It's summer of COVID-19 and I just turned eighteen. My mother remarried last September and I moved out on my own. I left home just as COVID began and jobs were hard to come by. Lots of girls like me had no money to buy food or pay the rent. Things didn't turn out all that bad for me though. I found a nice little apartment and mornings I worked at the restaurant two doors up. All we could do because of COVID was takeout so we started making up breakfast sandwiches and coffee and selling them down at the dock to fishermen heading out to fish or pull traps. I wore my thong bikini and guys bought every day and we made good money.
With so many girls broke and no immediate prospects bosses and landlords began to pressure girls to exchange sex for jobs or rooms to rent. I knew people, being local, and they would help me pretty much so I wasn't really bothered, at least at first. One big thing I missed was going to the gym, closed by the pandemic. The gym owner was young and kind of nice looking and actually was kind of a friend of mine so I went to him rather sheepishly and offered him a blow job in exchange for a key to the closed up gym.
To my surprise, and relief, because I really did like him and didn't want him to think I was too much of a slut, he asked not for a sex act but for me to pose for him in the nude for some bodybuilding pictures to use as come-ons for when the gym reopened. He figured if girls saw pictures of me looking good from working out they would come to work out. And guys would quickly follow. I did look decent, having lost weight from not being able to buy enough to eat. What I didn't figure was that half the town would end up seeing my nude pictures.
This came about just about April first. Our seaside town had been closed for about two weeks and the local economy depended heavily on tourism which generally began to pick up each year at about this time. Most of the downtown businesses were restaurants, retail shops and bars. Except for a few oddball places like the food store and the bank and the drug store and the post office everything was closed. And those were short staffed and treated like Fort Knox.
I was really lucky with my breakfast job, working at the bicycle shop, making subs for take-out and a few specials for guys who saw me hawking breakfasts at the dock every morning just about naked. The specials included washing pickup trucks in my bikini and dancing topless in bars that were supposed to be closed but weren't if you knew the secret handshake. A couple of Friday nights I danced nude on the stage of the art deco movie theater downtown but we were closed down by the police when guys started openly to queue on the sidewalk to get in.
Later dancing in the nude became quite the thing. A lot of girls came over from Ireland to work for the summer and when there were no jobs they needed some ways to make money. A lot of them were virgins and wanted to remain so, which I greatly respect. So they would dance in the nude to get money after things opened up some and more gatherings were permitted. Some of them also took it in the bum for money so they satisfied the bosses and still remained virgins. In fact I met my first roommate Ciara after she was forced to take it in the ass when she refused to do it as God intended. Later she became my first female lover and later still it was my turn to take it in the bum. But back to the bodybuilding picture story.
The best part of my day was the morning. I'd get up at five, shower and dry my hair and climb into one of my bikinis. It stays cold mornings in Maine until almost the Fourth Of July, though where we were by the ocean it was moderated a little. There wasn't too much snow. I wore outdoor boots to keep my feet dry and an Eisenhower jacket to keep me warm above the waist. The jacket was short, like Eisenhower jackets were, so my just about bare ass showed rather fully, and if it wasn't too windy I could leave the front open some so my just about bare boobs showed rather fully too.
At about twenty to six I'd head two doors down to the breakfast place, being careful to zip up the Eisenhower jacket so as not to appear too whoreish to the rest of the staff including the wife of the owner. She and two other girls stayed at the restaurant while the owner and I were down at the docks. They sold takeouts through a window that opened onto the front porch and made and delivered more stuff to bring to us downtown. At first the other girls considered me a slut but we split all tips, the majority of which were slipped into my bra by satisfied customers, and then the other girls liked me better. Anyway, I helped myself to a sandwich and coffee and the owner and I loaded up the truck and he drove us down to the dock.
Before I moved to town I had never been at the dock so early in the morning, preferring to go bicycling in the park and then to the beach when I was around. We would arrive at the dock at six and there would be some folks already coming in. Fishermen that is, maybe the occasional kayaker. And they were indeed almost all men. Some fished and some pulled lobster traps, and those last should probably be called lobster men but it's simpler to just call them all fishermen. I enjoyed them. They worked hard and were almost always strong and hardy types. They were polite and looked me in the eye when I dealt with them, not at my boobs or my ass. I was, after all, somebody's daughter. I never got the idea they judged me. I was working and they were working. It was a reality of life.
There were three generations of fishermen. The sons, the fathers and the grandfathers. The boats belonged to the older men and were passed down to the younger ones, as near as I could determine. They were all decent to me but only the sons really talked to me and though they were nice few smiled. They were working, after all, and the pandemic had hurt restaurant sales and thus their sales. When they gave me a tip they put it in my tip jar, not in my bra or down the front of my bottoms. When they saw me on the street they nodded as they passed and maybe then kind of smiled. They did not try to chat me up. None of them asked me where I lived.
Come June the fishermen congratulated me when I graduated from high school, though there was no graduation ceremony due to the pandemic. There hadn't even been any classes since March, at least at the school. We learned online. No matter the fishermen knew a high school diploma meant better jobs. No one asked me if I was going to college. That was not on their radar. But they knew even McDonald's hamburgers wanted a high school diploma. Of course we had no McDonald's because, COVID or no COVID, that would hurt restaurant sales. I was always surprised we had even a Subway sandwich shop.
I think I mentioned elsewhere that at some point someone filed an attractive nuisance complaint against me with the police for wearing my thong in public. Such a complaint was similar to a barking dog complaint except in this case rather than being a pain in the ass the nuisance attracted people, thus leading to traffic jams or some other inconvenience. I was never officially contacted but very soon after starting work I knew every cop in town and they told me about the complaint and that the police chief quashed it. Local merchants welcomed anything that might attract people to town even at six in the morning. In fact soon we stayed till about ten AM. I hope I helped bring people in but an army of nearly naked girls could not make up for the enormous cruise ships that no longer arrived off the coast almost daily.
Speaking of armies of naked girls, and as I previously mentioned, I was due to get naked at the local gym to have my picture taken flexing various muscles and hoisting various pieces of exercise equipment. All in the name of attracting paying customers once the gym re-opened. I met with the gym owner to discuss arrangements. He did regular photo sessions, when the gym was open, for people wanting a record of their progress. Many were girls my age who sought to firm up their behinds doing the new exercises like hip thrusts which targeted the gluteals. The gluteals being the muscles in one's behind. Well, I had a pretty decent behind due to years of goblet squats, reverse hyper extensions, pull throughs on my knees, you get the picture. I also had a decent rack due primarily to the fact that I had inherited one from my mother.
All of which to say the gym owner had the appropriate equipment to do a photo shoot. I also had some experience with being photographed in my birthday suit and knew about stuff like not wearing tight under clothes beforehand that would leave marks on the body and not eating a big meal which would distend one's tummy. I knew how to shave myself clean without leaving marks. Older men often preferred girls with no hair down there because in their day they never had a girl like that. I had no tattoos which, if large, can disguise one's muscle definition. One wears no jewelry and, of course, no sanitary protection. Minimal make-up, another distraction, and no tan marks since it was not yet beach season. Squeaky clean hair which I always had. We were set, it seemed. Not a pro, he never asked me to prove I was eighteen. I suggested we wait a week until I had officially graduated from high school. It would look better. And we waited.