ENF: Embarrassed Nude Female

by C. M. Noe-Flores

  I finished with the worst jete I’d done in my life. The sand must’ve absorbed most of my jump and I had little time to extend my legs before landing. Despite the finale, somebody actually clapped. Never before had I used the term mortified to describe my emotional state, but this was it, or close to it. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact name for the emotion I was feeling, anxiety, shame, horniness, embarrassment, a mix of many things, eating a bag of Halloween candy all at once, enjoying some of the flavors but disliking others and ultimately getting sick from consuming so many sweets. The sickness was regret, or rather a looming fear of regret, the regret I would feel tomorrow. This wasn’t me. This bikini was meant for someone more exciting and careless, someone who didn’t think about consequences and lived in the present, someone passionate and reckless, not me.

  When the applause, if you can call one person clapping applause, subsided, I almost played it cool by taking a bow with a flirty smile. But the thought of bending over in this bathing suit was too much. Instead I stared straight ahead at the ocean like a robot as I walked forward, found some cool damp sand where the waves washed up and sat down.

  The sun was getting ready to dive into the ocean and my big day at the beach turned into me playing with a big pile of sand in front of me, the soothing feeling of sand pouring through my fingers, massaging the cracks in my skin. I kept moving back as the tide rose. Not too far away, a boy and girl were building a sand wall, fighting the tide, always a losing battle. They had little seashells decorating the top of the wall, something I did as a child as well. When the water washed the seashells away, the game was over.

  The first time I got up to move back, the boy looked up at me and since then, he glanced my way every few seconds. I hung my head between my legs and laughed. The most attention I got today was from a ten year old. Not that I wanted attention. I didn’t know what I wanted.

  “Hey girl, wow! Beautiful girl like you sitting all alone? Where’s your boyfriend?”

  I looked up at a man thin as a pool noodle wearing an American flag speedo and carrying a matching motorcycle helmet. His leathery skin sagged in all directions. The sight of him was so jarring that I almost forgot that he asked me a question. I managed a shrug.

  “Wait a second girl,” he said looking both ways. “Are you of age?”

  Although definitely a creepy thing to say, I tried to play it off with a loud, “Hah. You’re silly.”

  “There it is. What a great smile. Mmmm yeah, show them pearly babies off.” And with that he took off. I watched him go down the shore and start talking to a group of highschool girls. He sounded like a salesman, the way he talked. When the girls saw him they screamed and laughed and demanded they take a photo with him. I found myself smiling, he wasn’t selling anything. The beach was a strange place full of strange people and here I was, plotting my next move.

  It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to go swimming alone in the ocean at night, so I stood up to get in before the sun sunk any further. I had somehow forgotten about my extra cheeky bottoms until I started to wipe sand off. I’m sure I looked like one of those postcards in beachshore gift shops, the ones with topless models wiping sand off their bums, except I wasn’t topless or as attractive. Still, it was a sight I was embarrassed to be displaying, so I stopped wiping and started sprinting towards the water, a mist of butt sand trailing behind me.

  The water had been heating up in the sun all day and now the air was cooling faster than the water could, making it the perfect time to get in. The waves washed up pretty far on the shore and you could wade out quite a while before it got too deep. I made my way past the crowds to where the water came up to my shoulders. The only others out that far were some boys, body surfing off small waves. My father taught me how to body surf when I was eight. I took to it really well until a decent sized wave crashed on me, sending me tumbling underwater and cutting my shoulder on some coral. The scar is still there. They didn’t let me body surf for a whole year after that. ‘It could’ve been your head!’ my father had said.

  I scanned the horizon for a suitable wave. It wasn’t long before I found one I liked approaching fast. I kicked off the ground towards the shore and started swimming, the wave just behind me. My speed increased as the wave lifted me. I stretched my arms out straight in front of me and did my best to become a surfboard, an oddly shaped, less hydrodynamic surfboard. It certainly wasn’t as easy as back in my flat chested youth.

  The wave dropped me off among the crowded swimmers, not as far as I hoped. I would’ve done better if I had kicked off just a split second later than I did. I stood straight up in the waist high water and felt a cold breeze where I didn’t expect it, my boobs. They were exposed. The water friction pulled my top down to my waist. I shot down into the water and readjusted myself, then scanned the area. None of the other swimmers were staring at me. Had any of them seen? So many people wore sunglasses at the beach. You could never be sure where they were looking. I suspected that was a competing reason for wearing sunglasses to the beach at all.

  Discomfort prompted me to reach down and tug on my bottoms. My brief physical exertion had given me a wedgie. A wedgie in this bathing suit was pretty much a thong, but my lower half stayed underwater and while body surfing, the wave covered it. Nobody could’ve seen since the wave covered my bottom. The wave covered my bottom hmm, I had an idea.

  I strode out beyond the swimmers to my wave catching spot and started to shiver as I pulled off my cheeky bikini bottoms. I balled the suit up in my fist and stood for a few moments looking out over the water at all the other swimmers. I felt water flow between my legs with a freedom I had never allowed. I looked down and saw my own bare self. I could barely make out my toes, half buried in sand. Any farther distance than that was a murky blue. Anybody here could be naked underwater and nobody would know as long as they kept a few feet away from everybody.

  “Hey there,” came a man’s voice from behind me.

  I snapped my head around. He was about ten feet away. Sunglasses rested in a nest of short brown hair. The shades had spent most the day protecting the skin around his eyes, the only part of his face that wasn’t as pink as the bikini bottom in my hand.

  “I saw you body surfing,” he said. “You looked good out there.”

  You looked good? Does that mean he saw my innocent breasts bounce up out of the water? All I mustered was a, “Thanks.” My mind was fixated on the issue under the water. My lower body was pulsating. The sunburnt man said something else but I couldn’t hear it over my heart pounding. I lifted my leg up and tried to get it in my suit but a mischievous wave threw my balance and my head went under for the briefest of moments. I gave up on putting the suit back on and stood straight again.

  “Are you okay?” the man said coming closer.

  A mild shriek emitted from my mouth, an overreaction for sure. The man seemed perfectly harmless and his concern after my self-dunking was sincere. Some other swimmers looked my way when I yelled. I was so embarrassed I covered my mouth with my hand. Nylon rubbed my mouth and chin. Oh no. I had covered my mouth with the hand holding my bathing suit. I practically guffawed and shot my hand back into the water.

  His smirk was instantaneous. He turned around. “Sorry, didn’t realize you were...adjusting. Those waves can be brutal, especially to women.”

  I slipped my bottoms back on saying, “Yeah, yeah.” Apparently my vocabulary had been reduced to ‘yeah’ and ‘thanks’.

  The man said, “Well hey, my friends and I are having some drinks down there. He pointed to a handful of guys and girls under a couple umbrellas down the shore. “I saw you swimming alone and thought I’d invite you.” Somehow he was blushing through his sunburn. “Whenever you want, no pressure, we’ll be there awhile.” He started walking towards his group of friends, passing closer to me on the way. I noticed his eyes dart down at my bottom half when he was close enough to see down there, only for a moment, guess he couldn’t help himself. “See ya,” he said.

  As m
y pulse returned to normal, my mind was finally able to process the scene that just occurred, the things he had said right before I attempted to re-suit myself, he was kind of nervous. If only he knew how nervous I had been. He had blurted out a few questions back to back. Do you body surf often? You seem pretty fit. What’s your secret? Obviously flirty. I wasn’t even that fit really. He was already a dozen feet away but a sudden urge to redeem myself made me call out, “I’m a dance instructor.”

  The man searched around for the source of the voice. He looked back at me.

  I repeated, “I’m a dance instructor. That’s my secret.”

  He laughed. Oh jeez, I was pretty sure I just made myself look like even more of doofus. “Good to know,” he called back. “Maybe later you can show us some moves.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’m going to catch a few more waves first.” He nodded and continued his slow trek back to his friends. It was the coveted meet-cute you see in so many romantic comedies. And what if I did follow up on the man’s invitation? I’d have a few drinks. Maybe they’re fun and I enjoy myself, maybe not. He invites me back to his place. He’ll say didn’t you bring any real clothes?

  It would’ve been a good time to head home. I had a little excitement now, don’t be greedy. But my body was still tingling which turns out to impair my judgment. This time I checked my surroundings first. Nobody in my immediate proximity. I pulled off my bottoms and felt the cool water again flow freely.

  A solid candidate appeared in the ocean, a large moving lump of water, something as a child I had called a monster wave. I wasn’t sure I was ready to do this. I looked towards the shore. There were people ahead of me. If I fell short like my last surf I’d end up amidst them, bottomless. I was going to do better than that though.

  I bent my knees, preparing for the kickoff. The wave was almost there. Don’t kick too soon. Wait for it. My chest was thumping. Oh no! There was a fatal flaw with my plan. I wouldn’t be able to swim well with my bottoms in my hand, unable to cup the water properly. Plus someone might see the suit once my arms are extended in the surfboard position. The wave was upon me. I shoved my bottoms under my top and kicked off. I swam my hardest and felt the wave take me.

  I was gliding without a single worry in the world, including the worry that the water friction on my breasts might do worse than pull my top down this time; it might send my bottoms for an oceanic voyage. I laughed at my earlier thought that nudity should be commonplace so that it wouldn’t be a big deal. If that were the case, I wouldn’t have been able to derive so much pleasure from this. My bare bottom, covered only by a few inches of foamy wave water, passed through the asteroid belt of swimmers still going strong. Too strong in fact. When the wave finally released me, the water was only a couple feet deep.

  Careful not to stand up, I examined my body. Of course my top had been pulled down. I fixed it underwater, but there was a problem. Where were my bottoms? Panic was a musician plucking a harp inside my chest. It was the same harp that played when one was in love, and although it was intense staccato throbbing right now, I had to admit there was still something pleasurable about this panic. I scanned the surrounding water and down at the flock of swimmers. My suit must have been pulled off around there. Would I have to swim around those people in a desperate search for my bottoms, always making sure to keep more than a few feet from any one person? It sounded like some perverted video game.

  I looked back at the group of beer drinkers my new friend was apart of. He forgot to tell me his name. Shades, that’s what I’ll call him. Between Shades and his friends and myself, I saw my bottoms, floating casually among a patch of seaweed closer to the shore. I crawled through the two feet of water on my hands and knees. Waves came in and out but I kept my eyes locked on the suit. If someone walked by right now, they’d see my bare ass clear as day through mere inches of water.

  The wave fully retracted, leaving me with a bathing suit even more unique than the one I came to the beach in. I had done my best at covering my sensitive areas with the nearby seaweed. I even tried to pull it around my waist so that, from a distance, one might think nothing odd of my new swimwear. I glanced around. Nobody was looking at me, good. There was Shades and his friends again. Shades saw me looking his way and waved. They all waved. How I managed to wave and smile despite the dread I felt inside is something I still awe at to this day. Thank god they didn’t come my way.

  The next wave arrived and my seaweed was quickly dispatched with. I grabbed my bottoms and sort of slunk forward on my butt until I was back in slightly deeper water. As soon as there was enough space for me to slip my bottoms back on, I did. At this moment I felt the ease of a bed after a long day’s hard work. I tried to float on my back and relax but I was still in the part of the shore where the waves were turbulent, so I started towards my wave catching zone, where the waves weren’t breaking as much. Maybe I could relax there.

  The water was just a little too rough to float on. I stood on my toes and eyed the pier in the distance where I had once caught a baby shark. That’s what my parents had told me anyways. They were known to lie to my child self, usually for the betterment of my imagination, in the same vein as Santa Claus. I didn’t known what baby sharks looked like back then and we let it go back in the water after we took a photo. The photo was lost before I was old enough to really develop a good enough memory of it. I’ve always been skeptical about the baby shark ever since.

  Swimming towards the pier, I was no longer some weird woman alone, wading in the water. I looked like I was swimming with a purpose. Maybe I was meeting someone at the pier. Maybe I was exercising. Maybe I was taking my entire swimsuit off.

  I pulled the string on the back of my top and yanked it forward off of my body, then tugged the bottoms down. I held one piece in each hand and kept moving towards the pier in a breaststroke so as to keep my cloth filled hands in the water. A warmth coursed through my body that contradicted my lack of clothing. Wasn’t the original purpose of clothes warmth? And here I was, warm once they were removed. Another reason for clothes was probably protection from the sun. I wondered at what point the distortion in purpose occurred. When did it stop being about warmth and protection and start being about hiding from others? Did a group of cave people shed their winter clothes and suddenly find nudity vulgar? Maybe a long winter had repressed them sexually, perverted their minds, and when Spring came, parents for the first time were concerned with the way young men looked at their daughters. So they asked everybody to keep their clothes on. The leaders, fathers of course, enforced their newfound prudery. The second distortion came years later, at a time when the group had all the food and water and shelter that they needed. Bored, one of them altered an outfit, probably with the intention of making it more efficient, and inadvertently gave birth to fashion, along with jealousy and envy over material things.

  I did my best to keep my distance from other swimmers, but I found myself allowing a shorter and shorter distance between them and I. Every passerby was a rush, shooting out ripples of nervous pleasure. But each subsequent time, required I get a little closer for the rush to kick in. This was bad. I had never been addicted to anything in my life. It was a mere glimpse into a world I had never come close to understanding. A sympathy for drug addicts, gamblers and perverts flirted with my mind.

  I shook it out and held my hands in front of me underwater. I opened my fists and watched my bathing suit pieces float out, inches above my palms. Those two little pieces of fabric were so important yet so vulnerable. Floating there in the open ocean, though just inches from my hands, they might as well been blowing in the wind near the edge of a cliff of a bottomless pit. The light tingling sensation prickled inside my belly.

  A monster wave crashed onto me and I went tumbling underwater. I popped back up gasping for breath, reminded of my childhood body surfing near death experience. There was a split second where survival distracted me from the panic of the situation at hand; finding my bikini. I searched frantically for my
top and bottom and nearly exhaled my lungs out when I found them. They hadn’t gone far. I grabbed onto them, held them close to my body, squeezed them tight, but I didn’t put them back on. Having the bikini back was like sobering up at a party you’re not ready to leave. I let go again. This time for a little longer. I was facing the shore, leaving me vulnerable to any wave that wanted to come by and tear away my tiny pieces of dignity. Just the thought, the potential for this disaster, intensified the sparking in my body. It was like the fluttering sensation of young love we call butterflies in the stomach. It was a bit lower than my stomach, closer to my bladder. It didn’t quite feel like I had to pee but it wasn’t far off. It was akin to the initial free fall of a roller coaster.

  I continued to release my suit pieces, letting them float away or be hit by a wave before coming back to them, grabbing them, letting my heart pace return to normal before doing it again. I even started swimming away from the tiny bits of nylon, getting farther and farther each time, but always keeping them insight.

  And all along, I was still moving closer and closer to the pier.

  The tall wooden posts holding up the pier were covered in jutting nails, so I kept my distance. I heard a man was bit by a shark around the pier a few years ago. A great white! I’m not sure if it was true though. I had never seen a shark out here in my life, and the one I supposedly caught as a child doesn’t count since I don’t know if that even happened. Rumor was a few years ago, the shark had been agitated by a fisherman’s hook. That at least made sense. I knew sometimes fishermen hooked swimmers. There weren’t any fishermen on this side of the pier at the moment so I figured I was safe.

  The ground was rougher over here, less sandy, a lot of rocks. A plan began to form as I rubbed my feet against a sizable stone, a shock of pleasure ringing out from the tip of my toes to the nape of my neck. I plunged underwater, lifted the stone and tucked my top and bottom under, then set the stone back on top. I emerged and caught my breath, used my feet to feel around and make sure everything was secured, then went under again just to double check with my hands.