Three friends. Best friends. School teachers with the summer off. North Carolina, hotter than Hades. Charlene, with an old family tie to the slender islands known as the Outer Banks, found a beach house to rent, through a friend of a friend. A four bedroom though they'd only need three, the three friends all bringing their husbands, of course. The house is just a few miles from Cape Hatteras lighthouse, and a nice beach walk to the Pier.
"I'm going to burn off some pounds walking," Charlene said to Vanessa and Kendra, the three-way phone call connecting their girlishly sparkle-colored iPhones.
"Oh, yeah, that'll be nice," Vanessa said. "We can all burn some calories, with the ocean to look at."
"And men," said Kendra. "There'll be lots of beach-body hotties there, I'll bet."
"More like
dad
-body hotties, but that's not so bad," Charlene said. "There was a silver fox walking the beach when Gunner and I drove over last week. He was as hot as an old guy gets."
Kendra chuckled. "How old was he?"
"Fifties. Sixty, maybe. He was slim, and tan, with a short grey beard and wavy grey hair. Yeah, I woulda done him."
Vanessa and Kendra laughed, and Charlene giggled like she does. The girls, as they call themselves, can go off on giggling tangents about good looking men at the drop of a hat, so much so that they have to watch themselves at school, in the teacher's lounge, where caffeine-fueled conversation flows easily.
They'd become a three girl clique because they're youngish and childless. Youngish as in thirties, although Kendra and her husband Calvin are the pups of the group at twenty-nine. Sweethearts since they were kids, she and Calvin had survived college apart, a long stint of working in different states, and now are together again, married for the last three years.
Calvin plays softball with Vanessa's husband Zeke, and Zeke hunts with Charlene's husband Gunner. Calvin's not a hunter. He says a black man should never enter the woods in North Carolina during hunting season. Gunner says he's right, even though it saddens him to think that his home state is still such an intolerant place when it comes to race. As far as Gunner is concerned, Calvin and Kendra are good people, simple as that. Color is something you pick out at the paint store, not something that distinguishes a friend.
Zeke thinks so, too. He's a displaced Northerner who ended up in Raleigh for work. He met Vanessa in a dusty antique store one fateful day. Gunner and Charlene met in a similar way, though it was at an antique gun show and she was with a redneck boyfriend who was way less than the marrying kind. So clueless was he, he didn't even notice the love-at-first-sight look in Gunner's eyes when Gunner slipped Charlene a business card.
Gunner's Firearms and War Antiques
was emblazoned on it, and Gunner's own personal phone number was written on the back. He and Charlene were married a year later.
And so the six of them had decided to vacation together, a week at a beach house. It was a first, all six of them together like that, with overnights involved. The closest they had come to something similar was afternoon pool parties at each others houses, parties that occasionally stretched into the evening. The first was the jittery one, with nervousness about showing bodies in swimwear, but that had quickly normalized. Charlene remains the most self-conscious. "Gunner wanted me to buy a bikini to take, so I found one, and bought it," she said to Vanessa and Kendra, there on that threeway phone call. "I'm sure I won't wear it. I hope he forgets about it."
"Why?" Kendra said. "Girl, you look as good as anybody. There isn't a man alive who wouldn't say you're cute."
"If I can wear one, you can," Vanessa said. "Kendra's the only one with a bikini body, but do you see that stopping me?"
"Hey, if your fat's not all rolled up like the Michelin Man, you're good," Kendra said, chuckling. "You girls have nice curves. That's all a man looks at."
"Damn right," Vanessa said. "When we get there I'm putting on my bikini and finding that silver fox. I want to take a walk with him."
The girls all laughed. Their minds all pictured a sun-stroked beach, and a tanned, handsome man.
—
Charlene decided that the bikini Gunner had made her buy was a maybe. She would
maybe
wear it one time on their vacation, if the stars aligned in a perfect way, with few people on the beach, or maybe none but her own comfortable group, with Vanessa and Kendra wearing theirs. If it did happen, she needed to be prepared, meaning a suntan all around her middle, so she worked at it for two weeks before the trip, in her backyard, in private.
Gunner caught her at it one day, when he came home earlier than she'd expected, him saying "Damn, hun, you look good all sweaty."
Charlene, lying on her back in the strong sun, propped herself up on her elbows. "What are you doing home so early?"
"That guy came and bought all that Civil War stuff, so I closed up," Gunner said. "We should celebrate."
And so they did, right there by the pool in their private, surrounded-by-woods backyard. Stripped naked, sweating in the sun-stroked North Carolina heat, they fucked three different ways and Charlene came twice. Gunner loves the way she orgasms — loud and proud, always giggling, always smiling.
—
After she'd tanned her middle, at home, Charlene didn't wear the bikini again until the last day of the vacation. The week at the nice beach house had gone by in a flash — days of suntanning, walking, exploring the lighthouse and swimming. In the evenings there was homemade pizza, restaurant dinners, and even a night of dancing out at hole-in-the-wall bar, to the sounds of a loud, old-fashioned jukebox that was filled with classic rock and oldies. In the late evenings the three couples watched Netflix movies on the TV, sipping wine and beer. Lots and lots of wine and beer. Sunny mornings worked off mild — and not so mild — hangovers, walking the beach and swimming in the new day's surf. It had been the perfect vacation, full of good cheer, friends getting along, lots of laughter.
"I can't believe how fast this went," Vanessa said, walking the beach with her two best girlfriends on that last full day. "I don't want to go home tomorrow. Think the landlord will give us another week?"
"This place is booked solid," Charlene said. "We were lucky to get this week."
She and Vanessa and Kendra all fell silent as they walked. The gentle, rhythmic whoosh of the surf hypnotized them, as it does, and their minds played back the memories of the dreamlike week. Charlene, proud of herself for finally working up to that day's unveiling of her first-ever bikini, found that her own dreamlike remembrances were stuck in a loop — it was the quiet, muffled sounds of her friends having sex that, for the moment at least, was most memorable. They were surprising sounds that she'd never anticipated. That kind of new, voyeuristic intimacy hadn't even crossed her mind before the trip, although she realized it probably should have, what with three youngish, healthy, happy couples, all sleeping in small bedrooms clustered around a small upstairs hallway. There
will
be sex, she now realized, and the quiet, dreamy, sexy sounds of it echoed in her mind.
Vanessa, and especially Kendra, didn't think much about it. Kendra had expected it, thought of it as normal, and Vanessa, after just the first night, went with the flow and let her inner teenager out, the one who never cared much about conventions. It was part of why she had found the week so relaxing. It was a true get-away, and the sexual dormitory feel of the late nights was a nice little thrill. Over the last few years the girls had talked about their sex lives some, so, for all of them, hearing the audible proof of their friends' healthy marriages was nothing but good, and secretly exciting.
