Vacationing Alone

If you would like a Microsoft Word version of this story (a much better read), please contact me at the link below.

by Ian Daytona and Marcia R. Hooper

It was three o'clock in the afternoon. Jill lay out near the sea-oats, behind the hotel, sunbathing. People constantly passed by . . . couples young and old, moms with and without their kids, kids on bicycles and roller blades and skateboards on the sidewalk twenty feet above Jill on the rampart . . . enough so that she decided not to take off her bikini top but lay down upon it instead while she sunned on her tummy. Nude beach or not (well, topless beach, anyway) she was not brave enough for that.

She was drifting in and out of a doze, the sun baking her back and her legs, enjoying a breeze off the water strong enough to stir her hair when she heard a noise. Rather, she sensed she heard a noise. Lifting her head, she saw a young man with a camera drifting slowly past her about twenty feet away. Her stomach immediately tightened.

Keeping her chest planted firmly against the sand, Jill raised up on one elbow, shaded her eyes and called, "You're not taking pictures, are you?" in an accusatory tone. Oh yes, he is, she thought. Pervert.

The young man immediately blushed. "No," he lied. Then he grinned and that made it better.

"I'm sorry," he said. "The truth is, I was just drifting along the beach taking pictures with my new camera and well . . ."

Eying the camera, Jill decided it did in fact, look new. It also was not digital, which meant that he probably was not running home to download pictures onto his iMac.

"Would you like a drink?" Jill suddenly asked.

If the young man was surprised--and of course he was--Jill was surprised even more.

Uh, excuse me? her shocked sense of propriety asked. What are you doing?

I'll let you know when I figure it out, she thought back.

The young man seemed to struggle for an answer, then said: "Yes, I'd like that very much. And I'm Ian."

Jill told him her name. Then she reached behind her and resnapped her bra, smiling faintly as Ian glanced away.

Yes, she thought, I do like this guy. In fact, she momentarily wished she had left the bra alone.

They sat on the shady-side of the poolside bar, drinks before them on the laminate counter, their stools about a foot and a half apart. Jill wore her bathing suit top and a sarong over her bikini bottom. She had let down her dark, shoulder-length hair and then put it back in a clip. They chatted safely about the view and the wildlife on the island while Ian kept his eyes safely away from girls with bare breasts.

"You come here often?" he asked.

Jill shook her head. "Vacation."

He looked comically let down. "Where from?"

"A suburb of Washington, D.C. Bethesda. Actually," she then amended, "It's really called Rockville, but Bethesda sounds so more rich."

Ian laughed. "I've been here since spring."

"There is no spring here," Jill corrected. "Only summer, summer, summer and summer." And bare breasts, she thought. Plenty of bare breasts. In fact, there were so many bare breasts about that she felt almost odd wearing her top. Almost.

"Where are you from?"

"New York. Can't you tell?"

"Yes," she said, laughing. "But I didn't want to make it obvious."

"Brooklyn born and bred. Lived in Soho a while, then over in Greenwich Village. Then back to Brooklyn again until 2001 when I moved to Battery Park City . . ." His voice trailed off.

"Oh," Jill said. About that, she wouldn't ask.

"Who you down with?" he asked. Jill thought he did quite well, keeping his tone hope-neutral.

I should tell him my strapping big boyfriend, she thought. All six-feet six and two hundred and sixty pounds of him, only that would be a lie, because that was her next door neighbor (although he might have wished differently) and even jokingly, she didn't want to jinx her luck.

"With my girlfriend, Marie," she said. "Current whereabouts unknown."

He looked both quizzical . . . and relieved.

Jill explained. "She did this to me once before. Two summers ago on our first trip down. This is my third," she said. She didn't say that trip number two was not with Marie, but with a guy, and Ian didn't ask. "The second night they had this really big party--" she circled her head, indicating the entire pool area. "--and Marie danced with every guy in sight. So did I, I guess," she admitted with some embarrassment. "But about one a.m., she just disappeared."

"Just like that?" he said.

"Just like that," snapping her fingers.

"Where'd she go?"

Jill sipped at her drink.

"Well, when did she come back?" he amended with a laugh.

Jill said: "Not for two damned days! I could have killed her. I almost did."

Ian shook his head. "She called, I hope."

"She called."

He waited almost too long to ask the question. "Is she, uh . . ."

"You serious about that thing?" She indicated his Nikon camera, sitting on the bar. Uncapped, the lens reflected the top part of her, upside down.

"Trying to be," he said.

Jill let a smile creep across her lips. "How many did you take?"

Ian's smile crept just as steadily across his. "I am sorry," he said. "Would it have helped if I'd asked?"

She continued to smile.

Don't you dare, little girl! her voice of reason hammered. This is not some chaperoned photo-shoot and I know what you're thinking.

Jill said: "A friend of mine back home . . ." she didn't have to tell Ian it was a male friend. ". . .wants some pictures of me in . . .well, exotic dress." She laughed at his sudden blink. "Not lingerie; I don't mean that." She nodded across the parking lot toward a native woman in a bright flowered sarong and bright flowered hat. She wore a necklace of bells around her neck and across her ample buxom and jingled when she walked.

"Like that?" he commented uncertainly.

"Something like that."

They sat silent for a time, then Ian questioned: "Can I ask you something, Jill?"

"Like what?"

He continued to stare at the brightly clothed woman. "If I did those photo's for you, the ones for your friend, would you consider. . ." His voice trailed off again.

"You could ask," she said.

His face would not let him. It was a virulent red.

Slowly, as though afraid too fast a movement would have him snatching it away, Jill ran the fingers of her right hand across the bar's wrinkled surface and onto his. She interlaced them and he held them nervously.

If he coughs now, she thought. I will absolutely die laughing.

He didn't cough, but it certainly looked close.

"How's this? she asked. Her hands were crossed beneath her chin and her crooked elbows made her look like a teacup. She felt silly and wonderful at the same time. And embarrassed. And oh yes, embarrassed.

"That's great," Ian said. His voice was a concentration-focused whisper. Behind the camera, working the lens, he looked like he knew what he was doing. Sweat stood out on his brow and stood out on hers as well . . . also on her neck, her back and her chest. She wore only her red bikini bottom, and though bare-chested--of which she was very self-conscious--Ian had her concealed behind the back of the wicker chair on which she knelt.

They had gone strolling along the thousand-stall bazaar of Market streets, Landsdowne and Meridian. Children from toddler-size to scruffy teenagers in stappy tank tops and even strappier shorts begged for change everywhere they went. They were a constant annoyance, as were the ankle-sniffing dogs and Ian shooed away both. He was less success with the hair-braid-hawkers, however, most of whom were women and as used to deflecting shoo-offs as telemarketers. Finally he'd suggested she just do it.

"What?" she said, smiling at him from under the wide brim of her hat.

"They'll keep after you until you do," he said, indicating the bevy of other vacationers just like herself, being badgered by the stout island women or already with braids or cornrows in their hair.

She smiled at him, bemused. "I don't know."

The short stout woman with a thick Jamaican accent and colorfully beaded dress fingered Jill's hair. "Will look good," she assured her. "And not expensive, no. Only five dollar."

"Five dollars?" Jill asked. She felt both absurdly pleased and slightly embarrassed that she was actually thinking about saying yes.

"Bo Derek," the woman said, making Jill laugh. Now, kneeling on the wicker chair in front of a backdrop of sun-glinted ocean spray in the cramped but cozy studio at the back of Ian's ranch-style house, her knotted hair hanging about her head and tipped at the ends with tiny white beads, she felt more like the Williams sisters than Bo Derek. . . or perhaps Bob Marley.

The camera lights flashed, then flashed twice more as Jill saw comets stars. Following his hand-guided instructions, she sat cross-legged on the chair and rested her chin on the seat back. Then atop her left hand on the seat back. Then on the seat back again. Professional modeling, she decided, was probably a lot of work.

At five feet seven inches tall and one hundred and twenty-five pounds, Jill was built like a model. Her breasts were borderline-small but nicely rounded (more important than size any day, so many men told her), with pea-size nipples and small pink aureole. At twenty-four years of age, she had no cellulite on her legs and no puff at all to her tummy. She worked out three nights a week at the Gold's Gym up the street from her house and had even worked out here, twice now in the hotel gym. Her legs were long and coltish, and her arms graceful and long. She had beautiful, long-fingered hands. Now, she thought, if only she were the beautiful creature she felt like right as Ian triggered the camera, instead of Jill Kendle . . .

"How's this?" she asked.

"That's great."

Jill began to laugh.

"I know," he said, laughing at her laughter. "But that's how it works." He positioned her again and so far, he had not shot her breasts.

"I want to ask you something," she said.

"Shoot."

"If I was getting paid for this, would it be a lot?"

"Um, between five hundred and five thousand dollars."

Jill whistled softly. "Really?"

"Really."

"That's a lot."

"You work a lot. But you're not working at all."

"Hey!" she cried indignantly. "You're not paying me, either!"

She continued to pose and Ian continued to shoot her. He had exposed six rolls of 48 frame Kodak film (Jill didn't even know they came in 48 exposures) on her outfits and accessories bought at the bazaar. For these would pay him, for development and the cost of the paper, too. The rest . . . well that was Ian's treat.

My God, she thought, and this really hit her for the first time. I'm going to pose nude. Not topless as she was now, either, but completely nude. And that knowledge aroused her.

"This is so totally weird," she said. "I'm going to do this?"

Ian only bobbed his head.

I have to hand it to him, she thought. I'd have been ya-ya by now. I am ya-ya. In fact, I'm so ya-ya I'm about to orgasm in this chair.

Lifting her hair and jutting out her breasts (for once, less concerned about their size than about how white they were against the rest of her body) she turned sideways to the camera, held there a time, then bent over. Then she bent over farther. Then she got down on her hands and knees and then onto her elbows and knees and then onto her knees and her chest and did things in front of the lens that just four short hours before, hot and dreamy and sunning on the beach, would have gotten someone slapped hard across the mouth for even suggesting.

But somehow, someway, the camera was in her eye.

Finally she just came right out and said it. "I want these pictures to be seen, Ian. Is that possible?"

Ian lifted his eye from the viewer. He seemed unsure. "Seen by whom?" he asked.

Jill was breathing hard. Her heart beat was hard. Surf pounded hard in her ears. "By anyone who wants to see me," sat perched ready on her lips when this thought flashed across her mind: My God! I'm leaking between my legs!

With that she bounded off the floor, snatched up the terryclothe robe he had provided and whipped herself into it. Her heart was a galloping racehorse, her ears kettle drums pounding in a night club, but no longer from arousal. Or not entirely from arousal. She had gone too far.

What was I thinking?

"Jill--"

She shook her head. Tears and fear welled behind her eyes. "Can we just scrap this idea?" she begged. "Forget it ever happened?" Tears were forcing their way into her eyes and there was fire in her nose. She began to panic.

"Jill!" he snapped into her turmoil. "I said there's no film in the camera!"

"What?"

Twirling the camera on its base, he showed her the back. Opening it, he showed her the insides. "No film," he said.

She repeated: "What?"

He only shrugged. And Jill suddenly didn't know whether to be stunned and elated, or cheated and enraged. She could only stare.

And then he shrugged again in that, Sorry, Jill, I thought it best inflection and Jill made her decision.

Crossing the floor of his small but now suddenly intimate studio, she took his hand and lead him away from the cameras and the lights, away from the props and the backdrops and two steps up onto a small, pillow-covered dais and said: "That's okay, I was never getting paid for it anyway."

Then she lay down with him and she spent the night and the following day and you know what? It was Marie that got pissed and Jill never went home from her vacation.

THE END