by Julia Kent
“Hold up,” Darla said as we turned a corner and found an enormous pool, shining in the sun, stretched out with little tent cabanas along the edge, a waiter serving drinks to the twenty or so sunbathers and swimmers. All nude, of course.
Eye candy. My God, the bodies. Some were model perfect. Others less so, but the confidence was what made them attractive. Even forms that I’d have never looked at twice back home made me do a double take. A swirl of confusion began to twist inside slowly, like a growing hurricane, taking disparate pieces of myself and merging them for an enormous storm.
“If he’s an asshole for saying that, then so am I, Joe,” she said.
“You’re not assholes,” I said, backing down. “You’re probably right, but who the fuck wants to hear that?” I felt raw and overwhelmed. All I wanted was to get out of here; some kind of culture shock was smacking me hard. The contract, the big break, the money—it all paled in the shadow of the huge feeling of too much, too soon, that the past few minutes had triggered in me.
“Joe, I just watched your ex-fiancee, someone I didn’t know existed until twenty-four hours ago, go down on a guy dressed like a quarterback. After seeing the Easter Bunny pull out while fucking a woodland creature. And then the naked water-gun fights…” She looked at Trevor with wild eyes. “I thought the naked hitchhiker story was about as crazy as my life would ever get, but apparently I set the bar a little lower than I really should have.”
And then she stalked off, leaving us in front of the pool.
I did the only thing I could think of that didn’t involve punching something.
I stripped naked and threw my clothes at Trevor, taking off at a dead run for the pool and diving in. The water was the perfect antidote to this whole fucked-up mess. Trevor and I, apparently, had a penchant for finding ourselves in complex social messes hundreds—now thousands—of miles from home.
Home. As I dove headfirst down to the bottom of what I guessed was a ten-foot-deep pool, I thought about that word, the water’s pressure making me nothing but a vessel. Home. Home meant something totally different now, seven months after meeting Darla, a semester after going away. Home meant my mom and dad, but it also meant the apartment with Trevor (which wasn’t mine anymore), the time I spent with Darla, my apartment in Philly.
Home meant a lot of things, and nothing, all at once.
Breaking the surface felt great, the water cold enough to make my balls crawl inside me but warm enough to be pleasant. The fact that I was completely nude didn’t register on the faces of the people congregating about the pool. No children were here, and that was how it should have been. I hadn’t been at a public pool without teenagers and kids around since…
Never.
I felt more adult than I had any right to, and yet it felt right, too. The sting of Darla’s kiss on my mouth from a moment ago clung to me, the water unable to wash it away. When she did that—kissed me and Trevor in public—something lurched inside me, fearful and repelled, because that?
Being that open?
Couldn’t happen in real life.
Knowing this place wasn’t in touch with real life was one thing. Living each moment as if that were true was quite another.
For a guy who made that claim I was awfully hypocritical, clinging to the side of the pool with my balls ready to drip all over the smooth, gray concrete when I climbed out.
“Join me!” I called out to Darla and Trevor.
Trevor had guts, stripping out of his clothes and sauntering right over with a swagger I’d kill to copy. His junk was right out front and no one said a word. This really was the norm here.
Darla was the one who was the deviant, clinging to her button-down shirt and yoga pants.
“C’mon!” I shouted as Trevor plunged in, his body disappearing in a blur of bubbles under the blue water.
Do it, I thought. Join me. Because my heart can’t take being rejected again.
Is it a test if you don’t know you’re being evaluated? Was I being fair to her, to keep so much bottled up? What if she thought my “I love you” at the airport had been a joke?
And then Trevor broke the surface.
Darla walked over, her hair shining in the sun, no clouds obscuring anything. A light breeze tickled her waves and she did a slow striptease, unbuttoning one button at a time, sharing her eyes with both of us as Trevor swam to the pool’s edge and grinned like a maniac at the sight before us.
Could she swim? The thought hit me, hard, and I almost asked, but stopped myself. I knew she hated being treated like…like she was different from us. Less worldly or less experienced. And some mental filter I didn’t own before kicked in suddenly. I could imagine myself in her shoes, and I hated it, too.
Hated being treated like someone worthy of being disconnected, of being different.
If she couldn’t swim, I reasoned inside, she wouldn’t striptease, so don’t borrow trouble. The part of my brain that thought all this through was on 24/7 and I felt it unwind the tiniest bit, my sac floating with my shriveled cock in a public pool where I was decidedly naked, in the water next to a nude Trevor, and then Darla slipped out of her panties and, newborn-naked, cannonballed right in.
We
Were
Free.
Until I looked over to see two beady eyes peering at me from one of the tent cabanas, a woman whose body I knew all too well, one so different from Darla’s that they might as well be from different species.
Suzy. She nodded with approval at my display, and that made my balls crawl even higher, as if they sought asylum. At this rate they’d be in my throat soon.
What was she doing here? She didn’t work here, and this was an invitation-only resort. Why…her? Had the people who hired the band somehow wanted her here? Was this all connected to me in some mysterious way?
Darla swam over to us with confident, practiced strokes. So much for my stupid, useless worrying about her ability to swim.
“This is nice,” she said, a bit breathless. The buoyant water made her breasts float around her collarbone and it made me want to reach out and take one nipple in my mouth. I could do that here. No one would care.
So I did. The pink skin tasted like sea water and chlorine, and I realized this was a saltwater pool. Nice. The slippery nipple pebbled in my mouth and I slid my hands under the water to cup the bottom of her breast, my legs scissor-kicking to keep me afloat.
I wondered what sex in a pool would be like.
She squealed, and then Trevor came to the other side of her and did the same.
“What are you guys doing? We can’t!” she hissed.
“Why can’t we?” Trevor crooned. Great. We were on the same page. My cock hardened at the idea of it. Sex in a pool? Under everyone’s noses? In public?
“Because you don’t just do that!” Darla said, but her voice held a moan.
“Do what?” Trevor teased her, and our hands bumped. I pulled back while he worked on touching her clit, her face a picture of pure arousal and conflicting thoughts. Oh, she wanted to, but…
“When in Rome,” I whispered, tonguing both her nipples.
“When in Rome, you visit the Pope,” she said.
“Let’s see whether we can get you to say ‘Oh, God’ and call that the same,” Trevor said, coming up behind her, his arms on either side of her.
“Not here,” she said, suddenly serious. “But hell yes to the swimming pool in our room.”
When I looked up, Suzy was gone.
Aha.
Darla
You think that having sex in a pool is going to be all smooth gliding, with the water warming you up like you’re in a womb, and that you’ll be sleek like seals and all sexy and shit like those old Chanel No. 5 commercials that pop up sometimes on cable.
It totally does not work like that. First of all, holy lube. You need some lube down there, because water and pussy are like oil and water, only worse: at least oil is a lubricant.
Second, you ever try to position your bo
dy just right in the water while someone tries to enter you? There needs to be a Red Cross class with certification in Water Fucking 101, because me, Joe, and Trevor failed that one miserably. In frustration, we finally just climbed out and had sex on the edge of the pool until Joe made some foolish move and upended us all into the water just as I was about to have a screaming orgasm.
I screamed at him instead and we just got on the bed, soaking wet and all, and fucked ourselves into oblivion.
And then there’s the chlorine rash that made the edges of my hoohaw swell up like a blowfish.
So pool: 1
Pool sex: 0
(And hint: hydrocortisone cream is great for damn near anything, but Joe wants to make sure you guys know that it tastes awful. Whoops! Plus, don’t have oral sex with the kind of cream that has lidocaine in it. Feeling resumed about twelve hours later in Joe’s lips, so thank goodness he’s a bass player and not a singer.)
We ended day two here on the island by ordering dinner in, along with a few bottles of wine, and just chilling. Does it seem wrong to hang out in luxury and hole up? I think we all needed it.
And I had the whole fish-lips thing going on down there, so sex wasn’t exactly on the menu.
A good night’s sleep was what we all needed, and my sweet dreams were filled with unicorns, squirt guns, blowfish, and crazy cheerleader eyes.
Chapter Nine
Trevor
Day three on the island passed by in a blur of practice, talk, practice, confusion, and sex.
Attempts at sex would be the more appropriate term, because pool sex with Darla had shown us that the resort’s work at finding the perfect water pH might have saved us from various germs in the pool water, but her body did not like the chemical combination it took to drive out Ebola or whatever organism they worked to eradicate by using what should be trademarked as Cockblocker Solution.
Her lips just…yikes. She looked like Donatella Versace, Carrot Top, and Megan Fox combined in labia form.
My sympathy had limits, and by the end of this pre-dinner set, my body was pumped, throat hoarse from singing and brain addled by too many talks about sound-equipment positioning, coming in at odd moments, Sam being offbeat and Joe’s weird face movements as he kept stretching his lips, trying to find feeling in them.
Dining at the Y had come with a side of temporary lip paralysis for old Joe. I tried to warn him, but…poor guy.
Okay, that’s not what I really think. I’m just supposed to be nice and care. It was fucking hilarious.
Darla offered blowjobs, which we happily accepted, and back home that would have been fine, but here? This place was the Sex Hotel.
We took a break to go down to the lobby and coffee up. We were wearing what we called “practice clothes”—old concert t-shirts and jeans, clothes we could get sweaty in and move around without worrying. We looked like shit, and who wouldn’t after being stuck in a small, windowless room with three other guys and a sound tech for hours on end?
Along the way, I saw no fewer than twenty-seven naked pussies (yes, I counted) on the walls, about seven in the hallway attached to female bodies (I say “about” because one of the bodies made gender determination difficult), and the lobby was teeming with naked women.
Women only, I realized as I sucked down half a macchiato in front of the fountain, a glass penis ejaculating at regular intervals that were a marvel to behold.
I looked down at my own crotch. If only…
“You walking around with a boner nonstop, too?” Liam asked, double-fisted with a cup of coffee in each hand. He finished one and tossed it, three-point style, into a gold trash barrel. Score.
“Yep.”
“At least you have Darla to help with that.”
That made me do a double take. “You are in a buffet of pussy. I figured you’d have sampled most of the spread by now.”
“The buffet appears to be closed for me.” He frowned. “Nobody’s biting.”
“Or sucking?”
He nodded slowly. “It’s…I think a bit Sapphic around here.”
“Sapphic?”
And then I got it as I watched two women who could have been Ralph Lauren models start a deep, slow French kiss that made me hard in under a second.
“Oh, God. Please, have sex now. Please. Please let me watch,” I practically growled, blood shooting through me like cannons engaged.
Joe
You don’t see your ex-fiancee dressed as a cheerleader going down on a fake pro football player every day, now, do you?
Unless you’re me.
I’m a good, smart person. I follow all the rules (most of the time). I’m clean cut, good looking, well mannered, and highly educated. I’ve climbed the ladder to success and currently hold a much-coveted spot in a top-seven law school in the United States, and as long as I stick it out for two and a half more years and follow the Big Law path, I’ll be in the one percent for the rest of my life.
And yesterday I just watched my stalker knob gobble a guy dressed like a quarterback.
Worst of all?
It was kind of hot.
I’m not above admitting that, but this was the final straw. Day three of being on Eden and I’d had enough. Ten thousand dollars was a lot of money, and I wasn’t going to pitch a fit or be “that guy” and hold the band hostage, but as I walked down to the beach, averting my eyes from the naked kite-flying contest, I felt like throwing something. Screaming. Punching a wall.
Eden was anything but.
Starfish dotted the sand, and as I came over a grassy bank and down to the beach itself, I saw loads of brown starfishes as naked people bent over to pick the real starfishes up and fling them back into the water.
Perfect. Something completely ineffective that involved throwing shit. This I could do.
For the next hour I just threw starfish—stupid starfish that would get stranded again and again on the beach with the tides—back in the water. Natural selection made the task Sisyphean.
Much like my relationship with Darla and Trevor.
What was I doing here? Practice time had me stoked, inflamed and fueled by the knowledge that we’d perform tomorrow night, knowing this was our next step in hitting it big.
The thought of leaving here—well, until an hour ago, it made me sad.
Now I lived in anticipation—no, trepidation—of what Suzy would do next.
I needed to know why she was here. How she’d been selected to come. What purpose she served.
I needed answers.
And I needed them now.
“Excuse me?” I asked some random naked dude whose penis seemed vaguely familiar.
“Yes?” His voice had a lilt. Irish?
“If I want to learn more about the island, where do I go? Google didn’t cut it.”
He laughed, a dark sound that made my hackles go up. “Good luck, my friend.” He chucked a starfish into the waves like skipping a flat rock on a placid pond. It skipped twice, then sank.
“That tight, huh?”
“They really protect the master. As they should.”
“Who is this mysterious master?”
He shrugged. I had to stop looking at his cock. I wasn’t naturally drawn to it, but it was only day three. I wasn’t used to talking to naked strangers. Yet.
“He runs the place. Makes all the decisions. Decides who’s invited.”
“Invited to work here? I’m with a band that’s performing tomorrow night.”
“You’re with Random Acts of Crazy?” Heard a lot about you folks. Looking forward to tomorrow’s concert.”
Never one to miss a chance to be admired, I felt my spirits rise. “Thanks. You said ‘invited.’ You on a gig, too?”
He smiled wistfully. “No. Just lucky.”
My gears turned a bit. “So everyone here really has been invited. On some level.”
He nodded. “It’s all for some purpose only the master understands.” He clapped me on the shoulder, and then someone in the distance shou
ted his name. “Freedom, man. It’s all about freedom. Don’t overthink it. Just live it.”
And then his cock and balls bounced like a pink ball attached to a rubber-band paddle as he ran across the beach to his friend. The two embraced, then kissed.
Just live it. Suzy was invited? Was here for a reason? What did the master (and what the fuck was up with that? Master? Like I was living in some BDSM fantasy land?) have in mind when he invited her here?
I had fewer answers and more questions. Story of my life.
This would not do.
I wasn’t going to let this go.
Darla
I suppose the first clue that we were in a very different section of the island should have been the clothing.
People wore some.
It was a relief, actually, because while the resort appeared to be “clothing optional,” the operational word was optional. Liam had started walking around naked all the time (and hoo boy, my eyes didn’t hurt when they landed on that body), and Trevor and Joe and I had our outdoor pool time, but for the most part I stuck to my non-optional body covering, and so did Sam and Amy. If they were getting naked it was behind closed doors, and that meant they were getting naked quite a bit, because those two spent as much time as possible in their room.
It was kind of cute, and if I didn’t have labia that were doing an impressive imitation of the Goodyear blimp, I’d have been the same with Joe and Trevor.
The section of the island we strolled toward was intriguing. It was like an amusement park unfolding before us, except instead of rides and sections, we had humans as benchmarks. First, we passed by the naked croquet players. Then the paddle boats—shoes, apparently, weren’t optional, but as I watched people paddling those boats along a canal that split the island, I had to wonder about chafing. Ouch.
“I’d love to try a paddle boat,” Amy said, pointing.
“Bring some disinfectant wipes,” I muttered.
An increasing number of men began to dot the grounds, sitting on benches and chatting, playing chess in a little courtyard, or riding bikes past. Now, normally I don’t pay attention to other men (quit laughing—not much) because hello? I have Trevor and Joe, which is more than enough for me.