Free The Summer of Naked Swim Parties by Jessica Anya Blau

sweaty toes, with ineffectual little licks.
    Jamie stared at the beige, vinyl swirl-patterned wallpaper.
    She wondered if Brett’s mother had chosen the wallpaper or if it just came with the mobile home. She wondered if Brett’s parents had ever had oral sex in the mobile home.
    She wondered if Taffy Longue let the boys do this to her or if she just “ate and ran.” Then she worried about what she would say to Flip—surely he would want to know if she was enjoying this. Could she tell him that taking a shower with a strong nozzle felt better than this? Could she tell him she would rather be sitting in the Abe Lincoln theater on Main Street in Disneyland? Could she tell him that just because she now did the things that Taffy Longue did she really wasn’t anything like Taffy? Jamie would never wear a tube top to school, for example, or a terry-cloth shorts jumpsuit with the shorts no bigger than a pair of underpants. And Jamie would never write on the third stall of the C quad bathroom, “My Mother is a fucking Bitch and my father is a fucking Prick and they’re fucking each other because they fucking deserve each other. Fuck them, Taffy.” Jamie thought that graffiti was as destructive to a society as littering and all her friends could vouch for the fact that Jamie never littered!
    “Feel good?” Flip mumbled into Jamie’s crotch.
    “Yup.” Jamie looked at the door to the bathroom—it was so narrow! She wondered how obese people who owned  mobile homes managed the doorway. Did they make special doors? Or did they just take the door off and squeeze into the bathroom bare butt first? And what about oral sex? Would an obese man’s stomach obscure his penis so as to make oral sex impossible? Would a man performing oral sex an obese woman just lift her stomach, rest it on his head, and carry on?
    “Think you’re gonna come yet?” Flip asked. “ ’Cause my jaw’s getting, like, totally tired.”
    “Yeah, any second.” Tammy and Debbie had talked about coming. They talked about orgasms that made their toes shiver. Jamie shut her eyes and internally focused on her toes. Nothing was happening. And then she felt a stirring near Flip’s mouth and she wondered if it was an orgasm peering out from deep inside somewhere, or if it was just that she had to pee. The urge became stronger and Jamie was convinced that if Flip went on much longer she might begin urinating right then, on his face, an act that would surely end their relationship and put her in the oral history books with the likes of Kenny Marino, who was caught masturbating against a tree in his backyard when a group of kids were cutting through his yard to a lemon orchard.
    “I’m done!” Jamie put her hands on Flip’s ears and lifted him like an urn.
    Flip pushed up to Jamie’s face and kissed her. He smelled chalky and slightly sour and Jamie couldn’t help but think how odd it was that their genitals were now meeting through their mouths, each imbued with the other’s juice.
    “I gotta pee,” Jamie said, and she went to the narrow door of the bathroom, opened it, and entered. Once inside she sat on the toilet and stared at her face in the mirror mounted over the sink. The urge to pee vanished.

    “Don’t be disappointed,” she whispered to herself in the mirror. Then she looked at the stripes on the wallpaper and began to count them as if she were trying to lull herself to sleep, right there, on the toilet.
    When Jamie returned to Flip he was sleeping, body spread limply across the sheets, one arm bent up by his head, the other sticking out as if he were pointing to the bathroom. Jamie put on her clothes, went to the kitchen, sat at the table, and turned on the TV. The Munsters was on channel 11. She watched, silent and still, wishing her head was as hollow and clanking as Herman Munster’s so she could stop thinking about the ways in which her body would never be the same.

5
    Jamie hoped Flip wouldn’t be able to come to her