Little Waves

“Don’t be a stranger,” she said.

“Same to you. If you need anything, you know where I am.”

I watched her go. The way her ass jiggled in those jeans, I couldn’t help but think of her on her hands and knees, me thrusting into her, that ass rippling. She must have sensed my eyes lingering on her, because she looked over her shoulder…

…and smiled.

* * *

I spent that entire afternoon hammering out the scene pretty much as Eva suggested, the words flowing out of me to such a degree I forgot to stop and stretch, and went to bed that night with a cramp in my back and neck. My sleep, as you can imagine, was full of images of a certain long-nosed, full-bodied beauty smiling at me.

Ever since I started getting into working out again in my mid-twenties, mornings had always been my ideal time to do it. Back then, it was because of my schedule. I commuted from Pike Bridge to the city to work a boring office job, and by the time I got home at night, I was too drained with it all to get in much of a workout. So instead, on the advice of my brother, a health nut, I tried working out first thing in the morning. To my surprise, it worked. I had lots more energy for the drive, I came into work feeling happier, and it led eventually to me dropping a good thirty or forty pounds.

Now I worked out religiously in the cool mornings. Sometime after seven, I was doing half-kneeling presses with my kettlebells, a fine sheen of sweat on me. Whereas I’d once been what could conservatively be called chubby, I now leaned more towards… well, lean. I wasn’t shredded — I liked food way too much for that — but I had a nice, solid pad of muscles. I could probably stand to get in more cardio, and now I had the perfect excuse in Eva and her college friends, if they liked to jog too.

That thought led to another. I wanted to see her again, and I really did owe her a thank you for helping me with that scene the day before. I could combine the two, I thought, and I knew how. She liked the tea the day before, and mentioned she once had an electric kettle but it was lost in a move. So once I finished up my workout and showered, I decided a drive into Pike Bridge was in order.

What was supposed to be a quick trip ended up being a few hours. I picked up groceries I couldn’t get out in the countryside, had an impromptu breakfast with my brother and his wife, and spent the bulk of my time trying to track down an electric kettle, which I wound up finding at the hardware store, of all places. While I was there, Ross Walsh, the manager, pointed out to me that it was the Fourth of July in just days, and hey, didn’t I need a barbeque?

I did, I decided, and we crammed it into the back of my Jeep. By that point, I was feeling good and mellow, and decided it was late enough in the day I could drop in on Eva and her friends without waking anyone up.

The funny thing about the lake homes was that I could walk and tell you pretty much where and how far anyone’s home was. But driving, I got all mixed up. Even if I knew Eva’s house was just four or five houses from mine, I thought it was a longer drive than that, and wound up having to turn around.

When I did pull into their driveway and parked behind a pastel blue Beetle, I was greeted in the best possible way. The house, like mine, had a wraparound porch that encompassed three sides, and like mine, it had a set of stairs leading down to the driveway. Down those stairs came Eva in the tiniest — and I mean tiniest — pair of denim cutoffs I’d ever seen, along with a cropped cherry red top that made her bounce in ways that seemed to defy gravity.

Fuck me. I should have bought another bottle of lotion because whether or not it was moral, I was going to need it that summer.

Until that moment, I wasn’t sure if I was being too stalkerish or clingy or whatever, but her smile was wide and genuine, and as I stepped out, she said, “Alex! Hey!”

“Hey,” I said. She came to me and gave me a hug, no doubt as a means to kill me by heart attack. Her nipples were very stiff, and there was a very distinct lack of a bra between us. Fuck fuck fuck, absolutely no chance I wasn’t going to stiffen. When she pulled back, I fought the urge to clear my throat. “I, ah, I wanted to say thank you for your help yesterday walking through that scene with me. So I got you a thank you gift.”

“Ohhh, you didn’t have to do that.”

“It’s nothing big. I needed to run to Pike Bridge anyways so I picked you up an electric kettle and a tea assortment.”

“Ohhh, thank you! That’s perfect.”

I heard a French door slide open as I dug in the back for the tea and the kettle. When I turned back to Eva, another young woman was coming down the steps, also in a crop top and in creamy shorts that didn’t do much less to hide her thighs than Eva’s. And fuck me, she was just as busty, with deep brown skin and frizzy hair that came down to her shoulders. She had huge eyes, and I don’t mean that as innuendo, though her breasts were certainly plentiful too. Those eyes danced as she grinned wide.

“Is this him?” she asked.

“This is him,” Eva said. “Alex, Cheyenne. Look, he got me a kettle!”

Cheyenne’s smile became quizzical. “A… kettle?”

“Ah, she mentioned she lost hers in a move, so I thought since she seemed to like her tea… yeah, kind of dumb.”

Eva smacked my arm as she cradled the kettle to her breast with the other. “Don’t you say that. I love it. Really. I do.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean… that’s me, always ruining a moment,” Cheyenne said. “But I’m glad she finally came over and said hello. Took her long enough.”

“Cheyenne!” Eva said, blushing hard.

“Uh,” I said, utterly floored at what I imagined I was hearing. “Sorry?”

“Oh, she has a big-time crush on you.”

“Cheyenne!” Eva said again, more sharply, but her friend reached out and covered her mouth playfully and kept going.

“When her parents told her you were living out here now, she practically begged me to come stay so she could say-”

“Oh my God, Cheyenne!”

“Wait. She told me…” I said.

“Oh, I know what she told you,” Cheyenne said, grinning wide. “We have gone through a serious battery shortage in this house since she came here.”

Eva darted for the house, clutching her tea kettle the whole way. She turned around at the door, and bellowed, “I’m going to murder you.”

“No, you’re not. You’d go the next three weeks without getting your thighs around his yummy head, and you’d regret it the rest of your life.” Cheyenne eyed me up and down as Eva yanked open the door and stormed inside. “She has had a thing for you for forever. When you got famous, we never heard the end of it.”

“I… Eva? Really?”

“Oh come on. Don’t tell me you don’t have a little something for her too.”

“She was my neighbor’s kid.”

“She’s not anymore. And I don’t think anyone would drive an hour one way to pick up a gift like that for someone who wasn’t on his radar.”

“Ah jeez,” I said, my cheeks burning.

“Listen, she’s not crazy or anything. I don’t mean she came out here to stalk you. She came out here because she wanted to shoot her shot. If that’s really not what you want, let her down gentle. Okay? She’s my best friend and… she deserves the best. To be happy. So just be sweet to her.”

“I… I will. Uh. Do you all have plans for Fourth of July?”

She laughed. “Oh yeah. Margaritas, bikinis, watching the fireworks. Why?”

“I just bought a barbeque, because how do you live on the lake without one? I was thinking burgers and ribs, if you and your friends are interested.”

“And Eva.”

“Yeah, if she’s not too embarrassed.”

“She won’t be. She’s shy, but she didn’t put on those shorts this morning just to hang out with us.”

“You mean…”

“You, Mr. Writer Man. She was hoping you’d come by, or she’d see you on a walk again.” With that, Cheyenne turned and sashayed her way to the house, her own ass nearly as tempting and juicy as Eva’s. She looked over her shoulder at me and winked.

A bottle of lotion? Fuck, I was going to need gallons.

* * *

Without knowing how to reach out to Eva and tell her she didn’t need to be embarrassed, I let her make the next move, and it came sooner than I expected. That night, I was having a beer out on the deck and listening to the crickets and other wildlife, along with the faint music drifting to me from what had to be Eva’s place. My closest next-door neighbors were grilling something that smelled damn good, and I was just thinking about testing out my own barbeque when I got an email ding on my phone.

I glanced at it and smiled. Eva had sent me a friend request on Bottlegenie, the least douchebaggy of the social media apps. Ostensibly I was on all of them but gladly gave over my public persona to the publishing house’s PR people. My private account was reserved only for friends and family. I spent all of about half a second before I tapped the “accept” button, come what may. I wanted her. She wanted me. I thought there would be hell to pay from her parents, who really were good people, but whatever remained of my resistance to Eva died a very quiet, very passive death that night and I was lost to her.

I opened the app to shamelessly ogle at her page, which made me wish, again, I had invested in a lotion company at some point during that day. Eva had a link posted with a fairly innocuous message attached — “For my modeling shots, check out my professional page!” I clicked on that, and leaned forward.

“Holy shit,” I murmured.

Eva wasn’t just going to be a translator. Eva was a fucking model, or influencer, or whatever you want to call it. A hundred fifty thousand subscribers. A page full of pics of her and her friends that week in one-pieces, bikinis, short shorts and hand bras. There were frontal shots, back shots, and my favorite, a recent pic taken just that day of five of them on towels on the lakeside beach, the shot clearly showing off their thongs disappearing into the cracks of their amazing asses.

I sat back, utterly and complexly dumbfounded. I didn’t move for a solid minute, not until I got a message ding. Eva, sending me a private message on her similarly private friend and family page that I’d just friended.