Back then, I was twenty-one years old. The summer after my college sophomore year, I was still a shy girl, still with some baby fat plumping my cheeks. The shyness was something I fought, as mightily as I could, but it was a battle. The quiet of a library was my true comfort zone, with my nose buried in a dusty text, but I took the advice of my father and applied for a summer job on a cruise ship, one that sailed out of my hometown, San Diego.
I was surprised when I got the phone call saying I was hired, and nervously exited when I was out to sea for the first time in my life. My job title, sounding wonderfully grand, was Junior Expedition Leader — a fancy title for a crewman who takes passengers ashore here and there along the cruise. As a student majoring in the field of anthropology I'd been hired aboard a ship that continues on past Hawaii, visiting remote Pacific atolls, small groups of small islands, many of them uninhabited but with a history of past settlements. It was on just such an island, a tiny, ancient, unspoiled place, where this story takes place.
I worked quite a few cruises that summer, each ten to fifteen days long. The passengers, guests, as we called them, were generally quite wonderful, and I got to know the rest of the ship's crew quite well, and made lots of friends. My father was right — that summer truly helped me to grow into a woman, in more ways than he'll ever know.
I'm happy to say I wasn't still a virgin at twenty-one, but I certainly wasn't an expert on boys, at least not the living kind. My first, full, virginity ending sexual experience had happened at school that previous autumn. Quite nearly sensational, and certainly confusing, it made me wonder about promiscuity, and freedom, and the many meanings of the word love.
It turned out I didn't have to worry about promiscuity. The boy, it turned out, already had a girlfriend, and the magical confluence of events that apparently had to happen to bring two people together, naked on a bed, didn't happen again.
Would it happen again? That was a question I often asked myself, but I trusted in the old-fashioned ways of long-term relationships and marriage. I kept telling myself that someday, I will get there.
I was surprised when my best friend told me, before I started the summer job on the ship, that I'd better get myself on 'the pill.'
"Why?" I asked her. "I'm just a book nerd. You know me, I'll me in my cabin every night."
"Yeah," she said, with a wondrous look in her eyes, "but who'll be in there
with
you?"
I thought she was crazy, but just a week before my first ten day cruise I must have decided she was right; I went to my doctor for a prescription. Looking back, it was purely wishful thinking; I knew, deep down, I'd never get lucky. We science geeks, we book nerds, we're always quite certain about such things.
So imagine my surprise when, on just my second cruise, I found myself kissing a crewman, an adorable man-boy named Hash. As you may be able to guess, Hash was a nickname, a quite perfect one for a stoner boy like him.
Long haired and happy eyed, Hash's uniform shirt seemed to magically disappear whenever he was out of sight of the guests, and his deeply tanned, hairless upper body was the picture of perfection. Five years older than me, Hash was a full-timer on the ship, having worked there ever since graduating from high school. Looking back now, I can only imagine how many 'summer crew' girls he bedded, and I'm sure he was invited into more than a few passenger cabins over the years.
So yes, I was one of his conquests, but it didn't feel that way. It all felt very natural and wonderful, just a summer fling, with no expectations. I felt like a real young woman for the first time in my life. Safe on birth control, far out to sea with a cute boy, the summer was turning out to be a memorable one.
Our next cruise was one of the longer ones, reaching all the way to a small group of tiny, uninhabited islands, truly in the middle of nowhere. Some of the passengers were traveling as a group, a 'marriage encounter' group, to be more specific, which is something I hadn't heard of at the time. Married couples, traveling with a Catholic priest as counselor, working on making their marriages stronger.
After quite a few days underway, at the far end of our journey, with the ship anchored and the weather perfect, the excursion boats were lowered into the placid sea. They're fairly large boats, able to hold two crew plus twenty guests. Hash and I helped them all aboard, he took the helm, and off we went, landing on the pure white beach of the most perfect little uninhabited island I'd ever seen.
Unfurling their towels, the couples, all of them from the marriage encounter group, staked out their little piece of paradise. Being a cozy little beach, no one was too far apart. I began my little talk, the first I'd given about this particular region of islands, and a few people asked questions.
"Men and women lived here?" a woman asked.
"Yes, both," I said. "They were small groups, we think, maybe fifteen or twenty inhabitants per island. Coconuts and other forage supplemented the seafood, but the islands are all very small, so..."
"So no privacy, is what you're saying," the woman said, smiling. "I wonder what they wore. Were they truly...native?"
"Yes, we don't think there were any mixed race, or Caucasians."
"No, maybe native is the wrong word," the woman said. "I meant...were the women...topless, like you see in National Geographic?"
"Oh," I said. "Yes, they would have been. And maybe even more nude than that. This is a particularly isolated part of Polynesia, and at the time of these settlements full nudity wasn't uncommon. There were areas throughout Polynesia that made use of some forms of clothing — waist cloths for the women, made of fabric woven from the fibers of the mulberry tree, called tapa cloth, and loin cloths for the men made of the same material, but that was mostly found in settlements after voyages of migration had begun. No evidence of clothing has been found on this group of islands."
"So all the strong handsome male ghosts who are watching us are bare naked, huh?" a woman named Carla said, drawing laughter. "I wonder what they think of our swimsuits."
"Ghosts can see right through them, Carla. Didn't you know that?" said a man named Marty, earning himself a silent punch in the arm from his wife.
Carla smiled. Being a marriage encounter group, together for the purpose of learning to
strengthen
marriages, not weaken them, I got the feeling that flirting was a bit of a no no, but Carla seemed to be one of those women who knows the power of her bright smile and smoothly curved busty physique. I could imagine her easily making a man her pawn, and maybe that very power was the reason she and her husband, Richie, had joined the group — an attempt to learn how to reign in the flirting tendencies that she and he both shared. If so, so far at least, it hadn't worked very well. "Gee wiz, Marty," she said, still smiling brightly, "those eyes of yours look like they see right through, too."
To which Marty's wife added a second punch to his arm.
Marty, I could sort of tell, would have dearly loved for the magic of x-ray vision to be bestowed on him right then and there. He was in the company of his wife and nine other attractive women, women that, I found out later, he'd gotten to know in many group marriage counseling sessions over the years. These women were fleshy in various degrees; by that I mean, they had boarded the twenty passenger excursion boat dressed for a day of sunbathing on the beach, their bodies decorated with various styles and colors of swimsuits, some of them one-piece, some of them bikinis. Carla wore a bikini, quite boldly, with no cover-up of any kind. I remember the other women as being somewhat more modest, at least some of them, wearing cover-ups ranging from t-shirts to wispy chiffon over their swimsuit tops, and a few wore shorts as well.
The men, well, they were just men, common looking for the most part. Quite a few were my dad's age, but half, I'd say, were only five or ten years older than me. Only one of them truly caught my eye, and that was Carla's husband Richie, maybe because he's a flirt, like I said, although I think I would have found him attractive even without his flirting. There was just something about him — an older man charm, and a dad body that was nicely tanned, fit, and strong looking.
"If you're all up for it," I said, "we'll take a hike now, to the interior of the island. Optionally you can stay right here and lounge on the beach if you'd like. There's plenty of time to do both, though. We'll be on the island for a few hours."
Almost everyone in the group decided to take the hike, with only one couple electing to stay on the beach. And so, off we went, eighteen hikers following along behind me, and Hash at my side. He used to just stay with the excursion boat on the beach, but now that we were becoming a 'couple' he joined me on the walks.
The interesting thing on this particular day was the view from an opening in the jungle-like trees, a view looking down from a promontory up near the highest spot on the tiny island's tiny mountain. It's a lovely view of the pristine little beach we'd just come from, with our boat pulled up on the sand, and on this day, it was a perfect if somewhat distant view of a naked couple having doggy style sex on the wet sand at the water's edge. It surprised me, I must admit, and for some reason I just stood there, silently, watching, as many of the others did. A few seconds passed, and then more seconds, and once everyone realized we were all true voyeurs, it was too awkward to stop. At least that's how it seemed, and so we just kept watching, silently.
Lillian and Glen are the couple who'd stayed on the beach. From my few interactions with them on the ship, they seemed like a nice couple, always a bit quiet, and thoughtful. Their sexuality, right there on vivid, fully nude display, seemed slightly at odds with their personalities. I remember that being very interesting to me, this quiet couple, fucking each other with serious energy and erotic skill.
The sight of Lillian lunging around to take Glen's apparently orgasming cock in her mouth is what prompted me to break the awkward silence. "We should probably...move on," I said to the others, my face red with embarrassment, I'm sure.
"Does this happen often?" Carla asked, smirking. "I'll bet it does. Are we allowed to...go native, if we want to?"
I felt suddenly warm, and flustered. "I mean...I don't know," I said. "It's such a small island. I'm supposed to keep us on the beach and on this trail, without anybody wandering off."
Carla nodded, but didn't say anything. The crude map that I'd been given showed that the primitive trial ended there at the overlook; there was nowhere else for us to go but back down the small mountainside, so we hiked slowly, looking at the plants and trees, and I'm sure everyone was wondering, as I was, what we'd find when we wandered out onto the beach.
It turned out to be a placid sight, Lillian and Glen back in their swimsuits, sitting on their towels, applying sun screen to each others sweat-shined bodies.
"Hey you two!" said Carla, loudly, waving to them as we approached. "You guys didn't have to get dressed for us. We wouldn't have minded."
For a few long seconds, Lillian looked horrified. She watched as Carla pointed at the break in the trees up near the top of the rise where we'd been, Carla saying, cheerfully, "There's a really nice view from up there."
