Nine Kinds of Naked (2 page)

And she really did. Nine months later no one in her church could doubt it, though she never told a soul.

 

3
M
OMENTS PASSED
before Diablo noticed a pulsating purr complementing his vision. Several more passed before Diablo realized the throbbing thrum was not the background hum of the ecstatic universe, but rather the drone of a very large bee buzzing laps around his crown. His trance vanished with an irate swat, which solidly whapped the insect and sent it spiraling drunkenly away. Moments later, Bridget Snapdragon, who had been gliding across the surface of the pool on her stomach and pretending to be a water pixie, yelped and frantically splashed to her feet, one hand on her rump and the other clawing its way out of the water. “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” she gasped in ever-louder cries, whimpering in between breaths. Once out of the water she began to run but slipped on the slick shale, falling gracelessly sideways but catching herself with the hand that had been clutching her posterior. Her tumble jolted Diablo out of his stupefaction over witnessing the inadvertent
consequences of his irritation. He reanimated his slackened jaw and would have hailed an offer of help if Bridget had not leapt up from her spill, burst into a panicked bawl, and broken into a full-speed adrenal flight into the trees.

“Oh shit,” Diablo swore, half-mortified and half-amused, because, let's face it, people look funny when they stumble, especially if they're without permanent injury and stark naked besides. After Bridget disappeared from sight, he called out a not-too-loud apology, sincerely sorry but helplessly elated. He swallowed his grin, shook his head, and caught sight of her abandoned red blouse beneath the willow tree across the creek. The least I can do, Diablo reasoned, is get her clothes back to her. He resolved to follow her trail and leave them anonymously on her porch. It seemed a basic kindness, and intoxicated by the purity of his experience, it never occurred to him that she might find this creepy, which, as it turned out, she did not.

As for Bridget, she tore through the trees and the brush like the divine madwoman she so often imagined herself to be. Indeed, as she would exaggerate to herself later, the souls of a thousand maenads were drumming at her heels, and all creatures fled the elemental ferocity of her path, embodying as it did the howling, yowling fury of all that is wild but unfree.

 

4
D
AVE
W
ILSON
had dozed off while praying for his fallen wife. Toppled sideways from his knees, torso sprawled inelegantly on the surface of the sofa, he would have looked like a fresh corpse to a passerby. Upon closer inspection, however, the passerby might have noticed a telltale bulge stretching the
fabric at the top of his left trouser leg. Assuming rigor mortis was not to blame, this had to indicate the fires of Creation still crackling away. In fact, Creation was roaring like a raunchy pagan bonfire. Dave was enraptured by the sort of dream he had experienced more or less annually since he was thirteen, when his mother woke him from an afternoon nap on the sofa with blows from her heirloom hardcover edition of the King James Bible after seeing that his hips were throbbing to a carnal cadence. Despite the rude awakening, he ejaculated uncontrollably, and was beaten the worse for that. It was his first, and to date his last, sexual climax.

This annoyed Dave considerably, though not for the epicurean reasons you might suspect. No, Dave's motives were properly immaculate, for while he desperately desired a child of his own, sexual congress with Bridget was invariably a filibuster. No matter how hard or how long he thrust, he could not find the edge of the waterfall. Bridget, meanwhile, came again and again, thrashing and moaning into her pillow like a banshee in heat and quite horrifying Dave, who feared he was turning his wife into a terrifically lusty sex beastess. Hence, while their lovemaking was famously furious, it was equally infrequent. It was simply impossible for Dave to maintain the illusion of puritanical procreation in the face of his squirming wife's unchaste and unabashed pleasure.

To be sure, Dave knew the pleasures of the flesh. He just didn't enjoy them, at least in retrospect. Nonetheless, the latent hedonism of his body took advantage of any loosening of the gnarled fist of his sexual repression to saturate his brain with forbidden hormones and thereby trigger vivid and wildly
absurd fantasies. It was to be expected, really. Repressing a natural urge increases the pressure of the eventual surge, while stubborn naïveté of the unrelenting thrust of existence only succeeds in dilating the boundaries of the imagination.

Thus, the dozen or so naked and oily women who were smothering Dave in their frenzied attempts to experience his manhood simultaneously began screaming like sirens on a roller coaster. Their shrieking stridulation so startled him that he threw himself off the sofa as he kicked awake, just in time to see Bridget, inexplicably stark naked, charge wailing into the room.

“What's happened!?” Dave thundered, frightened, flabbergasted, and floored.

“Help me,” Bridget choked through her hyperventilating sobs and pointed at her swollen derriere. “A bee.”

“Oh, honey . . . ”

“It . . . stung . . . me,” she stammered between blubbers.

“Okay, okay.” Dave leapt to her side. “It'll be all right.” Not yet awake enough to be baffled at her nakedness, his skin merely prickled with a vague awareness that he was helping a damsel in distress. He felt humbly good—chivalrous—as he unbuttoned his shirt and slung it over her shoulders. No matter that his pasty torso lacked the slightest hint of muscle definition. No matter that the only scar he had was a little white dot beneath his armpit where he'd had a mole removed. What mattered was that he felt the archetypal rightness beneath the situation, the valiant courtesy, the gallant nobility. Sure, his swashbuckling swagger stumbled when he couldn't get his last button undone, but he succeeded in the end, and perhaps even
lent the scene an element of high drama when he popped the button off after a couple of desperate yanks. He cloaked the frightened woman, and in so doing fulfilled that purpose to which he imagined his whole life to have been directed. He defended. He protected. He provided. This was it, his masculine crescendo, and his performance was extraordinary.

And so it was with perfect clarity that Dave helped his wife to lie facedown on the sofa. Once she was settled, he whispered into her ear that he would be right back, and waited for her fearful but trusting nod to release him. Flawless was his valor as he strode stouthearted into the kitchen, where he fetched an ice pack and a dish towel, then on to the bathroom for some tweezers.

Bridget, meanwhile, lay on the sofa in ponderous exhaustion, breathing heavy but considerably calmed. Dave's tenderness soothed and pleased her, and she solicited seconds by whimpering when he jogged back into the room clutching his improvised surgical tools. “Here we are, honey.” Dave genuflected beside his wife and stroked her brow, eliciting a tenuous sigh. “This will take the edge off the swelling.” He wrapped the ice pack in the dish towel and moved to place it on her fanny, pausing for a moment to glimpse its tumescence. Bridget sensed his gaze and smiled with her face to the cushions. She moaned ambiguously as she allowed her butt to rise and meet the ice, gasping at the first touch. Dave, suddenly aroused, jerked his hand away with the blind speed of having touched too hot a surface. He turned his head momentarily, then stole a grunting glance.

Good Dave Wilson belonged to that subcategory of men
known popularly as the
ass man.
He delighted in the rump, and this was no small part of the reason why he always sat in the last row of pews at church—he probably could have described in impressive detail the rear end of every woman in his parish if he were thus interrogated. Though he never admitted it to his conscious self, Dave was irresistibly attracted to the gentle but daring slopes of a woman's hips. At any opportunity, his eyes would sneak across the borders of the nearest patootie, stroking it ever so softly with his gaze. Again and again, his eyes swerved unerringly through the slick curves, careening into the danger zone and back like an invincible teenager late for a midnight pottery class. If Dave had not believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible, he may well have entertained the notion that woman was formed not from the scraps of some naked guy's rib, but shaped from the clay of the earth and turned on the wheel of life by a potter both sensual and depraved.

“Baby?” Bridget's voice interrupted his reverie. “Do you think you'll be able to get the stinger out?”

Dave's eyes went wide. “Oh,” he fumbled. “Yes. Yes I do.”

Bridget smiled. She knew she had a fine ass, and she knew Dave knew it too. “I think it's numb enough now,” she offered.

“All right.” Dave removed the ice pack and scrunched his brow in an effort to squash the bawdy excitement roiling his physiology like a tickle tussle in a hot tub. Thus focused, other details became suddenly apparent. “Where are your clothes?”

Bridget bit her lip. “I went swimming in the creek,” she admitted, knowing her husband wasn't going to like it.

“Naked?” Dave asked, tension tightening his voice. “Skinny-dipping?”

“Oww,” she pouted. “Can you take the stinger out, baby?”

“Of course.” Dave leapt again to the duties of chivalry. Gingerly, he touched the area around the epicenter of the sting. Her skin was cold to his touch but an erotic heat throbbed just beneath the surface. “Okay.” He picked up the tweezers. “Here we go.” With princely precision, he caught the exposed tip of the stinger on first grasp and slid it free. The effect was immediate as every muscle in Bridget's body relaxed.

“Mmm, thank you,” she sighed.

“You're welcome,” he said, and stroked the swollen peak of her bun, smirking. “So how did you get stung?”

“I was swimming,” Bridget said sleepily.

“But how did it sting you there?”

“On my pumpy?”
Pumpy
was Dave's favored term for her bottom.

“Mm-hmm.” A helplessly lewd grin scampered across his face.

“I was on my stomach. I guess my pumpy was above the surface of the water.”

The image of the shimmering mounds of her buttocks rising out of the water like twin islands of buoyant pleasure overflowed the guilt-built dikes of Dave's imagination. His breath shortened, his heart quickened, and his willie stood at heroic attention. “Oh,” he said after a few moments.

“Will you kiss my boo-boo, baby?”

“Sure,” he squeaked, trying to sound casual but trumpeting
a strangled falsetto instead. Forgetting to breathe and becoming thus breathless, he glanced wildly about her behind. After several aborted lunges, he finally mustered the grace to lean gently forward. His hand preceded his lips, and the moment his index finger brushed the surface of her skin, Bridget purred and arched her back like a cat in heat, rolling her flesh into his lips. At that, Dave lost all control, kissing her venom-hot skin not just with his lips but with his mouth wide open and his tongue slip-sliding all around. Involuntarily, he fondled her callipygian contours like a blind man groping for paradise.

Bridget was thrilled, and moaned her encouragement. She was nonetheless surprised, however, when Dave scrambled to his feet, frantically unfastened his belt, yanked his trousers down, and kicked out of his pants. When he eventually worked his way between her thighs, she accepted his invitation and guided him inside. As soon as he entered her fully, however, the situation became altogether too much for Dave. Tendons pulled his entire body taut and centered on his groin. Life cracked its whip with an ineluctable
hiah
, and sent his entire body thrusting against her. Within seconds, Dave's frenzied slamming suddenly ceased. He whimpered a wheezing groan, and his body relaxed upon hers.

Two decades after his first wet dream, Dave had finally experienced his first conjugal orgasm.

Hiah!

 

5
A
S ANYONE
who has ever chased a tardy white rabbit can attest, curiosity is chaos without fear, and is a necessary precondition for wonder. Bridget, of course, was content to drift
along the serendipitous currents of the curious and discover what she might. Hence, following Dave's premier ejaculation, as his breathing slowed into a postcoital trance atop of her, Bridget's thoughts bewildered toward a recollection of the occasion when they met. It was a wedding, and when she'd heard that the reception was dry, she stopped by a liquor store after the ceremony and purchased three liters of tequila. Bridget, quite Irish in her Catholicism, did not believe in sober weddings (indeed, she was offended by the notion), and so she resolved to spike the punch into makeshift margaritas. There was no punch to spike, however, only orange juice, and so she succeeded in mixing up a very stiff bowl of Father J. J. Speed's favorite nightcap—tequila sunrise less the grenadine. Stressed from the day's work—weddings did little more than remind him of his own begrudged celibacy—Father J. J. Speed wound up drinking three tall tequila sunrises within the first hour as he related wedding mishaps to Bridget, all the while gnawing on his omnipresent toothpick and laughing increasingly close to her face. After pouring himself a fourth, he excused himself and sauntered over to flirt with Joycie Hammer, his most devout parishioner whose lusty confessions he had heard every single morning except Sundays and Christmases for years. He was back within minutes to ladle a tequila sunrise for her, and soon they were guffawing uproarious, falling into each other, the whole mess.

This might have raised a few scowls, for this was not a congregation to turn a tactful eye from scandal, but just about everybody else was already either animatedly engaged in their own loud conversation or riling up the dance floor. Aside from
the jazz band, who were lit on their own variety of intoxicant, the bride and groom were the only people at the wedding who had not made it to the buffet. Alas, their dancing was hopelessly out of sync with everyone else's, and guests kept jostling into them, gushing apologies and slapping congratulations. The bride and groom looked increasingly stern in their matrimony.