This is a story that I wrote many years ago, but recently found in my archives and heavily edited. All people depicted herein are fictional and over the age of 18. If you enjoy my stories, I would love your feedback in the comments!
Sometimes life teaches you a lesson. One summer on a school break, I learned that even when you're seemingly handed a bag of crap, if you pay attention, keep your wits about you, and have a little luck on your side, things can turn out better than you'd imagined.
My best friend Alicia and her family moved at the end of the school year, and I was devastated. I missed her so much it was physically painful. She and I were closer than sisters, and the move was so sudden, so there was no time for either of us to mentally prepare. Her mom got a promotion, which was great, but it meant relocating from Colorado to West Virginia. Less than a month later, they were gone, and my closest confidant, my buddy from the swim team, my sounding board, and fellow mischief maker, was halfway across the country.
At the end of that summer, I got the opportunity to fly out to visit her. It was my first time alone on a plane, and the hits, as they say, just kept coming. My flight was delayed, and when I landed, after an extensive (and time consuming) search, it was discovered that the airline had lost my suitcase. Adding insult to injury, Alicia was taking classes over the summer to help her get a jump on college, which meant that we didn't get to spend that first together at all, and now I had lost most of Thursday afternoon and evening searching in vain for my luggage.
All I had to wear the next morning were the yoga pants, bra and T-shirt I'd worn on the flight, so she loaned me a pair of capris and a fresh T-shirt. She is taller than me, but the pants fit fine, if a little high on my hips and long in the legs. They were closer to pedal pushers than they were designed to be, and looked all wrong with my running shoes, but there was little I could do about it; I had no chance of fitting my small feet into a pair of her sandals. Alicia and I were close, but I'm not really "wear your panties" close with anyone. Thankfully, I had stuffed my one-piece practice suit into my carry-on at the last minute in case we wanted to do a swimming workout together, so I was able to wear that under my clothes rather than borrowed underwear. She headed off to school, and I was left to spend the day with her one-year-older brother and a couple of his friends. Alex and I got along fine most of the time, but we'd never actually hung out alone, without Alicia, before.
My day began to improve a bit when Alex introduced me to his friends Jamal and Mike, who were both very cute guys. I lamented my unflattering outfit, but there was nothing I could do about it as we rode around, me on Alicia's mountain bike with its slightly too-high seat, exploring the little town. After seeing most of what there was to see in the village, we stopped in the tiny general store and bought some bottles of water and granola bars, and then decided to go to the forest to ride on a trail there.
The woods were peaceful and beautiful, but the footpath was obviously designed with hikers, not mountain bikes, in mind. Exposed roots, rocks, and uneven ground soon made riding too difficult, so we leaned our bikes against a tree off the path and continued along on foot, chatting about how quickly those bikes would have been stolen back home, as compared to the countryside of West Virginia. A part of me wondered silently why they'd wanted to ride this trail in the first place, knowing as they must that it wasn't bike friendly, but my trust in Alex kept any darker thoughts from coming to the forefront, and I chatted happily, laughing often, with the good-looking trio of guys as we walked the lovely countryside.
I imagined that it would be busier on the weekend, but on a Friday in the late morning, the woods seemed deserted except for us. The trail was worn enough, but the light vegetation was not completely trampled, leading me to believe that this was a less popular section of the hiking paths in the area. Before I could become suspicious, Mike and Jamal pulled us off the trail. I thought that I got a brief sense that Alex was apprehensive, but I found no trace of it as the guys smiled, joked, and conversed lightly while guiding me along a barely-there path through the trees and higher grasses. We walked more slowly as we wound our way between the maples and birches down a hillside, tramping through increasingly green ground cover as the canopy overhead thinned, allowing more sunlight through.
No more than ten minutes after leaving the main trail, I began to hear the tinkling of flowing water, and soon I saw that a small spring-fed brook fed into a tiny pond. The setting looked like something out of a story book, with short, wild grasses waving gently in the breeze, surrounded further back by the forest, a pristine, cloudless, and pure blue sky cradled in the circle of treetops. The water was crystal clear, and standing on the grassy, rocky shore of the tiny, hidden pond in the wilderness, I could see every inch of the gently sloping mud-and-stone bottom that dropped to a depth of perhaps six or eight feet near the center. It was absolutely gorgeous.
"Do you want to go swimming?" Jamal asked as I marveled.
"Swimming?" I replied. I was concerned about wildlife. Although I could see no fish in the transparent water, I had an irrational moment of fear of alligators sunning on the far shore, although I knew no such animals lived in West Virginia.
"In the country out here, folks just skinny dip," Mike said confidently, misinterpreting the apprehension in my tone.
"Skinny dip?" I repeated. The concept was familiar to me, but it didn't make sense in context. I wasn't catching on to their mood yet.
"Yeah, it's no big deal," Jamal said nonchalantly.
I looked quizzically toward Alex, trying to understand what was being said. I'm not normally so slow, but such a thing had never been suggested to me before, and it was a foreign concept. I was looking for the punchline or trying to understand a different meaning for those words. My mind spun with questions. Why would we skinny dip? Were they serious? Do people really just get naked and go swimming here? Is it a country thing? Is this really that rural? Furthering my confusion, I thought of Alicia. She had never mentioned anything like that to me, and that's not something she'd have ignored. "The words must mean something different here," I decided. I was still concerned about animals, regardless. Were there snakes or anything?
"Um," Alex said, turning his head. Less than a second had passed while my thoughts spun in circles. From the corner of my eye, I thought I caught a sharp look from Jamal and Mike, just for a fleeting second, and then I thought I saw Alex blush lightly in response. "Yeah, it's no big deal. If you want to swim," he finished lamely.
I felt more off-balance now. They were lying to me, somehow. My first thought was animals, again. Was this a cruel initiation prank? Would some sort of wild muskrat screech at me and send me screaming, naked, back into the woods? They seemed to sense my reticence.
