It was a hot summer's day and my daughter had half a dozen people over for a bit of a pool party. It was a case of boys and girls together and as long as they didn't get too rowdy I'd keep out of the way. I'd already laid down the law where alcoholic refreshment was concerned. The fact that I was keeping out of the way didn't mean I wouldn't keep a general eye on things. After all, that was my daughter out there. She might have been of a legal age where certain activities were concerned (they all were) but as a father I thought she should remain a virgin until she was married and even after marriage immaculate conception was a good idea.
They were getting along quite noisily when a late-comer knocked on the door and I admitted Shelley. I pointed her toward the room that was being used as the girl's change-room and waited until she was ready to show her out. Just being a polite host - not waiting to see what she looked like in a bikini.
She came waltzing out of the change-room, saw me, and blushed, looking a little self-conscious. As a matter of fact when I saw her I damn near blushed as well. There are bikinis and there are bikinis. The tiny bits of material that Shelley was wearing, connected with strings fine enough to be dental floss, did not, in my opinion, rate as a bikini.
Her face was getting redder by the moment as I looked her over, her self-consciousness climbing to the skies.
I was polite, friendly even. I simply said, "No."
"Wh-what?"
"I said 'no'," I repeated. "This is a word that expresses a negative. In this case it's stating that you are not wearing that invitation to rape out there in front of boys who, while sober, have probably had just enough to drink to lower their social inhibitions. You will go and take your pretty little tush back into that room and change out of that insult, because that's what that thing is. An insult to you, your intellect, and your morals. If you don't have something more fitting to wear you can borrow something from Becky."
"Y-you can't tell me what to wear," she protested, albeit somewhat feebly. "Becky's your daughter, not me. I'm eighteen. I can decide what I will or won't wear."
"I know, but that's not stopping me. Do you want to find out if I can snap those strings with my bare hands? I'm willing to bet the answer is yes. Push me and you'll be on your way to change without a suit on but with a big red hand print on your bottom, which you might find hard to explain."
"You're a brute," she snapped, while hastily backing up. "Alright, seeing you're so insistent, I'll change."
She vanished back into the change-room, looking oddly relieved at being forced to change. She was out minutes later, still in a bikini, but a much more respectable one. I nodded my approval but she stalked haughtily past, not deigning to notice the brute who took it upon himself to dictate her fashion choices.
Shelley was greeted by various salutes as she trotted down towards the pool. I heard one very interesting exchange.
"Hey, Shell, why aren't you wearing the new bikini I bought you?"
"Really, Bryce," she snapped. "You didn't really expect me to wear that thing, did you? The very idea was an insult."
That left Bryce looking somewhat stunned, Shelley projecting an air of self-righteousness, and me mightily amused.
Half an hour later the girls all came traipsing inside, leaving the boys behind. They congregated in the change-room and I could hear laughter spilling out.
"He couldn't have seriously expected you to wear that, could he?" someone said loudly, and Bryce was being denigrated rather thoroughly as a chauvinist of the first order. He wouldn't be getting any breaks for a while. I wondered if any of them were actually trying on that micro-bikini. Knowing girls the answer was probably yes.
The girls all traipsed outside again and general hilarity was the order of the day. Probably at Bryce's expense and I felt for him. Still, it served him right.
After a couple of hours various people departed, having other things they needed to do. This was the start of a general exodus, one of those departing being my daughter. Shortly after that the last few stragglers came in and vanished into the change-room, Shelley being one of them.
Two of the girls came out and I heard a car drive off. I wondered what was keeping Shelley. I heard a polite little cough and turned around, expecting to see Shelley there waiting to say goodbye. Shelley was there all right, but it wasn't to say goodbye.
"This, um, isn't really that bad, is it?" she asked waving her hand in the general direction of her body. I say her body because she'd changed back into that excuse for a bikini and she couldn't possibly have been referring to that.
"If you're talking about your figure then I'd have to admit that it's not too bad. Quite good, actually. Seeing I can see so much of it I'll go so far as to say it's excellent. If you're talking about that scrap of cloth you're almost wearing do you remember what I said about it earlier?"
"That it's an insult?" she said blushing.
"Before that," I prompted, and she shook her head.
If you've ever seen the green mankini that Borat is famous for you have a rough idea of the sort of bikini that Shelley was wearing, except with a lot less material. The colour was the same green as Borat's, but the stings, as I mentioned earlier, were the merest threads, widening slightly (very slightly) as they passed over her breasts before culminating in a crotch pocket that was more a thought than an actual pocket. It seemed as though those three tiny strips of material were holding a contest to see who could hide the most with the least. All three were losing.
"I said," I told her softly, "that it was an invitation to rape."
Even as I was speaking I was reaching out and pushing the shoulder straps off her shoulders. With no tension on the straps the whole thing just collapsed, falling down around her feet and leaving her standing there naked.
She gasped and slapped an arm across her breasts and her other hand over her crotch, thus hiding a lot more that the bikini had.
"You. . . You had no right to do that," she spluttered, and I smiled.
