were just as bad back then. Then she got to the interview section, and saw three portraits of an old man, his name in large letters at the top of the page, and she thought she remembered his name. Wasn't he a famous author? More ads—more liquor—an advice column, and then a pictorial. Old, sixties haircuts and nothing else, buxom women representing their colleges in a feature that featured just as much text as flesh. Holly found it strange for these young women to be so transparent (literally), sharing details about their lives, their aspirations, and the privacy of their bodies, as if it were no big deal. Or perhaps it was. According to the quotes she had to squint to read in the growing dark, posing in the magazine was "like a dream," for one girl. Or did she read "like a demon?" She decided she had had enough reading, and closed the magazine. Her mint julep was still over half full.

A little while later she was seated on the floor of the children’s room, the julep resting precariously next to her on the thick carpet, while she went through some boxes and loose items: sheets of blank construction paper, some Highlights magazines, crayons; this would take forever to clean out. She was probably going to have to rent a dumpster to throw away all the stuff that crowded this room and the nook. Some of the stuff she would feel bad about throwing out. A large trip to a thrift store would be in order. Just because she didn't want these things, didn't mean that somebody else wouldn't. Like her typewriter, still unused.

More pressing, though, was a desire to find anything that might give light to the lives these people lived. The wrong kind of people, the man at the liquor store had said. What kind of "wrong" had he been talking about? All sorts of horrible possibilities half-formed in her mind before she blocked each one out. She didn't want to imagine that she might be living in the home of the deranged family from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. An old-timey children's book she picked up, with happy bears in old frontier clothing, didn't look like something murderers would have.

As if to provide evidence of the former resident's purity, a sheet of construction paper slid out of the book, and unlike its blank brothers, this one had a crude children's drawing that made Holly smile. Four figures stood before a field represented in rapidly-drawn crayon slashes, and even though there wasn't much more to the scenery than that, Holly knew on instinct that it was the backyard that was being depicted, and the figures—two children and two adults—were no doubt the children that had lived here, and their parents. Classic smiley faces filled each round head, but other than that, there were no details, not even an attempt to define the sleeves of their shirts. Each figure was just a hollow outline, almost as if they were ghosts themselves. Something about that unnerved Holly and took away her smile, and she quickly slid it back in between the pages it had fallen out of and clammed the book shut before she could conjure up memories of the countless horror movies that focused the scares on children being creepy. As if on queue, she heard rhythmic creakings from somewhere else in the house that weren't just the boards settling.

"Hey there, ghosts," she called over her shoulder, in the same tone of voice one might use with a pet. "Are you good?"

Naturally, she didn't expect an answer. But curiosity had her standing up and going to investigate. She half-expected to run face-first into a ghost waiting outside the door for her, but the landing was empty. She went down the half-flight of steps, along the railed corridor, and down the next, so she could lean out and take a peek at the sitting room below—and then she saw it. The figure of what looked like a little boy dashed across the downstairs room, as if he were streaking around the house after exiting the bath. He disappeared around the corner that led to the foyer.

Nope, Holly thought, and backed away to return upstairs and finish her mint julep.

*****

"Do you have records that go back farther than 1999?" Holly asked the lady on the other side of the glass in the county clerk's office the next day.

"Well, the older stuff was never filed electronically," the chubby-cheeked and permed woman said. She rattled her long-nailed fingers on the keyboard and stared intently at the screen that Holly couldn't see. "...Nope, I don't have anything here, except the taxes, and then your sale."

Holly chewed her lip, wanting to ask about the wrong kind of people. The lady seemed oblivious to the contortions of Holly's face.

"Anything else I can help you with?" the woman asked with downcast eyes.

"Yes, um, well.. was there some sort of... controversy? With the people who lived there?"

"Oh gee, I don't know fully, honey, I moved here twenty years ago. I do recall a single guy living there by himself, not unlike you, I guess." She added the last part with a smirk. "Seems he threw a lot of parties there, so makes sense why people might not like that. Not that he was bothering anybody way out there. He hasn't been staying there for the last ten years, though. Real quiet over there."

"He's... the original owner?"

"Oh, Lord no, that place was built in the Fifties. As I recall, the guy that I remember was pretty young. Not much older than you."

"I see..."

"Oughta be plenty of space for you to invite all your friends over," the lady then said.

Thanks, Holly thought. I got plenty of them there already.

*****

As there was no location for Holly to repel in like Tom Cruise to sift through old records, Holly continued her cleaning of the upstairs. She had gone back to the liquor store to pick up some boxes, afraid of bumping into the surly old man or the belittling face of the smiling old lady. But neither were there, and the clerk didn't care who she was, and said she could take as many boxes as she liked. An hour later, she was sitting cross-legged in the children's room, stashing what looked like might be of interest to a thrift store-goer into a box, discarding what wasn't into a black trash bag. She was surprised at how quickly she swept out the room. There were still things, but already the space opened up and felt larger. She ran through ideas of what she could use the room for; another bedroom for guests? If she were an artist, it would make a perfect painting room. It could be a writing room, but she already loved the nook, currently crowded with boxes, which she knew she should have finished first. Next, however, she moved on to the closet.

The closet, in contrast to the whole room, was comparatively empty. One abandoned coat hung at the end, to the left, in shadows, and the rows of wire hangers leading from it were like its friends who had already died and turned to skeletons. One cardboard box sat on the floor below it, and some folders and papers stuck out from the edge of the wooden shelf above her.

The first thing she did was check the coat, hoping there would be money inside. Unfortunately, there was only lint. It was a nice coat, though; it was wool, and looked vaguely military. Maybe she would wash it and wear it, make part of the house's history her own (she recalled what Toby had said). She checked the box next but it was empty, and then she looked at the shelf. What she pulled down was a plastic binder. It was light and not very full, but there were several shiny, plastic pages filling it, and she was somewhat startled when she opened it to the middle and was immediately presented with a black-and-white photograph of two nude children. It made her eyebrows raise; it would have been an innocent enough-looking photo if they had worn clothes. A boy and a girl stood in a grassy yard, probably the very yard behind the house right now, the boy looking to be about eight and the girl—slightly taller—perhaps a tad older, and both of them were shamelessly presented, as if there was no concern leaving uncovered what most kids were taught must remain hidden. It was alien to see, and a pit in Holly's stomach tightened, the phrase repeating in her head: the wrong kind of people. A chill ran down her spine as she thought of what the lady at the county clerk's office had said. Seems he threw a lot of parties there. She almost didn't want to turn the page, afraid of what she'd find, but with the need to get to the bottom of everything, she held her breath and flipped to the next page, and was surprised to see a picture of two adults, arms over each other's shoulders, as nude and as shameless as the children. It was a tall woman who looked almost fifty and had a warm smile, and next to her, almost as tall, was a stocky man with a mustache of short bristles that did not hide his jolly smile, nor did he hide his heaving belly, almost as if he were proud of it, and nor did he seemed ashamed of the rest below, and Holly was certain: that was her naked ghost.

*****

"Was this the girl you saw?" Holly asked Toby as they knelt in the center of the kid's room and opened the binder to show him the picture of the couple.

"What the heck, who takes pictures like that naked?"

"I'm guessing they're nudists."

"Hippies."

"It was the Sixties. You don't recognize her, though?"

"No," he said immediately. "The ghost I saw was younger."

"A child?"

He shook his head vigorously. "No, she was... our age." He flipped the page and came upon the picture of the two nude children. "What the hell, man."

"Do you think it's an older version of her?" Holly said, pointing at the little girl, no longer phased by the photo. "'Cause I sure think the boy is the other ghost I saw."

Toby's eyes passed quickly by the startling photo and by all the other photos that Holly had looked at, mostly wide shots of what was definitely her back lot, only faded and in black and white, occasionally with a nude person far out at the end of the scenery, blending in with everything.

"I thought about what you said about furniture and stuff, everything melding. What if people blend together with all the inanimate things?"

"No," Toby repeated. "The girl definitely wasn't..." He got to the front of the scrapbook and let the binder fall closed. "Doesn't it feel kind of dirty to have this?"

"Well, there's a reason I leave it up here and not sitting downstairs," she said, thinking it ironic how she had left the Playboy sitting on an end table in the living room, and how interested Toby had been in it when he saw it lying there. "But the pictures are innocent. At first I thought there was some Jeffrey Epstein stuff going on here. The lady at the clerk's office said the owner ‘threw a lot of parties,’ but he wasn't the original owner. These pictures are too old."

"Why were they even left here?"

Holly shook her head.

"I don't know. There's a lot of old stuff just crammed up here. It's like the guy who bought it before me had all this leftover stuff and he just pushed it all upstairs. Maybe the original owners left in a hurry."

"I wonder if he saw this?" Toby asked, glancing down at the binder. With it no longer open, the attention was now drawn to each other, with the awkward realization of how close they were, their knees almost touching.

"I don't know," Holly said, imagining the wrong kind of people flipping through the scrapbook the way Toby wanted to flip through the Playboy.

*****

Holly was upstairs the next afternoon, setting her typewriter out finally on the desk that filled the end of the narrow nook, now cleared of most of its clutter which sat out on the landing in stacks of boxes. She ran her hand along the smooth iron of the antique, and the light from the window was dim and indirect. In the evening, the setting sun would shine through, and she knew exactly what time of day would be perfect for beginning the story that was now forming in her mind. She would write until the sun fully set and night took over, and the ghosts would come out to encourage her.

Ahead of schedule, one of the ghosts made noise from downstairs, more direct and singular a noise than she'd heard from them so far: a rhythmic knocking.

"That's right, ghosts," she said. "I'm going to tell your story."

The ghosts did not reply to that, but she wasn't offended. She returned her attention to her typewriter. It looked so regal. However, she didn't know if it actually worked. She supposed she should go get some paper and test it out. It would be awful to get settled down in the evening only to find that the typewriter was inoperable.

The ghosts knocked again, a little louder. Maybe they can read my mind and are agreeing with me, Holly thought, though she quickly realized the knocking was coming from downstairs at the front of the house.

She was startled when she opened the front door and was met with nearly the exact visage of the full-bellied man from the scrapbook, and her ghost, only wearing a workman's button-down shirt and a pair of round glasses.

"Hi, I hate to bother you," the man said in a scratchy but somehow comforting voice. "But I used to live here."

Realization and rapture flooded through Holly, and her mouth hung open but failed to say anything.

"I had heard somebody decent moved in that might actually take care of the place," the man continued. "I figured it was as good an opportunity as ever to come see the place again."

"C... come in," Holly said, stepping back in invitation for him to enter.

*****

The house is different, but incredibly the same. Through the large sitting room Harry runs, past the foyer, through the dining room, past his mother standing at the kitchen sink, looking down at him with fondness as he bolts out the back door and into the field in pursuit of his sister. He runs free and without a stitch on, just as his mother watches them through the kitchen window without a stitch on. He does not comprehend the difference between his current state and the dressed state he must take on when going into town. He only knows that he is currently in his default state, but that it is an unacceptable state to be in when outside their property, or when people come over, and he feels better when he is in his default state, his bare feet padding against the damp grass, the air cutting against his chest, the expanse of their private lot as large as he needs it to be. Beyond the trees he feels as if he could run forever, though he knows he can't, and doesn't care to, for all he needs is right here.

He catches up to his sister, standing in a grove of young trees; they are in good company. She turns to him and extends her hands, and resting on her palm is a fat toad, whose throat undulates and whose eyes blink calmly at Harry. The toad sees no threat from them; they are all in harmony with nature.

But they become aware of a much different presence nearby: a man crouches in the brush, and his eyes widen when met with theirs. He is clothed, in dirty overalls and an undershirt. Dirt is smeared across his face. Though Harry and his sister are naked, it is the clothed man who ironically seems like a savage. Sensing danger, Harry takes his sister's wrist and the toad drops to the padded grass with a barely audible flop, and the children turn tail and run just as the man stands up and props his fists on his hips. They run into the safe proximity of their father, who has stepped off the back porch and stands with his fists on his hips in much the same way as the clothed man, and when Harry and his sister are behind him, he begins to march out to confront the intruder, but the man has darted away like a scared deer.

"I haven't seen this place in almost fifty years," the man who introduced himself as Hal (or "Harry," though he preferred Hal) said as he and Holly walked into the large sitting room where she and Toby had pondered about the ghost that now walked with her. "It's uncanny."

"How long did you live here for?" Holly asked him.

"Until I was almost ten. We had to move out abruptly."

"When would that have been?"

He cocked an eye at the direct question. "Oh, I would say in the mid-Sixties. Dad had to handle the sale of the house from afar, through an agent. We were in Texas when the house sold."

"Hey, I worked in Texas."

"Ah really? Where at?"

"Houston."

"Ah yes, We actually live close to there."

"Really? And you drove all the way here?"

"A friend of mine told me that the house sold again. I guess I just got curious."

They had drifted into the TV room, a room still as-of-yet unused by Holly, and curious, she went over to the far wall next to the giant television and turned around the figure painting that she had left propped there.

"There's a lot of stuff in this place. Like this, for instance. Was this yours?"

The man looked down at the painting with unfamiliar and curious eyes. "No," he said. "That looks too recent, anyway."

She returned the painting to its position facing the wall.

"I guess from the second owner, then," she said.

"Or probably the third. Couldn't keep tabs on the place, we didn't have internet back then. All I know is that the guy who bought it from Dad wanted to make it a bed and breakfast, but his idea didn't last long and he sold it, too. I heard through the grapevine about the guy that bought it after him, in the Seventies, and I guess he kept it in shape to the bare minimum."

"Yeah," Holly said. "Most of the leftover stuff was just moved upstairs. Speaking of which..."

She chewed her lip and thought about whether or not to present him with the things she had found up there. "Hold on."

The man nodded and Holly rushed out of the room, across the sitting room, and up into the second floor. She felt vulnerable leaving this stranger in her home (he was a stranger, afterall), and she didn't stay away long, coming back down with the binder from the kid's room closet moments later.

Hal was waiting for her in front of the door to the TV room.

"This," Holly said as she came up to him, holding out the book and hesitating at opening it. "I found this upstairs the other day."

She went through with it and opened it. The scrapbook opened to the picture of the two happy, naked children. Holly glanced up at Hal and saw his eyebrows raise.

"Is this you?" she asked, pointing at the boy.

"Why yes... That was left here?"

"Yep," Holly said. "Found it in the closet."

"Well I'll be. I guess Paula was making a scrapbook."

"Paula?"

"My apologies. My sister, That's she and I."

He reached out for the book with affection and Holly handed it over to him. He flipped the page and came to the picture of the nude man and woman.

"And those are my parents," he said. "Mom and Dad." He sighed, and his eyes looked up from the page.

"I guess it bears explaining, but we obviously were dedicated nudists."

"I figured that," Holly said flatly.

"We were a good family. There's a lot of misunderstanding about the... I hate the word "lifestyle," but that's the word that people use."

Holly nodded slightly, studying the man's face. He didn't seem like "the wrong kind of people." But still, an interrogative spirit took over her.

"So why did your family have to leave abruptly?"

The man looked up from the book and sighed. "Well, I'm afraid there were some people in this town that didn't approve of us. It was unfortunate. I often wonder what I'd be doing if I had finished growing up here."

He flipped a page and looked forlornly at the photo of the back lot, perhaps seeing into his memories.

"If you want to let it out," Holly said, "I can make us some mint juleps."

*****

They were still standing in the kitchen almost an hour later, leaning against the counter and peering out the window at the expansive back lot as they nursed their drinks and talked.

"So just like that, we had to leave. The bricks through our window were the last straw," Hal said. "My father didn't want to risk any harm coming to us. Ironic, that the people who suspected child abuse would potentially endanger a child. Nobody cared when we left. You'd think they'd want to pursue us and make sure we were safe."

He told Holly all of it, how his family, émigrés from Czechoslovakia, had been recent converts to the philosophy of nudism before they left their country, and decided to instill its values in the family they grew. And so Hal, his sister, and his parents spent more time unclothed in their spacious home and estate than they did dressed. And they had found camaraderie with others in the region, others recognized by a twinkle in their eye and a dismissiveness towards society's taboos and insecurities. Over time, gatherings were had at Hal and his family's house, and he met many unique and varied people, and quickly accepted their nude appearances, realizing that, unlike those outside his family up until that point, where he had only associated his mother, father, and sister with nakedness, that other people were the same. There were many jolly festivities had at the house, from the first day of spring to the summer solstice, to the Fourth of July, and even Christmas (spent with clothes on mostly, though not completely). But the more activity that occurred at the house, the more attention came from the outside town, until rumors spread that the family was a bunch of sexual deviants, and that they were sexually abusing their children.

"I'm glad for the time I spent in this house," Hal concluded. "At least I got to reach an age old enough that the lessons this lifestyle taught me stuck."

"And you never tried to come back?" Holly asked, completely comfortable with this man now, leaning steeply against the counter, cradling her nearly-empty julep in her hands.

"No," Hal sighed. "Life got busy, you know? After Dad finally sold the place and we got settled in our new lives, well, life just went on. Me and my sister went to high school and all that. My father fought hard to find stable employment. Naturism—or I'm sorry, ‘nudism,’ whatever you like to call it—was far outside of our minds. By the time me and Paula were grown up, we had our father to tend to, for he was falling ill. Life threw us so many challenges that coming back here wasn't a reasonable task. But it's not like I didn't think about it.

"We found out about its transfer of title through a friend that was still loyal to us here in town," Hal explained. "And we could not guess as to the character of the new owner, except rumblings that he was young and he liked to party. Not that coming to see the place was within our minds at that point. But after Dad died, I began to rekindle my desire for that type of life again. I found like-minded people, and I revived the club that my mother and father founded."

"It was a club?" Holly asked, sloshing the almost-melted ice cubes in her glass as she swirled it in short circles.

"When we had enough regular guests at our house here, we began to call ourselves the ‘Bare Social Society,’" Hal explained. "It's an offshoot of sorts of a network Dad was part of back in Czechoslovakia."

Bare Social Society... Holly wanted to snicker at the almost unfortunate acronym that formed, and she bit back her grin, but it fought against her teeth and turned into an earnest smile.

"Once the internet became a thing, it became a blessing for organizing and communicating," Hal explained. "We have members all over the globe, even here, in this town."

"Really?" Holly asked, surprised.

"Why yes. We still keep in touch, too. And thanks to the internet, I was able to know whenever this place switched hands, and the people I knew here told me the hidden details."

He sighed.

"It sounds like I'm spying." He laughed.

Holly chuckled. "You're fine," she said. "I would want to look in, too." She swished the melted ice around in her glass and tipped it back. There was nothing to taste but tangy water, and she thought about making another julep, but told herself that she probably shouldn't get drunk with a stranger (he was still a stranger, but a little less so) in her house. She was loosened up enough, anyway, to open up about her "housemates."

"So..." She didn't know how this would affect him; would he burst into tears, or maybe be offended? Would he think she was crazy? "I've been seeing ghosts here."

Hal let his glass down on the counter.

"Wow..."

She could see a quiver in his eyes. She didn't want to ask how long ago he had lost his father.

"Who—what did you see?"

"Well, the main one, he looked... well, he looked exactly like your father's picture, naked and everything. I hadn't found the scrapbook by that point."

She heard a shaky breath issue from Hal and he put his hand to his chest.

"Wow," he repeated. A fond smile appeared out of the haze of his sadness.

"When I first saw him, I was scared out of my mind," Holly said. "I thought a maniac broke in. I locked myself in my bedroom first thing."

"Wow." It seemed to be the word of the hour. "I can imagine how scary that would be, all here by yourself."

"When I heard the children's laughter, that's when I really freaked out," she said, and caught herself. That kid was standing right in front of her.

"Children?" Hal asked.

"Y-yeah, that is kind of weird, isn't it? I heard a child laughing, and saw one, too. It was a naked little boy. I didn't see his face."

"Well that's certainly odd; I'm right here."

"There weren't... any other siblings? I'm sorry, I don’t mean to pry, but..."

"Anyone that died? No, it was just me, my sister, and my parents."

"My friend saw one of the ghosts, too," Holly added. "He said it was a young naked woman. That your sister?"

"A young woman? Well, Paula was just a year older than me when we moved. And Mom was in her forties. Did she look in her forties?"

Holly shook her head.

"I don't know. He didn't describe her like she was in her forties. It did freak him out, though."

The man contemplated things and picked his drink back up. It was almost as depleted and diluted as Holly's. He took a sip.

"It's weird that my dad's spirit would travel a couple hundred miles just to come back here."

"Well, you did," Holly said, and Hal looked down at her and smiled.

"You're right," he said with a laugh. "I sure did."

"Say," Holly perked up. "There's something else up there I wanna show you, let me go grab it."

"Actually, if you're okay with it, can I come up?"

Holly realized it was his house as much as it was hers. She almost felt bad for leaving him down here. And, though she still had her guard up, she did trust him.

"Sure."

*****

"Wow," Hal said when she held out the children's drawing. "I never thought about it in over forty years, but I remember that picture."

"It's yours," she said, thrusting it out to him. He took with this a delicate grip and Holly almost thought she saw a tear form.

"Here, you can keep it safe in this," she said, reaching down to pick up the storybook that she had found it in. "Actually, this might be nostalgic, too."

"It sure is," Hal said when he looked up and saw it, and he accepted it from her as if he were accepting a great gift.

"Say," he said. "If you're not going anywhere and you want some help clearing this stuff out, I'd be glad to take some of it off your hands. I got a truck."

"Oh, wow, you don't have to. ...Though I guess you'd love to dig through some of this stuff, wouldn't you?"

"I sure would."

So just like that, Holly had help, and what was a seemingly insurmountable task was cut in more than half thanks to Hal's help. With plenty of the liquor store boxes still, they stashed childhood books and toys, and even the old TV downstairs, which he offered to dispose of for her, into his truck. Hal even helped her box up things she planned to donate, and bag up other things that deserved the trash. He let her keep a lot of the old books, seeing as they were less important to him as a child than they were to his parents, but he took at least one, something to remember his father by.

"Nice typewriter," he said when they were clearing out her writer's nook. "That's older than I am."

"Thanks. I got it at a thrift store for about as much as I bought this house for."

"I dare imagine how much you spent," he said, and Holly bit back a laugh. He must not have known how cheaply she had gotten the house for.

"Did you get that at the thrift store, too?" he said, jutting a thumb down at the issue of Playboy she had sitting on top of her notebook, next to the typewriter.

"Oh," she said with a laugh. "No, I found that here. There's a few more, and a bunch of National Geographics, too. You want 'em?"

"Ah, no, they're just magazines. You can keep them, if you want them." He paused a bit. "I suppose it would be weird for me to covet a nudey magazine as a nudist," he said, and Holly laughed reflexively. "I mean I suppose it would reflect poorly on us, knowing what the magazine is and all."

"Oh, well, I'm glad to keep that issue. There's an interview with an author I already started reading."

"I don't read a lot," Hal said. "I should. I want to. I'd like to write some articles for the BSS."

"I want to write a story about this place," Holly said. "About you."

"Oh! You should!"

"Fictionalized, of course. Or at least, I thought it would be. I was gonna just make up something based on the clues I had. But now that I've met you..."

"Do what you want," Hal said. "Though I'd love for our story to get out. Our real story."

Holly nodded and sucked in a breath through her nose. She felt the pain of how they were wronged, and felt the injustice of it, and felt the purity of how they had lived. "I just might do that."

*****

Outside, with Hal's pickup bed half-full with boxes, and the orange haze of evening setting in, Holly asked him: "Are you sure you don't want to stay? Maybe... to get to see..."

"My dad? No, that's okay. Who knows if I would even see him? I have his things with me now, so he's with me, too."

Holly almost had to bite back a sob. She never thought she would be so touched by the history she uncovered.

"Plus, I don't want to impose. It's your house, now. And I gotta get back."

"Well thank you for helping me go through all that stuff."

"Thank you for letting me get to do it," he said. "Take care."

And with that, he was off. Holly never thought to ask him for his contact, after talking of possibly writing his story. It seemed he had given her carte blanche. But if she needed to consult with him over facts, she could always look up the BSS.

*****

She found the organization difficult to find. Standing in the kitchen, looking on her phone because she did not have internet hooked up at the house yet, she found nothing that looked relevant when she Googled "Bare Social Society," even when putting it in quotes. What came up were some thinly-veiled borderline-pornographic sites, and other pages and organizations that had nothing to do with nudism or naturism (she recalled Hal making a distinction between the two).  She regretted now never getting Hal's number, though maybe, if she were observant, she would find the other BSS members who lived in town. They obviously had found her. Looking up from her phone to the kitchen window, she observed the sunset, and imagined Hal, as a child, running free through the back lot, and she found it a very appealing idea.

*****

The idea hung in her head when she was in the shower later, so that when she got out, in her usual routine of wrapping her towel around herself (as if there was anybody around that required decency) and another on her head, she let the former fall open in front of the mirror and finished up her routine with the moisture slowly evaporating off of her skin. Then, in an exciting decision, the type of dull idea that would excite people who live alone, she decided to exit the bathroom without the modesty of the towel, and to skip her usual routine of pulling out her bum-around wardrobe. She instead walked down the hall, and down the two flights of steps, in the nude. She was hit with an urgent feeling, as if she should be turning around to go get dressed, for the middle of the house was not a place to walk around naked, but she walked all the way downstairs, knowing that the only other people in the house were naked in spirit, too.

*****

"Yeah, he stayed for a while and helped me clean all this crap up," she told Toby on the phone a while later, after it had grown dark. She stood at the kitchen counter, with a fresh mint julep in her other hand and the deepening dark outside the kitchen window, and she was still nude, unbeknownst to Toby.

"Wow, so mystery solved, then," he said. "So they really were nudists."

"Yeah, and they seemed like nice people. Or I mean, he seemed like a nice person. I haven't met the others yet."

"Well you sort of did."

She was in the middle of taking a sip of her julep and coughed with a laugh.

"Yeah, I guess I did." It struck her that she had just said, word-for-word, what Hal had said earlier that day. She sat her glass down and errantly found her hand gliding along her thigh. "Anyway, you should come over and see how more open the place feels," she suggested.

"Sure, maybe tomorrow?" he offered enthusiastically. If only he knew the invite was being made by a naked girl, though she certainly wouldn't be naked when he arrived.

"Yeah, you know I'm free all the time, now. Bring your ghost-hunting stuff, too. Maybe you'll see that naked girl again," she said.

"Y-yeah..."

*****

She did something that night that she had never considered doing in her life: she slept in the nude. Under her recently washed blankets, she felt crisp and clean as she slid into them, and she found herself able to toss and turn more comfortably than she'd ever imagined, and her body heat collected so effectively under the coverings that it became like an oven, and she threw them halfway off and soon drifted off to sleep. The next morning, she awoke, stretched, came down to the kitchen nude, and looked out at the dimly-lit lot as she waited for her coffee to brew, imagining again Hal and his sister running free out there, toying with the idea of doing it herself, but too afraid to step outside. She shouldn't be, she knew; who would see her?

The call beckoned her later, when she was sitting in her nook in front of her typewriter, ready to use it for the first time as a blank page also beckoned to her. But as she sat there (on a towel she took from her linen closet), she found herself peering out the window blinds at the back lot now kissed by the afternoon sun.

She was at the back door in the kitchen moments later, staring out at the lot with the yearning of a child missing out on a game with friends. Her heart rattling, she put her hand on the doorknob, and turned.

The urgency from the previous night, when she had stood on the landing before coming downstairs, returned. It bid her to turn and go safely back inside, but at the same time, it bid her to move forward. Pulled between the two urgencies, she stood petrified at the top of the stoop, feeling, for the first time in her life, the sun baking her chest and abdomen. The air was still, but she could feel it on her skin. The birds chirped happily as if to announce her appearance. She took a ginger step down the stoop. Then another. And then was on soft grass. The whole lot stretched before her: thin, tall-climbing trees, spaced widely, with flowing grass filling the spaces, and the scenic view of faraway mountains out in the distance, through the haze, and not a soul in sight. Bravely, she stepped forward, and walked out into it all. It seemed that she could run forever, run in her new attainment of freedom, both the freedom of her new life in her new home, and in something more. Then her feet moved quicker and she broke into a run.

An inner child was unleashed, and a grin spread on her face, and she spread her arms out too, feeling the breeze slip between her fingers as she ran. She ran until she got to a copse of trees and stopped, sensing this might be the limits of her freedom, but seeing no obstruction to her progress. When she turned around, the full distance between her and the security of her home was overwhelming. Her vulnerability out in that open space was palpable, but the call to let it all go swelled the bubble of unsureness until it almost burst, but it retracted and her sense of modesty returned when she saw a person standing at the left side of the house, fully colored by the sun, his shape recognizable. Toby shielded his eyes and peered out at her. Even in the distance, she could see his face was colored in disbelief. The idea to run and scamper into the brush came up, but how silly would that be? Instead, raising her hand to shield her eyes from the sun and ascertain that it was indeed Toby, who had agreed to come over, she then raised her hand and waved at him.

A desire he does not expect stands fifty yards away, radiant in the sun, near the base of a tree, and she is everything his guilty mind once imagined, a slender, seamless profile, with winks of femininity ascertained in maroon and black, surrounded by porcelain skin. She stands as naturally as any other creature of the earth, like a deer sighted, stopping in the woods, but unlike a deer, she waves, and the invitation draws him in, and he takes the first two hesitating steps forward, hesitating at first because he does not know if this is something he should see, and then hesitating because he recognizes what he sees, as it mirrors the nude figure he had glimpsed days before. At that moment, what he sees in front of him and what he saw in the recent past merge into one moment, a moment existing in multiple points of time, in the same place. Echoes of the past and glimpses of the future all share the same space, and a ravishing and radiant but also innocently beautiful echo of a person he had yet to fully understand approaches him across the open land, an echo of the day she was born, nude.

Sea Angels

The fire crackled high and bright, and before it, the wrinkled old man's face was alive with the story he was telling, though Larry nudged Jim, his friend and business partner, and pointed at the pantomime play going on behind the old man: several women were running around holding out sheets, trying to throw them over several men, who led them each in circles.

"Shh," Margaret said to his left, swatting Larry's hand when he laughed. To Margaret's left, her friend Scarlet sat with undivided attention—the fire reflected on her pursed, glossy lips—at the display going on for them and some of the other members of the cruise, who when stopping off at the seaside village, entertained its tourist attractions and now sat on stone benches around the fire, listening to the old man and watching the performance.

"In the earliest days of this island's history," the man said with a raspy voice and thick, curious accent, "Our ancestors quickly realized that they weren't the only inhabitants of this island. From time to time, they would be visited by the others, who used Old Mava as a resting place, and who our ancestors had to learn to coexist with. For once a season, always just before dusk, naked maidens would arise from the sea and walk the island."

Larry nudged his friend again.

"Gee, we might have better chances here than on the ship."

"Shh!"

The old man noticed the squabble, and his eyes held on Larry, so Larry decided to be a participant.

"So these maidens, do they, uh, still come ashore to this day?"

The old man nodded solemnly.

"Oh yes. Though not in as great numbers as long ago, but several who live on this island can tell you stories about seeing them. I have seen them. It is believed they are a creature like the mermaid, though they have no tail. They walk on land just as you and I do. But like a mermaid, they are all fair, elegant, enrapturing young ladies! This ceremony you see behind me continues to this day, representing the wives who tried to keep their husbands from laying eyes on the sea angels."

"Yep," Larry said into Jim's ear. "We definitely would have better luck here."

"Shh!"

*****

After the tour stop at Old Mava Island, all the members of the cruise lined up to board again and ride for the mainland of South America, where they would coast next to for the rest of the night. It felt almost stifling to get back on the boat after being able to stretch on the island, but there were not enough accommodations on the island for a thousand all at once. Not that there weren't plenty of accommodations on the ship.

Currently, Larry sat at an outside bar on the upper deck along with the others, and behind them, over the railing, plenty of people took advantage of the Olympic-sized swimming pool on the lower deck. Glancing over his shoulder at the sound of a high, tittering laugh, Larry saw a girl in a skimpy bikini running from her boyfriend so that her small tits bounced rapidly under their loose coverings. Indeed, all around the pool was flesh aplenty; another girl in a blue and accentuating one-piece leaned forward off a diving board and slipped gracefully into the water. Others lounged and displayed themselves on their chairs. All of it stirred his lust and his frustration, and he turned back to the bar with a sigh.

"Anyway, I'm glad to be back. I can't believe they patted me down for my flask when were were getting off the boat."

"He probably smelled you from a mile away," Margaret said. Their seating arrangement mirrored the moments by the fire: she on his left, Jim to his right, Scarlet over on the far left, as revealing and as stirring as the girls in their bathing suits with a dark spaghetti-strap dress and a low-scooped neckline. He had hoped that she and Jim would get acquainted.

"Tell you what, after this, how's about a night cap up in my cabin? It's already late."

"Actually, I wanna stay out here on the deck for a while," Margaret said, brushing her straight, blonde locks behind her ear and finishing her mojito. "I might walk around the boat. There's lots to see."

"How much can you see that we haven't already?" Larry asked, his frustration showing; a bad move.

"There's lots of people out," she said. "Who knows who I might meet?"

"Hey, now when I invited you out on this thing, I figured it would be an opportunity for us to spend more time together. Now you're going to go trompsing off?"

"We're here for three more days," she said. "Don't force yourself." And with that, she slid back on her stool, smoothed her capris pants out on her thighs, and stood. "I'll be around," she said.

"I'll go with you," Scarlet announced, though a fresh mojito of her own was being placed in front of her by the bow-tied bartender.

"I can take this around the ship, right?" she asked him. The rosy-cheeked man smiled and nodded his head.

"You may do as you wish, ma'am."

"Thank you," she said, sliding the glass over with both hands and standing, her dress swaying into place at her knees, and Larry watched as the two women exchanged looks and walked off without looking back. Larry sighed again and took a look at his drink, an old fashioned. It was almost empty.

"Another drink, sir?" the bartender asked.

"Yeah, another old fashioned, thanks."

"With friends like these, right?"

"Yeah..."

The bartender turned to reach for a bottle (enclosed in a latched, glass display case behind him to keep the product from falling off the shelves) and Larry glanced over at Jim, who he had almost forgotten was at his side.

"Hell of a wash, isn't it bud?"

Jim seemed startled to be addressed. "Yeah..." he said with a non-committal voice, his eyes bereft in the cradle of pudge made by his chubby face.

"You oughta get up, walk around," Larry told him, turning in his stool to face him. "Maybe you'll bump into Scarlet alone."

"Yeah, maybe..." he muttered, looking into his nearly-full Long Island Iced Tea. The bartender came back with Larry's drink.

"Thanks," he told him, and fished out a fifty to pay for his—and Margaret's, and Scarlet's—drink.

"I'm gonna stretch my legs," he told Jim, sliding his glass over. "There's plenty of fish in the sea, and half of them are flopping around on this boat." He stood and took a first sip while staring at his mopey friend. "You oughta go down to the pool," he said with a smack of his lips. "Plenty of skin down there."

"I don't have a suit."

"Well go skinny-dipping. Some girl will turn her attention to you for sure."

"No skinny-dipping," the bartender said with a laugh. Jim's face returned to the dark pool of his drink.

"A bunch of sticks in the mud, the lot of ya," Larry said angrily. "I'll leave you to mope, I'm gonna go have fun."

With his back straight and chest out, Larry glared at the side of Jim's face and then turned away.

*****

He ended up moping, on the lonely side of the ship, leaning against the rail with his glass cradled in his hands over the distant water below, and a deep pool of shadow around him. It would be a place where lovers would discreetly go to express themselves, but everybody was in the center of the ship, having fun and sticking together. Larry lifted his glass and the ice was nearly melted, nothing good to drink remaining. He didn't feel like going all the way back to the bar upstairs to get another, and his flask had been confiscated and not returned yet. He sighed; he thought about chucking the glass into the sea. On the darkened port side, Larry could see the charcoal and silver contours of waves below coming to detail in the dark, and churns of foam that would form and swirl and fizzle out, like his libido right then.

And then a bright form broke the surface. Larry almost dropped his drink into the sea, where it would have landed on top of the... dolphin? At night? Though it didn't quite look like a dolphin. Its skin was pinkish and pale, though shiny and slippery. A pit of terror formed in Larry's stomach as he realized he may be seeing something unnatural, a cryptozoological being, for the figure, thirty-foot down, displayed a black, wet mane, and then the rosy domes of a rear-end rose out of the water and the naked woman slipped under the dark waves again.

Larry's eyes widened.

"Hey!"

The thing broke the surface again, and indeed it was a woman. A smiling face looked up at him, her rounded shoulders pointed forward, her slender back disappearing into the deep. Larry blinked in disbelief. Perhaps one of the girls had overheard his suggestion of skinny-dipping and had taken it upon herself to do so where nobody—except for him—would notice her. He instantly realized how stupid an idea that was. Anybody jumping out into the sea would be left behind and never seen again. And yet he was looking down at this feminine face as if he were looking down in a pool of still water. Though the boat was moving, she was somehow keeping pace with it. As if to display her superhuman abilities—or to display herself—the naked girl leaned back, flipped positions, and paddled on her back, her legs pointed forward, water pooling in the concave of her prone stomach, her presented breasts full but flattened by gravity against her body, and she grinned.

"How'd you get down there?" he called to her. "Get on up. Can you get up? Here, I can try and find a rope."

"Who are you talking to?" a familiar voice called, and Larry tore his eyes away from the water to see Margaret, along with Scarlet, and a man between them, very tall and dressed in a grey suit.

"There's a girl in the water!" he cried, and the man took immediate concerned interest, though Margaret twisted her face in disdain.

"Really?" the man said. "Should we get help?"

Larry stood pointing at the water as the man hurried up next to him and Margaret and Scarlet slowly followed him.

"Ain't nobody there," Margaret said. "If someone fell in, they'd be miles behind us by now." But as the man stepped up to the rail, there was a soft splash from below, and Larry saw the man's expression tense, but he said: "There's nothing there."

Larry looked and indeed, the girl had vanished.

"Did you really see somebody fall over?" the man asked, looking at Larry's darkened face with concern, and then at the empty glass in his hands.

"No, I... I just happened to look over, and..."

Maybe the rest of the details ought not to be said, he realized.

"Maybe I was just seeing things."

"Fantasies at the bottom of a liquor glass," Margaret said, finally coming up to both of them. "This is Larry, who I've been telling you about."

The man's expression brightened.

"Oh, Larry." He extended his hand as if he was eager to meet him, and Larry swapped his empty glass into his left hand and shook feebly. "I hope you're having fun."

"Yeah, kind of," Larry said in a descending voice, wondering if he was shaking the hand of the man who was going to take his prey away from him.

"I'll have to get some stock tips from you later," the man said. "Scarlet tells me you're a broker."

"Y-yeah, I am. Helped me pay for this trip."

"Or maybe you wouldn't be willing to share your knowledge. After all, if you shared it with your clients, you wouldn't be rich!"

"Well, I wouldn't say that. Sorry, I'm a little bit out of it, I think I may..."

He took one more glance over the railing before dismissing himself. Below there was nothing but churning, dark waves.

"He's probably had a lot to drink," Margaret said, though Scarlet, beside her and silent, held yet another full mojito. "He probably needs to go get some rest."

"Yeah," Larry said, knowing full well that Margaret was sending him off so he wouldn't witness her schmoozing another man. "I think I do. Excuse me."

*****

He was immediately back up at the bar again, with the same rosy-cheeked bartender, glad to see him. Jim was no longer there.

"So she just came up out of the water, like she was swimming in a lake," Larry told the man as he slid over another old fashioned. "I thought someone had fallen over for a second, but she was like a damn fish."

"Fantasies of pleasures unobtained," the bartender said with a chuckle, and Larry smirked at him.

"Yeah," he agreed. "Maybe you're right," and he tipped back his glass full of fantasies and downed nearly half of it in a burning gulp. The bartender's face tensed with concern.

"Maybe you should go get some sleep, sir."

"I can't sleep," Larry said. "If I did, I'd probably have a nightmare."

"Or maybe a very pleasant dream," the bartender suggested. Larry snorted and consulted his drink again.

"Yeah, maybe..."

He took another lengthy gulp and looked over his shoulder at the pool deck, lessened of some of its occupants, but still with an ample amount of skimpy female attire to fuel his continued fantasies. Then, with a raise of his eyebrows, he saw one lumpy, overdressed, and familiar figure there: Jim sat in an upright chair, and next to him, her bare thighs curled up deliciously in her seat, a young, blonde, bob-cut woman in a purple bikini chatted with him (or to him) and played with her hair.

"You go get 'em, tiger," Larry said in a low voice, and he tipped back the remainder of his drink. He thought right then that he should march out and join Jim, maybe meet a young, nearly-naked girl to talk up himself, but as he launched himself from his chair, he swayed on his feet.

"Might be time to throw in the towel, sir," the bartender suggested, still watching him.

"Yeah," Larry said, not able to fathom a drunken walk down to the pool deck any more than a drunken walk back up to his cabin. "I hate to say it, I think I'm done for the night."

*****

He stumbled down the narrow hall towards his cabin, bumping against each wall on either side as if it the boat were throwing him left and right, and not his drunkenness. He focused on the end of the hall, his final goal, though his original goal had been to sink his dick into something. He barely felt like keeping up with the pursuit now. A warm bed and his rancid sweat-soaked clothes were as inviting as all that.

After five minutes of stumbling and calculating his steps, he made it to his door. Or his and Jim's door. He had reserved two cabins, one for the guys, one for the gals, though the intention was to have half of them swapped so that it was Larry and Margaret and Jim and Scarlet. So much for that now. Larry found his keys in his pocket after a full minute of fumbling, opened the door, and found the room empty and dark, just the view of the black ocean and the hint of moonlight outside the wide window.

A bed lay on either side of the room, the large window between them. A desk sat unused in the corner immediately to the right of the entrance. Larry skipped the bathroom to his left and went straight for one of the beds, falling face-down into it and entering sleep in a matter of seconds.

He didn't dream. Or rather, there was a sliver of a replay of what he had seen out on the port deck, but it was interrupted and soon forgotten with the creak of the door.

Larry snorted and rolled over to greet Jim, wanting to tell him of what he had seen, but he was struck still by a delectable silhouette: a slender, sloping shape, and the faint, shadowed impressions of a full set of breasts. Then the door closed and his visitor was thrown into shadow. Over the subtle sounds of the waves rocking the boat, he could hear her footsteps, until she came into view, lit by the ambient moonlight from the window.

His mouth had opened to beseech Margaret's name, but it was not Margaret, who was shorter and more stout. The slender and busty figure that stood before him had very dark hair, streaming down her bare shoulders, dark hair not unlike the wet mane he had seen of the girl at the side of the boat. He detected the distinct scent of salt in the room. He sat up, and as his eyes adjusted, the woman's face came into detail, her eyes wide open and searching, her mouth upturned in a sly smile when she locked eyes with him.

She was completely naked; the flattened breasts he had glimpsed when she swam on her back now hung full and bursting before her otherwise thin frame, her waist quickly tucked and tapered and flared out and the space between her hips delectably smooth as a doll. She took a step and Larry leaned forward, his hands propped on his knees and aching to reach out and touch the woman.

One of her knees came up and rested on the bed, and Larry’s hands shot up immediately to purchase on her taut sides. She did not flinch, and his hand crept up to cup and cradle her soft breasts.

"My..." he said, in an uncharacteristically awed tone of voice. The woman hovered over him so that her inviting breasts were just inches from his face, and he dove in, plunging his face between them, tasting the salt of the sea and her sweat, and the enveloping heat of her body. Her hands crept to his back and clawed at his shirt. They both sat on the bed, backs straight as Larry leaned back from the feast of her flesh and frantically unbuttoned his shirt, pulling it off before he could fumble the last button, popping it instead. Their warm bodies instantly pressed together, and soon he was on his back with her straddling him and his hands reaching down for his belt. She raised her hips to allow him to strip down his slacks, under which he wore nothing, as any high-flying swinger wouldn't, and his cock waved for attention before her. She raised her hips higher. Meanwhile, Larry raised his hands and felt the purchase of her breasts fitting into his palms, and the rubber texture of her hard nipples against his fingers, and he sunk into her. She settled on his lap, and the lovemaking began. Though his cock strained with the pressure of unfulfilled relief from his night of drinking, it labored inside his maiden to bring both him and her to the height of pleasure, which he attained, raising his hips, detecting the explosive breaths of his lover reaching his face. It was like a fantasy visited upon him by sympathetic gods. And like any gift he had received in his life, he spent it quickly, as he climbed to a crescendo inside of the woman, and her hips twisted and bucked on his lap, and the moment of release was disappointingly imminent but then, he pushed through the wall. His pleasure waned, and he found his second wind. He plunged into the girl with the same wall-hugging dance as when he was drunkenly trying to get to his room, hoping to grant the girl the pleasure he had, though she remained stoic, almost impatient, waiting for the release. His hands traveled down her torso to feel her taut rump, and her tits hung and bounced in his face as he bucked up into her. Larry lost his sense of time and place, his memory of trying to woo Margaret or trying to hook up Jimmy with Scarlet, of all the delectable flesh at the pool, and even the mysterious girl he had seen by the side of the boat, now, he realized, attained, and entwined with him. Her palms palmed his chest, and he thrust up into her and finally felt the climax coming. He groaned as he expulsed into her with a painful sting. She was silent through the whole split-second ordeal, and when Larry was spent, she massaged his chest a little bit before raising her hips off of him, his spent dick falling over like a soldier shot directly with the iron ball of a musket. Larry breathed out a sigh of satisfaction: his ocean-bound mission had been accomplished. His lover leaned down to snuggle against him briefly, and he pursed his lips for a kiss, but like a dismissive cat, the girl satisfied herself with a warm nuzzle against his neck and then rolled off the bed. Larry was left splayed and naked and with the ever-more urgent need to pee as the beautiful nude girl presenting her curved and tight backside to him walked away from the bed and to the door, and from there, was out the door, leaving him spent, confused, and strangely, all of a sudden, not fulfilled.

*****

He was energized after that. He sprung off the bed and opened the door, stepping out in the hall naked, in hopes of seeing his departing lover. But she was gone. Before anybody could spot him, he ducked back inside and finally went to the bathroom to relieve himself. Then he washed his face at the sink and stumbled through the cabin, picking up his discarded clothes to put back on. Then he was out on the boat, wandering around, looking for the renegade naked woman. It was well past one in the morning by that point, and only a few people remained at the pool, and a few people walked down the curving stairs from the bar on the upper deck as he stumbled up them, looking for somebody to announce his findings to. The bar was still open, but nobody sat at it. The familiar bartender turned and recognized Larry.

"Dreams no good, huh?" he said, narrowing his eyes at Larry, as if debating whether he should serve him again.

"Who the fuck needs dreams?" Larry said, throwing himself on the stool. "She came to my room."

"Who?" the bartender asked incredulously.

"The girl. The girl I saw in the water. She's real."

"Yep, you had some good dreams," the bartender said.

"No, really! She came to my room, and she was already naked."

At this, the bartender paused.

"Hmm, well we did have somebody running around nude, after you voiced your suggestion of skinny-dipping."

Larry's eyes lit up.

"Really? That's her!"

The bartender scoffed.

"No, just someone having a bit too much fun. You, sir, had a dream. And I should say, you probably shouldn't have another drink."

"I swear! I never had a better fuck in all my life! She's here, on this ship. We have ourselves a sea angel on board!"

The bartender just laughed. Then his face tensed and looked off to Larry's right, and his jaw fell open. Larry turned and his jaw fell open too, even though he had just been entertained moments ago by what he now saw. Out on the lower deck, surprising the few people who were still there, was a completely naked woman, her heart-shaped rump moving rhythmically as she walked along the edge of the pool. Larry would have turned to the bartender and said "see?" but instead he stood and walked over to the railing. Down there, the few people who remained on the pool deck—a group of mostly guys and two women, one of whom, in her purple bikini, Larry recognized as the girl who had been talking to Jim—all reacted as if a wild bear had entered the scene. The women pulled their feet up on the loungers and the men circled in wide berths around the naked woman, who was veering past the shallow end of the pool and heading straight for them. She was unaware or unconcerned with the exposure of her naked skin; the glittering pool lights danced on and caressed her tight bottom as she walked straight up to one now-petrified young man, looked him in the face, and then dropped to a knee, taking down his swim trunks with her. All that, Larry saw, from afar: a simple, indistinct interaction in miniature, two simple nude people, one of them with their face at groin level and taking the other's unseen penis into her mouth. At this, the seated women pulled their feet all the way up and hugged their knees, as if to fully distance themselves from the lewd display, and the other men, crowding in, one-by-one stripped off their swim trunks to stand naked and erect and in waiting.

"Oh, this is definitely not happening," the angry bartender's voice came from behind Larry, and he walked around the bar to come up to the railing.

"Put that stuff away!" his voice echoed. "Not that kind of cruise!"

He may as well have been speaking to an untouched native tribe, for the man being pleasured looked up at him with glassy eyes, not understanding, while the others zeroed in on his pleasure, even the unbelieving women. Then the man's eyes squinted and he looked down and reached before his pleasure-giver, taking his elevated cock out of her mouth and producing a white stripe across her cheek in an instant.

"Oh for fuck's sake," the bartender muttered, and went back to the bar. Larry only glanced at him and returned his eyes to the scene below, where another man was stepping up, cock in hand, before the girl in the purple bikini sprung to her feet and rushed over, smacking him on the shoulder. The unheard argument between the man and his apparent girlfriend lasted only a second before she took off her bright top to distract him from the naked, fellating woman, and she took his cock in hand, reeling him in for a kiss.

In his absence, one of the other men approached the naked girl, cock slipping through his working fist, and she serviced him next. A literal orgy was transpiring out on the deck, and Larry had the thought to go out and enjoy a second nut, and thought, all of a sudden, that Jim certainly was missing out. Where had he gone, anyway? The girl he thought had eyes for his friend was now pressed against a bare-naked man, her fingers trailing indents on his cheeks.

The man taking his turn with the naked girl was taking a very lengthy one, drawing impatience from the last remaining man, who stepped in and began rubbing his cock on the girl's face, near the other man's, who didn't mind and repeated the gesture, so that on each side of the hungry girl's mouth, a turgid tip pressed into her cheek. She seemed hungry for cum. Why, though? She had marched so purposefully into Larry's cabin and took from him what she needed, but now, abandoning her own pleasure, she seemed satiated by drawing out white-hot pleasure from others. Larry was so incensed by the scene, and the spraying burst of an urgent orgasm going everywhere except for the naked girl's open mouth, that he furiously tore at his shirt and began unbuckling his pants.

"Uh-uh," came the bartender's voice, and it was the only thing rooting Larry to reality when swiftly, from around a corner, came two security guards, and two from the other side. Both pairs joined at the curving staircase leading to the orgy below, and Larry watched with his pants half-down. One pair of guards broke up the mostly-naked couple, the others failed to approach the hedonistic trio before the second man ejaculated, and when a guard pulled on the man’s shoulder, a white rope was slung over the pavement. The two nude men were pulled away, and the naked woman stood and turned in a circle, observing the chaos. The third girl, who had remained inactive, was now running up the steps, clutching her towel, while her friends were being talked down to. Meanwhile, the naked girl, being ignored for the moment, turned her eyes to the pool and dipped her feet in at the shallow end. The guards didn't notice her entrance into the water until the splash she made, wherein they started yelling at her, but she swam to the center in a picturesque physicality of a graceful breaststroke, her body centered in the shimmering blue, wherein she righted herself and splashed water on her face, washing off the semen but also sucking remnants of it off of her fingers.

At that moment, as the other girl reached the top of the steps and looked at Larry with disgust, his pants still below his hips, his pubic hair and the base of his cock protruding, another couple appeared from around the side corridor that the guards had come from, their eyes passing over Larry but quickly zeroing in on the pool, where the evidence of the orgy was gone and only a scene of casual nudity remained, with the naked angel resuming her swim towards the deep end and the guards pacing the pool to follow her, while at the shallow end, the two lovers argued with the guards there.

"Oh, I didn't know it was clothing-optional hours!" the girl of the couple on the upper deck said, and summarily pulled off her evening dress, revealing nothing underneath. Larry was as amazed as the girl's boyfriend was, but the boyfriend, watching his naked other half scamper down the stairs like a happy child escaping a bath, changed his expression, shrugged, and pulled off his shirt. Despite the protesting of the bartender, who was further ignored, the man followed his girlfriend down to the patio, completely naked as well. The guards there turned their attention to them and put out their hands to stop them.

"What's going on here?" a voice came from behind and to Larry's left, and he recognized it, for it was the seldom-heard but distinctive raspy voice of Scarlet, who stood holding shut a silk robe, craning her neck at the scene below. Behind her crept Jim, hastily dressed with his buttons fastened crookedly. Larry almost hollered his friend's name, but Scarlet looked at him and raised an eyebrow at his exposed trunk.

"Is this some sort of after-hours thing?" she asked him. Larry hitched his pants back up. "No..." he said, thinking next how to explain what was transpiring.

"You're not going to keep me out of a good time, are you?" she asked, and the robe went open. Nothing was underneath. In stunning profile, Scarlet stood as the robe fell, and her prominent and proud chest was thrust out, each full breast capped by a large, ruby, studded areola, on her sturdy torso a faint tensing muscle drew the eye lower to a full angle of a tangly, dark bush. Behind her, Jim's eyes went wide at what Larry could only imagine was an exquisite posterior, and something Jim should have conceivably seen if their appearing together in immodest dress had anything to indicate. Then Scarlet turned, unintentionally presenting her backside—which was exquisite—to Larry while she addressed dumbfounded Jim with a simple proposal: "How about a skinny dip?"

Before the flustered young man could answer, Scarlet turned, and Larry turned as she went, observing the unbelievable and often-imagined sight of her perfect nude form descending the staircase. Then Larry looked back to Jim.

"Well... when in Rome, right bud?" he said, and he reversed the position of his waistband, taking down his pants in front of the shy eyes of his protégé and the distressed shouts of the impotent bartender. Before Jim had time to react—or undress—Larry was taking his first brave steps down the stairs to the pool deck, completely in the nude, his refreshed erection swaying stiffly, and yet his soul looking forward to an innocent swim as much as another go with his naked angel, who was now looking up and smiling at Scarlet, who instantly jumped into the pool, and the swarming guards found themselves unable to control the situation. Two of them were already running back up the stairs as Larry approached the edge of the pool, looking down at the two delectably nude women—one a normal person, the other... who knew?—and he was winding up his arms to make a running jump when a voice on a loudspeaker broke the festivities:

"This is your captain speaking. We are making a landing at Puerto del Afin. Please exit your cabins and prepare to disembark."

*****

The party didn't last long. Larry had taken his plunge into the water right after that announcement, and enjoyed, for a brief period, swimming in the nude, delighted at the free, airy feeling of swimming without trunks, and unfortunately losing sight of his beloved, who exited the pool amidst a swarm of even more security guards, who bid he and Scarlet leave the water. Jim was standing nude and baby-like at the edge, looking forward to diving in but denied the pleasure, and quickly embarrassed at the judging eyes of all around him, His would-be lover (or maybe established lover, Larry wasn't sure) sauntered up the steps to the upper deck, dripping wet, with a line of uniformed men trailing her until she picked up her robe. Larry exchanged a quick glance with exasperated, vulnerable, naked Jim, as he'd never seen him before, and saw fit to ask then, as they stood naked before each other as bonafide men, whether he had scored with Scarlet, but then Margaret appeared, dressed more casually now, in a pair of sweats and a sweatshirt, with the tall man Larry had met earlier similarly dressed. Margaret reeled at Larry's nudity and her man scowled.

"What's going on out here?" she asked. "They came and made us get out of the room. Did you cause all this?"

"No," Larry said without feeling the need to cover up. Let her see what she's missing out on, and let him see what he's got to measure up to, was his inner thought. "It was that girl I saw, and you two didn't believe me..."

Margaret shook her head and averted her eyes from Larry's low-hanging fruit, which gave him a small amount of pleasure. Then the captain's voice broke their conversation:

"Get out, and get dressed," his voice boomed over the speakers. "Get yourselves under fucking control. We're landing."

*****

The departure of the cruise-goers onto the shores of the little village they landed upon was pure chaos. It was well into the witching hour, the deepest part of the night, and residents were awoken to the clamor of a thousand tourists crowding their piers, half of whom remained undressed. And into the night free-spirited streakers ran, seeking to enjoy a night swim along the village's pristine shores, and somewhere out in that night, Larry's naked angel roamed, trailing with her a number of emboldened and naked women who took to running through the streets with their arms trailing behind their backs, their backsides bare and bouncing, and the legend of the Sea Angels then extended from Old Mava to the shores of Puerto del Afin, and thrived from there.

Seaside Grove

Emmie couldn't help but be nervous. This was the first time she'd set out on an adventure all on her own.

She couldn't tell her friends about it. This was a "me" vacation. A sabbatical. It was a chance for her to have some isolation and to dust off the rough outline of a memoir she had jotted down years ago. Maybe she could publish it and it would be her ticket out of the stockbroker world. It was only a pipe dream, but it was a nice dream. The other reason she couldn't tell her friends about her sabbatical was because it was at a nudist resort.

She had driven an hour, and halfway there, the urge to turn around faded and instead, she felt like she was being reeled in. It was inevitable that she end up there and take off her clothes. It shouldn't have been such a hard idea to fathom; she had been to nude beaches as a child, when her parents lived in Italy. It was actually what her memoir was partially going to be about. She figured she might as well reunite with a childhood pastime. But being nude as a child and being nude as a self-conscious adult were two different things.

"Children are natural nudists," she had read when she began to do research on nudism and the nearby resorts, and she remembered how freely and happily she had streaked down the beach, the wind streaming her hair, the sun warming every inch of her skin. She had felt fully unleashed and felt that she could run forever. She had never felt anything like that since. She never even realized what a uniquely amazing feeling it was until reflection as a teen, when being naked was something to be self-conscious about. And now, as a world-weary adult (read: twenty-eight years old), the post-college grind was grinding her soul down. She should be glad; she had a good-paying job and lived in a posh high-rise penthouse when most girls her age were barely scraping by in apartments they couldn't afford, or moving in with boyfriends, or living with family. But there was a soul missing amongst all the fluorescent lighting and concrete parks and plastic-sealed lunches. It was killing her slowly day by day. It made her absolutely depressed some days, and those days were usually strung along for weeks. No, she needed a change. Or maybe just a breath of fresh air. The nudist resort she was going to was by the sea, it was even called "Seaside Grove." The pictures showed a beautiful stretch of beach unlike any she'd seen in the region, with a beautiful sunset. It wasn’t quite summer yet, but Emmie was sure the beach would be pleasant to walk on. The park itself was lush and green and throughout it, sun-reddened fannies drifted past campfires, and bare, dirty feet tip-toed down a pleasant-looking walking trail. It looked like Eden. She had only fifteen miles to go.

*****

Emmie got a bad feeling when she pulled into the resort. There wasn't even a gate; a long gravel road led her through sparsely wooded land until she came out into the open, and though it was lush and green, it was populated with over a dozen permanent campers, some with wooden porches built onto them. It looked like a trailer park.

The "sign-in shack" was one of those very trailers, with a set of empty fold-out chairs in front of it. When Emmie pulled her car into the little gravel spot across and got out, she had a sinking feeling in her stomach. Then the door of the trailer opened and a man came down the steps, not nude, but wearing blue-jeans and a t-shirt and holding a can of Coors Light.

"Oh, hey there," the man said.

"H-hi, I'm Emmie, I had called about staying the weekend?"

"Oh sure, give me a sec, let me go get the paperwork."

The man set his beer in a cupholder space on one of the chairs, turned, and climbed laboriously back into the trailer. Emmie turned in a circle and observed the "resort." It certainly wasn't what she expected. It felt small, just a collection of campers in a field. There was no sign of the walking trail, and where was the beach? She thought she could hear it in the distance. Besides that noise, there was not much noise happening, or activity. There was no sign of anybody outside any of the trailers. The place was quiet as a tomb until the metal door of the camper in front of her swung open and the man came down, the trailer shaking with his heavy steps. He was holding a clipboard.

"Here ya go, just put all your information there, and there's a map and a sheet with the rules underneath. When you're done, I'll take you on a two-cent tour."

He said this with all the relish of a tour guide at a resort worthy of the tone, but his voice betrayed a hint of boredom, and even unpreparedness, as if he did not have to give this spiel that often. Emmie nodded and took the clipboard, where the paper there asked her her name and contact information, who all was visiting, et cetera.

"You can have a seat if you like," the man said, motioning to one of the camping chairs. Emmie wanted to ask why the man wasn't naked, but bit her lip, figuring she was lucky not to have to speak one-on-one with a naked man more than twice her age. She settled down in the fold-out chair, which shifted on the soft dirt as she applied her weight, crossed her denim-wrapped legs, and filled out her info, wishing that she could turn around and run away but going through with it as if on autopilot. All the while she glanced up at the man, who had taken up his Coors Light and stood looking out at the dismal park, occasionally smacking his lips and letting out a satisfied sigh.

When she was done filling out her info, she flipped the paper and saw the map. There, a dozen grey rectangles signified the trailer park (for that's what it was), and a ring around the whole park was labeled "walking trail." In the upper left, a collection of three small squares was labeled "cabins," and then, to her delight, there was a bisecting line to the left (the West) that led out to a crude drawing of a beach, with a label, naturally, that read "the beach." She sucked in a breath and looked forward to walking on that beach as she did the Italian beaches in her childhood as she let the sheet fall back down and stood.

"All done," she said, and the man turned.

"Great. And are you paying cash or card?"

"Uh, I don't have cash. If you take card..."

"Of course we do!" the man said jollily, and he dropped his beer in his chair's cupholder again and reached into both his pockets, taking his phone out of one, and a little, square device out of the other, which he plugged into his phone's micro-USB slot. He held out his phone for her to swipe her card as if he were a waiter presenting a five-star dish.

After she paid, the man grabbed his beer and beckoned her along. So commenced the so-called and appropriately-named two-cent tour.

"These are the permanent residents," the man said, waving his hand to all the campers. "They all live here year-long, including me and my wife. We’re owners of the place. Oh, I'm Abel, by the way."

"Nice to meet you," Emmie said. "I'm Emmie."

"Yeah, I know. And up there is where the cabins are. That's where you'll be staying. You're cabin number three. Got one other one rented out this weekend, not a bad pull."

"Do you not get a lot of people here?" she then asked the man.

"Oh yeah, but you know, we're not quite into spring yet, you've kind of come early. Usually we have a lot of people bring their campers and stay, we've only ever had those three cabins for visitors without campers. We never really saw the need to expand. Now here, though, here's the selling point: out there's the beach."

They had walked to the edge of the campground and stood before a line of scrag and bush, over which, Emmie could make out the faint line of the distant ocean. Her heart soared until she saw the chain and sign crossing over the sandy path that led out to the beach: "No nudity beyond this point."

"You're free to go out there, but you have to be clothed. That beach isn't part of our property, so it isn't recognized as clothing-optional. People used to abuse that privilege and would go out there naked anyway, and they drew some negative attention from the community, and some negative characters would wander in, so we had to rope it off."

"I see," Emmie said with disappointment.

"Anyway, let's take you to your cabin."

The cabins were just as disappointing as everything else. Small, square constructions on top of cinder blocks, each of the three structures formed a semi-circle around a picnic table on a bed of gravel. The man fished a key with a large plastic tag out of his pocket and unlocked the door of the cabin farthest to the right: Cabin Number Three. The waft of stale air that came out made Emmie wrinkle her nose. The man switched on a light and there, harshly lit under the bulbs from a ceiling fan, was a bed against the left wall, extending out into the center of the room, a small desk and a chair across from it that looked suitable for a grade-school classroom, and a small counter with a microwave. It was bone-cold inside, and the man crossed the room to turn on the heat on the wall-mounted A/C unit.

"We'll get this heated up for ya. Showers and bathrooms are just outside, around back, I can show them to ya next."

"That's alright," Emmie said. "I can find them."

The man dropped the key on the little children’s desk and tapped it to make sure that Emmie saw it.

"Anyway, it's pretty quiet here, oughta be nice and good to relax," the man said, standing there and folding his hands in front of himself. That's when Emmie thought it fit to ask: "So, um, I can be naked here?"

"Of course!" the man beamed. "This is a nudist resort, after all."

"O-okay, I just wanted to be sure. Since you weren't, I didn't know..."

"Aw, well it's a little nippy still. I only really take it off when it's too hot to bear clothes. And even then, it's unpleasant to be all sweaty."

"I see..."

"Well I'll leave you to it. Relax and enjoy yourself. When you're headed out at the end of the weekend, just lock the door and bring me the key, and you'll be all set."

"Thank you."

"Alright, then."

"Oh, I should move my car."

"Oh yeah," the man said. "No rush, if you want to get settled first. It's not gonna be all that busy."

And then he turned and walked out of the cabin, and Emmie was left standing in the middle of the space that was somehow smaller than her college dorm room, wondering if she had just wasted her money. The puny little desk didn't seem like a comfortable place to sit down and ponder her would-be memoir. The room was good for nothing but sleeping in. She sighed and thought about how to make the best of everything.

The first thing she thought of was to get into "uniform" before she moved her car. She was at a nudist resort, so she might as well get naked. That was an inevitability, but getting through with it before she moved her car felt like an exciting idea. She had never driven her car in the nude before. So there, in that small space, she took her keys out of her pocket and set them on the tiny desk next to the cabin's key, and then turned to look at the bed and collected a big sigh as if she needed bravery to undress in a private room. It still felt weird. She unbuttoned her shirt and let it splay open. The slightly burnt-smelling warm air coming out of the window unit tickled the upper, exposed slopes of her breasts as she reached behind and undid her bra, letting it fall and standing with the weird feeling of being half-exposed in an unfamiliar place. She pulled her feet out of her loafers and realized she should have packed sandals. She had never worn them on the beaches in her childhood. Oh well, she thought. She wouldn’t need them here, either.

It took a surprising amount of courage to unbutton her jeans and take them down, and the running air on her thighs reminded her of her last goal, and she stripped her panties down next, completing her task, her objective on his trip. She stood in the middle of the strange room naked. Memories of awkward locker room moments came flooding back. She hooked her panties in on her big toe and flung them up in front of her to catch them, and she slung the garment around on her finger and threw it into the corner of the room, where she tossed her jeans as well, then following suit with her shirt and bra. Then, picking up both sets of keys from the tiny desk, she took a breath and faced the door, and did something she hadn't done since she was a child: she stepped outside in the nude.

Even though the resort was dead and silent and motionless, Emmie experienced a thrill she had never felt as she exited the cabin. It was a thrill exemplified in videos she'd seen, during her recent renewed interest in nudism, videos obviously made with pornographic intent behind them, of girls stepping out into public spaces without a stitch on. She had felt a commiserating embarrassment watching those videos, and now, experienced the thrill that those models may have felt, except that there was nobody to see her. That fact instilled in her a feeling of confidence as she closed and locked the cabin door and faced the gravel trail that led back to the trailers.

Behind every blackened window, Emmie imagined eyes watching her. She walked with no option of hiding and no way to cover up, and in four paces, accepted her nudity, and the rush of exhilaration that came through her chest in accompaniment of it. She was really walking out in the open. She could hardly believe it. But this is what she had come here for. She walked freely and unopposed to the camper across from which her car was parked, and in front of which the man who had signed her in now sat, in his camping chair with his beer in hand, which he raised as if in a toast to Emmie, and she instinctively hugged herself.

"When in Rome!" the man said jollily, and Emmie affected amusement and slinked to her car, unlocking it and getting inside in record time. As she settled down on the fabric seat, so strange and new against her bare butt, she let her heart calm down. It was beating against her chest as if it wanted to get out. Holy crap. That was a rush. It wasn't so much about being naked and being seen by someone else, it was the fact that she was naked and that he was not. She was on display, and he was not. It was an uncomfortable feeling. Letting out a shaky breath, Emmie put the key in the ignition and invited another new and unfamiliar—but not quite uncomfortable—feeling: driving her car naked. The shock of that last brief encounter vanished from her mind as she backed her car out of the space and maneuvered it down the gravel trail towards her cabin, and when she was halfway there, she was already grinning. She was safe inside the isolated confines of this paltry nudist resort, but behind the wheel, she felt as if she had the world stretched out before her, stretched out before her and unaware of her nudity. It was an almost powerful feeling. Then she pulled in front of her cabin and saw that she had company.

He was sitting at the little picnic table in front of the cabins. He was very pale, and very chubby. His back was facing her as Emmie pulled in, and the curve and line of his baby's butt depressing on the bench seat (with a white towel underneath it) reminded Emmie of all the "plumber butt" meme photos proliferated throughout her college years, only with the clothes that framed the often-laughed-at "crack" done away with. And the young man—a little younger than Emmie, by the looks of his fresh and reddened face—turned his head over his shoulder to witness her pull in. Round-framed glasses sat on his nose, the only thing he wore. She sat there with the engine running; she didn't want to get out now. But the young man wasn't going anywhere. So she shut off her car and took in a big breath before getting out. All her bravery from her wayward walk had vanished, and she got out of her vehicle with her arms trembling and the young man's shimmering eyes scanning.

"Hi," he said first, looking over his shoulder but not turning around to face her, so that his maleness—the part of him that made him different and potentially delectable to her—was modestly hidden in front of his pudgy frame. "I guess you’re my neighbor?"

"For now, yeah, I guess, " Emmie said, standing with her car between her and the young man. She ducked in to retrieve her cabin key, then ducked in the backseat to retrieve her bag, and then she was faced with no other choice but to walk from around her vehicle and present herself. As she did, she could detect the boy's eyes widening as he sat there on that bench. But there was nothing she could do. She was naked now; she might as well get used to it. And perhaps the boy would need to get used to it as well, as his head swiveled and switched positions when she passed around him, closer than she would have liked, and he continued watching her (or so she could only assume) as she unlocked the cabin door and entered without saying anything. When she got inside the dingy-smelling cabin, the only thing she heard was her heart. She dropped her bag on the bed and contemplated how to spend the next few hours stuck inside that little twelve-foot space.

*****

She had laid her items out on the bed’s smoothed-out blanket: her beach towel (though a stack of towels was provided on a shelf to the left of the desk), her snacks (granola, an apple, and beef jerky; she was led to believe there would be other food options during her stay), and her old spiral-bound notebook, with the one-page outline of her childhood and a fountain pen slipped into the spine. She sighed and contemplated the little coffeemaker on a runner table to the right of the desk. She inspected it, lifted out the stack of filters, and saw a little can of breakfast blend, which, when she peeled off the plastic lid, was half-full, stale-smelling, and had a metal tablespoon inside.

A few minutes later and the cabin filled with the bitter scent of the old coffee and the gurgle of the pot was somewhat comforting as she placed her notebook on the desk and pulled out the chair to take a seat, stopping when she remembered that she should be sitting on a towel. She took one of the white towels from the shelf and spread it out, and then sat. She felt like a stranger in a place she didn't belong; she felt like a wanderer at the most pitiful of resting stops, with a long journey ahead of her. The long journey was the next day and a half she would spend there, and she wasn't sure if she wanted to spend her time like that. But the thought of leaving was almost depressing, an admittance of defeat.

The notes she had taken a year ago were hardly inspirational. She stared at the blank space below her scant jottings and took a break to get some coffee, poured in a little styrofoam cup provided, and it was not illuminating, either, though after a moment, it did make her heart flutter. It fluttered so much that it was worse than when she was wracked with nervousness outside. So she pushed her chair out, leaned back and stretched, appreciated her stark and unfamiliar nakedness—the running air feathering her arms, the growing heat summoning up hints of sweat—and she stood. She felt so alien. And she felt the need to get out, just as her heart had expressed when trying to escape from her chest earlier. She picked up her key by its big, plastic tag and headed for the door.

She only opened it a peek; the young man was no longer out there. She then opened the door wide and stepped all the way out. Fear arrested her. She closed and locked the door and made haste to hurry away from the cabins.

She spent the next twenty minutes exploring the walking trail, for that's all it took. It took her in a big circle around the resort, and it was like walking a ghost town, except for when she was at the northeastern end, where she heard a radio playing, and passing by a camper, an older lady in a loose and open shawl permitting her peculiarly pale but still sun-spotted breasts to breathe looked up at Emmie and waved with a smile. A modicum of warmth entered Emmie's heart and she waved back, even smiled, but no words were exchanged, and she wandered on. It seemed there wasn't much more to see of the resort, except for the beach, though she would have to put on clothes to do that. As uncomfortable as she was, she didn't want to do that. It would defeat the point of her reliving her childhood experiences. A rebellious part of her wanted to go out onto it, and she had a wonderful thought: maybe she would go out there when it was dark. Surely nobody would notice—if there was anybody around—one lone woman walking in the dark. The thought filled her with a little bit of hope. Sunset was hours away, though. So for the time being, she checked out the one other amenity she hadn't seen: the showers.

They were as dingy and depressing as she had feared. Dirt streaked in on the tiled floor inside, the outside of the building shielded by a rotting picket partition that surrounded it, with wooden benches on their inner sides. A men's and women's bathroom were separated from each other, a moot consideration, Emmie thought, considering the nature of the place, but maybe not so much; she went into the women's restroom to relieve herself. A minute later, she looked at her startling image in the mirror above the little ceramic sink, from the waist up, the sink covering, only partially, her lower half. She was surprised at how she looked because she was not used to seeing her naked reflection in such a setting. Her face looked scared, but her body looked confident. She stood there a moment with the water running as she contemplated her image.

She was back at the bathroom just ten minutes later. Despite the coffee, she wanted a nap, and before a nap, she wanted to be freshly showered. She went back to her cabin, managing still to dodge the chubby young kid who was nowhere in sight, and she grabbed a towel and washcloth, and walked around the corner of the cabins and up the weedy path that led to the bathrooms. There she embraced the refreshing feel of the shower, despite the dingy smell, and in that vulnerable space, she attained a small rush of confidence, turning under the spray, displaying herself to nobody, feeling the nervous sweat wash away. When she exited, she felt almost like a new person, and when she stepped out into the daylight, the air was cool on her still somewhat wet skin. She walked with a little more pep in her step, though nervousness still worked its summoning of fresh sweat. But the late afternoon air was pleasantly cool on her skin, raising goosebumps on her arms and more rigid ones around her monolithic nipples, and she once again slipped inside before her neighbor could come and engage in conversation. She fell directly on top of the bed, without putting on the covers, and the extreme heat of the small room enveloped her like a blanket, and she was out.

*****

Though there was only one window in her cabin, with a thin curtain covering it, she could tell by the change in the light that it was getting close to dusk. Excitement made her sit up. It was like the excitement of a child on Christmas morning. The beach. Soon would be her time to go see it. But first, she tore open one of her granolas, for her stomach was growling, and she dipped it in her cold coffee and enjoyed the simple pleasure of a stale piece of granola infused with caffeine.

Nobody was outside when she cracked the door. She felt like a kid sneaking out of her parent's house. It was ridiculous that she should carry herself so that she didn't have to be seen, didn't have to be interacted with. This was a nudist resort, afterall; being there was supposed to dash social fears. But she couldn't abide being a spectacle for that lonely-looking young man.

It was not dark, though the sky's light was fading. It was too early to enact her vision of a moonlit walk on the beach, but there was nothing left for her to do to bide her time, except work on her new memoir. But work wasn't something she wanted to do right then. She was on vacation. So she walked down the gravel trail once again, coming within reach of the man's camper, which was now lit in a warm orange from within, but with no signs of anybody outside, nobody there to witness her drifting past and heading for the sandy path and its roped-up sign so that she may break one of the resort's rules. Could there be anybody watching, from one of those illuminated windows, her naked figure, ashen in the dusk, ascending that sandy path? Could someone be clicking their tongue in disapproval, or licking their lips in rapture? Both thoughts were unnerving, but both thoughts didn’t falter her. If anything, the thoughts made her hurry. The sound of the ocean was clear now, and when she approached the sign, she could see the dim horizon before her. No sunset, she realized. The sun was setting off to the right, only evidenced by a throb of color behind the grey cloud cover. The air was chilly. The breeze was intense. Emmie squeezed around the roped-up sign, scrag bush scraping her behind, rough, prickly leaves stabbing her bare soles. But then the gauntlet was passed, and she hurried onward to the beach, for once, finally, feeling like her child-self again. Despite the lack of a picturesque sunset and the warmth of the sun, the vastness of the ocean and its shore was mesmerizing, magnified because of her solitude. It was almost like she was standing in the middle of her expired memories, which had grown dim and dark. Darkened, but she was still there. She put her arms out, the key ring safely hooked on one of her fingers, and she ran out to the surf. She stopped right as her heels got wet and she faced the roaring ocean and let out a satisfied sigh, kept her arms held up, and felt the cold touch of the wind. Her hair was flung behind her. Every square inch of her body was felt. She was not supposed to be here, but she was, and as she glanced to her left and to her right, she saw that her isolation was full, and the safety of it made her happy. Yes, she was glad she had come now. This was the main attraction, roped off from people who would enjoy it.

She didn't notice the cough from behind her because it mixed in with the crashing of the waves. But the second cough, louder and more purposeful, made her heart freeze, and she turned.

The chubby boy was standing there, dim in the dusk, naked as her, his maleness now presented to her, short and stubby. He was completely non-threatening if not for his unexpected presence, though the glare of the last light of the sun shined on his glasses like the eyeshine of a wolf.

"S-sorry," he said. "I just didn't know you could come out here."

Emmie let the lump descend from her throat. Her heart rate calmed, though all the bare freedom she had just experienced now transformed into vulnerability

"I wanted to see it," she said. "And I didn't think anybody would follow me."

The young man's eyes lowered in shame. The wind blew between them, keeping them apart.

"Sorry," his voice came softly, obscured by that wind. "I was worried."

"Worried?"

"Yeah," he asserted, his eyes looking back up at her. "It's just that you’re not supposed to be out here and..."

She narrowed her eyes at him and watched his avert again. She suddenly didn't feel vulnerable, but powerful. She no longer felt the desire to cover herself, which had been urging her hands seconds before. Her hair blew in her face and she knew she must look astonishing; she imagined the reflection she had seen in the bathroom mirror and transported it to this picturesque scene. In contrast, the young man was not picturesque. But on second thought, something about him was; the complete vulnerability with which he stood before her, the absence of any expected erection making him seem emasculated, passive. He was just as vulnerable as her. And, like a predator sneaking up on him, the wind-blown shawl of another person stood at the top of the trail.

"Looks like we're about to get busted," Emmie announced, and the boy looked up abruptly and then turned around to follow her gaze. The woman who had waved at Emmie earlier was now coming down the path, her shawl brushing the sand below her like Lawrence of Arabia.

"Y'all ain't supposed to be out here," her voice carried over the wind. "Y'all know that."

She came to a stop five feet behind the young man and folded her arms, her shawl continuing to blow in concert with Emmie's hair.

"Sorry," Emmie called over the boy's shoulders. "We"—it was funny that she chose to include the boy—"figured it was dark enough that nobody would care."

"Well, you're probably right about that," the woman said. "You come out here together?"

Emmie thought about that. The boy was also visibly processing his response, but she spoke first.

"No," she said. The woman picked up the hem of her shawl and came closer. She came right up to the young man and looked directly into his eyes, and his hands covered his privates in humiliation.

"You wasn't coming out here to bother this young lady, were you?" she demanded.

"No! No, I just... happened to be out here at the same time."

The old lady scowled and then went "hummph." Then she looked at Emmie.

"And you, Miss, you alright?"

"Yes, everything's alright. I was just... I was just thinking how it's a shame we can't come out here and enjoy this spot."

"Well, you're here now." She kept her arms folded, as if she expected the two of them to head back, but she didn't demand it of them. Emmie saw this as an opening to explain herself.

"I grew up near a nudist beach, my whole childhood was spent running up and down the surf. I guess I wanted to re-live part of that."

At this, despite the increasingly lowering light, she saw the old lady smile.

"That does sound nice," she said, and she walked further in, past the boy, putting herself between him and Emmie. She came right up to her, and Emmie could see the hard wrinkles on her face. "The reason we forbid nudity on the beach is because of the public. This isn't recognized as a nude beach, even though it's at the edge of our property."

"I understand," Emmie said, remembering what the other man had told her.

"It's a shame it has to be that way, but people don't know what to make of us. Worse yet, they get the notion to come on in and they cause trouble. We've had a lot of trouble here."

Emmie let those words sink in. The man had alluded to this, though Emmie wondered just how much trouble had gone on. A million questions swarmed in her head that she wanted to ask, but she thought better of it. It was just nice to be having such a calm conversation whilst in the nude, even though the lady was, at least partially, clothed. But Emmie no longer felt the odd separation between her and this clothed person. Even the young man, realizing they weren't in trouble, had turned to listen in, and only half-covered himself. As the dusk was growing, the need for modesty was quickly being erased, anyway.

"Well, you can enjoy yourselves," the lady said, then stepping closer to Emmie so her voice could not be heard past them: "If you're okay with your company." Her eyes darted to the side, gesturing to the boy behind her.

"Yes, everything's fine. I think."

"You think."

"He just followed me out here, but I don't think he means any harm."

The lady gave her the saddest look at that.

"You always got to have your guard up," she said, still in a low voice that Emmie barely caught in the tumult of the wind. "Always." Then, she took a step back, straightened her posture, and said in a louder voice: "Well, why don't you two come on back to me and my husband's trailer? It's getting cold out, and we got a fire going."

The old lady turned and looked directly at the boy again, which almost seemed like a threatening gesture, and he shrunk at her attention until she looked back at Emmie, and then Emmie looked at the boy, and between them there seemed to be some sort of understanding; they were in the same boat.

"Sure," Emmie said. "Why not?"

*****

"You eat yet?" the woman asked them when they arrived. It was almost fully dark now, and a friendly-looking man sat near the woman in a fold-out chair before the dancing fire, his skin bright orange from its light. Unlike his wife, he was naked.

"N-no," Emmie answered. "Just some granola." The young man didn’t say anything.

"Well Chuck here just grilled up some burgers, if you want any. You're not vegetarian, are ya?"

“No, but you don’t have to...”

Chuck waved a hand. "Welcome. I'll go get you some. You both want one?"

Emmie nodded and said "sure," feeling self-conscious in front of this man, even though he was as nude as her. He was innocent enough, but something about his eyes didn't seem so. They lingered, not long enough to count as staring, but they definitely assessed her.

"And you?" he asked the young man.

"Oh, y-yeah, sure."

"Have a seat, won't ya?" the woman asked, motioning to two chairs conveniently vacant for them. It seemed this was a place where neighbors hung out and spent a lot of time together.

"Oh, we should get our towels," Emmie said.

"You always gotta take your towel with you," the woman replied jokingly. "Don't worry, we got some extra ones, I'll go grab 'em."

And with that, both the woman and her husband disappeared inside the trailer and Emmie was left standing out there with the chubby, naked young man, closer to him than he had been up until that point. His gaze turned to her and she could tell he was working up something to say.

"S-sorry about sneaking up on you back there," he said, his voice low and unconfident. "I wasn't trying to follow you, I just..."

"That's alright," Emmie said, though she was still cautious. "I'm Emmie, by the way."

"Mike."

Emmie smiled and was about to say the standard "nice to meet you, Mike" when the trailer door opened again.

"Here's yer towels," the woman said, coming down the steps. Her bare chest bounced animatedly, as she was no longer wearing her shawl.

"Thanks," Emmie said, and her new friend, Mike, was again silent, and they each took a towel from the now-nude woman and laid them out on their respective chairs. Emmie again wanted to comment on the woman's attire, or in this instance, the lack of it; You're naked! Perhaps she hadn't been wearing her shawl for modesty. Perhaps she didn't like the chill air. And in front of the fire, the shawl would be useless, she figured.

"Oh, what's your name?" Emmie then asked the woman as she eased into her chair.

"I'm sorry, I never introduced myself. I'm Macie. And you already met Chuck."

As if summoned, Chuck pushed open the trailer door with his knee, holding two paper plates.

"Here you go!" he announced, coming down the steps, the movement making his loose penis swing like a pendulum. There was no way for Emmie to avert her eyes, for she was sitting, and he came up to them, handing each of them a plate with a plain burger, no sides. But she couldn’t complain about free food. She just wondered if she'd have the appetite to eat it amongst all the bare flesh.

Chuck and his wife Macie settled down in their chairs as their guests contemplated their burgers. Mike didn't seem to have a problem with sinking his teeth into his, while Macie held hers up first and hesitated. Finally, she bit in. The burger was a little overcooked and smoky-tasting, but it was good. Conversation started at a trickle. Chuck awkwardly inquired if Emmie and Mike were a couple, to which Emmie shook her head aggressively and said no, while the old man laughed, and Mike slouched.

"We don't really get young people out here," Chuck said. "Most places don't. it's nice seeing you come out." He said this and Emmie envisioned his eyes over her body again, though there was no visible indication that he was peeking, and she was curled up in the chair, not really in a position to be conveniently gawked at.

"I grew up in Italy," Emmie explained. "I used to go to the nude beaches all the time as a girl." She noticed Mike glance at her out of the corner of her eye.

"That's great," Chuck said. "Kids are natural nudists. We used to see kids come in here all the time."

Emmie nodded and didn't say anything because her mouth was full, but she squirmed a bit at the phrase she had recently read coming as it was from an old man.

"What Chuck means though is you Millennials," Macie explained. "And Gen-Z. They're typically not interested in nudism."

"Were you guys raised as nudists?" Emmie asked. It seemed she was doing all the talking. Mike sat silently a foot to her right, finishing his burger and bouncing his eyes from speaker to speaker.

"Actually, we just ended up here!" Chuck said proudly. "We're both retired, and we wanted to take our camper someplace and just enjoy life. And well, when we stopped here, we never left."

"Wow..."

"It's a comfy life," Macie added. "Sure, some people might ask: 'Why live in a camper when you could have so much better?' Well, we don't need much space. And it sure is nice not to have to do laundry here."

Emmie laughed at that. She was beginning to become comfortable in her skin, in front of these people. Even Chuck and Mike.

"I'll be honest," she said, leaving her burger half-eaten, interested in the conversation that was developing, "I was a little taken aback when I first arrived, because the guy who signed me in was wearing clothes. And you too," she said, looking at Macie. "I didn't know if I should take off mine or not."

"Oh," Macie said, mixing it with a laugh. "I'm sorry if I made you feel awkward. it's just that, when you live twenty-four-seven in a place like this, you sometimes still put on clothes out of habit. Or if it's chilly, like tonight. But with this fire going, well, I'm a lot more comfortable now."

Emmie found herself laughing again. She raised her burger to finish it and thought about what to ask next. To her surprise, it was Mike who asked the next question.

"Is it always this slow here?" he asked.

"Most of the time," Macie replied. "It gets busier in the summer of course. But we haven't been as busy as we used to be. This is an old person's scene; that's why we're happy to see you two here."

She said this while looking straight ahead, even as she finished talking, looking not necessarily directly at Mike, but just looking straight ahead, as if she were avoiding looking at her husband.

"We used to have big summers here. All sorts of people. But maybe we got too big. I don't know."

She trailed off, looked down at her lap, and then gave one quick glance to her husband, who grimaced, and then she looked at Emmie.

"And it can be out of the way for a lot of folks. That's why some people focus on non-landed clubs."

"Non-landed?" Emmie asked with a muffled, full mouth.

"There are a number of little groups floating around," Macie explained. "I don't know a lot about them, because I'm not on the internet. That's the domain of you young people. They link up on social media and have house parties, or rent out pools to have nudist events. It's more of a widespread community thing. That's what Abel tells me."

"Abel?"

"Abel Smith. The owner. He's the one who signed you in."

"Oh, right."

"He keeps tabs on the scene. It's still predominantly older folks, but there are groups with young people. You two should look into that."

Emmie swallowed the next-to-last bite of her burger and nodded. "That sounds interesting," she said.

"It is," Macie replied. "I think that's where the future lies, with young people like you and nudism. As long as it's done for the right reasons."

The right reasons, Emmie thought, looking back to Mike's apologetic demeanor after following her out onto the beach, and assessing again the eyes of Chuck, which were looking off to the side, but had briefly been looking at her before she directed her attention at him. Yes, the right reasons, the reason why she felt comfortable now.

"It's just an idea," Macie concluded.

*****

Emmie found herself with the awkward situation of walking back to the cabins with Mike by her side. They had thanked the old couple for being so hospitable, left their towels, and were navigating through the dark, desolate nudist park, their pale skin standing out. The cabin key, and her safety, was hooked on her finger.

"That's a neat idea," Mike's soft voice said next to her, the suddenness of it making Emmie almost jump. "A non-landed club."

"Yeah," Emmie said, looking ahead, having trouble realizing the setting she was in. The cabins came out of the darkness. One of them—presumably Mike's—still had the light glowing from inside. Soon they were at the gravel patio with the picnic table where Emmie had first met him. They stopped.

"Why did you come here?" Emmie asked, feeling it suitable now to pick the young man's brain.

"Oh, well... I've always been interested in it. In nudism, I mean."

He said this while turning to look at her. "I've always been interested in it since I was a kid."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah, I always wanted to go to a resort. I'm like you, though... I figured this place would be... more populated."

"Me too," she said, and she let the silence gather between them. "But I'm glad I came out."

Mike blinked as she said this, and Emmie twirled the key on her finger and began to step away.

"Well, I'll see you," she said, and she looked away, heading for her door, leaving the young man perplexed, perhaps expecting something to have happened... or not. Whatever he thought, Emmie didn't look back until she had the key in the lock, and Mike was already shuffling to his door, head down. He had his door open and slipped inside and missed the opportunity to see her looking his way.

*****

It was bright day. The sun beat down from directly above and warmed Emmie's shoulders. Warming her, too, was the buildup of nervousness in her chest as she walked down the beach, passing people laying out on towels, or stretching out on loungers, people all clothed, at least meagerly, with trunks or skinny straps covering them. Meager, but enough to make them seem decent and normal compared to her. They stared, and it made her consider her actions, for she was the only one completely nude.

Nobody told her she couldn't do it. She just did. She walked out in the open without her clothes, and she accepted the looks that came her way. They didn't affect her. They could look if they wanted to. It was understandable that they did. But some of them outright stared. That was understandable, too, but less acceptable. All she wanted to be able to do was walk comfortably...

The sun, while still filtered through the curtain of her sole window, was exceedingly bright. She had slept in until ten. Emmie sat up in bed, the sheets sliding off of her chest, and she took stock of where she was. The dream and her current setting were melded. It took her a moment to ascertain that last night's events weren't part of her dream. She was in Seaside Grove, having slept naked under the thin sheets of a rented bed, a strange feeling even if it were at home, for she had never slept nude before. She found herself appreciating the freedom with which her torso folded without anything to constrict against her body. She had another full day ahead of her, a fully nude day, though she didn't know what she would do with it. It seemed she had seen everything there was to see.

Mike was surprised to see her carrying her bag from the cabin to her car when she came out. He was walking from the trailer area back to the cabins when he caught her.

"Huh... you're leaving?" he asked with obvious disappointment.

"Yeah," she said. "I about had my fill." She was being truthful, though why did she feel so bad about the decision?

"You weren't weirded out about last night, were you?"

She widened her eyes at him. "No, why would I be?" She didn't know if he meant his intrusion with her onto the beach, their time with the old couple, or their walk back to their cabins. Or if he had read her mind about her wariness in front of Chuck.

"You're right," he said, and then, with some pause: "I had a good time last night."

Emmie couldn't help but smile. "I did, too," and she said it truthfully. Then, keys jangling in her hand, she walked her bag to her car while Mike meandered on the gravel patio. She had had a good time; she enjoyed the conversation with Macie and her husband, and was intrigued by the idea of a community extended beyond the resort. She threw her bag in the car and then turned back to get her clothes and the cabin key.

*****

She was fully clothed when she parked her car in front of the sign-in trailer, where the man she had first met—Abel Smith, his name was, apparently—came out to greet her, fully clothed, as she had met him before.

"Leaving already?" he asked with concern on his face.

"Yeah," she said, handing over the key. "I have to go back home and take care of some stuff," she lied. "But I enjoyed the time I had here." What she really felt inclined to say was "there wasn't much to do after one day," but she knew that wouldn't be the polite thing to say, and deep down, it wasn't true, either, for the one thing she would have liked to do was spend more time on the beach. There wasn't a way to comfortably do that, though, as long as the big rule loomed in her mind.

"Well I hope you come back," the man named Abel said as he took the key from her hand and his fingertips lightly brushed against hers, causing time to freeze for just a moment, for her to be able to see the hesitation in his eyes.

"I will," Emmie said, though she was not quite sure if she would. She didn't regret coming, but she had indeed had her fill.

"Hey!" a voice called out, and both of them turned to see Macie shuffling across the grassy lawn towards them. Unlike the first time Emmie had met her, she was completely in the nude, her shawl forgotten. "You're not heading out already, are you?" she asked as she came up to Emmie and Abel. In a weird inversion of what Emmie had experienced so far, it was the other person who was now the odd one out by being naked.

"Yeah, I got some stuff to take care of," Emmie explained. "But I enjoyed spending time with you all last night."

"Hold on one second," the old woman said, raising her finger. "Let me go get my phone and we can trade contacts."

"Oh, well—"

"Just one second." She turned and dashed off. Emmie heard Abel snicker and then he turned without a word and headed back into his trailer, and Emmie was left standing in front of it, waiting, not unlike when she had first signed in. She felt as awkward as she had felt when first walking around without her clothes, ironic now that she was in the opposite state. Several minutes passed, where she felt pulled between her desire to leave and the calling to stay. She looked between her car, her avenue for escape, and the assembled trailers, her anchor here in this alien place. Then Macie was hurrying through the sparsely spaced trees towards her, the black phone in her hand the most distinctive thing compared to her light skin.

"I would have just read you off my number, but I'm old, you gotta remember. My mind's not as sharp." She held up her phone. "But go ahead and read me yours and I'll call ya. I know you know yours by heart!"

Emmie sighed. The lady was ensuring she wasn't just going to take her number and lose it. Talk about pressure. She shouldn't feel annoyed, though, she realized; Macie was a nice lady. She read her number to her, and Macie entered it with slow, trembling fingers, and then finally Emmie's phone buzzed in her pocket and she took it out to accept the call.

"It's me," she said, with her voice echoing smaller and tinnier in front of her, and she laughed and hung up, tapping "save contact" as Macie asked one more question.

"I got your friend's number, too. Do you want it?"

Emmie looked up. Macie would stay saved as "M" for now.

"Oh, uh..." It seemed there was no polite way to avoid this, either. She supposed she could have said that she already had Mike's number, but instead she said "sure." Perhaps Mike would get to see her again.

*****

The sun was on its way down, and this time, Emmie got a wonderful sunset view. The beach was perfectly aligned. And perfectly empty, save for a dozen other people who enjoyed the sunset and the sand with her. They ran into the water, which was warming up with the season. It was pleasant enough that it was surprising that there was nobody to interrupt their group skinny-dip, but they had managed to find an isolated part of the beach that people seldom visited, and if someone did come upon them, what was one person going to do? They would be outnumbered by the naked people so that it would be more embarrassing for them than it would be for Emmie and her new friends. Mike was among them, also enjoying the freedom of the water, no longer as transfixed by Emmie because of the large number of other people they had managed to gather for a meetup at this secluded beach only twenty minutes away from Emmie's home, so that they may enjoy themselves, no matter where they were. And standing there, watching the others splash about, Emmie raised her arms as if to invite an embrace from the sun, and finally, she felt the same magic she had felt from her childhood.

To Sail with Naked Girls Again

(Overheard on the Island of Fayal, 1921)

It was finally time. It was summer. The war was long over. It was time to sail again, though the waters were very dangerous.

There was a crew of jolly men, bounding across the currents in their puttering dinghy. They had no idea the adventure they would be on.

They hailed from Germany, and spoke the most terse English I have ever heard. They were young, strapping men, the oldest of them the "captain," who was forty. His name was Christoph, with strong but lean arms tanned as dark as if he were a Latin American, tanned from a life mostly at sea. He was on a gunship during the war, and now, he commandeered a boat that would, if not repair the damage from the horrible conflict, would prevent further lingering harm. He maintained his own private boat and worked on contract as a minesweeper.

Along with him he had his former colleague from the battlefield, a very studious-looking man named Felix, who looked more suited for the halls of a library than the theater of battle, and seeking employment, two young men, both in their twenties, eagerly threw themselves into the dangerous task. Things were very difficult in these times, and it is certain that these two were starving. Their names were Anton, a very rosy-cheeked, happy-go-lucky young man, and the other, slightly older, was Elijah, who I might consider the main character of this story, as he, at first glance, seemed the most mysterious, and the most to potentially grow from change, as I learned from more from him when he told me this story.

The story began with an idea. The idea had come from Felix, the learned-looking man. He was indeed very learned, because it was he that was a partaker of the ways of naturism, and who one day suggested embracing it on the high seas.

Their repeated outings on the boat came to resemble a pleasure trip with good friends. For each of them, they were escaping something at home, and their being there provided for them. It fed and clothed them. That aspect certainly is ironic.

Perhaps it was to ease the sense of danger, for doing their task with one boat was very dangerous. The idea could have been considered dangerously distracting, which Christoph the captain suggested, but Felix was insistent on it because it would actually help him focus, and so enthusiastic about the idea was Anton, young and inexperienced with the world, that the captain relented. Doing their job out at sea, Felix's attire was nothing at all. He would wait until they were out of port, with the land but a speck, and he would peel off his shirt and strip down his pants. For a man who claimed to be a naturist, he looked very pale, but he proved to be a shade tanner than our good hero Elijah when he finally decided to get nude as well. But he was averse to the idea, on the side of the captain as far as this issue was concerned. It was Anton's overwhelming enthusiasm that gave Elijah much inner conflict. For when the young man stripped off his clothes, he did it as if disrobing for a bath, without concern of the others, and as he became nude, from head to toe (except for a cap), he made Elijah's eyes linger, for without clothes, one could see the emaciated state of the young man, his ribs showing a little, though compared to Elijah, he was a healthy young man, musculature definition on his arms, his body mostly tanned, being apparently a sporty and outdoor-loving youth, compared to his peer. But most distressing for Elijah was always keeping out of his main gaze the puff of black at Anton's base and its protruding worm, or the flex of his boyish rear when he moved. Yes, Elijah harbored a taboo attraction. He had only been dimly aware of it up until now, but seeing a boy just a year or two younger than him strut about as if the ship had come from Eden, that made it clear for him.

"Now wait a second!" you might be saying. "I thought this was a story about sailing with naked girls!" It is. You will see.

On the sea, they had ultimate privacy, so that Anton and Felix entertained their own desires for freedom. As there was no sail, there was no shade, except for the central structure of the cabin, beside which you could stand, either on the starboard side, or the leeward side, depending on where the sun was. At the height of the day, there was no escaping the sun, though neither Felix nor Anton put their clothes back on. Christoph, entertaining the idea in a half-measure, stood at the wheel with his shirt off, though it seemed he metamorphosed over time, as later, his baggy pants were off, and he stood at the mast in his knickers as if they were swimming shorts, and he felt ridiculous standing up there like that, almost in the spotlight, as if the white knickers drew more attention to him than if he wore nothing at all, so he soon wore nothing at all, in solidarity with Felix, and it became apparent how ridiculous it was that he should wear so many fabrics in the heat. However, the sun can be an enemy if you embrace it too much. Christoph's arms and even his chest were already brown from the life he led. Only his rear was stark white, the line of separation between the two shades like the snapshot of two different people.

Amidst all this nudity, Elijah was uncomfortably the odd one out. It took him a long time to brave up to join his mates, though nobody pressured him. If he were comfortable remaining clothed, then he could remain clothed.

But he wasn't, really. It was hot, and the sweat gathered at the nape of his neck and soaked into his clothes, and the others looked so comfortable, their bodies moving freely in their work. They took care of one mine on that particular day. It would not be the last interesting thing they found, though.

Part of Elijah's concern was his arousal presenting himself. Seeing the young Anton so freely naked was exciting enough, and the idea of stripping down nude was a tantalizing idea less because of the comfort it seemed to bestow, but because the thought of it turned him on, and it stiffened him in his pants. Being nude with Anton, so close on the small ship, would feel like an intimate moment, in that endless privacy out on the sea, but in the presence of others... Elijah did not want to be thrown off of the ship.

So, clothed he was, and it was he, who, while leaning on the gunwale looking out at the dark water, happened to spot the other shade of skin out on the sea.

She was motionless, except for the rocking of the waves, her body draped over a wrecked piece of what must have been the boat she had been on. She wore a white, frilly dress, or once frilly, its fluffiness now soaked and flattened against her shoulders. The skin of her exposed neck, where her red hair was swept away and instead covering her face, was pale white, as were her slender arms reaching out from the sleeves of that dress and gracing that floating piece of wood like a lover.

They feared she was dead, but when they got up beside her and pulled her in—Elijah hanging by a rope off the side of their boat and reaching out to get a handle on the splintered and sun-bleached wood—the woman sighed and turned over.

The emergency had left no consideration for decency, and perhaps the expectation of her being dead left no thought in any of the other men's minds to cover up for her, so when the woman turned and gazed up at her rescuer, her clothes damp and the carmine impressions of her areolas showing through, his clothes also saggy and damp, and beyond him, where three sturdy, nude men stood at the gunwales, her eyes widened.

"Oh," she said. "Are these what angels look like?"

The woman spoke in cockney English, and Felix, adept at many languages, explained to her who they were, and why they were there, and in speaking with her, found his hand covering his offensive part. Christoph, too, looked around to locate his clothing.

"So this is some sort of pleasure cruise or something?" the woman asked. "Much more racy than the one I was on."

They learned of her story; she had been on a yacht with her would-be suitor and a gaggle of his whoring friends. Only a few other women accompanied the little cruise, women who Annie—for that was her name—detested. She found herself up on the deck when the explosion happened.

"A mine," Felix confirmed. "These waters are dangerous. That is why we are here, cleaning it up."

"But why are you... nude?" she asked with incredulity. Her British sensibilities made her eyes avert themselves from the male nudity surrounding her, but an inner, truer self made her eyes drift to their penises as if by magnetism, and it reddened her cheeks.

"We are nudists," Felix explained. "Or, at least I am. It is a new movement taking hold in Germany, people going back to the way we were supposed to be, people seeking to get back in tune with nature, like our ancestors."

Annie absorbed this information with caution and awe. It was such a strange concept to her.

"But I suppose, for your comfort, we should cover up," he added, while behind him, Christoph had picked up his discarded knickers. Annie, though, did not affirm the suggestion. A desire, perhaps, to keep the scandalous scenery about her, held her tongue, and she instead spoke of what they would do. She and her friends had left port from London, and it was her wish to return there.

"Do we have enough fuel to make it to London?" Felix asked Christoph, and, still nude, standing up at the wheel above everybody else and holding his underwear casually in his hands, he furrowed his brow.

"We should be absolutely fine, but is everybody prepared for the journey?"

"Her emergency supersedes everything else," Anton spoke up. "I'm okay with going."

Elijah, with no family back home, had no problem with the adventure, but did not so enthusiastically express his consent. He communicated it with a solemn nod that was interpreted by the others as an expression of reservation towards being away from home for so long, but really, the hesitation was because a prolonged excursion would mean more time with Anton shamelessly flaunting about, which he and the others continued to do so as they changed course.

"Next stop, London!" Christoph cried as he turned the wheel in great strokes, having discarded his undies and standing proud and nude at the helm. Felix too, realized he could maintain his comfort being nude, and Anton was on the cusp of putting his clothes back on, though obvious excitement at being exposed to the lady kept him naked.

And that proved to be a great frustration for Elijah. As they abandoned their task and adopted a new one, the excursion indeed did begin to feel like a pleasure trip, and pleasurable for their new shipmate Annie was the company of her new nude friend, Anton.

"Well, I might as well," she had announced to sudden looks and raised eyebrows. "I've never dabbled in this sort of thing, but these clothes are dreadfully uncomfortable right now."

And right there on the deck, she peeled up her sun-stiffened dress, which clung to her skin from the dampness underneath, then left her in a semi-transparent bra, lacy panties, and a garter. Christoph had to force himself to keep his eyes ahead, and Felix found something to occupy him, while Anton, to Elijah's jealousy, stared in awe as the wet bra was unstrapped and the cups clung for a second on Annie's milk-white, voluminous breasts, and then fell away to reveal an ocean of more bare skin for the eyes to see, with their distinct circles of red.

Her remaining garments also clung to her skin as she tore them down, as if clinging on to their last bastion of hope: the need for decency, which suddenly was dispersed, her panties going down, and the dense, dark puberty at her hips gaining fresh air, and from here and there a stare, as used to nudity the others had gotten. The introduction of a female complicated matters. Or so it seemed. Felix suddenly acted like a great pressure had been released, no longer feeling different from Annie, or in need to cover himself. Christoph's initial distraction vanished, too, as he cheerfully led them along their adventure. But Anton, much to Elijah's anger, became attached to Annie's hip and would sit with her on the stern and have conversation as best they could with Anton's limited English, which only seemed to delight now-naked Annie, her clothes now pinned up against the side of the cabin to dry in the sun. Her delight upturned his male part so that Elijah, on a chance glance, would see the half-turgid show of arousal that Annie brought. And most surprising of all, this did not seem to bother Annie, or she just ignored it, as she brushed her wind-tossed fiery hair from her face while talking to the young man.

All this incensed Elijah to finally join his comrades, and he made a decision, and without second-guessing himself, began to take off his clothes by the leeward side.

The voracity with which he undressed, and the insistence he assumed of putting himself in front of everybody else, had the immediate effect of turning off Annie. She reeled at the sudden sight of him as if he were trying to insist himself upon her, as if his presence was in stark contrast to the other, more humble men. If only she had known he wasn't trying to get her attention, but Anton's! His undressing was an expression of jealousy that she did not comprehend, and naked, with Annie's expressed distaste, Elijah instantly wished that he had remained clothed, despite the sudden, refreshing feeling of the sea breeze on his skin. There was self-consciousness mixed in with that feeling, for he was rail-thin, with his ribs showing more than Anton's, and, to his surprise, he was not erect [a funny precursor to Lucille Fletcher, notes a commentator and descendant] and foolishly, he felt his manhood scrutinized, though that hardly was the case. He found himself retreating to the side of the ship where he could be alone, staring out at the ocean and feeling the sun burning his shoulders. He felt strangely at peace despite his troubles. And that's when Felix joined him.

"Thinking how your family will worry?" Felix asked him. It was so strange to be on the receiving end of a conversation from another nude man, standing so close.

"No," Elijah admitted. "I... I have no family."

Felix then, somehow, understood, though he didn't voice it. Or perhaps that was only Elijah's perception, the paranoia that dogged him every day. The paranoia that people would know.

"Sometimes life hands you a situation that you don't know what to do with," Felix offered. "And the only thing you can do is keep your chin up, and see what happens, and react to it accordingly."

Felix may not have been privy to exactly what was going on in Elijah's mind, but his statement did help Elijah.

He had gained a new level of comfort and acceptance, and was standing at the bow, near Anton and Annie as they joked and talked while it grew dark, and eventually, the fog rolled in. Suddenly everybody became more alert, senses more attuned to every sound and sensation, as if the absence of their clothes heightened those senses. Christoph especially paid close attention to the fog, looking for things hidden within it. "Yep," Annie had said. "We're definitely close to London."

And then there was a halo of light in the impenetrable dark. It grew on all sides until it was like a miniature rising sun on the horizon, and inside the light, there formed a fuzzy silhouette of another ship. Felix and Elijah scrambled to grab their clothes, and Christoph, helpless at the helm, looked longingly for where his were discarded. But Annie and Anton, clinging to the gunwales, were the first to notice that they did not need to get dressed, for on the bow of that large ship, twice the size of their little vessel, there was glimpsed a surprising amount of bare skin.

A young woman stood at the bow, one foot propped up, her posture brave and bold, her form perfect and picturesque. Even from the distance, everybody on the little ship could see the completeness of her nudity as she glowed orange from the light, with the tally-mark of darkness between her bare thighs. Her dark hair hung just at her shoulders. She looked to be about Annie’s age. Coming up beside her suddenly was another young woman, with longer, lighter hair, and a fuller bosom, erasing any doubt that either of them was as they suspected: completely nude. Both ships slowed and aligned with each other, parallel, fifty yards of darkness between them. All on deck, even Christoph, gathered at the leeward side to holler over to the other boat, where there appeared yet another nude figure, this one distinctly male, marked by the obvious protrusion from a wispy, barely-there patch of age, and distinguished by his more square and more weathered frame. He appeared to be a man well above his fifties, his chest saggy, his skin bright and pale, and a straw hat perched atop his head, even though the sun was gone.

"Ahoy there!" Christoph yelled. "And who might you be?"

"This is the ship of the imminent Harold McCallister!" came the man's booming voice. "I see we of are the same mind!"

"Are we near London?" Felix called out.

"Yes, yes, we just departed from there!"

"At night? Are you a pleasure ship?" Felix then called. "These waters are dangerous!"

"Pleasure can be found in everything!" came the old man's voice, echoing across the sea after the first report, as if to emphasize his point. It was not lost on Elijah, who looked back at the collection of moments that had led up to the present with a certain amount of regret. "And what pleasure are you seeking, despite the danger?" the man then hollered over.

"Let us come closer," Christoph yelled, turning and in a hurry to get back up to the helm. He seemed eager to get a better look.

Minutes later, their dinghy was puttering up alongside the larger craft, which was indeed a solid craft and not a ghost ship. The grain of the wood was seen and touched. Peering down at them were the smiling faces and bare bosoms—one set compact and pear-shaped, the other full and maternal—of both naked young women. The old man appeared and lowered down a rope ladder. Soon they were upon the apparent pleasure craft.

There were four in all: the old man, who had introduced himself as Harold McCallister, an important name, mind you. Along with him was a skipper, a young strapping man. And then the two young girls, one of whom shares a name with one of our protagonists, so instead of names, they will be identified by their countenances, the first girl they had seen from afar, with her dark hair that flared out at her shoulders, her joyous face, and slender build, and her compatriot, with fuller figure and fuller hair. Each of them captivated our little dinghy crew, from our two older, seasoned gentlemen, to the young man and his female companion, vying for his attention but also taken by the free nudity, and even Elijah, who was taken by the careless display of beautiful bodies. Taken, they were, too, by this captain's story.

I had set sail eight years ago, truly as a pleasure craft, in contrast to our current ship’s mission. It was my idea that out at sea, under the sun, time would best be spent in the absence of clothes, and that the perfect companions for such voyages would be the prettiest of nude subjects. All in pure innocence did we sail the seas, and accepted was the reality that the eye favors the young and the nude. Such a delight were our voyages that friends and acquaintances—and clients—came aboard. So captured by the magic of fearlessly naked girls was one such client, a man named John T. Hungar, that he commandeered his own voyage, with paying clients, in competition with me. He and his vessel full of conscripted coquettes, and two clients, set sail, and in his inexperience, John T. Hungar got his crew lost at sea. The only reason this is known is because of a letter in a bottle, describing his new life on the island he and his crew shipwrecked on.[i] I decided I would find him, whether to rescue them (though Hungar claimed he did not want to be rescued) or to join them. The promise of a pristine island to live clothes-free and tanned, with the accompaniment of beautiful young ladies, was irresistible. Who wouldn't want to live like that? but then the war began.

It has been five years since I read that mesmerizing message in the bottle, and now, with the world getting back in its groove, I am ready to begin that search. And my girl companions requested to come, for they have friends out there on the island as well. And my lucky skipper, presented with the sight of them as we set out, for they insisted on being nude. When in the embrace of the sun and sea, who needs clothes?

So I detailed my story to the bewildered crew of the little minesweeper, absent of clothes and in the same mind as we, their crew delightfully co-ed and free, though our protagonist, Elijah, I sensed unease from. There was a tension among the crew centered around him. I was delighted to see that tension unravel on the deck of our ship.

That was when the question of accompanying us came up. It came from Annie, of all people. Annie, who the men had been on their way to deposit back home, but on hearing of my goal, and of the fabled island, her sense of adventure was piqued. She wanted to join along. It is possible that any connections to her old life had sunk under the water along with the ship she had been on, or perhaps she wanted an excuse to remain nude for as long as possible. Whatever her motivations, we were delighted to add yet another nude member of the fairer sex to our expedition.

Eager, it seemed, to follow the girl he had bonded with, or to follow the fairness of the other two nude women of our crew, the young man Anton volunteered to come along. Annie did not mind at all, and neither did my companions, who seemed delighted to have a lean, young, and nude and attractive male added to their crew.

The others showed surprise. "Don't you have family back home?" Felix had asked Anton. Anton was coy with confirming whether or not he did; all of his interest was now centered on my boat, my pleasure craft.

Anton's commitment guaranteed that Elijah would follow, as he quickly volunteered to come along, citing that he had nothing of value to go back to at home, though his eyes, lingering towards young Anton—and not his trio of female compatriots—did not deceive me. Love is blind. Lust is blind and deaf. I embrace commitment to these emotions. All great adventures start with lust. Less than half may end in love, but I believe the adventures are always worth having.

The man named Felix expressed interest in going, too. I did not expect to have so many people on my boat, but I had the provisions for it, and the sea has plenty of fish. I invited him along as well, for Felix was a most fascinating man, having taken to the German trend of nudism, which independently mirrored my current pursuits. He seemed most fascinated by how I had led myself to favor nudity on the sea, and he was of course charmed by my company. He was a most inquisitive and deep mind, and I looked forward to the lending of his wisdom to my pursuits.

The only one left, dejected, lonely-looking, but with more, apparently, to go back to than the others, was the captain, Christoph, who stood alone on their little dinghy and waved us off as we set sail on the seas. I would not see him again for a long time, and he had his own grand adventure. We, however, headed through the fog, and when broken through, were out on the high sea, with months ahead of us, on course for the spot of the sea where John T. Hungar's boat was last known to be, and where, somewhere out there, was his island of naked girls!

*****

Overheard at a tavern in Amsterdam

"Yes, this story is true. I parted ways with my friends and set out on my own, nervous about myself, a German, showing my face in London, but it was dark, and I had been sailing all day. I decided to skirt the shore and test my luck. It is weird fate that I had the side-adventure that I did.

Soon I saw the lights of the port. Slowing the boat, I headed towards them, knowing I would need to re-stock and refuel. Soon, the pier was closer than I realized, and I still had not gotten dressed. And even at that late hour, some people were standing on the pier, and they began pointing at me. It was two women. My clothes were out of reach and I had nothing to do but wave hello as my boat drifted in. They seemed absolutely delighted by me.

Before I could step off onto the pier, they stepped onto my boat. Before I could explain myself, their hands were on my chest, and my penis found its way into their hands. What can I say? I couldn’t protest.

I spoke very little English, and they understood very little German, but I was able to communicate to them my predicament, and they understood that I needed fuel, and wouldn’t mind some food, and they agreed to get me some, provided that they get to stay with me.

What a preposterous situation. I agreed and sent them off, and remained on the boat while they went on their task. I was terrified of being found out, but nobody questioned or noticed my craft now tied down on the pier. While the girls were out, I took up my clothes and contemplated putting them on, but they were dried and stiff and unpleasant to imagine wearing, and seeing as it was dark, I left them off. The girls were not disappointed when they returned.

I had everything I needed, except for a good rest. I intended to sleep in the cabin and depart before first light, and apparently, the two lasses decided that they would do so as well. But not before they had their fun with me.

As they helped me move my new stock that they had retrieved for me, the clothes came off. My arousal was presented for them and they were quite glad, as was I, as I permitted myself to lay my hands on them. They both were so smooth and youthful and perfect. I ended up falling to my knees and worshiping their nest of hairs and cradle of life with my tongue and lips, until my jaw was sore, and I was on my back, on the floor, with them entertaining me. The last memory I had before passing out was my ejaculation onto their surprised and laughing faces, and the euphoria of being sucked dry before my vision went black.

When I awoke, the boat was moving, and we were out at sea. I was equally surprised to see another young man in our company, who groggily sat up and rubbed his head. He was dressed in tattered clothes, and was quite a tubby little guy; I guess, despite his apparent poverty, he was eating better than Elijah or Anton.

We didn't understand each other, and all I could glean was that he was someone my two lovers had roped in on an adventure. They were nowhere to be seen, and I, still nude (and in need of a piss) stood, to the detestment of my new shipmate, and went up on deck to find the two British lasses manning the helm, completely nude, taking us on an adventure to where I did not know.

I rushed up and demanded answers. They supplied laughs. They said they always wanted to go on a sea voyage. I asked them where we were, and they admitted that they did not know. I was sure in a spot.

Eventually, our male cohort came up on deck, and was taken aback by the nudity of our two female captains. And the gravity of his situation settled in. We were all in the same boat, quite literally. At some point on our adventure, where I tried to determine our coordinates and steer us towards German shores, our young crew member decided to get nude as we were, and the women sneered and laughed at his appearance, and gave all their affection to me.

It is fateful coincidence that he is their only company now, for things did not go well; a storm swept into the sea quite surprisingly, or maybe we were so far out that we were pulled into its clutches. We had a most perilous time traveling through that tempest, the boatloads of water that were thrown at us making me glad we were nude, for we were cascaded, and otherwise our clothes would have soaked it all in. My three new shipmates did what they could to bucket out the water, and I did what I could to steer through the storm, like Peter Simple, only nude, and more brave. My bravery cost me, and I was thrown overboard by a crashing wave. In seconds, I lost sight of the ship, so dark it was, and with the best of my abilities, saved myself from drowning, until I ended up here, with you.

I hope with all hope that my new friends have survived their perils, though I fear the worst. I am bound to go look for them, for all of them, however long it takes. Whether to find them floating and bereft on a piece of scrap as how we found Annie, or whether it is on the shores of this island that supposedly exists out in the Atlantic, I will go, after I get back home and prepare. If I have to go alone, I will, though in the back of my mind, I would wish for the opportunity to sail with naked girls again...

Naked Expedition

It really did feel like an adventure now. Not that it hadn't over the past few days on a giant vessel cutting through the open sea, with half the crew made of attractive models, but that was like a vacation adventure, a "safe" adventure, an adventure for Mom and Dad and Timmy and Susie, not an adventure for Indiana Jones. Now, as the island came into view through the fog, Pablo knew they were on an adventure fit for him.

He was in the lead raft, manned by the ship's second-in-command, Carl Hamburgh, a straight-laced, anal-retentive guy who looked a little tense surrounded on the small craft by Pablo's models. Behind them, four other rafts were split between crew and models. The crew (both for the film and for the boat) were outnumbered overall by the models, who came from around the world to be in Pablo's first film, so some of the rafts only held one lone and lucky man and three half-naked or thinly-dressed young women, who in a few minutes would toss those easily-removed articles aside. Behind them loomed the "SS Ariel," named by him after a friend, former model, producer, and the person who had gotten him into being a photographer, and it was a perfect name because the acronym backwards spelled out his muse.

He was the "Ass Man" to many. His name, for a long time, had been twisted commonly to "Pablo Asscobar," but his real name was Pablo Estrada, which he preferred. His other nickname was “The Ass Man.” Asses had been his sole theme early in his career. He would photograph hundreds of nude models, but purely focus on “that ass,” as some people say. But one day, he met a model so perfectly beautiful, specifically in her nudity, that he understood the wider appeal. Her name had been Dora, and she had overwhelmed him with her effortless and captivating beauty, the way her body, when backlit by the sun, glowed like an angel, the line of her hips tapering at just the right angle, not too steep and exaggerated as to be seen as nothing but erotic, but not completely straight or without appeal; just in the middle, faintly alluring, fully feminine, and the particular shape created by the puff of her bush, which she did not need to trim, was a perfect aesthetic compliment to the whole image. She almost made Pablo Estrada become "the bush man."[i]

She sat now on that raft with him, eyes forward and in awe at the lush, green island that appeared as they completely passed through the fog.

The waves sloshed their raft onto wet, damp sand and Carl Hamburgh stood. He put his hand up for the others to wait and he threw his feet into the water, soaking his pant legs up to his thighs as he pulled the raft securely onto the sand and the other rafts came near. Pablo stood on unsteady knees, steadying his hands on his camera equipment in its supposedly water-proof case, while Dora and the rest of the girls eagerly climbed out, with no concern about getting their clothes wet, what little they wore. Pablo was the last in the raft, and he did flip over. Saltwater burned his nostrils and filled his ears, and as his face came above the surface, the first thing he saw was Carl Hamburgh and his extended hand, and the second thing, which kept him on his knees, captivated, was Dora marching up the sand, her hair blown completely horizontal by the wind, the nape of her neck and her shoulders framed in the wide cut of the striped and high-cut shirt she wore, with the other models slowly following, all peering at a high and dark rock shelf rising like a giant monolith hundreds of feet above them, and beyond its peak, lush, forested hills, and a mountain far behind, obscured by clouds. This was the perfect setting for his naturism film.

For that's what he was making. Dora had inspired him. She, along with another of his models that had been overlooked by him and picked up by one of his business partners, had already filmed a handful of so-called "naturist" films, bright, zippy adventures full of beautiful locales and complete nudity from beginning to end, an extension of the exploitative nudist films of the 1960s, fun adventures celebrating the human form, specifically the female human form. Pablo was so in love with the idea that he dabbled in the scene, making himself present on several shoots, and learning the ropes so he could helm his own vision. And now he was here, scheduled to spend several days on the shores of this lush island to do just that.

Catching up to Dora were a few other models he had met and worked with that were among his favorites:

There was Zoe, walking up in her white shawl which blew in the wind, and under which showed her black bikini, complimenting her sable hair. She had gotten his attention with half of that bikini at a networking event, where she showed she had the boldness and lack of modesty to present herself.[ii]

There was also a young college student named Claire, with long, messy-looking dirty blonde hair, who was a friend of Zoe's and interested in modeling after her exploits on her college campus testing out her friend’s supposed "invisibility cloak,' with unexpected circumstances that left her exposed to many[iii]. She, unlike her colleagues, dressed most casually, ironically most covered up, as if she were going to classes at her school back home, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt that looked like too much clothing for such a tropical location.

Estrada himself wore a Hawaiian button-down and loose slacks both kept the breeze going through him and protected his light skin, and his head was protected by his full, thick hair. His sunglasses completed the image of a Miami clubber.

Lastly, there was Nako Takoyama, a celebrity in the world for her nude philanthropy, competing in nude video game tournaments and even hosting her own show akin to Marie Kondo’s, only without clothes.[iv] She was quite a personality, and the most bubbly and innocent with the way she embraced the scenes she found herself in, including the beautiful island that now stretched before her. She skipped past Dora, stripping off her short shorts as she went, as if she was eager to already get nude, and as Pablo stood, he witnessed her pale, bare bottom bounding as she ran up to the rock shelf, where she stopped to peel off her top, and then turned around to gaze at him. Pablo already wished he had had his camera ready.

“Why don’t you get naked too?” she yelled over. “Your clothes are all wet!”

Pablo laughed and waved a hand. That was not an appealing idea to him. Nobody wanted to see his pudgy, pale body, and besides, the focus was the girls. And Nako was the first girl to fully embrace the uniform for the shoot.

Raftfuls of other models disembarked, each dressed in varying states of exposure or modesty, each ready to be completely immodest, as Pablo dragged his camera case to the shore and unpacked.

"We should probably recon the beach," Carl suggested as Pablo unpacked his equipment and looked up to see the other crew members disembarking. "Make sure everything is safe."

"You do that," Pablo said, already framing shots in his mind. "Where’s Sheldon?"

Sheldon was his production assistant, the one person on the trip who had reigns on Pablo Asscobar, though he didn't seem up to the task. And, apparently, he suffered from sea sickness.

"He’s coming," Carl said, then hitched his belt and looked out at the inland beach, flinching a bit at the sudden sight of so many bared buns and slender backs.

Paul had a bare-bones story outline, written by a newcomer, but he had an even more detailed picture in his head already. The plot wasn't important; the film would be about a bunch of naked girls discovering an island. All he had to do was string together beautiful montages of naked women, and the story would come out of that. Or so that's what he assumed.

The rest of the rafts landed. his crew members disembarked, and so did the rest of the models, all eighteen of them. Sheldon was with them, looking flustered, already exhausted, and ill-prepared. Pablo paid him little mind and focused on his tireless, naked vision. Soon the beach was flooded with pretty girls, and some of them followed Nako's example and began stripping immediately. Pablo, as well as his crew, were elated.

"Alright!" Pablo shouted. "I'm going to get a first shot of you all coming up on the island, so get ready!"

At his command, the horde of girls undressed while the male crew stood by and gawked. The first shot that Pablo captured was a procession of nude posteriors following behind Dora and Zoe as they peered up at the rock shelf, an exquisite shot of fresh, plush young fannies under the sun. He could already see the shot up on the big screen.

*****

Later, as they got things fully set up, all the naked models gaggled by a ready-made thatched hut that his crew had constructed, as if they lived there, and Pablo captured candid scenes of the nude girls laughing and joking, and as they laughed, their tits would jiggle slightly, and as their bodies turned, their posteriors were displayed at a variety of alluring angles. It was all cinematic bliss, and his partners were overwhelmed by the presence of so much nubile flesh.

Zoe and Claire talked and laughed, play-shoving each other and then breaking out running along the surf, which Pablo videod. Dora was her usual captivating and elusive self, walking to the edge of the water, where Pablo followed, to capture her throwing out her arms to the sun, and to the distant ship, on which the captain very well may have been watching through binoculars, wishing he was there.

*****

Dora enjoyed her liberty, her ability to stand unburdened by clothes before the expanse of the sea, and before the focus of Pablo’s camera. It was freeing, but also constricting, though she enjoyed the opportunity to show off, and in the presence of the flustered male crew, she enjoyed their varied reactions.

Such as what transpired in front of Pablo's lens:

Coming back to the hut, where more than a dozen other young women stood nude, filling Dora with confidence; an impromptu volleyball game, after the net was erected by the male crew and a ball provided. Many choice shots of bouncing breasts as girls would reach up to spike were immortalized on film. And the men, particularly Pablo's production assistant—Dora thought his name was something wimpy like Sheldon—walked around with shoulders squeezed in, as if terrified of brushing against anybody. His eyes squinted through the glare of the sun on his spectacles and there was a defeated look on his face that accepted his fate, that there was nowhere he could look without potentially staring at somebody. Meanwhile, Pablo stared aplenty. Through his camera, that was, and also standing up, getting an idea for a shot, and down again, and often shouting "vivo!" when a shot came off right, or sometimes shouting it even when he wasn't looking through the camera, just happy to be surrounded by almost two dozen naked girls. He was a boisterous man, and unapologetic. Dora liked him and found him amusing.

The experience had been different on the other nudist adventure films she had been in. There, she had male co-stars (albeit outnumbered by the women) and all the crew was nude, from the director to the coffee boy. A beautiful harmony had been achieved there; they weren't filming her as fawning admirers looking up from the base of a pedestal, but as friends and cohorts all making a fun movie together. Perhaps Pablo had a lot to learn about nude filmmaking, but despite that, despite his overflowing expressions of adoration and the theme of his work, Dora had never felt uncomfortable with him. The only thing she wished was that he had at least half the passion for organizing as he did for pretty naked women and their butts. The shoots were aimless, the story seemingly non-existent (though there had been an outline written up by a writer, not present), and Sheldon the production assistant was of little help. Getting to essentially be on a nudist vacation on a beautiful tropical island was nice, but Dora wondered what the final film would be like.

They broke for lunch and were filmed sitting on the beach, laying on the bare sand, eating wedges of fruit that would sweat onto their chests (all good for the camera) and the feel of the scene was a charming day-in-the-life of the naked island girls. Dora sat with her legs drawn up, her hands propped on her knees, holding a piece of coffee cake, while around her, the other various women were hardly eating, some of them reaching for a single grape from the craft table under their thatched hut. Dora had never been much for restricting her diet to be a model. She just ate what she wanted, was reasonably active, and posed as her natural self. So too, apparently, did Zoe and Claire, who she sat near because she identified with them the most. They were both college students, both curious about modeling nude, and both starting out. Zoe had modeled before, but Claire was completely new to this; the only nude posing she had done was auditioning for Pablo. Now she was naked and three hundred miles from the shore and from home.

As Dora sat there wordlessly with them, the sand hot under her butt, surrounded by the bare shoulders of all the other seated girls and the slender figures of the ones who passed by, one more animated person, that boisterous, almost child-like girl named Nako, skipped and twirled by with Pablo in pursuit, holding his handicam and grinning. Dora imagined that what his camera saw was an implied story of one girl from the party breaking off, leaving the group and going on a daring adventure. The lovable naked star turned in place to show off her slender, sinuous, slightly-tanned frame, turning so the camera could appreciate her compact little butt (Pablo's favorite thing) and her puffy black pubic hair in one moment, and she grinned, breaking the fourth wall and stopping the viewer's heart before she broke contact and turned to the endless beach again.

"Hey!" Pablo exclaimed, and turned to his procession of nude models as if they were his consultants. "I'm thinking Nako wanders off, finds some little adventure of her own, and all the others go looking for her."

It was like Dora and Pablo were of the same mind, and she smiled, but then frowned when Nako, taking up the idea, took up the attention as well.

"Yes!" she shouted, almost in character (if she had a character). "Come follow Nako, Tako...." She spun around like a ballerina and nearly lost her balance. "...Yama!" And with that, she turned and ran down the beach, and Pablo hurriedly raised his handicam again to record her retreat, then he broke into a jog.

"I don't like that girl," Claire said, and Dora broke her gaze from Nako's distant and bouncing rear and laughed. Zoe, in her quiet demeanor, snickered and bit back a grin. Then Pablo came trotting back up the beach, out of breath.

"Okay, everybody, come with me!"

*****

Zoe relished the adventure, relished Pablo's spirit of adventure, and she relished being nude, particularly on this picturesque beach, and particularly in front of so many people, both the flustered male crew members and her nude co-stars with their limitless expression. Especially Nako Takoyama, as they all ran down the beach in pursuit of her, while Pablo floated through them all, immortalizing them with his camera.

"Look distressed!" he said. "You are worried about your friend!"

They ran along the curving beach towards a region unknown, dense jungle to their right, as Zoe trotted and felt—and relished—her tits bouncing for the camera. But Pablo was behind her, filming the marathon of naked girls bounding towards him, then, undoubtedly, spinning around to catch her rear, the thing that he loved the most, and the thing that had captivated him when she got his attention by taking off her bottom at the Bikini Minus One networking event, where she felt even more alive being the only one bold enough to walk around without a bottom instead of a top. That was, until she influenced the rest of the party to follow suit. Before that, she had been in the spotlight, which she liked, and now, she may have been in an occasional spotlight, but the presence of her seventeen or so co-stars made sure the camera was always on a swivel, capturing candid grins and sun-kissed tits, getting lost in a kaleidoscope of bare skin and feminine features. Zoe, seeing all that through her own eyes, transposed over sand and sunlight, imagined, in her dark mind, one of them tied up on a wooden post in the sand, before the ocean, as a Leviathan emerges from the sea to take its sacrifice. Something about the island setting and memories of old movies and her own twisted mind spun up this fantasy, where the appeal was exposure, helpless exposure, She thrived off of that feeling and it drove her to take Pablo's direction and act as a terrified, naked maiden, thrown into a world of danger and vulnerability.

When they cleared around a bend and stood at a stretch of unfamiliar, endless beach, Pablo came to a stop, and looked bewildered as to how to frame his bare-bones, on-the-fly story next. It became clear to Zoe that Pablo was going to do the entire production by the seat of his pants, which made sense, since his stars were not wearing any. Zoe had no idea how he was going to make a sensible movie out of this, but she was looking forward to seeing herself up on the big screen. That had been Pablo's plan as well, to get the movie shown in theaters in an effort to normalize simple nudity, as the growing trend of naturist movies was slowly doing. She had no idea how he imagined he'd get the movie shown if it didn't have a plot, though.

Adding to the feeling of disorganization was the fact that Nako was now nowhere to be seen. Lines of naked girls were now stopped, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the sand, with Pablo drifting through them, looking just as bewildered but still sweeping with his camera to record their confused reactions. Then Nako burst brightly out of the brush and threw up her arms and shouted "boo!" and made several of the nearest girls and even Zoe jump in surprise, and then laugh, or scowl, and all of it was captured, from the sharp and rapid jiggles of youthful breasts, to the honest, candid faces, all beautiful and charming mixed with the bright sun.

Zoe quite liked Nako. She bit her lip when Claire talked down about her. She admired and even relished her pure energy and enthusiasm. And her complete lack of modesty, no care in the world, throwing herself nude in front of everybody. She seemed to honestly enjoy being naked, like a happy child, but she also seemed to like the stiff reactions from the men she presented herself in front of. It was not quite the exhibitionist tingle that often tingled through Zoe when she detected a pair of eyes glancing down at her jet-black pubic hair, but it was a delighted amusement at how her lean, sprightly body elicited discomfort and desire among their male crew members. She had a zest for life, as long as it was naked, at least, displayed as such when they returned to the ship that evening.

Nako had insisted on leaving her clothes off. She had left them lying in the sand and eagerly climbed into the raft on the way back, her skin wet and shiny, the skipper, Carl Hamburgh, sitting straight and with a stern face. It was an unspoken assumption that once the shoot was done for the day, the clothes would go back on, as some of the models pulled their discarded bikini bottoms back up their legs, or slipped down dresses or wrapped shawls over their skin. But not Nako. And Pablo didn't seem to mind. So Zoe stayed nude, too, though she carried the two halves of her black two-piece and her white shawl with her. Dora had put on her loose pants, but on seeing Zoe and Nako nude, left her top off, much to the skipper's agitation (she had way nicer tits than Nako or even Zoe, large but not too large, perfectly shaped, perfectly symmetrical, perfectly distracting). Claire, still getting a feel for this life unknown to her, put her clothes back on and looked all the more uncomfortable for it. As the rafts floated back to the ship, the crew on deck were in awe when half of the arriving group was still naked.

Zoe had assumed that the captain would shake his head to nudity on the ship, adhering to social norms or in interest of not having distractions, but there was no voiced rule that nudity was prohibited. It was a giant nude film shoot, afterall, and so, those who chose to come back to the ship remained nude, and soon, others joined them as well, and Zoe and Nako had some fun.

Zoe, not particularly, but Nako and a few of the others, had expected and looked forward to sleeping out on the beach, but they were not in The Blue Lagoon, and all the civilized comforts and necessities were on the ship, though Pablo had announced plans for nighttime scenes, and even now, as the moon rose over the dark bay, lights could be seen far out on shore as the crew members out there busied themselves constructing more huts. Zoe watched them from the window of her cabin and longed to run out on that beach. Then the door opened and Nako appeared.

"Whoops!" she cried. "Wrong room!"

Zoe was a bit startled, but glad to see Nako, as if her mere appearance lent her some energy.

"You forgot where your room was?" Zoe asked with a smile.

"I did. All of the doors look the same to Nako. I was going check my socials before I walked around the ship and see what’s up."

She had a curious way of speaking occasionally in the third person, like Elmo, that was annoyingly infantile but at the same time somewhat charming. And she kept up-to-date on her "socials" all during their trip, for Nako Takoyama was a popular person. Zoe was surprised she had never heard of her, but she seemed a natural celebrity to be cast in the movie they were now involved with.

And she was naturally magnetic with her unspoken offer to tour the ship and torment the men there with their bodies. Zoe immediately joined her, and along the halls they walked, delighting in the flinches of surprise from the surly crew members they crossed paths with. Some were surprised and embarrassed. Others were pleasantly surprised and leery. Nako and Zoe only entertained their eyes and nothing else, though with every encounter, Nako seemed more poised to introduce more sexual tension.

"Why are we the only ones who are naked?" Nako asked as they traveled from the interior to the deck outside. "The way Nako sees it, everybody should enjoy themselves!"

Maybe the second day would embolden some of the others, for Zoe wouldn't have minded seeing some of the men naked, such as the skipper, Carl Hamburgh, who was a sturdy, handsome, and increasingly flustered man, or Samuel, strong and tall and midnight-black with a shiny, bald dome of masculine sweat that Zoe could not help compare to the imagined image of his twitching, engorged cock-head. Animal lust drove her to wish to see these men as nude as the girls were, to have the tables of lustful looks up-ended. And then one of those lustful admirers appeared as they stepped out onto the deck: a gentle giant named Andy, who was well over six feet tall, and who Zoe imagined must have the same measurement of inches in his pants, or more, to match his stature.

"Oh," he said, quite surprised to see the two of them. "The day never ends, huh?" He concluded this statement with an unintentional show of lust by the lick of his lips.

"Nako wants to be naked whenever she can!" Nako beamed, and Andy's gaze upon her softened, as if he were taken away by her innocence and exuberance.

"Well," he said with a laugh. "I certainly don't mind."

"Nako is glad!" the girl then sang, canting her hips to frame and display her wiles. Andy again licked his lips.

"Andy! another male voice called, and a fat, portly, unappealing man named Biff appeared on the far end of the deck. "Why aren't you out there?"

"I was just going," Andy explained. Biff looked between Andy and naked Nako and naked Zoe standing there with nowhere to hide, and his face was knowing of the possibility of distractions.

"Get your shit together, man," Biff said, and waddled off. Zoe and Nako had nothing to do but laugh, and their jiggly, animated, nude laughter shook Andy.

"Are you going to help build us more shelters?" Nako asked Andy, and Zoe just stood and grinned, folding her arms and pushing up her bared breasts. She kept her grin from spreading when she saw the trickle of sweat run down Andy's temple.

"Yeah," he said, with a cautious voice. "Gotta get them all up by the end of the night."

"Can we come?" Nako then asked. "Nako would love to walk on the beach at night."

Zoe watched the man's face grow worried and unsure.

"Gee, well..."

"Great idea!" Zoe exclaimed, dropping her arms and stepping up next to Nako. Whatever consequences Andy was going to face, he must have deemed the bargain worth it.

"Aw hell," he said. "Come on," and he reached for a chain to lower the raft. Nako was giddy as he helped her down the latter, and soon Andy was crowded in the raft with the two naked girls against each side.

The men on shore were naturally shocked to see Andy's company. All of the men stood around the huts under construction, a gas generator running and powering rows of spotlights to help them work. Zoe saw the production assistant, Sheldon Mann, step forward. Over the roar of the generator, Zoe couldn't hear Sheldon but didn't have to, as his voice mouthed oh hell no. By the time Andy had pulled the raft to shore, Nako had already scrambled out and splashed down knee-deep into the water, putting her arms out and spinning circles. Zoe almost expected her to go running up the beach and get lost for real like their impromptu scene earlier that day, but there was much more to interest her right there. She ran to land with her hands still thrown out to greet all the working men. She rushed past Sheldon, who stopped and put his fists on his hips, waiting to admonish Andy.

"What the hell is this, man? We don't need any distractions."

Zoe had come up next to Andy, folding her arms again in that unintentional but slightly intentional display of her womanhood.

"We just wanted to see the beach at night," she said for Andy, who dipped his head like a scolded child.

"That's for tomorrow," Sheldon said, looking directly at her, angry enough to not be distracted by her exhibition. "I know Pablo didn't approve this."

"Well we're here now," Zoe said. "We won't get in the way."

Sheldon looked over his shoulder, where Nako stood, talking animatedly, bouncing on the balls of her feet—and making her small tits bounce as well—surrounded on three sides by her admirers and very much getting in the way.

*****

Despite being the production assistant, it seemed like Sheldon had very little power. The men, who answered to Hamburgh, didn't regard him with much fear or respect, probably stemming from the fact that any of them could pick him up and twirl him over their heads. They only begrudgingly followed his orders when Carl was around. The other men and women of the small production crew were even worse. Young and without a sense of respect, constantly bitchy, and slow in their physical labor to the point that the seaman seemed preferable. And like the crew of the ship, the crew of the production regarded his direction much less than they did Pablo's, for his personality outweighed Sheldon's, his energy and passion coursing through everybody.

And then there were the models, who, in contrast to the other two sets of subordinates, barely acknowledged him. Any direction was given by their passionate director. When Sheldon was faced with giving a direction directly to one of the bare and intimidating beauties, they followed it, but there was always a moment of pause, as if they were considering it first. Or, in this case, he had two of the models making a spectacle of themselves in front of his workers when they needed to hustle to get everything set up before the next morning's shoot. His voice was lost in his throat, unable to rise up and to tell the spunky Japanese girl not to insert herself into the work area, where she would beam "Nako can help!" and the delighted men grinned and rubbed their scalps and told her where to hold up a wooden beam, or when to go fetch some more palm fronds for the roof. Sheldon hated to admit it, but work was getting done, without his guidance.

At least somewhat. The other girl, with equally dark but much shorter hair, effortlessly seduced one of his best workers, Samuel, who stood talking with her, his posture tall and confident, his arms folded, his eyes erratic, and the girl would croon and laugh and animate her nude body in a way that made Samuel lick his lips with desire. It succeeded in making Sheldon find his voice.

"Sam, get back to work!"

Both Samuel and the dark-haired girl turned and looked at him with the contempt that one would give the un-cool kid at a party, their stares stony and stern. Then Samuel turned his head and looked over to the work area, where Nako was standing up on a stool, holding a patchwork of palm fronds up while men stood around her to guide and steady her, their faces next to her puffy pubic hair and her smooth hips. Then Samuel shrugged, put his hands in his pockets, nodded to the girl by his side and said something inaudible, and turned to get back to work. The girl made a face and then followed him, as if jealous to have the other naked girl as competition.

And yet the work got done. Though there were many pauses to stop and look at their nude company, and though the short-haired girl mostly stood around, the crew seemed to be motivated to have a pair of naked girls overseeing their work, and their work was cheerful. It was as if Sheldon didn't even need to be there. And then, adding to his sense of powerlessness, Nako dusted off her hands when the last structure was erected and announced she was going for a swim. Like kids summoned by an ice cream truck, the crew followed her. They followed her all the way to the shore and then stopped, like vampires unable to enter holy ground, and Nako bounded in. Then, one of the boldest of the men peeled off his shirt, pulling it out from his waistband and revealing his white undershirt underneath, which he tore off as well. In response, several other men mirrored his actions, even when he unbuckled his belt and pulled his pants down, and then, his boxers.

Sheldon could hear Nako shout "yes!" from the water, and he was helpless to stop what was going on, as five pale and masculine asses flexed towards the water where the Japanese girl waited. If Pablo were there, he would have immediately been filming, Sheldon knew. And, as he was the production assistant, he saw it fit to pull out his phone and hold it up in landscape mode, panning his camera, and he began filming. In the grainy, low light, what he captured could have been any night beach party from Spring Break, full of careless nudity and hedonism. Hedonism, because, as the men stood up past their waists, some of them were in various stages of arousal, and Nako, a hedonist at heart, was thrilled to be surrounded by them.

*****

"Fantastic," Pablo gasped as he saw the footage later. "It's like a found footage film, only happy!"

Indeed there was much happiness on the little screen. Several men stood alongside Nako, smiles on all their faces, and sturdy erections slid into her playful hands. All around, they were wagging like dogs. And off on the side, the short-haired woman named Zoe embraced with a shadow: Samuel blending in with the dark. It looked like they were kissing passionately. It was a scene of shared pleasure all around.

"It's obscene enough to denied a theatrical release," Pablo added. "But just obscured enough to actually make it in! You have an excellent eye!"

"Wow, thank you."

"This might be a big ask, but how would you like helping me behind the camera for the remainder of the shoot? We have eighteen models; there is too much to capture with one cameraman alone!"

Sheldon was taken aback.

"Wow, well..."

It wasn't like he had been feeling successful at his assigned job up to this point, as much as a dream job ferrying around a horde of naked models was. It actually proved distracting, and difficult. Many times he was unable to think of what he needed to do next as he beheld bouncing and bare flesh before his eyes. But if he were behind the camera... His job then would literally be to focus on all these beauties.

"Sure," Sheldon said. It was strange to be accepting a request from someone who was technically his subordinate, but he swelled with pride at how happy Pablo was.

"Excellent! You are going to have a fantastic time chronicling Heaven on Earth!"

Heaven, however, was filled with much difficulty.

*****

Sheldon felt blessed and cursed at the same time. That day, they convened on the beach again, as Pablo directed and Sheldon followed his lead, and the gaggle of nude girls—who this time departed from the ship already nude, or most of them at least—congregated on the beach before the newly-erected huts as they decided what their next scene would be. Sheldon quickly discovered he was playing the part of cameraman and production assistant at once, often having to formulate plans and make sure everybody was practicing safety. They were on an untouched island, afterall. All it would take was for one of the actors to get bitten by a jellyfish and the production would be a disaster. He had to keep on his toes, and keep an eye on everybody, especially that Japanese girl Nako, who seemed addicted to going off on her own adventures. Already a potential disaster had happened, when Sheldon was filming an impromptu scene of Nako and three other girls poking through some lush overgrowth that separated the beach from the unexplored jungle. Pablo had said something to the effect of "their bare skin contrasting against the green is an important image," and Sheldon took it to heart, and his hard-on, recording a little adventure that had the air of fantasy, as the bare beauties parted lush, thick leaves that brushed their shoulders. Besides Nako, the other three women were Tamara, a vixen without effort, with her perpetually playful facial expressions, her long, chestnut hair, and beautifully bare body, her rear flexing as she walked through the overgrowth. There was Nikkie, similarly darkened hair, cut shorter. She was a little more voluptuous, with an insane symmetry to her thin, tapered waist and wide hips, and a well-defined triangle of scraggly hairs that were hypnotizing to Sheldon’s eyes and magnetic to the zoom of his camera lens. And there was Xiao Xin, a demure Chinese girl, who always looked at Nako with an air of suspicion, as if she were competition, with a puffy, pretty patch of pubic hair and diminutive little tits, and a pale complexion. She possessed an effortless grace, and stirred up innocent fantasies of deplorable acts. Sheldon was thankful he was wearing clothes, for unlike the other crew members who had cavorted around nude the previous night, he was not so confident with his masculinity.

And then there was Nako, who was suddenly absent, and Sheldon found himself parting the brush, his skin sweaty and sticky under his safari getup, with his camera lent by Pablo hanging around his neck and a trio of nude girls at his back, as he sought out the rambunctious Japanese girl who had drifted away.

He almost felt like an adventurer on safari, exploring any remote island from any adventure movie, hoping King Kong wouldn't come out to snatch him or the menagerie of enticing maidens at his heels. His real fear was a viper or a tarantula creeping in the brush and pouncing on the unsuspecting prey of four humans, three of them bare. When they broke through a treeline and beheld a vast plain of untouched land, Sheldon began to fear for his position, the production, and the careless girl.

"Nako!" he shouted, and his voice echoed across the long plain. Tamara, Nikkie, and Xiao Xin followed suit, adding their voices, and Sheldon was hit with a remembrance of advice that Pablo had given him: record everything. And so, like The Blair Witch Project, Sheldon raised his camera and filmed while he searched, making sure to turn and record the three nude girls wandering through the jungle. 

And then, like before, Nako appeared without warning, like a jump scare in another type of movie.

"Hey!" she beamed, jumping out of the brush. The view in Sheldon's camera visibly shook and blurred, as pale and bubbly Nako stood under the shade of some trees.

"Jesus, you scared us," Sheldon said, as the man behind the camera in their unscripted found footage erotic horror movie.

"Nako found something cool. Come!"

And so Sheldon and his other three consorts reluctantly followed Nako through the brush, and Sheldon had the mind to stop and let the others go ahead of him, capturing a quartet of bare butts disappearing through the jungle.

What Nako had found was a pristine spring, sparking and clear under the vibrant canopy of overhanging jungle branches.

"Wow," Sheldon found himself saying as Nako turned around and gauged their reactions to her adventurer's discovery.

"Looks like a scene to me," Nikkie said, stepping forward, and Sheldon instinctively raised his camera again to capture the shifting motions of her rear as she approached. There was the slightest, gelatinous jiggle to her ample rear that would hopefully be immortalized on film and that strickened Sheldon's sudden erection in the uncomfortable confines of his pants, an experience that would perhaps be shared by whoever may view the scene in all its glory. Tamara, too, skipped ahead, and Sheldon held his camera steady, wondering what Pablo and the rest of the crew were doing at that moment.

The scene was like a scene out of Eden, except Adam was sitting out, and four more of his ribs took form to present a more focused image of beauty and lust than a sole male and female couple. The image of four naked maidens bathing in a spring… Sheldon had to take a breath at the captivating images he was filming: Nako plunging her entirety under the clear water and becoming a shimmering, salacious mirage; Tamara walking into the water, her hips exaggeratedly swaying, making a spectacle out of her rounded butt; Xiao Xin laying out on her back and floating backwards as one delectable, innocent form glowing pale except for the darkness of her pubic hair; Nikkie carefully wading in, her body slowly transforming from a clear image of beauty to a rippling memory of one. At one point, one of them scooped up two big handfuls of water and threw them up, making Sheldon wish he could have captured it in still. And then, all four women turned and looked directly at him, at his camera, at the viewer, and the invitation was obvious. That scene would fade out for the viewers, as Sheldon lowered his camera, wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow, and found a place to sit the device down. Then, hurriedly, he unclothed. Nikkie, Tamara, and Xiao Xin went back to their bathing, but Nako came up to the water's edge and grinned, watching Sheldon as he opened his shirt and bent down to untie his boots. Her attention hardened him further, so that when he took down his pants with a surprising lack of fear uncharacteristic of him, his erection popped out, boldly and beautifully curved. The slaps of Nako's clapping palms brought him to Earth, and Sheldon found himself grinning as he approached the spring.

It was then that the others turned and observed him, his nudity, and his erection, with expressions that he couldn't tell if were from amusement or mirth. But soon he was wading into the water, and his offensive part was about to slip under the surface when Nako jumped up and stood, rushed to him as if to welcome him into the pool, and firmly wrapped her cold hand around his trunk.

A little gasp escaped Sheldon then, as all doubts about what this moment would hold were dashed.

"Nako didn't know it would be so big!" she beamed, and that swelled Sheldon's pride as well as his cock, which instantly burst through her grip and coated her abdomen above her matted wet bush with runny, clear semen, and Nako shrieked with joy.

"Wow," she said, and leaned down to fawn her fingers over his jumping erection running with deluge, closing her fingers lightly over it and sending a throb of euphoria through Sheldon. He leaned his head back but then snapped it forward again as she let his dick go with a stiff wobble, and then she stood straight and took his hand.

"Now you get clean!" she cried, and gently pulled him along, and he followed in the haze of his sudden heaven, and let himself fall forward into the water, where he swam and spent heavenly time with Nako, Tamara, Nikkie, and Xiao Xin until they had their fill and exited the water with nothing to dry themselves with except for the air and the passage of time. Sheldon dried his hands on his discarded shirt before picking up the camera, and then they made their way out.

"You don't want your clothes?" Nikkie asked Sheldon with a cocked eyebrow and her delicious nudity that threatened to summon up another show of lust.

"Nah," Sheldon said. "I don't need them." Nikkie smiled at this and Nako jumped for joy, and then they all made their way back to the beach, and Sheldon didn't think to record any more footage until they were out of the jungle.

*****

Pablo was very surprised to see Sheldon exiting the jungle with the models in tow, he now as nude as them, and he threw up his camera when he saw them. Sheldon put up his hand to shield his face.

"Vivo! No, act like I'm not here. We'll talk about using the footage later."

And Sheldon lowered his hand, and lowered his penis, involuntarily, as he resumed a flaccid and unexcited state amidst this sudden embarrassment. But he felt proud and brave, having spent time with his director's muses, and he assumed the character of a man who existed in an island paradise with a hundred naked girls.

They talked later, in one of the assembled huts, about how the production was going, and how they would use Sheldon's footage, both the footage he took with his phone and the footage of himself that Pablo had just shot.

"I'm thinking this narrative is about a group of men who are shipwrecked on an island, an island which they soon discover is inhabited by naked girls, and they join their ranks and become like them."

"I really think we should have planned this out better," Sheldon offered, still nude, with a towel draped over his lap as he sat in the fold-out chair under the green canopy of the hut. "Didn't you have a writer?"

"Yes, but he only gave me an elevator pitch. That was all I needed. Vivo!"

"So what's the story, though?"

"I just told you. It is all we need."

"We're going to need a little more guidance, or else your 'movie' is just going to be a bunch of aimless vignettes."

"Well what's wrong with that?"

"Audiences need a story."

"The story's in the vignettes."

"Yes, but they need a throughline narrative."

"Hmm," Pablo mused, as one of his muses passed by the open entryway to the hut, distracting his attention, and right then, Sheldon knew they would need to re-figure and rejigger if this supposed movie was going to have any legs.

*****

Brad Whitley tensed his hand on the pack held in his lap, his pack containing many changes of clothes, a notepad, and ink ribbons for his typewriter, which was a 1930s Underwood enclosed in its own case and stashed in the cargo hold. He didn't like being away from it, and he feared the turbulence would knock its many moving parts out of whack. But he was more nervous about the assignment, being whisked away to an island in the Atlantic after one frantic phone call, putting aside the script he was already working on to sacrifice three days or more under the erratic supervision of Pablo Estrada. This was not going to be a fun week. But the anticipation of what he was going to see made him accept the request right away, for on that island would be almost twenty nude models, as envisioned by his pen (or rather, his keyboard) when he had bashed together the treatment for Pablo "the Ass Man." He couldn't imagine how much help he would need filming a vapid softcore movie.

But then his expectations materialized beyond what even his writer's mind could imagine, as when the helicopter hovered over the beach of the film's island location, he could see already, from a hundred feet up, the myriad shades of bare bodies scattered down below. When the helicopter landed and the pilot threw open the door, Brad fumbled with his seatbelt as he was distracted by rows upon rows of bare, beautiful women, just as he had imagined for Pablo; golden skin kissed by sun, perfect figures elusive to the most dedicated philosophers, winks of nipples and flashes of dark pubic hair, grinning, emancipated smiles and full, bare, baked buns. The sheer volume of what he saw outweighed what he had visualized. Nothing his pen created could do justice to what he was now presented with, and he felt a surge of inspiration, convinced, suddenly, that he could write something centered around this vision.

When he got out of his seat, he knew he was stepping into a new world of sorts, and this new world had surprises in store, for Pablo Estrada broke through the crowd and took Brad aback, for the notorious nude photographer was now as his subjects, completely bare, sun-reddened, and portly, contrasting harshly with the favorable figures that surrounded him.

"Brad!" the maddened artist sang. "Welcome!"

Brad was without suitable words, sifting through his brain to ask if he had just walked onto a nudist island resort instead of a film shoot.

He was set up many minutes later, unpacking his typewriter in one of the straw huts that were assembled along the beach like actual native settlements.

"A typewriter?" Pablo scrutinized, still nude, still distracting, still an uncomfortable presence for Brad. "You are an oldschool writer, I see!"

"Well," Brad explained. "We're in an extremely humid climate. Do I really want to bring a laptop here to work in this climate for days? This is more secure."

"Very smart," Pablo said, waving a finger. "Very smart, indeed. That's why you are my writer!"

"So what is our current narrative?" Brad asked, as the ocean roared just outside the hut. He felt like he was indeed in paradise.

"Just as you outlined," Pablo exclaimed. "But with a twist! Our island full of naked girls has crossed paths with civilized men, and they soon throw off their clothes and join them in merriment." He narrated this as he paced around the room. "But what we need is a concrete story. You haven't given me that, yet."

"You didn't ask."

Pablo looked down at him.

"Well now I am. We need a plot, something to propel all this beauty from scene to scene!"

As if summoned by the utterance of the word "beauty," one of the beauties passed by the open doorway, a girl-next-door type with tangly dirty blonde hair and no shame. Brad recognized her; she had been clinging close to Pablo since Brad had arrived on the island. She was not a professional model, but a newbie. He couldn't recall her name.

"So a bunch of men, shipwrecked on an island, where a bunch of girls had been previously shipwrecked. Blue Lagoon, but with a much larger cast," Brad offered.

"Yes, yes! That is my vision."

"And what happens next?"

"That is for you to decide."

"Maybe they make a civilization, but civilization comes to ruin it, and breaks up their party."

"Let's work with what we have. I don't have the extra cast or props to depict a third party," Pablo explained.

"What if they remake society? What if they breed and create a whole new generation on the island?"

"I don't have the extra cast for that, either, and there are no babies present for us to show that," Pablo leveled at him.

"What if... they wake up and it's all a dream?" Brad then asked.

"A cliche idea, but I can film some footage back home to make that happen," Pablo then said. "But what happens in the middle?

"Well... Maybe some romance..."

"Romance is always good."

"...And maybe two important characters embody that romance, they mingle, they mate, and then they wake up, but they have never met each other."

"We're getting somewhere," Pablo reacted.

"And then they meet each other in real life."

"Yes, yes."

"So we would need those two. Who among the cast would be considered a main character?

"Main character?" Pablo asked. "This is more an ensemble. But we do have...

Amelia. She's a little older. Dignified-looking. Unique. And she's got some incredible tits. She might be good for a "Sex in the City" type of vibe.

There's Nikkie, she's a fairly new model, only has one set with a previous photographer. She's a fresh young face. She's got a devilish face, too. And look at her waist-hip ratio! Fellatio! And when she walks—my favorite thing—there is the slightest of jiggles on her backside that drives me mad. Can you see it?

There's Fabrica, she's an elegant woman, much like Amelia, though not as well-endowed. And her posterior, my god! None can come close, not by a mile, as being as pretty as her butt and her smile!

Xiao Xin, she's amazing. Brave and bold, yet with a wholesome look to her. Wholesome even when she's completely naked. She'd be a good pick if you're thinking a girl-next-door type, and maybe a plus because she is non-white. And what did the old people use to call that? Ah, yes, "exotic."

"Yes, girl-next-door is good. I'm thinking young. What about that girl that just passed by the door earlier?"

Pablo's illuminated eyes faded and he blinked.

"When?"

"Just a minute ago. She had tangly, long hair—"

"Ah, yes, why that is Miss Zoe's friend, como? Carrie. No, Claire! Though she's a bit homely..."

"Yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking. Like a nerdy girl-nextdoor."

"Yes, but she doesn't have much experience acting. Or modeling. She's just a college friend of Zoe's, but she does have a plump and ponderous rear!"

"I've acted before!"

Brad's eyes widened. Re-summoned was the girl from moments before, popping her head past the frame of the open doorway. Pablo wheeled around.

"Oh, you have?"

"Yep, I took theater first semester. I auditioned for some plays."

"Well! Would you be interested in taking a lead role in the film? With a love interest?"

"Wow," she said in obviously feigned surprise. "I dream of being a main star. And the love interest..."

"Would it be too uncomfortable, having a love interest in the nude? Perhaps pressing your bodies close together?"

"No, actually," Claire said with a nervous laugh. "It would just depend on who they were."

"Well, we would have to pull from the crew members on this mission, whoever is willing to take on such a role. This sounds rather conspiratorial, but... do you have any that would strike your fancy?"

"Well, I would have to take a look..."

*****

Claire had her look. None of the guys on the island appealed to her. They were either too classically handsome, like the skipper Carl Hamburgh, who reminded her of the actor Kyle Chandler, to the midnight-dark black man Samuel, who looked like Lance Reddick. He already had Zoe's charms, though, and Claire wouldn't want to do love scenes with him, because she was, in fact, a little racist.

The other crew members of the ship were either fat or freakishly and gangly tall. All the male members of the film crew were wishy-washy soy-snorting wimps, except for the few that looked overcompensatingly masculine, the ones with mullets and beards or tattoos and jacked arms. They were usually the ones who were the biggest assholes.

Not that Claire was picking, specifically, a mate. She was picking a person who'd she be comfortable on camera with, who she would be okay with being physically close to, but... certainly not actual, clinical intimacy? She looked at all her men as if that were the expectation. Because most of them had chosen to be nude now, it was even easier to window shop. It was interesting how often their penises changed shape and size, at one moment small and flippy and funny, at the next moment—when talking to one of the many models that made Claire feel self-conscious—extended and at a slight angle, betraying their lust. There was nowhere to hide your emotions when you were naked.

Other men had their penises hanging low and loose when they were not thinking lustful thoughts, like big horse cocks. Samuel's was like that, fitting with stereotypes, and Andy, who literally looked like Andre the Giant, had a long, fat, swaying cock as well. Claire found them kind of gross. There was something more... cute... about a normal penis at rest. The only real time she had seen one up close was in college, and not in the way one would expect. Rather than a first moment of intimacy with a classmate, it was when she was concealed under the cover of an invisibility cloak her friend Ian had invented. It was something straight out of science fiction, but it was real. It worked. Until it didn't. She had been naked underneath, as instructed (it wouldn't work if one was wearing clothes), and after sneaking into the men's locker room to spy up close on a guy showering, the water interfered with the cloak's functionality, and she was left naked and exposed. That was part of why she ended up on the island; she had had her experience with public nudity, and even presented herself naked in front of Ian, much to his shock. And that was the third time she ended up seeing a penis up close (the second just moments before), and the first time she held one in her hands. Ian was fat and pale and nerdy, completely unappealing to her (he looked like Biff, one of the other of the ship's crew along with Samuel and Andy, and Biff even looked like Ian when naked, too, only a much older version of him), but she had encouraged him to get naked in his dorm room as well, while they watched their anime shows. He agreed, and in the corner of her eyes she saw the transformation from stubby little elephant trunk to a giant sandworm of Arrakis, foreskin peeling back to expose a ruby-red head. And then, at some point, it was in her hand. She softly jacked him while their anime ran to its end, Ian's head up at the ceiling and missing the final moments of the show as he throbbed in her grip and the hot wax of his lust ran down her knuckles.

Those experiences left her open to not only casual nudity, but to casual sex as well, though she supposed that the way she did it was not the normal college experience. She had yet to have a penis inside of her, anyway, though didn't have any illusions that she was going to on this trip.

The pairing began right away. Of the eager volunteers or self-conscious fence sitters, Pablo found one of the young production crew, one of the tattooed and jacked men that she had been scoffing at, and Pablo insisted he was great because he loved being naked, was familiar with film, and that he was strapping and masculine like the males on the covers of Harlequin romances. But Claire refused. He was too masculine, too forward, too eager to pretend to be her lover on camera, shown by his eager and monstrous erection whenever he was near her. Her refusal created some friction, and the search continued. She knew that whoever they picked would not be sufficient, for the one male who did draw her eyes also happened to be one of the few still wearing clothes: she could not help but be in awe of the meek but boyishly handsome writer, Brad Whitley. The way he blushed and stared at her when she entered the hut to propose being the star, the way he gazed up past her body, the way her body tingled as his eyes quickly scanned, made her worried over her own involuntary shows of lust, from the petrification of her pointy nipples at the tips of her tiny, apple-shaped tits (which burned with her hardening and with the knowledge that Brad's eyes briefly centered on them), to the warm trickle threatening to streak down her thigh. He looked like a smart man, he looked like a quiet man, and he looked thoughtful and yet masculine still, exemplified by his appearance of physical fitness, and neatness, wearing a collared shirt with just a few buttons undone enough to see a hairless, tan and toned chest, and his jet-black, luscious hair made him look like Clark Kent, and she wanted to see Superman. She knew he had to have a nice dick. She wanted to see it, she wanted to press her body against him and feel the underside of his dorsal vein pulse against her as it pressed against her stomach, she wanted to get on her knees and study it, its heat emanating onto her lips...

Yes, Claire was a little horny. And walking around completely naked and free in front of the flustered male crew, clothed or not, had her constantly running into the ocean to clean off her excretions. It had made Pablo constantly focus his camera on her, to capture the image of a nude girl bounding in the surf, and it was her horniness that led her to being the natural star of the show.

*****

Brad quickly worked at his typewriter, fleshing out the scenes that were to commence. They finally picked the girl Claire's love interest. The lucky guy would be Sheldon Mann, the production assistant, who looked helpless and scared, and who Claire seemed to hide contempt for, which made imagining their scenes difficult. What also made it difficult was that as he spun up fantasies of the girl wooing another man, he felt unreasonable feelings of jealousy.

She was fantastic-looking, not that every girl on the shoot wasn't fantastic-looking, several of whom fixated on him to pry and prod, perhaps because they thought he was cute or perhaps because he insisted on remaining clothed when so many others were submitting to nakedness. He compromised by working in his hut shirtless, for the island was incredibly humid and sweat lined his chest and soaked into his shirt, and now shirtless, the perspiration sheaned on his skin so that he wished for a dip in the ocean, but he worked diligently and did not want to risk coming back to work with water dripping off of him and potentially ruining and damaging his only hard copy of the script. He was already afraid that his sweat would drip on the vulnerable pages and ruin them. He was also afraid of what the humidity and salt air would do to his antique typewriter. He had told Pablo that the climate would ruin a laptop, but it was just as likely to ruin and rust his oldschool writing machine. But at least it would be more likely to work properly through the whole ordeal, and it was an ordeal of concentration amidst so much ample and bare female flesh. Of the women who tried to coax him, there was Amelia, who was older than him, elegant, captivating, almost obscene with her abnormally large breasts on her otherwise thin frame, and the exaggerated, wide angle of her full bush, which made Brad glad he still wore shorts, for every time she was present, he was hard as a rock. But he ignored her wiles and focused on his work.

Harder to ignore was the spunky Japanese girl, Nako Takoyama, a celebrity he always blushed at the thought of meeting, and now that he had met her, he became annoyed with her. She was a constant presence, and a distraction, popping into his writer's hut unannounced and announcing her entrance ("Heeeeeear’s Nako! What adventures are you thinking up now?"). She would persist in staying in the hut, asking Brad all sorts of questions as he tried to formulate the sequence of events that he loathed to imagine: Claire, in her shy but randy demeanor, vulnerably naked, embracing the naked and unsure Sheldon, who should be undeserving of such naked attention. Nako would sit her bare butt on the edge of the table, the smoothness of her thighs and the puffy black at their nexus distracting for Brad's eyes, as she rattled on and on about adventures she had already had, including a racy interaction with the very man he was writing about, who she revealed ejaculated in her loving hand. That salacious story fueled Brad’s painful and lustful depictions of Claire and her lover, though he knew, as he wrote them, that Pablo would not be able to film such scenes. This was supposed to be a theatrical movie, afterall, with ample nudity, but no explicit sex. It was not a porno.

It was some balm and a great deal of dreadfulness when Claire entered his hut and eventually chased Nako away. She didn't seem to have much love for the exuberant girl. Neither did Xiao Xin, who Pablo had been keen on suggesting for the main role before Claire came up. Xiao, who was so innocent-looking, so guiltily tingling one's lust, seemed to also detest Nako's magnification of that ignorant innocence, and perhaps as the only other Asian cast member, she saw Nako as either competition, or perhaps a perversion. Claire appeared to have a similar distaste for Nako's openness to being fetishized, sexualized, and scandalized. Their personalities were as different as can be; Nako loved not only being naked, but being seen, and the alight of erect penises, to her, was like the cheering of crowds to Hulk Hogan. Arousal gave her power. Claire, on the other hand, seemed much more guarded with her sexual appeal, as freely as she presented it. Like Xiao Xin, she was cute, a girl nextdoor type, but unlike Xiao Xin, she had a reservation about her, as if she still held a sliver of discomfort with being so plainly seen, or as if, maybe, the exhibitionist pleasure that fueled Nako Takoyama also coursed through Claire, and that she may be afraid of it.

Claire had come in and chased Nako off so she could sit and talk with Brad about how her character was supposed to act, and to inquire about what her next scenes would entail, and Brad, with a trickle of sweat and a surge of jealousy, told her, specifically, that she would be laying down on the sand next to Sheldon Mann, talking, then embracing, re-enacting the famous scene from From Here to Eternity. He held the explicit visions he had already written inside his head and prayed she wouldn't get curious and pluck up those X-rated pages. It was also an incredible ordeal to have her sitting there, completely nude, with him, half-nude and fighting his staring eyes, fighting his desire to lean forward and bury his face in the crisp, dark nest of her pubic hair, of filling one of his palms with one of her pert, apple-sized tits. The whole time, his cock throbbed and burned with sensitivity against the fabric of his boxers, and he felt sure he would cum in his pants right there, just being in Claire's presence. Would she smell it? Would she sense his neck tightening, and then releasing? Would she hear his soft, subtle sigh? Would she somehow, through telepathy, know of the obscene scene he had written of her and then hidden under the pile of his completed pages?

*****

The scene played out, and Brad sat and watched while Claire and Sheldon stood in front of the vista of the horizon and its setting sun, both naked, as he had written, talking and holding hands, and Sheldon's penis traveled inch-by-inch into an upward climb, no acting on its part, until it tickled his flame's belly, and she laughed nervously. Maybe that was acting, or maybe it was not, but it was too much for Brad to bear, and he stood up and walked away from the scene, as he wasn't needed as a writer at that moment.

Walking a distance away from the group, he looked out at the ocean and decided he needed its cleansing powers. Emboldened by everybody else walking around naked, he finally took down his shorts, tossed them behind, and headed out into the water. He may have been seen in the background of Claire and Sheldon's scene, which would be fine; it would be just another one of the characters, out enjoying the tropical paradise. He had to admit, once he was in the water, floating free, with no trunks on him, something he had never done, he felt unleashed, he felt free, and he felt no reservation when he marched back to shore nude, with his penis flipping in front of him, hardening slightly with every flip at thought of the scene he would be coming back to.

And when he came back, he saw Claire's and Sheldon's embrace terminated, filming halted, and Claire speaking with Pablo, and Sheldon standing off to the side, looking dejected.

"I just don't think I can do it," he overheard Claire's voice in the wind as he went back to his chair, where Amelia and Nako soon found him, fawned over him, and threatened his now-exposed penis, which Nako was especially delighted by, to lurch up and present its bare emotion.

“Dicks are fun,” Nako added, as if tugging his dick were the most trivial thing.

It was when Claire turned from Pablo and flinched at the sudden, fully nude view of her screenwriter, that Brad's arousal fully extended. This seemed to give delight to Nako Takoyama, who instantly palmed his erection and sent shudders up his body. Amelia, less brazen but with a hint of jealousy, extended her hand as well, and through exasperated breathing, Brad saw Claire's face burn with jealousy. And then Pablo turned around.

"Wow!" he shouted. "My writer is getting some inspiration!"

"I..." Brad began, and swatted away his handjob maidens at the realization of his full exposure.

"S-sorry," he explained. "I..."

"Sorry hell, your body expresses what your mind resists to show! Think of an erection like a mood ring! It might be seen as inappropriate, but you cannot help it. It is a signal of your desires, of your lust for life!"

Brad marveled at the naked, pot-bellied man waxing poetic on uninvited erections, taking in the tiniest bit of inspiration from this madman's spiel, and taking inspiration to remain unabashedly aroused by the piercing eyes of Claire, who he detected, with hope against hope, a touch of hunger at her lips, which the tip of her tongue quickly, almost imperceptibly, traced.

Pablo then approached Brad, which made his prominent erection now feel inappropriate, uncalled for, and in need of hiding, but the portly naked man quickly closed the distance between them, and Amelia and Nako scattered.

"We have a problem," Pablo explained, his penis not the slightest aroused, as if to reflect his suddenly serious attitude. It flipped and bopped freely as his chubby thighs maneuvered him closer. "I don't think Claire and Sheldon are quite the pair. Can you somehow write that into our narrative?"

"Well, let me see," Brad said, picking up the thin stack of his script which lay at his side, but as he picked it up, a gust of ocean breeze snatched it from him, and a hundred pages went scattering across the sand.

"Shit!" he cried and launched to his feet. He chased after the scattering pages, which tumbled over the surf and went out to the ocean, as if they desired to be free. There was no saving his script; his decision to work on it analog-style came back to bite him. He stood, panting at the water's edge, as the last pages curled in the wind and then dropped to dissolve by the water. He forgot about his nakedness.

Pablo came rushing up.

"Don't tell me that was the only copy," he said.

"Of course it was my only copy, we don't have a Xerox machine here."

"Should have brought a computer," Pablo said. "I thought I could trust you as a writer. I trust you have the script in your head, because we need to change some things."

"I..." Brad began, but he was breathless as he watched his important work floating limply on the opaque waves.

"We need to remedy their chemistry, it is not the perfect love scenario that we imagined," Pablo said.

"I think I can help." another voice came, and Brad turned and was surprised to see Claire standing before them. "Can we re-shoot the scene? With a change, though?"

*****

Claire had finally gotten her wish. She was espying Brad when he stood up and walked away, just as she was joining hands with Sheldon and feeling the tickle of his dick against her stomach, which was objectively arousing but nothing more. Her heart was needed to make her performance believable.

Brad was everything she had hoped: in shape, lean but toned, a very delectable male specimen as he walked up the beach, his square ass flexing, and with the briefest glimpse of his penis when he walked away, limp, but longish, not freakishly long like the other well-endowed of the crew, not diminutive like some of the others, but a happy medium, about four inches of slack maleness oblivious of pleasures to come, and when he returned, after she had called cut and stood away from her erect and panting co-star, did she see him fully, as he sat at his chair and was swarmed by that old vixen Amelia and that twit Nako, and she saw the full rigidity of her flame's cock, lurching and bumping between other women's fingers. It burned her with jealousy and increased the burn and trickle between her thighs.

The scene was not going to work out; she made that much clear to Pablo Estrada, who stood bare and big-bellied and surprisingly and inoffensively un-erect, and when he went to confer with Brad, and when the script escaped Brad’s hands and floated out to sea, she knew that improvisation was going to be needed, and she improvised the perfect scenario in her head, and expressed it to Pablo.

"I think I would have more chemistry with... with Brad," she said, and she guiltily watched, out of the corner of her eye, Brad react to her saying his name.

"Well, he is our writer..." Pablo said, trailing off, and then thinking. She could see the thinking going on behind Brad's eyes, too, out of the corner of hers, and she insisted, imagining his touch.

"We've barely filmed anything with Sheldon. Let's change direction," she said, and she saw the eyes of Pablo go soft and contemplative. "I think I'd be more comfortable with him. And he does have the movie-star handsome look."

She finally looked, no more stealing glances, and saw Brad straighten his shoulders with pride, and his urgent penis straining up into the air for attention.

"Well," Pablo said. "If he is comfortable acting...."

"S-sure," Brad's voice cut in, and he was now standing within reach of them, having taken a few invisible steps forward while they were talking. Claire fought hard to contain her joyous grin. "Whatever needs to be done," Brad then said.

*****

The sun had fallen and night had taken over as they filmed the improvised scene. Sheldon was now replaced with Brad, and his hot skin was under Claire's touch, and her fantasies became real as she interacted with him as if the cameras weren't there. The only distraction was the hot spotlight pointed at their bare skin.

He was putty in her hands; he was trembling, urgent, tense; excited. Pablo stood with his camera steadily aimed at them, and all their spectators, nude models and nude crew members, stood by and watched as Claire and Brad collapsed on the sand. It happened in such a blur; it happened as if this were a normal, intimate reaction between two lovers, but it was all for the screen, their intimate moment, Claire's intimate moment, her unfulfilled fantasy panning out, and Brad was just along for the ride. He lay flat on the sand as the surf licked his heels, and Claire straddled his legs. His wagging, wavering erection was presented before her. She took it into her grasp, and felt her would-be lover's pulse through it.

The illusion of private intimacy and the true exhibition of what they were doing both fused within Claire as she took Brad's hot erection under her fingertips and pressed it against her sex, and sensed his big intake of breath, and saw his stomach rise and fall. She faintly heard Pablo whisper vivo as she fumbled with the hard cock and then, unscripted, led it into her quivering, puffy, eternally-wet lips.

His crown entered her with a pop, and she leaned forward on him, taking his full length in. Brad lay slack and dazed as she pressed her hands on his chest and began rocking her hips against him. Now I have had a penis inside me, she thought, and what better a penis. It involuntarily stabbed and prodded within her as she manipulated it with her hips, trembling at the wincing lances of pleasure it left wherever it went, feeling it knocking back and forth within her. She shuddered at the new feeling as Brad well did, flattening against the sand and leaning his head back in his euphoria, and Pablo recorded in awe, saying nothing now, until a little moan escaped Brad's parted lips.

"Don't cum," Pablo commanded, as if he were the host of a Pornhub edging video. "I can't be responsible for a pregnancy!"

Claire groaned in frustration but continued bucking her hips. She made an earnest effort to slow down, but each stab of pleasure urged her to continue, until she could feel Brad pulse with the threat of release. She halted her hips.

“You’re gonna cum?” she panted down at Brad. He panted back up, but formed no words. She knew he was at his threshold, so she lifted her hips and Brad's wet cock escaped her, snapping back rigidly against his abdomen, and she fell forward, bracing herself with her hands planted on his chest, and she flattened against him, meeting her face against his and waiting for the hot flood on her abdomen. It never came, and she lifted her face, scooted back, and felt the wet glide of Brad's penis against her stomach, her chest, then slicing between her breasts and then tickling her neck, until her face was planted before his lap and the rigid display of arousal wavered, its tip pointing towards Brad’s chin.

She treated herself, taking in his display of lust and claiming it as her own. Her scent and slime was already on it, and her lips pressed against his hot glans and pursed, and she felt his heartbeat, and heard Pablo in amazement again, but sensed the camera still rolling, so she took Brad's cock in and indulged in the senses, in the way his pulsed against her tongue, the musky scent of his manhood, the moistness of his pre-ejaculate brimming and coating her taste buds, the fulfillment of her desire for him, offered up before her face. Now she had a cock in her mouth, another bucket list item, and she took it out of her hungry lips to manipulate it and enact her next as-of-yet unobtained experience: being a porn star and getting a facial.

It took but a second. She literally thought she saw his cock-head swell and retract like an animated cartoon, and then the white deluge came, and she put her lips close to let it slide down her chin, felt the pure heat creeping between her lips to seep into her mouth, listened happily as Brad groaned with pleasure, and stroked his chest while his dick ran dry. Pablo took a step back from his camera, wiped his brow, and marveled at what he had just filmed.

*****

The footage did not make it into the final film, though it was obtained by Claire and watched over and over again. Not that she needed to fill a void, for Brad Whitley and her soon became an item. There were enough erect penises in the final cut, however, that Pablo wasn't able to sell it to distributors, and there was too much present to just cut them out and not suffer a blow to the film's integrity. So the film and its lavish production was a wash, but it found its audience on home video, and through Pablo's website, where it was hosted and viewed more than any of his already established photo sets. Pablo's first foray into the naturist adventure genre still proved to be popular.

Plans were made for the next production, and Brad Whitley was at the writing helm again, this time with enough preparation (and experience) to write a truly well-realized vision, a story about a young man and woman who meet in the middle of New York City and go on exhibitionist adventures together, walking nude in the middle of Times Square, which was filmed by Pablo, and acted by Brad and Claire, and eventually shown in theaters, because media attention was too great for the film to fade into obscurity, and the era of casually nude cinema began.

There are plenty of Naked Thrills when naked girls are On the Move...

Press flesh with P.A. Choi at:

twitter.com/PAChoi4

instagram.com/pachoi4

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Or shoot an e-mail at pachoierotica@gmail.com

[i]Discover Pablo and Dora’s journey in Ass Man

[ii]Learn of that adventure in Bikini Minus One!

[iii]Read of Claire’s naked journey in The Naked Invisibility Cloak

[iv]Nako’s adventures are exhaustive, but they include:
Naked Smash Ultimate
Naked Smash Handheld Edition
Naked Night
Land of the Naked Girls
The Naked Girl Task Force
The Naked Cult of Eyeshine Island
Naked Sparks Joy!