Beach Rules

Looking back on it, the crucial moment occurred when she noticed she was still wearing underwear.

Normally that would have been a good thing -- modest and prudent. She wasn’t the type to ‘go commando’, especially in a sun dress. But the beach trips with her sister and brother in law had developed their own rituals, and changing into her bathing suit at the beach was one of them. After the first time, when she had been caught unprepared for the decision to actually go swimming (the surf was high and it was almost sundown), she had been more careful. On that occasion, she had been wearing bulky shorts and a flimsy t-shirt. She decided to wear the shorts into the water, but she didn’t want to go home in wet panties, so she slipped them off, sitting on the cool sand, and then struggled back into her shorts. The question was: had David glanced over at her during that unguarded moment? She had stood on her knees to wiggle into the shorts, naked from the waist down for a few seconds. He could have seen everything – or did the sightlines limit him to a view of her bare ass? She would normally have said bottom, or tush or even backside … but something in the way David had been looking at her lately, even fully dressed, made the raw single syllable more appropriate.

Bigger question: did she want him to have seen her? She certainly didn’t care any more if Sam looked at her, and she was supposed to be in love with Sam.

More troubling still: the night after that beach day she climbed on top of Sam and really made love to him for the first time in … well, a long time. Too long. So Sam was happy. And so was David: he had certainly been staring at her after that swim, when she bobbed out of the water with her soaked t-shirt clinging to her breasts, as close to naked as he’d ever seen her, stiff nipples showing pink through the pale membrane of cotton.

Funny, she had caught Sam glancing at her in that shirt a few weeks before – it was a little immodest even when it was dry -- and said something like “I’m never wearing this shirt in public again.” Well, so much for that resolve. She hadn’t just worn it, she had sat on the beach a foot away from her extraordinary brother in law, damp and brazen, and let him stare. Carol acted as though it meant nothing. Maybe it did mean nothing. Beach rules were different. You were supposed to show a little skin there. Anyway, David and Carol’s marriage was strong, supernaturally strong, or so it had always seemed. A moment of permissible summertime indecent exposure couldn’t change that.

She had worn the wet shorts home, and the next time she wore bikini bottoms under them. Still, she had to change into the top on the beach. She would have called it another oversight, then; now she knew better. She had stood a little apart, facing away, while David turned and Carol made a note in the margins of her book, and bared her back to him. But she had left her top on the sand and she had to lean down sideways to pick up the scrap of fabric. David’s could see everything. She could feel his eyes on her, memorizing the slight droop of her small firm breasts.

Their eyes met and he didn’t look away.

That was the sexiest thing of all: that he didn’t look away.

It felt strange and spooky and ambivalent. She didn’t want to cheat on Sam; she certainly didn’t want to seduce her sister’s husband.

But here she was, on the way to yet another beach afternoon, with her bathing suit in her big straw purse, along with the sun screen and bug spray and other practical supplies, wearing her sexiest panties, knowing she would have to slip out of them at some point, or go swimming with them on.She could have pulled over and changed; or just put her suit on in the bathroom at the cottage. But she didn’t want to. Her psychiatrist had said, “Find the thing that excites you, and then do It,” when she complained about her dormant libido.

Well, she had found the thing that excited her.

And she was doing it.

Carol was in Connecticut; Sam was working. This was going to be the first two- person beach picnic ever. Just like a date, except of course it wasn’t because David was like a brother to her. It didn’t have to be a problem. She’d just ask David to turn around while she changed. The beach at Squam was always deserted this time of year. She could have her dip in the water, modesty intact.

Except, she wasn’t going to ask; and she wasn’t sure he’d do it, anyway. He wanted to see her strip. Might as well just say it: he was hot for her and that made her hot. And feeling hot made her feel alive, connected to a world of possibilities, even if they were dangerous possibiulities, forbidden ones, destructive ones

Maybe especially if they were.

As to David, God knows why he was interested -- maybe his sex life was as arid as her own. Maybe he was just cool and adventurous. Maybe he had an open relationship with her sister. She had shared boyfriends with Carol before, when they were in high school and college, though they had usually shown the decorum to wait for a break-up.

Usually.



This is how it happened:

She stood on a chair to reach the picnic basket won from a high shelf, and let him look up her dress; handed it to him and let him look down the front. She let him put his arm around her waist on the way to the car and walked closer to him when his fingers slid down to cup her ass. All she felt at that moment was a raging frustration at the two layers of fabric between skin and skin.

That was the first time he had ever touched her, beyond the occasional brotherly hug or peck on the cheek. Some boundary had been broached. After that, it was easy for him to rest a hand on her knee as they drove, and to slide it upward, gathering the fabric as he bared her thighs.

And then, on the beach, after a glass of wine, she said “I guess I’ll just change then,” and stood in front of him and started unbuttoning the dress. When the two sides were hanging loose, shifting in the breeze from the water, she saw his sharpening attention, and thought about turning around. Instead and eased the fabric off her shoulders and let it fall, glancing up and down the empty beach. They were alone. The sun was warm on her exposed body. She was so white in the private places. It made her pause.

“Go on,” David said. His voice was rough.

She pushed down her panties to mid-thigh and then to her knees, finally letting them gather at her ankles and stepping out of them. When she reached for her bag he grabbed it.

“Let’s just skinny dip,” he said.

She ran for the water as he pulled his clothes off, and plunged into the icy grip of it. He was right behind her, his arms around her again, this time pulling her to him and pressing against the length of her, no fabric between them, skin slippery with the cold water. He was huge and she could feel him growing. He found her mouth and they plunged into a deep briny kiss. They went under for a few seconds and broke the surface laughing. He spread her legs in the dense, charged undertow and slipped into her and thrust once and she was coming instantly, crying out, biting his neck.

Then he carried her out of the water and laid her out on the beach towel. He paused over her for a few seconds, just looking, then lunged into her and her orgasms fell into each other like plush dominoes and she cried out “I can’t stop coming” and he said “Let me join you” and she could feel pulse as he drove himself into her in a last frenzy of lust.

When he rolled off her, he said “That was incredible.”

And she said, “Just wait.”

She slid down his stomach to give him the most intense, committed gluttonous grasping gulping blowjob either of them had ever experienced. She sucked harder when he finally came and he was shouting and screaming as she slipped her finger up inside him and found the spot she had read about in the sex manual when she was still trying to fix things with sex manuals. He arched up like a fish on a deck and twisted and writhed and pounded the sand with his fist.

Finally she slipped him out of her mouth and smiled sweetly.

“You’re mine now,” she said

She knew that she meant it, but she had absolutely no idea what it meant. She was about to find out at least part of what it meant, though. Sam had just crested the dune grass and was running toward them, across the beach.