For a second, it feels like I might. For so long, I’ve been frozen midstep over the precipice of me and Ethan. Does everything with me have to be so complicated? This, me and Ethan, should be simple.
“Everyone ready?” Laurel calls out to the crowd.
Ethan clears his throat. Anxiety prods my lungs.
“Dark side?” My question cuts through my increasing panic.
She claps her hands together. “ONE,” she hollers.
Ethan’s shoulders roll back. “Uh…we all get arrested and register as sex offenders?”
“TWO,” the crowd joins in, their shouts filling my ears like water.
I force myself to focus on Ethan. His shoulder freckles. The hair playing at the nape of his neck. The ropes of muscle trailing down his back. “Uh…no, actually.” I feel the tight cord around my throat begin to unravel. “That’s not a penalty for misdemeanor indecent exposure.”
“Then I think we’re gonna be okay.” He stretches an arm behind him, fingers reaching for me. Before I have a second to reconsider, I remove the hand covering my chest and accept his firm, reassuring squeeze.
The throng cries, “THREE.”
He releases my hand.
Petey’s low baritone thunders through the trees. “EVERYBODY RUN!”
A sea of skin takes off into the woods. I freeze, momentarily shocked by the chaos, the noise of a dozen or so near strangers howling naked into the lowering sun. It’s so animalistic. Primal. I shield myself with my forearm and take off too.
My one-armed running gait is a bit clumsy, and I release my own little yell. It’s the kind a child lets out when they’re sledding down a hill, mostly fear and adrenaline but with a tiny jolt of joy. At last, the fear seeps out of my skin and is replaced by something like elation.
The euphoria of the moment overtakes me in waves until finally I throw my head back and shout out all my inhibitions, my pressures. I’m not a woman alone in an emptied-out house with a job that asks too much. I’m a shape in the setting sun. A set of lungs screaming into the heat. A pair of legs that can carry me any which way I want. I’m endless potential.
I tear the hand away from my chest so that the air can graze my nipples, before I pump my arms and break out into a run. We move as a swell of bodies deeper into the trees, free and wild and connected, just as Ethan promised in his speech. We’re fragments of an unforgettable moment. I don’t even have to photograph it to know I’ll have it forever.
“AND TURN BACK,” Petey calls out.
The whole pack pivots as one like a colony of bees. All except for one.
“Ahh!” Ethan shrieks from behind me.
I’m kneeling next to him in an instant, still moving on wild impulse. I scan every inch until my eyes fall on the way his hand is clutching his ankle. My vision tunnels, so much so that I don’t notice how we’ve become an obstacle in the center of a nudist stampede and that my head is disastrously positioned at crotch height.
A hand connects with my shoulder first, then a knee at my back, until finally a dangling bouquet of flaccid penis and distended testes slaps the side of my face. For a split second, thesweaty skin sticks like a bug on flypaper, then it peels off my cheek when the owner of the rogue scrotum leapfrogs over my topless body. He buckles at the knees in front of me the instant he lands.
“Holy sh—” Russell cuts himself off, biting his own fist. His other hand is clutching his roughed-up genitalia.
“Are you okay?” I ask after him. He curls up into the fetal position, writhing in pain.
“Your cheek is so bony,” he says accusatorily.
“You got some of my nose in there too,” I respond, a little hibiscus LaCroix bobbing in my throat at the memory of Russell’s balls against my face.
His body rocks back and forth like he’s a giant baby entering the world in nothing but a pair of Hokas. Finally, he begins to uncoil when the pain appears to reach just-walk-it-off levels and he can stand.
“I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” I repeat.
“Ted!” He ignores me, calling out to his friend. “I need ice, Ted.” He hobbles away from us toward Wet Ted’s, behind the handful of stragglers.
“Your shoulder is bleeding.” My scrape pulses under Ethan’s stare.
“From Russell’s shoe, I think.” I position myself in front of him, leaning down over the ankle he’s still massaging.
