Earning Respect

by Blair

  Margot sighed. “What is new? Other than the hairdo, which is great. Who did that for you?”

  “Qary and Rhonda. It was something of a team effort.”

  “Our facilities guy and maid are fashion consultants now?”

  Billie laughed. “In another life, Qary was a hairdresser. He was teaching Rhonda how to do it in case she was ever stranded in a tourist resort and needed to make money, or some bullshit. Probably just an excuse to stay close to her nubile body.”

  “Qary was a hairdresser? How did I miss that?”

  Billie laughed. “I would imagine that, to get this gig, he kind of left it off his resume, accidentally on purpose.”

  When the phone rang, both women looked at it. “I have a sick feeling that things are going to be distinctly unpleasant this morning,” Billie said.

  “I hope your instincts are shitty,” Margot said.

  Unfortunately, she was right.

  “I don’t get it at all,” Margot told Billie later. “They buy the island to make money, but won’t invest in it. If they won’t spend money for advertising, and we can’t have any kind of promotions, how can they expect us to turn things around?”

  Billie shrugged. “I do hope that question is rhetorical. If not, I don’t have an answer. If it is, I don’t have to answer.” Margot stuck her tongue out at her and Billie laughed. “My best guess is that these are folks who are used to having their cake and eating it too. It just isn’t working out that well for them at the moment. They bought the place just before they hired you to run it. I don’t think they know shit about the tourist industry; I bet they paid too much for what they were told was a going concern and forgot to ask exactly where it might be going. If they had checked with anyone, or talked to the staff, like me, they would have known the answer was that it was going downhill. Now they are just trying to squeeze all the juice they can out of what they see as a bad investment.”

  “Well, regardless, it seems we are the ones expected to do the squeezing. I didn’t hear anything new from them.”

  Billie shrugged. “I am a finance person, but I do understand a bit about people. We have a few guests staying in the close bungalows. Maybe if we work harder to make sure they have a good time, word will spread. You know how pervasive those travel blogs and online rating forums have gotten. Somebody has a bad time or is cheated and business does a slam dunk for a time. Somebody raves, and you are the hot spot of the moment.”

  “So they need something good to say, and mostly what we offer is a mellow and laid back place to relax, which doesn’t give them anything exciting to write.” Margot sighed. “Well, how do we make them happy?”

  Billie pointed a finger at her. “That is another rhetorical question, right?”

  ***

  After Margot left him standing on the veranda, Jake had sat for a time, trying to figure out her out. He wondered if she was losing interest in him. She had been hot for him at first and lots of fun in bed. She wasn’t really what he called playful, and he liked playful, but she had the potential. It was just that she needed to loosen up a little. He had thought he could nudge her in that direction, but now, somehow, it seemed they were moving apart again. Maybe it had been egocentric of him to think he could show her how to enjoy herself more. That, he thought, would be sad. If she was happy with who she was, if she had no interest in changing, then he could never see her as more than a nice woman, a lovely short-term affair, and perhaps a good friend. That was a lot, but sexually, Jake thought there was more to life than what he was getting right now. He had walked away from more imaginative lovers than Margot, although he hadn’t cared for them as much. This was the first time he had been with a woman that he liked better as a person than as a sexual partner. It was an odd situation for him and put him off balance.

  Jake knew himself too well to pretend or deny what was going on. Simply put, her conservative streak was proving to be a bummer. He had hinted that he wanted her to take the initiative, maybe wake him in the night with a loving touch or with gentle flicks of her tongue in all the right places. He wondered aloud what kind of dreams that would produce. Wow! So far, nothing had come of it.

  The truth was that he had to push and tease, and sometimes almost force her into trying new things. Her first lovers must have been crashing bores. He doubted that she had swallowed a man’s sperm before his. She had wanted him to spill it on her belly but he had managed to get his way and now she was fine with it.

  It bothered him that she about jumped out of her skin every time he touched her anus. Now, just when he had slowly made some progress in that direction, all of a sudden he was having trouble just getting her to open her legs for him.

  He knew she was worried about the job, but it was absorbing her most of the time and that was a drag. Often she came home in the evenings too wiped out to play. When he had first come to the island, she only went to the office to check people in or out, to order supplies from the mainland, and deal with emails inquiring about visiting the place. She could do it all in a couple of hours, especially with foxy Billie helping her. Now, Margot was in the office most of the damn day. Billie, and most of the staff, still got out to swim and play, but Margot seldom had time for a picnic on the beach, much less to spend an afternoon in bed with him.

  She seemed to be trying to relegate them into the kind of mechanical sex life the corporate drones had. That was a nonstarter, as part of his reason for being out here, of living as he did, was to escape that sort of bull. He wondered if her problem was really the work, or was that just an excuse to put him off? He couldn’t be sure. Whatever the truth was, the bottom line was that she wasn’t satisfying him. He did not see enough of her beautiful body, get enough time touching and fucking it. This morning he had wanted her bad and that little go round on the porch wasn’t nearly enough.

  For both their sakes, there was a limit to how long he could let this go on. He was going to have to explain that to her, but he hesitated. He had serious doubts about where that conversation would go.

  He went in the living room where he had dropped his shorts on the floor when they went to bed. He put them on, grabbed a pair of sunglasses and a straw hat and walked out of the hut. Instinctively, he headed for his outdoor gym--a stretch of beach located far from the areas where there were bungalows or huts. He called it the undeveloped section, although not much was developed anywhere, but this area was as private as could be found and no one but him seemed to go there. He wasn’t sure Margot had even been there.

  He found his favourite rocky outcropping at a stand of palm trees and took off the shorts, hat and glasses, putting them in a neat pile, with the sunglasses tucked in the hat, and the shorts on top, holding the hat down, so it wouldn’t blow away. Comfortable that his things were safe, he did a series of stretching exercises, enjoying the feel of the ocean air on his skin. He waded into the water until he was about calf deep and began to run parallel to the beach, spraying water erratically as the gentle waves raised and lowered the water level. Jake loved running and his run was about two miles up the beach to where an outcropping of rock ran across the beach, out into the water and blocked him from going further. There, he turned and ran back. Back near his starting point, he dove in the cool water, diving down to the sand and swimming out to sea until his lungs forced him to the surface, where he sucked in the salty air. Then he began swimming for a small spit of sand about a mile offshore. He had found that swimming to it, circling it, and swimming back at full speed, gave him quite a workout.

  He was winded by the time he waded ashore and he dropped to the sand to rest. Hugging his knees to his chest, he sat in the edge of the water and let the waves play against him, sometimes covering his waist, and other times not reaching his feet. He looked out over the unmarked stretch of sand. Any footprints that he or anyone else had made had been erased by the relentless ocean. It made the beach feel deserted.

&
nbsp; Finally, he stood and waded back into the water, walking out until it was deep enough to rinse the sand off his body. He hated sand in his shorts. Then he walked back toward his rock, stopping at a small tide pool. He grabbed his cock and pissed into it, spreading his legs and tilting his head back. It felt good to stand naked on the open beach, pissing over it and feeling the hot sun and salty breeze on his skin.

  When he finished a long and satisfying piss, he turned to get his things, but the rock was bare. No shorts, no hat, no sunglasses. He looked around. Could he have made a mistake and put them on the wrong rock? No way. He never varied his routine, except for the time. The path stayed the same. The time only changed with Margot’s willingness to fuck. He noted sadly that that he seemed to be getting to beach earlier these days.

  The real problem at the moment was finding his clothing, not Margot. He scratched his head. He felt certain that he could slip back into the hut without anyone seeing him. He seldom saw anyone when he came back along that path as most of the activity was over at the office or facilities shed. However, that didn’t solve the puzzle.

  “Lose these?” a female voice called teasingly from the shadows of the palm trees. He looked in the direction the voice came from, but the contrast between the bright sunlight on the beach and dark in the shade made it impossible to see much. He walked closer and saw an attractive blonde. Noting her ribs, he thought perhaps she was skinnier than was healthy, but not anorexic.

  She sat cross-legged on a towel holding up his shorts and wearing his hat and sunglasses, both of which looked ridiculously huge on her. She wore nothing else but a skinny red thong. With her long and skinny legs crossed, the skimpy bit of red cloth barely covered her vagina. Her breasts were small and pointy. She took off the hat and sat it down, revealing short hair, cut spiky. She looked him up and down, with a challenging smile that bordered on a smirk.

  He put his hands on his hips. It didn’t seem that any attempt at modesty made sense at this point. After giving him the once over, her eyes came to rest on his cock and it started to stiffen a little. As he checked out what he could see of her body, it stiffened a bit more. “I don’t think I lost them, exactly,” he said. “It would seem you appropriated them.”

  “Nice word, appropriated,” she said, laughing. “I prefer to say that I relocated them.”

  “Fair enough. You know your intentions better than I.”

  She laughed. “Now that I have your attention, you can have them back, but I am not bringing them over there.” She gave him a defiant look and put her hands on the sand behind, leaning back to rest on them, arching her back and pointing her tits at him.

  He shrugged and walked closer with his swelling cock now bouncing in front of him. He wasn’t sure what her game was, but he wasn’t going to pretend that he didn’t respond to female flesh. When he got close, she patted the towel next to her. “Sit for a moment,” she said. “I want to talk with you.”

  “That is going to be difficult, for me at least, if you don’t give me my shorts back,” he said.

  She laughed and tossed the shorts behind her, staring at the growing erection a few inches from her face and licked her lips. “That’s okay. I will probably do most of the talking. I usually do. Sit down.”

  Not sure what else to do, Jake sat next to her. He sat with his knees pulled up and wrapped his arms around them. She slid closer until her knee touched his thigh. “I’m Trina,” she said, “and you are Jake. You do the computer stuff, such as it is, for this place, and every morning you come out here and do your running and swimming thing. At least that has been your routine for the five days I’ve been here. The stretching is the best part, for the audience, at least. It really displays your muscles well.”

  He laughed. “You are well informed. And I will keep that in mind if I know I am performing.”

  She held up a set of binoculars. “I am observant, actually. And I observe that your exercise program keeps you in great shape,” she said, putting her hand on his thigh and squeezing. Hard muscles are nice, and it is fun to watch.”

  “My girlfriend likes the results,” he said. “Although I doubt she would be delighted to learn that you have been observing my fitness program this closely.”

  Trina laughed. “Oh yes, the manager lady.” She took Jake’s hand and placed it on her thigh, close to her pussy. “I should work out more myself. This thigh is awfully soft, don’t you think?”

  He gave it a squeeze, trying to not to stare too obviously down the bare leg to the thong between her open legs. Be he did look and noticed a dark spot where her juices had leaked onto the thin cloth. “I don’t know. Soft isn’t all bad. It isn’t a weight lifter’s thigh, but it isn’t a couch potato thigh either.”

  She laughed. “Oh, good response and tactful, too. Maybe you can recommend some exercises,” and she moved his hand even closer to her crotch. “I am sure you can think of some wonderful ways a girl can exercise her thighs. Exercise should be fun.”

  He squeezed the leg again. It was nice. He decided to pretend he took the question seriously. “I would need to know what your goals are for the exercise. Strength, shape, bulk...”

  She pointed out toward the sea. “This is a lovely vantage point to watch you from. I can see the entire run and swim. I did like today’s variation. Stopping on your way back to piss was great and perfect since this is the day I chose for a close look. That way I got to see it relaxed and still on display.”

  “While I appreciate the compliment, I didn’t invent pissing and I did it because I needed to piss. It wasn’t intended as a display of anything.” He picked up the binoculars and scanned the beach. “You watch me through these?”

  “Not usually. I have a much more powerful pair in my bungalow. They are very expensive, but worth it, when I want to see your muscles ripple. It’s very high tech. I can zoom on very specific muscle groups. ” She put a hand on his chest and began stroking it. “But I wanted a close look. Health in the raw. This way I not only see things more clearly, but get a sense of the touch and smell of you.” She moved her hand lower on is stomach and his cock twitched. “Good reflexes too. I noticed that some of the special muscle groups of interest don’t get any exercise in your daily program though.”

  He couldn’t think of what to say. He looked into her blue eyes and saw a grey glimmer of determination. She certainly seemed to be begging him to fuck her, but he had to be careful. If she were just playing around, a cock tease, she might scream out if he made a move. Some women were just nuts. He wasn’t sure fucking her would be a good idea anyway. They had never talked about it, but he had a hunch that Margot probably bought into the story that love and fidelity were a matched set and he was having fun seeing how much Margot could open up to him. This girl looked pretty open already and could be a spectacular fuck, but was she after a quick fling or something else? Was she using him? To piss off Margot, perhaps? There were too many complications.

  Trina rubbed her shoulder against his arm. “Tell me, does the manager lady shave her pussy?”

  The question surprised him. “Does it matter?”

  “I am curious. Any reason I shouldn’t know? Is it some kind of secret?”

  Jake gave up. “No, she doesn’t.”

  “Is that because you like furry pussy?”

  “Has nothing to do with me. She never asked me about it.”

  Trina smiled. “I see.” She ran her hands across her tanned legs. “I prefer to shave mine. Bald is beautiful and all that.” She grinned, rubbed his bald head, and wiggled her hips, scrunching her ass into the sand. “Do you like my little swim suit?” She took his finger and pressed it to the fabric of her thong. “Oh look! It is getting wet and I haven’t even been in the water yet.”

  “I guess that happens,” he agreed as he removed his hand.

  “By the way, do you like my tits? They are kind of small, but I th
ink of them as perky. Does perky turn you on?”

  “Nice tan,” he said.

  She took his hand and put it on her breast. The nipple instantly became erect. “See? Perky.”

  Jake was impatient with the game. His cock was starting to ache. “Yes I see. They are perky little tits in a self-wetting swimsuit, ready for action. Well, clearly you are a crazy bitch.”

  “I prefer to think of myself as a free spirit bitch, actually.”

  “Regardless, whether you intended it or not, you are leading up to something here that involves more than a chat about life in general on a deserted beach.”

  She ran a fingernail down his chest. “Smart boy. Can you guess what it is?”

  “You presented some hints---I am just not sure that you are after the obvious.”

  She laughed. “Oh I am. You see, I have a shitty job and live in a shitty and cold town in Germany. I saved up a year for a charming, but enormously expensive two-week vacation on this lovely tropical island. I must say it is everything your web site promised, and so I spent three days swimming, kayaking, and getting tanned. I can sunbathe in the nude here so I don’t look like a zebra, and that is all kind of nice.” She ran her hands up and down her thighs. “I figured out the perfect vacation. I even cut my hair before I came. It used to be long, but I wanted to swim, and frolic on the beach and not have to deal with getting the salt out of it all the time. Smart, huh? Thinking ahead. Now I am bored. Reading books has lost its charm, since most of them seem to be about people getting laid, sooner or later. Which is, I realize, what is missing from this idyllic picture. There has been a dearth of frolicking, for me at least, on these gorgeous beaches.”