The Bikini of Brevity

750 words, that's all.

****

"They always say less is more," Lenny drawled.

I followed his eyes, squinting into the midday sun despite sunglasses and his stupid Boston Red Sox baseball hat.

"I take it you are not talking about adverb frequency in a treatise?"

The target in his cross-hairs was walking perhaps twenty yards in front of us, down a sandy dune slope to the cold Atlantic surf off Cape Cod.

Lenny grunted. "You know what, Carl? Your capacity to despoil the simplest and most elemental pleasures of life is immense."

The dark-haired woman, probably of college age, had sweet legs, I must admit, and she moved with a confidence most appealing.

But Lenny's eyes were aimed higher.

Her breasts were held in by the most precarious confection of fabric, two tiny white triangles, flesh overflowing. The side of one was exposed, and her shifting movement while traversing the uneven slope would have provoked an erection in a dead man.

"Bet there's a wardrobe event once she gets to the waves." Lenny pointed a finger to the ocean, "assuming she gets that far."

Air temperature was hot, but the water was cold. Many swimmers had gotten only knee-deep and chickened out.

"Adverb count: Enticingly? Sybaritically? Jigglingly pleasant? Insurmountably arousing? Any others?" I asked.

Her haunches were round and meaty, visible tan-lines suggesting that this suit was briefer than others in her collection.

I sensed Lenny was tempted to turn his head to shoot me an incinerating stare, but somehow he resisted.

"Carl, don't tell me your sixty-year old prick is soft?"

He said this sideways, out of his mouth, like Dick Cheney at a senate hearing.

It wasn't. I didn't need to verify Lenny's condition but looked anyway. Despite his retirement belly, his protrusion was pronounced.

Unlike me, Lenny had no compunctions about leering. If eyes were laser beams, the woman's rump-cheeks would have been seared by two bullseye circles perhaps three inches apart. Her ass cheeks overhung a very small white bikini bottom, with tempting ties at each side.

Lenny licked his lips.

"If I were twenty again, I'd find a way to have my prick slithered up her three times by midnight."

I knew his earlier life well enough to know this was not an idle boast.

"Do you think she knows how handsome she is? What sort of attention she invites?"

Lenny grunted. "I suspect she well knows every adult male cock within sight is hard."

I changed the subject.

"Less is better. You ever calculate square-yardage of a bikini, Lenny? Got to be the highest price dollar-to-area ratio on earth. Priced one lately?

He tore his eyes away from the girl, now knee-deep in the surf, and gave me a withering look.

"No. Probably like every other kind of women's clothing, though, you could spend a ridiculous amount for something at the top end."

"Maybe forty to sixty dollars for an average one."

"For less than a yard of fabric? That's Kevlar territory." Lenny raised an eyebrow. "I spent my career in the wrong business."

"You know what Garrison Keillor said about a bikini?"

Lenny continued to stare at me.

"That it was like having a loaded gun on the table in front of you. Even if it is never touched or mentioned, it commandeers the entire environment."

Lenny turned to watch the girl wade past the first waves and dive into the water.

"Yep. That fabric barely covers her," he said.

"Only the best bits concealed."

"Ah, but that's the secret. Daring the imagination, rattling its restless cage."

"And teasing. Remember how much dating, our early dating experiences, were exercises in tease? The anticipation? A bit of a cleavage hinting at a lush, smooth-skin valley to ravage?"

The woman surfaced, turned back towards shore, using both hands to push her left boob more securely into place.

We stared as she sauntered back up the slope, drops of ocean-water glistening on her skin. The cold Atlantic had made her nipples hard, and they protruded through her top's fabric.

I was glad our sunglasses hide the intensity of our gaze.

Our heads slowly swiveled as she went by, perhaps fifteen feet to our right. A bit of dark hair, matted and wet, poked past the edges of the front of her bikini bottom.

Lenny couldn't avoid a grimace.

"Sometimes too much is too much," he muttered when she was safely out of sight.

Unlike Lenny, extra hair was special for me.

"Perhaps I was wrong," I said. "Sometimes more is better."