First, they bared their flesh; then, they bared their souls.
"We were so—" Toni paused, searching for the word that would best embody her thought—"naïve."
Behind her, the sea, blue-green to the far horizon, rolled in, white-capped and foaming, to break upon the golden sands of the deserted shore.
Rocks, seemingly stacked, one upon the next, formed jagged, jumbled pillars, against a cloudless sky of radiant blue.
A low rail guarded the platform that overlooked the forested mountainside and the meadow, bright with wildflowers, far below.
A trail, meandering among tall oaks, pines, maples, poplars, and elms, and dappled with sun and shifting shadows, seemed cool, just to look at.
Seated upon a bank, grass green behind them, their ankles in the cold, rushing water of the brook babbling beneath them, they looked as if they belonged here, as if they were part of the landscape, part of the land.
The sight of them was enough to make one believe that the stories of naiads and water nymphs were true, and that the mountain, meadow, forest, and river were, indeed, populated with spirits who looked fleshly in their slender nakedness, even the occasional few who wore sunglasses or spectacles.
Toni Daytona was in every one of the full-color photographs, unless she herself had been the one who'd taken them. At age nineteen, the girls had taken turns photographing themselves during the summer, when Toni and her girlfriends had decided to mount an album of themselves, au naturale, to commemorate what they'd regarded as the best days of their lives.
At nineteen, they'd never be lovelier than they were now, they'd told themselves. They'd loaded up Toni's pickup truck with gear and driven to Lone Mountain, an isolated campsite in northern California, offering views of craggy peaks, deep forests, the broad ocean, and bright meadows.
After a week, they'd photographed themselves in various settings, always nude, and had obtained all the pictures they would need to memorialize, for all time, the beauties that had been they, during the prime of their lives. Each had thereby acquired a copy of the same sets of photographs to mount in an album of Toni Daytona, Monica Saddlewell, and Stephanie Lake naked outdoors, free and careless as the wind that winnowed their long tresses and caressed their naked flesh.
They had been truly lovely, Toni thought, smiling at the beautiful young women exposing their charms to the camera, as shamelessly and unselfconsciously as if being naked in a forest or a meadow were the most natural thing in the world. For them, that summer, it had been.
The week they'd spent at Lone Mountain wouldn't be any different, the girls had thought. Like the others, Toni had believed this to be the truth, and, at first, it had been true—but, then, whether it was the way sunlight and shadow shifted, dancing upon Monica's bare shoulders or across Stephanie's naked breasts; the way that a breeze stirred one of the other girls' long, luxuriant tresses; the way that the cool morning air stiffened their nipples; or the way that an arm, extended to grasp a seedling or an outcropping of rock, as Monica or Stephanie, their muscles tight beneath their sleek arms and legs and buttocks and backs and tummies, climbed a stony hill, their nakedness was transformed; instead of seeing their familiar shapes and forms, it was as if scales had fallen from Toni's eye, allowing her to see, for the first time, the true and absolute divinity of her friends' nakedness, perceiving them as no longer mere mortals, but as the naiads and the dryads of whom the ancient Greek poets had written, spirits of the vast wilderness made flesh.
Toni, from that moment on, had been captivated by her friends' nudity. She'd spent the rest of their camping expedition trying not to ogle or stare, casting sidelong glances and snatching quick glimpses of Monica's hairless crotch and the dimpled cleft of her sex between her friend's marble-smooth thighs, or sneaking peeks at Stephanie's firm, round buttocks and the sleek slopes of her breasts as they spilled forward, dangling for a moment, jiggling and swaying, as her friend maneuvered among the stones and roots and depressions of a rocky trail or a mountain pathway.
At night, her own pussy sodden with desire, she lay awake, dreaming of embracing, caressing, and kissing her friends; in her sleep, she tasted the honeyed nectar of their loins. She wished their week's camping trip would never end and she could walk and climb and swim and sunbathe naked with these earthbound goddesses forever, eventually becoming more than just friends with these girls whom she'd known since their preschool days—much more than just friends.
She regretted, even now, ten years after their sojourn within the bosom of the earth, that she'd not been able to summon the courage to make her thoughts known to her friends, and that nothing had happened but the picture taking. She sighed, thinking that, at least, she had the album of photographs, the images of their ephemeral beauty, and of her own stillborn desires for an intimacy beyond mere friendship and of lust fulfilled.
"We weren't naïve," Monica, seated beside Toni, disagreed. "We were—" now, it was she who paused, seeking the right word—"pure."
Stephanie, seated on the floor, at their feet, laughed. "Pure?"
Monica nodded. "Pure," she insisted.
