Storytime

"write a story involving a lil green dress, a hot tub, a house that burned down, and bagels please."


My sexy friend Alys got too big while we were in Spain. We were walking all over as we didn't have cars and it was just the expected custom to walk and take buses and metros. But we were compensating, re-building all that energy lost with sweet chocolate croissants and fresh bagels in the morning, fat and juicy pizzas in the night, and topping it all off with a bit too much drinking.

I tried to stop smoking there. It was like trying to go vegan while living in a chocolate factory. So, right after lunch I'd get the guts - which had to be gotten from a drawer way way way at the bottom of all my courage - and put on the shorts, t-shirt, tennis shoes, and walkman and I'd bust out the front doors of the school. That year it was The Prodigy that got me moving up and down the scorched hills and sizzling stone streets. Even if I couldn't run, I walked really, really fast.

But Alys got a bit bigger. After lunch, she'd relax in the cool of her dorm room listening to the hip hop she missed, snacking on Oreos sent from home.

So, when we got to the beach of Alicante over a long weekend she realized she just couldn't squeeze into the dress any longer. I'd been eyeing that thing since the first time I checked out her closet. I'm really not one to flaunt myself. I can be rather shy sometimes, and, I suffer from mirror hatred like we all do. But I knew it was now or never. She kind of shamefully handed it to me and picked another cute dress out of her suitcase.

I never gave that dress back. I'm still surprised I can put it on and not look like a sausage in casing. It's really too short to play pool in, but I do anyway. In the summer, of course, when my skin has been kissed by the sun again.

Two summers ago, I was free and burning for lovin'. I wore the lil green dress out to a night of dinner and drinks with my colleague, her boyfriend, and his friends. It's always a bit difficult and I have to steel the nerves to put the dress on. She requires that I'm in a frame of mind, that I'm bolder, hotter, sluttier, more carefree and careless. She's green neon when she's out and I have to be ready for the girls to hate me and the boys to teeter on the brink of lust and impossibility.

I haven't grown up here - where winter changes everything and affects even summer. So, I'm not accustomed to how exaggerated summer can feel. Everyone and everything is just a bit more alive, a bit more feverish than in other regions where the sun shines longer. And, I'm not used to people owning their own hot tubs like they own a car. "Here's my house, my garage, my hot tub." After dinner and drinks that night, we caravanned out to a country home owned by one of the boys, and that's almost what he said. "Here's my house, the garage, drinks in the kitchen, and the hot tub."

This was the night that changed everything between my colleague and me. They were all stripping to underwear. My lil green dress doesn't afford room for a bra. So, I opted for total naked tubbing. I think the girls were uncomfortable, looking at me like a piece of cotton would make me a cleaner person. I guess the hot tub is usually preferred for winter because it seems almost silly in the summer. Why sweat in a pool of water to get out and sweat some more? It defeats the purpose that my Norwegian ancestors have seeped into my blood: sweat in the sauna or warm in the hot tub, but plan to jump out into the snow to cool off.

All the sweating slowly sobered us all up and one by one everyone started leaving. I wasn't playing footsie under the suds with him, but I'd found my eyes falling on the host of the party over and over. I put the lil green dress back on to say my goodbyes. When it was my colleague's turn to leave - my ride for the evening - I decided I'd be allright left behind. After all, I didn't wear the dress for nothing. This left me and the hot tub owner.

Like I said, I was free and burning. Back then, I didn't really need to or want to let myself go for too long without being touched. Prior to this night though I'd spent an unusual amount of time alone. My first real vacation in years and my first vacation on my own, I opted to spend 3 weeks in the U.P. Camping alone, hiking alone, not doing professional meditation but my own inward journeying and outward appreciation. I had a makeshift shower, lots of easy campfire carb food. I was stinky and I could have grown a beard. My green dress night out was my debutante ball to society again.

After we waved my colleague out the door, hot tub guy and I stripped our meager clothes off on the lawn and went back into the water. Both naked this time. My heart was pounding from a mix of the long minutes soaking and heating and from the fireflies fluttering in my belly. No better time like the present, he slid over closer to me. I don't even remember what the words were because they were insignificant. My temperature rose degree after degree with the proximity of his 98.6F mouth near my ear and neck. I'm sure my heart was at the brink of its fastest pace - opening valves to let blood in, closing to keep balance. Open, close, open, close, the thump thump grew louder. His lips felt like two hot punties burning the side of my neck. My eyes rolled up from the molten bubbles in the hot tub to the burnt shadows of tress and up to the hot, steel blue sky and icy hot, boiling stars. I leaned my head back and heard the sounds of my hair sizzling as it touched the tub.

It wasn't that I had willed my pheromones to spark my hormones to rage in this way. It was out of my control. From the smoking green dress to the stew of sexy hot bodies to the burning hunger inside me. When his hand reached between my melting thighs, there was nothing I could do to stop my internal combustion. The water around us sizzled and sparked. Out of nowhere, flames started jumping from the wood around us. By the grace of luck, he was able to pull us both out onto the cooler grass right before the entire tub burst into flames sending cinders up like fireworks. I was sinking into the warm mud beneath my body but was able to notice him look up in horror as the exploding fires licked quickly up the wooden walls of his country house.

He looked down at me. Smoke was seeping out of my mouth and my cheeks were on bright red. I could tell it was too far, too much. There was nothing to stop the fires from burning down his house.

Weeks later, I tried to explain it to my colleague but she wouldn't let me. I wasn't even sure how to tell her anyway. How would I explain that I had been so bottled up and was so inflamed with lust that I exploded? Maybe I should have blamed the green dress. And I'm sure I should have tossed it into the fire that night, but I didn't.