Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms (72 page)

Instantly, everyone turned and looked at the dissipating mist and flashes of electricity that were the last vestiges of the energy storm. They floated at near eye level, in the center of the place where Washburne had disappeared, exactly where the street would have taken us if there still were a street
to
take us. As small bursts of energy continued to crackle only a few feet from our faces, I realized River might be right.

I hadn’t considered that maybe the hole, itself, could have survived such an explosion, but then I didn’t even know how it worked, let alone what could make it
stop
working. And how could Washburne know any more than me?

That’s when we heard it. Just as the last bit of cloud, and boom, and flash disappeared completely, and the last drip of misty rain fell. Washburne. Laughing.

Somewhere on the other side of the hole.

“He’s alive,” Boone said, warmly. Lovingly. “That
son-of-abitch!
”

“Mayor Boone,” I said, “Your limo wasn’t an old car. How did it get through the hole?”

“An old car?” he said with the same, flea-circus on my face expression he’d worn earlier. “You don’t need an
old car
. You need
lead
. Lead-based paint—which they no longer use on current cars, so I suppose I can see your confusion, somewhat—and in significant quantities to hold the rift open.” He looked at me and laughed, amazed at my ignorance. “Old car,” he sneered. “How would the age of an automobile have
any
relevance in this kind of situation?”

How would
anything
have any relevance? We’re talking about extra-dimensional nudist colonies, and you’re looking for reason?

Whatever, old man.

I ran to the back of the advertising truck and retrieved the coiled rope I’d seen Sophie and Morgan rutting on earlier, then grabbed the piece of limousine trunk that had sheared through the billboard, took the hook we used to lower ourselves out the convention suite window from Wendy, and ran back to the edge of the hole to stand beside Wisper. Just being near the dimensional hole with the trunk piece was already causing the sky to roil once more with clouds and light and sound.

Encouraged, I tied the hook to the rope, swung a few times, and tossed it into the limbs of a large oak whose branches hung out majestically over the road, just above the now slightly glowing dimensional rift. It hooked a branch on the first try.

Karma. Kismet. The Law Of Attraction.

“Take off that shirt,” I told Wisper.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and did so gladly.

I tugged the rope hard.

The
actual
rope, oh you of the dirty mind.

It seemed to be safely secure, so I held out an arm to my one, true love.

“Are you sure about this?” she asked.

“As sure as I am of you and me, and how happy we’ll be for the rest of our lives.”

“Sooooo…not very sure,” she said, and laughed.

Aaaah, that magical sound.

I laughed with her. “Got any better offers, today?”

She lost her smile and studied me with intense emotion.

“There
are
no better offers,” she said with profound sincerity, then leaned in and kissed me passionately.

“Ready?” I asked her.

She nodded, and I tugged once more on the rope to test its strength as she leaned in and kissed me sweetly on the cheek.

“For luck,” she said, and I felt an odd sense of déjà vu. “Thanks,” I told her. “But if you turn out to be my sister in the third movie, I’m gonna be pissed.”

She laughed again, and with that I held her as tightly as my minimally exercised arms would allow—then just a little tighter—and leaped off the edge of the asphalt and into the blazing maw of clouds, and lightning, and rain.

In case you’re wondering, I became a television producer.

I got the idea from the video of Mervin and me. If people would pay money for
that
…

I started small at first, buying the rights to the nudist dimension soap opera,
Warm Sun Over Port Charles
, which I renamed
Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms,
rewrote a bit, dubbed slightly, and added footage to, in order to make it more ‘textile-world’ oriented. I’d read somewhere about someone who had done the same thing with a kids’ Japanese action show and made a bundle. So I figured, why not me?

I sold it to Starz as a soap opera set in a nudist colony. The greatest, most expansive, most elaborate nudist colony anyone in that world has seen outside Cape d'Agde, France.

Given that the acting was really excellent, the actors themselves gorgeous to look at and constantly naked, it became an instant cult hit that draws nearly two million viewers every night.
More
if you consider the after-premiere fans who watched it on Tivo, DVD, or iTunes downloads.

I also took a hint from Mayor Boone and created my own comics line because—for some reason—I still love them. I’d had enough of superheroes, though, so I created something with greater personal meaning for me: an ongoing comedy series about some idiots who get stuck in a nudist colony. It’s called
Green Valley
and it centers on a rich loser, a clueless comic collector, and a conservative minister. Oh, and I threw in a black stripper just to be ridiculous. Not that something like that could ever happen in
real
life.

Green Valley
spawned an entire line of spin-offs about naked people and the wacky situations they often get themselves into:
Spoodgie and His Frat House Pals,
(I never said they were intellectual)
Jezzebelle, Nikki The Nude Model, Nyna The Naughty Nudist,
(alliteration is fun and easy!), and
one
superhero book called
I Love A Girl In Tights
about horny teenagers who dress up and don’t fight crime.

I then took the money from these and other projects I’d sold back on my world and started using it to capitalize original material here in Nekkid Bottoms.

Er…I mean
Nikkid
Bottoms. Wisper hates it when I do that, almost as much as she hates the way my artists draw all the women with big tits. Comic book guys. What can you do? It’s in the blood.

Wisper and I had our occasional difficulties, of course, but she learned to trust that I wouldn’t backslide, and I now actually prefer to be naked—when it’s warm—and have stopped being an embarrassment to her family. Well, her father anyway, doorstop man from Nuckeby’s. Her mother accepted me almost instantly.

Wisper, in turn learned to stop running, went back to college and got a degree in history, specializing in nudism and its historical trends. She now teaches at Nikkid Bottoms Community College and frequently gets hit on by her young students. I visit her often at lunch.

Wendy and River continue to be an item, and I’m continually amazed at how compatible they are. It’s fun to see her boundless, sexual energy so focused on someone other than me, and River certainly enjoys being the target of her unbridled lust.

Morgan had to do some Nikkid Bottoms community service, and a little jail time for his ‘wandering hands’ bit on the auburn-haired stunner from the beach—for which I acted as witness for the prosecution—as well as take an online course in sensitivity training. But I think we all know how that turned out. He and Sophie also broke up, as expected, but she still occasionally has sex with him, so he doesn’t actually mind.

Once the road in both dimensions was repaired and Reverend Winterly worked out the supposed attempted child-molestation thing, he began to make regular trips to our naked shores, got himself into fighting shape, gradually grew less stern, and although I’ve yet to see him naked, I’m fairly sure Reverend Summersby has.

Woodruff never left. He took the cue from Homer and got comfortable almost immediately. In short order he found a nice, older lady, who was neither revolted by, nor terrified of, the thing that lived between his legs surviving on a regular diet of birds and small rodents. Not surprisingly, she was a direct descendant of Homer himself.

Washburne, apparently, came back into town immediately after the car-blowing-up incident and spent a lot of money in a very short time on some frivolous things. Then he got word that we—and his father—had made it back in spite of him, and he quickly disappeared. No one’s seen hide or hair of him since.

Good riddance I say, especially if he stays gone and doesn’t come back with guns.

Oh, and no one knows what happened to Mindie. She’s eluded the police and anyone else who’s gone looking for her for over a year now. I can only assume she’s still living in the woods somewhere, and in the stories parents tell their children at night to scare them into behaving.

If you had happened by the Nikkid Bottoms First Methodist Church on Saturday morning, June the sixth, you would have seen a sign out front that read, in white letters on black:

And just beyond that sign, you would have spotted several men, about half wearing tuxedos, while the other half wore ties.

Just ties.

You also might have seen my Aunt Hyapatia, and her husband Bernard, as they walked up to River Nuckeby and witnessed her nearly pass out with a combination of giddiness and renewed, postmenopausal lust as he took her arm and asked her the question every man asked each of the newly arrived.

“Friends of the bride, or of the groom?”

She waved her arms to indicate her rather puritan dress, shoes, and old-lady ankle-stockings. “You have to ask?” she purred.

As he guided her in, she ogled his substantial member, rippling muscles, and bare behind rather shamelessly, and smiled the smile of a woman expecting, imminently, to drink from the fountain of youth.

Uncle Bernard seemed not to notice, or more accurately, to
care
, as he followed them in through the church doors.

Within the hour, once inside, you would have seen a church divided into two equal halves. On the left, a set of pews for the uncomfortably clothed, and on the right, a set of pews for the comfortably nude—each side taking occasional glances at the other in either amazement, horror, or delight—and often various combinations thereof.