All characters are over the age of 18.
It was something every nudie had to do eventually, Aaron knew this and yet it still felt odd.
As he loaded his clothing into a garbage bag he felt oddly nostalgic, he wasn't sure why, it was just a bunch of old sweaters and pairs of underwear with holes in the crotches.
He had barely been a nudie for 15 hours up to that point, but to be fair a lot had happened up to that point.
When he found out that his mother was officially cancer free out of the blue like that emotion overwhelmed him, completely forgetting about his mother's other condition and giving his mother the biggest hug of either of their lives,
Before of course she got overwhelmed by his odour and pushed him into the pool while she went to toss out his half-melted swim trunks.
Clark then came out to their shared backyard to investigate all the noise and was surprised to find Aaron as naked as his mother with such a gleeful look on his face,
After the good news was explained to him he hung around for a minute to share a celebratory drink with them but quickly retreated back into his house, increasingly uncomfortable being the odd man out amongst the nudies.
The next morning Rashida woke up Aaron early before work and announced that they would be disposing of their now useless clothing before handing him a handful of trash bags and telling him to "have fun".
Perhaps it wasn't nostalgia he was feeling but a wish he could turn back time,
It wasn't that he regretted his split-second decision to hug his mother, far from it, and it wasn't as if he was dreading the nudity all that much either, he had witnessed his mom power through it the last couple of days and he felt as if he had no right to do any less.
What he was dreading was the attention, the wide-eyed look everyone he knew would have upon seeing his new wardrobe for the first time, the textiles asking why, the nudies congratulating him as if it was some big achievement, he almost wished he could just send go on autopilot until everyone got their reactions over and done with and could look past him as if nothing was unusual.
His train of thought was derailed as Rashida pounded on his door,
"Let's not take all day hon, move your naked butt," she shouted through the door.
Oddly enough Aaron and Rashida weren't awkward around each other at all now,
Aaron was a little at first, even trying to escape up to his bedroom while it was still light out, Rashida however insisted upon ordering a pizza and watching a movie, her tone of voice suggesting this was a decree from on high and not a simple wish.
He hid behind the couch as the pizza arrived and he watched Rashida give the gangly twenty-something pizza guy the surprise of his life, causing him to stammer a few words before sprinting back to his car without even accepting payment.
They had a good chuckle over that before sitting down to watch the movie,
Now Aaron and his mother had wildly different movie tastes, she was a die-hard fanatic of the hallmark channel while he preferred more esoteric sci-fi films, a genre Rashida couldn't stand, while Aaron could typically stomach a standard rom-com on occasion, so whenever they watched television together Rashida ended up picking what they watched.
That day's feature was a film called "Laid Bare," about a rather closed-off woman moving back to her hometown after a breakup, only to be reunited with her childhood best friend who was now a nudie,
For most of the movie, they flirted and danced around each other and had some third-act misunderstanding that was typical for this type of movie.
The only real surprise was at the end of the film where the girl, in an effort to earn the guy's forgiveness infected herself on screen, leading to a long take where the camera hung on her as her clothes fell off her body,
A quick Google search revealed that while the actor playing the guy was infected through happenstance, the actress playing the girl allowed herself to be infected for the sake of the movie and that the long take required no special effects,
Apparently, this was the right decision for the actress who off the back of this film secured the role of Aphrodite in some big-time adaptation of the Iliad.
Despite its unique subject matter, the movie was laughably bad,
By the forty-five-minute mark, the two of them were laughing so hard that all potential awkwardness from their nudity went out the window before either could notice it, which made it very easy for Aaron to walk down the stairs with three trash bags in hand no matter how much his dick was swinging back and forth.
"That's it?" Rashida asked in disbelief, surrounded by at least three times as many clothes piled by the front door,
"That's it?" Aaron repeated, marvelled that she was asking that question, "Why do you have so much, how big is your closet?"
"It's a walk-in," Rashida answered, "And that's only like a week's worth of clothes,"
"Yeah," Aaron agreed, "Do a load every week and I'm fine,"
"Okay," Rashida paused, "You don't do laundry every week, you can't fool me, it's not that big a house I can smell you,"
"Luckily that's not a problem anymore," Aaron said, shaking the trash bag of his clothes to make his point, "Let's just get in the car, I gotta get to work soon."
"Alright fine," Rashida sighed, "Why don't you get this all in the back of the car while I go finish making you boys lunches."
"I'm supposed to do all this by myself?" Aaron questioned, motioning to the dozen or so bags surrounding him,
"I still gotta get some muscle mass before I go doing something like that," Rashida explained, doing her best to flex a muscle in her drained, skinny arm, "I gotta be careful or I'm gonna hurt myself, thank the lord that I have my lifter to help me,"
She smiled and disappeared into the kitchen, ending the conversation.
Aaron sighed and got to work, grabbing the bags two at a time and taking them outside, throwing them into the trunk of his mom's van,
"Hey," Aaron called out as he came back inside for his sixth and final trip, "If I'm gonna be at work how the hell are you going to get these out of the van when you get to the drop-off?"
"Oh, don't worry about me," Rashida assured him coming out of the kitchen with two lunch bags in hand, "I've got a volunteer helper today."
She paused to check she had everything she needed to go out,
"Let's see... phone, wallet... keys!" She remembered, "Where the hell did I put those things? God I miss pockets,"
She ran up the stairs to go find them.
Aaron shrugged and took the remaining bags out to the car, tossing them in and reaching up to close the back hatch shut."
"Beautiful morning isn't it?" A voice asked, sneaking up on him,
His eyes shot to the side to see Chloe's winning smile shining in the morning sun,
It occurred to him finally that he was outside in the public view for the first time.
Up until that point he had been hidden by the relative safety of his house and the fenced-off backyard, only seen by his mother and by Clark, both of whom were close family members,
Well, technically Clark was only like family.
But this was his first time being seen in the buff by someone who hadn't changed his diaper as a baby and worst of all it was Chloe, to paraphrase Spider-Man, "The girl he had liked before he had even liked girls,"
This could present a problem, here she was standing before him, naked, sun-kissed and beautiful, and here he was, equally as naked, surging with unrestricted hormones brought on by a new spell infection and doing all in his power to keep an erection from forming short of closing his hand in the car door.
It didn't help matters that he could feel her gaze burn against his skin, her eyes glancing downwards for only a second but whatever she saw left her smile quiver ever so slightly,
His eyes also flashed down her body before he caught himself, remembering his mother's recent uncomfortableness with being stared at, he locked his eyes on her face and waited for fury that never came, her smile remained firm.