Chapter 17 A Little Ceremonial Exhibitionism
A Little Ceremonial Exhibitionism
Sunday, Now
The “bride card” is persuasive enough to get everyone’s tops off and a fair number of bottoms too.
Laurel and Petey lead the naked charge, which means I’m treated to his newest bum tattoos of Michigan J.
Frog and zombie Bart Simpson, because again, the sun is out and will not be setting for another ninety minutes.
Ethan’s wearing navy boxer briefs, a different pair from when we jumped into the lake earlier. Not that I noticed them then. Or now. I’m not even looking.
“Should I strip all the way down?” he asks. Can he read my thoughts? “You’re staring at my underwear.”
“No I’m not.”
His smile is the annoying, self-satisfied one. “I thought you said you’d seen it all.”
“I said I’d seen enough.”
“Sure, sure.”
“Stand in front of me. I promised Laurel I’d go topless for her little ceremonial exhibitionism, and I don’t want you to…” I gesture between his eyes and my tee.
“You don’t want me to see you? Seriously, Chuck? We’re going to be like that? Eight hours ago you were about to bang me up against a tree.”
“Don’t say ‘bang.’?” I cringe. “And the shirt was always going to stay on.”
“You were planning to Winnie the Pooh it for our first time? Disappointing, honestly.” He extends his arm and leans his nearly naked body against a neighboring maple. Heat burns at my aforementioned breasts and up my neck, blooming in my cheeks. He’s enjoying this, making me squirm.
“Fine. I’m a gentleman,” he says, backing down, but I don’t feel like I’ve won anything. He’s reading me like a book. A very simple book with only one line, over and over.
Then he steps in front of me, just as I asked. I step forward too, his back to my front with less than a foot separating us. His shoulders fidget, all of his previous bravado falling away. The space between us pulls taut. He seems to become equally aware of our proximity and what I’m about to do.
“Can you stay right here? So no one sees me, uh, take it off?” I keep my voice low, so that the sentence floats over his shoulder on the warm breeze.
“Mm-hmm,” he hums, his voice unsteady.
I pull off my shirt. He’s not even looking at me, but I feel him everywhere.
My fingers are his fingers. It’s as intimate as if he were doing it himself.
I peel off my bra, covering my breasts with one hand and clutching my clothes in the other.
“Okay,” I breathe. “Keep in front of me, Powell. Eyes forward, okay?”
“If that’s really what you want.” The response runs up my exposed surface. Ethan promising not to look at my naked body might be more sensual than an actual perusal from any other man on the planet.
We both wait for my response, wondering whether I’ll turn him around and ask him—no, beg him—to see all of me.
For a second, it feels like I might. For so long, I’ve been frozen midstep over the precipice of me and Ethan. Does everything with me have to be so complicated? This, me and Ethan, should be simple.
“Everyone ready?” Laurel calls out to the crowd.
Ethan clears his throat. Anxiety prods my lungs.
“Dark side?” My question cuts through my increasing panic.
She claps her hands together. “ONE,” she hollers.
Ethan’s shoulders roll back. “Uh…we all get arrested and register as sex offenders?”
“TWO,” the crowd joins in, their shouts filling my ears like water.
I force myself to focus on Ethan. His shoulder freckles. The hair playing at the nape of his neck. The ropes of muscle trailing down his back. “Uh…no, actually.” I feel the tight cord around my throat begin to unravel. “That’s not a penalty for misdemeanor indecent exposure.”
“Then I think we’re gonna be okay.” He stretches an arm behind him, fingers reaching for me. Before I have a second to reconsider, I remove the hand covering my chest and accept his firm, reassuring squeeze.
The throng cries, “THREE.”
He releases my hand.
Petey’s low baritone thunders through the trees. “EVERYBODY RUN!”
A sea of skin takes off into the woods. I freeze, momentarily shocked by the chaos, the noise of a dozen or so near strangers howling naked into the lowering sun. It’s so animalistic. Primal. I shield myself with my forearm and take off too.
My one-armed running gait is a bit clumsy, and I release my own little yell. It’s the kind a child lets out when they’re sledding down a hill, mostly fear and adrenaline but with a tiny jolt of joy. At last, the fear seeps out of my skin and is replaced by something like elation.
The euphoria of the moment overtakes me in waves until finally I throw my head back and shout out all my inhibitions, my pressures.
I’m not a woman alone in an emptied-out house with a job that asks too much.
I’m a shape in the setting sun. A set of lungs screaming into the heat.
A pair of legs that can carry me any which way I want. I’m endless potential.
I tear the hand away from my chest so that the air can graze my nipples, before I pump my arms and break out into a run.
We move as a swell of bodies deeper into the trees, free and wild and connected, just as Ethan promised in his speech.
We’re fragments of an unforgettable moment.
I don’t even have to photograph it to know I’ll have it forever.
“AND TURN BACK,” Petey calls out.
The whole pack pivots as one like a colony of bees. All except for one.
“Ahh!” Ethan shrieks from behind me.
I’m kneeling next to him in an instant, still moving on wild impulse.
I scan every inch until my eyes fall on the way his hand is clutching his ankle.
My vision tunnels, so much so that I don’t notice how we’ve become an obstacle in the center of a nudist stampede and that my head is disastrously positioned at crotch height.
A hand connects with my shoulder first, then a knee at my back, until finally a dangling bouquet of flaccid penis and distended testes slaps the side of my face.
For a split second, the sweaty skin sticks like a bug on flypaper, then it peels off my cheek when the owner of the rogue scrotum leapfrogs over my topless body.
He buckles at the knees in front of me the instant he lands.
“Holy sh—” Russell cuts himself off, biting his own fist. His other hand is clutching his roughed-up genitalia.
“Are you okay?” I ask after him. He curls up into the fetal position, writhing in pain.
“Your cheek is so bony,” he says accusatorily.
“You got some of my nose in there too,” I respond, a little hibiscus LaCroix bobbing in my throat at the memory of Russell’s balls against my face.
His body rocks back and forth like he’s a giant baby entering the world in nothing but a pair of Hokas. Finally, he begins to uncoil when the pain appears to reach just-walk-it-off levels and he can stand.
“I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” I repeat.
“Ted!” He ignores me, calling out to his friend. “I need ice, Ted.” He hobbles away from us toward Wet Ted’s, behind the handful of stragglers.
“Your shoulder is bleeding.” My scrape pulses under Ethan’s stare.
“From Russell’s shoe, I think.” I position myself in front of him, leaning down over the ankle he’s still massaging.
“It’s fine,” he says, pinching his eyes shut.
I sigh. “Let me look at it.”
He winces. “It’s twisted. What do you think you’ll find?”
“Can you put weight on it?”
He lets out a childish huff. “How should I know? It literally just happened. You were there.”
I swat his hands off his leg. “You must be in a lot of pain if you’re being this big of a smartass.”
That manages to extract a laugh from him, but then he jerks his head back.
Oh god, did I hurt him? “What’s wrong? Is it tender?”
“Chuck. Your boobs are right there.” He makes a show of averting his eyes.
I look down. In the shock of his fall and my collision with the penis, I forgot we were defectors in a seminude footrace. I pop my shirt back on and, after a moment of panicked indecision, stuff my bra in my shorts pocket.
“Okay, I’m decent,” I tell him.
His eyes peel open one at a time. “This is not what I had planned for tonight.”
“The naked run threw me for a loop too. Do you have a first aid kit in your van?”
Ethan doesn’t get the opportunity to answer. Instead, Petey scoops him up like he’s a toddler who’s fallen asleep in the car, with one arm under his knees and the other braced behind his shoulders. “Don’t worry, buddy. I’ll get you to the campsite tonight.”
“No, bro. Come on,” Ethan whines, chagrined.
I grab Petey’s elbow. “Absolutely not. He needs to ice and elevate his ankle. He can’t lie on the ground in a hot tent all night. I’ll stay with him in the van, and we’ll paddle in with Ted in the morning.”
“I’m really fine,” Ethan protests from Petey’s arms. We all ignore him.
“I can stay with him, Charley. It’s no problem,” Petey responds.
But then Laurel gives him the most conspicuous glare I’ve ever seen from her (which is saying a lot, as discretion is not one of her many strengths).
Petey corrects himself, telling us that “upon further reflection,” he needs to ensure his slightly tipsy fiancée gets to camp safely before sundown.
I’ve never heard the words “upon further reflection” fall from Peter Eriksson-Thao’s lips once in my life, but I don’t push back.
Petey sets a one-legged Ethan down in front of the van and backs away quietly like a naughty child.
Then he and Laurel climb into a two-person kayak, and we watch them disappear on the water behind a spit of trees.
From the water’s edge, Laurel calls out from between cupped hands, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do! ”
It’s only then that I realize I’ve forfeited my last chance to talk to my sister on the night before her wedding.
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