I found the passport right where Katie said I would, in the small top drawer of her chest of drawers. It was in the back, hidden by a jumble of tiny, brightly colored pieces of fabric and string -- her bikini drawer. I grabbed the passport, put it in my backpack and headed for the door. There wasn't a second to waste.
Then I stopped, went back to the open drawer and scooped up two handfuls of bikinis, leaving some behind. Into the backpack they went.
No time. We had a flight to catch.
*******
Katie doesn't know the effect she has on men.
She'd grown up in a small city up north, a place cold and gloomy most of the year. Her mother was an eccentric beauty, a drunk and a flirt. In reaction, Katie became something of a retro-hippie wallflower, hoping to pass through most situations, it seemed, without being noticed.
She is beautiful too, but on the cute side of the scale, the girl next door personified. She is 5-foot-3, 110 pounds, with dirty-blonde hair that she keeps long, parted on the side. She has green eyes and a wide smile, though it's hard to get her to smile for a picture -- she usually sticks her tongue out and makes a face just as you take it.
Her arms and legs are slim, very slim, and her breasts are small and in proportion, yet she has hourglass hips, and a lifetime of ballet has left her with a bottom that juts out dramatically from her lower back, with two deep dimples just above it.
She's 26, and still gets mistaken for a teenager.
She tends to dress for comfort more than style, and certainly not with much thought for sexiness. Still, men notice her -- of course they do -- though she seems heedless of their attentions. Many are stricken by her casual beauty and sunny nature; I soon found that in her wake she leaves a series of hapless crushes.
Count me among them. My heart was gone, the night I met her, and we married within 10 months, at just 24, bonding over movies and reading, folk music and liberal politics. She made me feel like I was home.
Within a year, we moved to Florida for my dream job. Though it didn't pay much, we agreed Katie would stay home for a while to fix up the little house we bought near the beach. We were only able to do that because of a down payment from the money she'd saved at a high-powered job in the city she moved to after college. Me? I was broke when I met her.
Restoring that house meant a steady stream of contractors who came early in the morning and seemed to stay until I got home in the evening. They enjoyed their work, I suspect: In that ungodly August Florida heat, Katie -- remember, she dresses more for comfort than style -- took to wearing tank tops and shorts, or short sun dresses, bearing her shoulders and slender legs.
And unless we were going out, and sometimes even when we did, she stopped wearing bras, which she found intolerable in the unaccustomed heat. As a result, her nipples were a near-constant sight, straining against her tank tops, silhouetted against her thin sun dresses.
She meant nothing by it -- she wasn't acting like someone who was trying to be sexy, which made the effect even sexier. Count the contractors among those she left swooning.
We began going to the beach too, as Katie started learning how to surf, which had been my passion since I was a preteen.
She had a bedraggled black one-piece swimsuit from freshman year in college that still looked magnificent on her, given her slender curves. But I think even she realized how out of date it was, especially given what the other girls on the beach were wearing. That is, not much of anything.
One evening she surprised me by modeling two bikinis she'd bought from the surf shop at the end of the street. By Florida standards, they were modest, with generous coverage on the bottom. But I was instantly hard: My Katie, in a bikini. Her belly button. Cleavage. The material coming to a V between her legs. Her bare back, with those dimples.
She registered my reaction with a smile.
And she took my hand as I led her, again, to our bedroom.
*******
Our neighbor, Jerry, is a sweet guy in his mid-50s whose yard is separated from ours by a low chain-link fence. He's among those taken by the Katie effect, and he spends much time with her, helping with the house and garden, just chatting.
As a reward, he gets hour after hour of Katie time, taking in the slender, casually sexy beauty of the actual girl next door, a reminder -- in the tender flesh -- of his younger days.
I had seen him gazing wistfully at the bare skin between her tank top and her shorts, the flash of bellybutton, the dimples on her lower back. And I had seen him taking in Katie's breasts, when offered, as she leaned forward in her sundresses to pull at a plant or ask his help on a woodworking project.
But he is always respectful; I have even seen him avert his eyes when she, unknowingly, leaned too far forward in those dresses.
Jack down the street, meanwhile, is not so relaxed about it. About the same age as Jerry, maybe a little older, he often ambushes us, drink in hand, as we make our way to the beach, stopping to tell us long, amusing stories about the neighborhood we had moved into.
That gives him the chance to leer at Katie behind his sunglasses, taking in every inch of her body, eyes flicking over her breasts, across her belly and the curve of her hips, down her slim legs, then fixated on her round butt as she walks away.
I didn't blame him. I often got a hard-on just walking with her to the beach, shifting my surfboard to cover it as best I could.
Sex isn't as important to Katie as it is to me, though that doesn't mean she doesn't enjoy it. But it's usually more about romance to her than animal passion. Sometimes, I admit, I wish otherwise.
Living in Florida though, in that heat, with that lack of clothing, seemed to allow her to push her boundaries a little.
One night, shortly after moving in, we were in bed when we could hear the quiet conversation of people in the yard behind ours, the clinking of glasses, soft laughter.
Our window was open, and we had not yet bought blinds, but our light was off and we were sure -- well, pretty sure -- that no one from the outside could make out what happened in our room.
We kissed and touched, as the gentle voices continued from beyond the window. I whispered to her. "Those people. They're right there. They don't know we're here."
Katie kissed me, her lips running down my chest to just below my bellybutton. I strained forward, urgently, and her tongue reached out to flick my cock. I groaned as she opened her mouth for me.
"Shhh," she whispered, putting her finger to my mouth. "Shhh."
Then she climbed atop me, naked, and took me into her, directly in front of the window over our bed. She was already very wet. She slid up and down on me, her hands behind her, nails digging into my legs, her back arched, her breasts glowing in the moonlight. Her nipples were huge; I could even see them in the shadow of her body that the moon cast upon the wall.
The murmured conversation continued, perhaps 15 yards outside the window. She moved faster and faster, the only sounds the soft rustle of sheets and the delicious slurping sound of her sliding up and down on me. She stifled moans as her orgasm overtook her. I'd already had mine.
After, she stayed there that way for a minute, maybe longer, feeling the warm night air on her body. She turned to watch her shadow on the wall as she gave a few more thrusts against my softening cock, seeming to glory in her power.
Weeks later we went for a walk on the beach, down to the shops and back. She wore a white sun dress, one of those with dozens of little buttons up the front, and just a pair of panties underneath. On the way back, we walked at the water's edge. It was high tide, and waves splashed the bottom of her dress, and a couple of larger ones made their way higher, up those buttons.
That night, in bed, she began to breathe heavier as I told her what she'd looked like in that dress, how the sun shined through it and showed her legs and hips, how the top became transparent when wet.
Then I went farther: While stroking her, I whispered how men in the long condo building that fronted the beach must have seen her walk by, must have stopped what they were doing to stand at their windows, to take out their cocks ...
She joined in the touching. Her breathing was much, much heavier by now.
******
I was perpetually in a Katie fever, sometimes absolutely on fire, but always with at least a low-grade fever, even at work, while driving, while shopping.
Shopping: One evening after work, I stopped at the surf shop, lingered by the boards, the men's shorts, then -- almost as if I couldn't help it -- I went to the bikini section, taking casual looks at the ones hanging on a rack. I was embarrassed. I was quick. I picked one up, took it to the counter.
But only after getting a surf magazine too. I couldn't make it look like I was just buying a bikini. Especially one so unapologetically bright red and tiny.
"Um, my wife wanted me to get ..."
The girl at the cash register didn't even look up. She'd seen this act many times before.
Katie rolled her eyes when I told her I'd gotten her something she might like. It was the same every time; I'd begun buying clothes for her and she'd complain, gently, and give that eye roll.
But here's the thing: She didn't like to shop for herself and, being of a practical mind, she would eventually end up wearing what I bought anyway: tight jeans, short shorts, tank tops, strappy sun dresses. And usually liking it, eventually.
Not so the red bikini, apparently. It went into her top drawer, tags still on, and stayed there for months. Occasionally, I'd say, "Um, do you think you want to wear that, um ..."
I got nowhere.
