Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [121]
She laughed, and the sound jiggled things that thrilled me in stupendous ways.
“So you just have sex anywhere you feel like it? In public?”
“Noooo,” she laughed again. “That’s frowned on, even here— although it does happen, now and again, and people really don’t get too worked up about it.”
“Inny pass decoy feather the cat.”
“Okay. You should never speak French.”
“I should never speak English. So, you were telling me why you can’t have sex with me in public, even though you desperately want to.”
She laughed. “Right. Well, we still prefer our intimacy in private, or semiprivate, because it can disturb others. Like chewing with your mouth open. Not world ending, but not the most pleasant thing to be around either, sometimes. But even then, it’s kind of Etruscan, as you can imagine.”
“Oh, I can imagine,” I said, chuckling. Which was true. All I could do was imagine. I had no idea what the hell she was talking about, other than that it meant we might still be able to have sex around here somewhere. Wasn’t ‘Etruscan’ a kind of bread? Whatever. The ‘wanting sex’ thing now made this an extra base hit. The count was starting over. It was time for the next pitch.
“What if someone becomes—you know—aroused in public?”
“What? You mean like you did with Petal?”
I gulped. Blushed. Looked at my feet. Apparently, the Nuckeby sisters had no secrets.
“Um, sort of like that.”
“It’s all right. She’s a pretty girl. It happens. Just don’t do anything about it.”
She smiled. I smiled. I couldn’t imagine ever finding anyone more attractive than she already was to me.
“How could I?” I said. “As long as you’re around.”
“Even when I’m not around.”
“Promise,” I said. “So, then, monogamy is still important here.”
“It is with me.”
“Good enough.”
“So what else do you want to know?” she asked.
“Wow. So many things.” I lost my smile and looked away. “But before I ask anything more, I really need to apologize,” I said sadly. She looked at me blankly. “For costing you your job.”
She looked suddenly hurt and turned away. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“No. It was. Grandfather feared my attraction to you, and yours to me. He got you fired. He thinks you’re a gold-digger.”
She laughed. Very hard. I glanced at her breasts as they bounced with her chuckles, then away again when she caught me staring.
“It’s all right. You can look at them now. I want you to.”
She posed provocatively in front of me, and I nearly fainted. She had to grab me to keep me from going over.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I squeaked.
“Sorry. I forget sometimes that you outsiders get more worked up about a bare body than we do.”
“It’s quite a body.”
“Thank you.”
“No problem. Soooo…em…not a gold–digger?”
“If you only knew.”
“That’s…” I coughed. “That’s not the first time I’ve heard that today.”
“Well, it’s just that a very rich man wanted me—but I didn’t want him. It’s how I wound up in the city and working as a model. I was escaping.”
“And now I’ve driven you back home, to him?”
“Near him. Not to him. Modeling paid very well, and it allowed me to live in an apartment away from here. Having worked my whole life in the family restaurant, I don’t have many job skills that could pay the kind of salary I’d need for a place of my own. Being seminaked was overdressed for me, so I had no qualms about the work, and I’m pretty enough…”
“More than enough,” I said.
“See?” She blushed. “You are nice.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
“You haven’t given me any reason to think otherwise. Other than the hand-dropping incident.”
I winced again. “Am I going to have to live with that for the rest of my life?”
“I hope so,” she said, with deeper meaning.
I warmed. I wanted to kiss her again, but I wasn’t sure everything was settled between us yet.
“Now I want to ask you some questions,” she said, letting me know not everything was.
Rats!
“All right,” I said. “Shoot.”
“How do you feel about being with a nudist?”
That was the million-dollar question. I looked off into the distance. We were a good ways past the Easter Island heads now, heading toward a cluster