Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [148]
So wait. That meant…
My brain hitched at the thought that Helena might not only be tolerant of, but could actually enjoy public nudity herself—perhaps even participate in it—Dear God! Was that something I could handle? Strangers were one thing, but a woman who’d been your surrogate mother since early childhood—and more recent mental childhood— taking off her clothes and exposing her hidden things to you, and— well—everyone else? The nakedness of strangers was one thing, but Helena?
The ice-cream headache returned with a vengeance.
Maybe Grandfather’s cryptic comment last night had something to do with this! More pieces appeared to fit than not. I seemed to know nothing about my aunt. Or her husband. Suddenly Pjuter’s odd, regionless accent…
He was from here!
Helena must have sent me to this place, knowing it for more reasons than delivering Ms. Nuckeby! She was probably intimately acquainted with it because her husband—and maybe sometimes she, herself—had lived here!
Amid the dawning horror, as I reeled from the shock of Helena buying groceries in nothing but sandals, walking through town draped only in jewels and skin, dining, dancing, living a full and active life with her tits, bits, and ass showing, something else slowly rose through my mental fog.
She had given me money. To spend here. She must have known…
Of course!
“Morgan!” I yelled just before he entered the store. “This way!”
I turned and ran off in the direction of Nuckeby’s Bar and Grill, the Duesenberg, and, perhaps, salvation.
“What?” Morgan called after me. “Why? Where are you…?”
He turned, saw the restaurant chef along with a couple of naked cops running fast in our direction, yelped like a whipped puppy, and hurried after me.
According to the police report filed later, Mindie had fashioned a bikini of sorts for herself out of leaves, twigs, and mud. She was still covered in boils and splotches, and the sharp sticks and dried foliage were cutting into her harshly, but she still felt somehow better having them there than being fully exposed to the unpopulated world around her.
She was struggling uphill through dense shrubbery, over rocks and dried leaves, and through tiny rivulets of icy water toward what she hoped was a road out of this place. A different road than the one beyond the bridge, which she hadn’t long ago abandoned. Too many nudists had kept coming by asking if she needed help. She did, of course, but certainly not from naked people.
She reached the clearing she had been angling toward, and glorybe-halleluiah, it was a road. A two-lane highway, in fact. Carefully— being sure not to overexpose herself, even though all her most important bits were well enough covered—she cautiously stepped to the edge of the asphalt and looked first one way, then the other.
The paved street curved off into the distance in both directions and disappeared behind thick trees lining either side of the road. No signs were visible anywhere to help guide her back toward clothed civilization, so she pointed alternately each way, silently mouthing ‘eeny, meeny, miny, moe’ until she had at last picked a direction that appealed to her.
Then she changed her mind and went the other way. She’d only gone about a hundred yards or so when she saw a police car parked on the opposite side of the deserted highway facing her. A trooper sat in the front seat, head down and apparently making notations on a clipboard.
“Oh, thank God!” Mindie cried and began jogging quickly toward him, bits of handcrafted bikini being tossed off her body as her pasty flesh bounced and jiggled in all directions. Inside the car, she saw the officer lift his head from his paperwork, and widen his eyes with amazement and surprise. He put down his clipboard and practically leaped from the car, which—of course—stopped Mindie in her tracks.
Because the trooper was nude.
Oh, he wore boots, a hat, a gun, and had a badge hanging around his neck on a lanyard. But the parts that Mindie feared most in the world were swinging loose, wild, and free in the summer breeze, and she