On The Beach by Dubinsky..,

These are college students, so everyone in this story is safely over eighteen.

Chapter One: The Beach

* * *

“I’m never sure quite why our house volunteers for this shit,” Lia groused, looking balefully down at an Ahab’s wrapper. She kept staring at it, a sour twist to her full lips, until I shrugged and picked it up. “Grubbing in garbage,” she groused, “it’s fucking degrading.” I thought it best not to point out that her bag was completely empty; Lia had done absolutely no grubbing at all, compared to the rest of us.

But I’d only met her that very morning. I wasn’t sure how far I felt like pushing her. Even when she spat a tangled wad of nicotine gum out of her mouth, landing it precisely where the wrapper had just been.

“It’s not about the garbage, honey,” purred Heidi, scooping a discarded coffee cup out of the sand. “It’s about the scenery.” We all looked appreciatively around, the beach a smorgasbord of bare legs and jiggling tits everywhere you looked. It was a near-perfect summer day, ideal for a relaxing stroll through the sands… if you weren’t wearing a cheap black Key Club shirt and hauling a trash bag. Heidi and I found ourselves looking in the same direction, at an absolutely smouldering pair of men prowling down near the tide-line, all buff torsos and, presumably, impressive penises.

Heidi adjusted her tasteful sunglasses and smiled secretly at me. Heidi had been the one who invited me on this little adventure. We were lab partners in McCutcheon’s physics section, and she’d known I was looking to fulfill my service hours. She was here with her sorority, and I’d thought it was nice of her to include me. “We should finish up,” I ventured, “then see if there’s anybody worth hooking up with.”

The other two girls traded a veiled glance. “Why wait until we’re finished?” Heidi laughed.

“Especially when we brought our own stud,” Lia added with her dark smirk. “Isn’t that right, Carter?”

More than once I’d spared a glance the dude who tagged along with us, a tall Ken doll of a man with the easy, graceful confidence of a guy who’d never had to work very hard to appeal to women. I could understand that: he certainly appealed to me, and I’d only just met him. There was a weird, electric-cable dynamic going on among the three of them; right away, I’d felt like a fifth wheel. But Lia was the only person I knew on the beach that day, and I didn’t feel like venturing out to find some other random black-shirted Key Clubber.

We’d scattered all across Black Rock Beach, poppy seeds on a vast pebbly bagel, fanning out to pick up the assorted trash that always accumulates on a beach. I had no doubt the place would be just as littered tomorrow, but that wasn’t my problem. That would be the problem of whatever future junior needed to fulfill her service requirement. I pushed my shades up my nose and glanced, yet again, at Carter.

He’d ripped the sleeves off his shirt first thing that morning. Of course.

Now he yawned, his trash bag trailing forgotten from his hand, staring openly at the ass of a string-bikini’d woman sauntering in front of us. “Always bring your own stud,” he agreed, “especially when you know it’s going to be a boring-ass day.”

“I don’t know how boring it needs to be.” Heidi yawned. “I’m not in the mood to be boring.”

“Yeah?” Carter turned his head to face her, but his eyes stayed on the woman in front of us. “What are you in the mood for?”

I nearly stumbled on my face when Heidi’s reply came, sweet, perilously low. “Dick.”

He smiled and swept his arm around the horizon. I bent to grab a Snickers wrapper, my bag already twice as heavy as the others’. “This is a beach. It’s summer. There’s dick all over the place,” he snickered, “but it’s not going to go for you in a university community-service t-shirt.”

“Maybe she should just lose the shirt, then.” Lia’s voice was loud, brassy, with no subtlety. She glanced across at me. “Maybe we all should.”

“Aw.” Heidi still sounded playful. Dangerous. “Whatever would Gerald and Ellie say if we took our shirts off?” She smiled at me. “What’d they say, Erika? We need to keep the shirts on and represent the Key Club properly?”

I felt a little thrill at being included. “That’s what they said,” I nodded. Heidi stepped casually over a take-out tray from Skipperdog’s. “So, like, they just send us out and let us go? No supervision?”

“You see how stupid they are?” Heidi agreed.

“Gerald and Ellie,” Lia scoffed, “fuck ’em.”

“I used to think they had spies running around the beach,” Carter shrugged. He was a Beta Chi; he’d done a bunch of these cleanups, but I was starting to wonder whether he’d ever touched a piece of trash. “They don’t. They really are stupid enough just to let us wander the beach.”

“They trust us,” Heidi explained, her gorgeous face sliding into a smirk. “Fools.”

“They spend their time in the backseat of the van.” Carter watched as the girl in the string bikini walked off the beach, her rump jiggling deliciously. He adjusted the front of his shorts. “Everyone assumes they’re fucking.”

“He’s not fucking her,” Lia snorted. “Gerald’s a prick. She probably makes him watch while she does other guys,” she pondered, “or maybe she pegs him or something?”

“Maybe.” Carter sounded completely uninterested in the sexual practices of the Key Club coordinators. He turned as he walked, every motion lacrosse-smooth, gazing back down the beach. “I think we’re far enough,” he decided.

“About time,” Lia muttered. She strode over to the seawall, where one of the wastebaskets leaned in the sand like an old tree fighting to stay up against the wind. She swept her shirt up over her head from the hem, shaking her thick hair out as she tossed the black thing between the wall and the wastebasket. “Yeah. Definitely about time.”

I stood there, feeling my mouth fall open as all three of them clustered around the trash can and whipped their shirts off. Both girls wore bikini tops, their tits looking stupendous, shelving out over their tanned bellies like offerings to some sort of sex god. Lia went a step further, whisking her shorts down her legs to show off a matching thong. “Showtime,” she murmured, her face in a savage grin until she caught sight of me. “Come on, Erika. Strip.”

Carter, his bare chest dusted lightly with dark-blonde hair, noticed my hesitation. “Fuck, Heidi. Did you not tell your friend to wear a suit?”

“Must’ve slipped my mind.” Heidi struck a pose, her bag forgotten under the piled shirts. “Hmm. Sorry, Erika.”

“You’re wearing, like, a sportsbra though, right?” Lia was staring critically at my chest. “I think? Looks like you’ve got some good boobage squished down in there.”

“Yeah.” I had a good body, I knew, but something about these two, their raw vulgar sex appeal… I felt a hint of nervousness, thinking I couldn’t match that. I glanced around, seeking other Key Clubbers and seeing none.

Because they were all probably doing the same shit we were doing.

“Do it, Erika!” Heidi cheered. “Show us what you got!”

My eyes slid over to Carter’s chest, down to his abs, and took a step into the spirit of whatever it was we were doing. “Should I, Carter?”

“Hell yeah,” he shot back bluntly, his face serious. If I could see his eyes behind his Ray-Bans, I knew they’d look hungry. Goddamn, this guy was sexy! “Fly that freak flag, Elena.”

“Erika.”

“Yeah, sorry. Erika.” He licked his lips. “It’s a gorgeous summer day. Way too gorgeous to be picking up trash.” He nodded, smiling, at a passing pair of MILFs; I noticed they turned to watch him as they went by. “Come on. Strip down. We’ve got plans.”

“Plans?” I asked. My shirt came of smoothly enough, joining the pile behind the trash can; I’d thought about worrying that someone would steal them or something, meaning we wouldn’t get our community service forms signed off, but who the fuck steals a pile of someone else’s shirts by a beach wastebasket? I rolled the top of my loose jogging shorts down, showing off as much hip as I could so as not to look too prudish in front of the others. I arched my back slightly when I caught him looking, but then I realized I didn’t have to “catch” Carter staring at any woman: it was just something he did. “What kind of plans?”

“Oh, we’ll just have to see what comes up,” Heidi smirked, and the other two laughed. I smiled, my eyebrows raised, expectant. “See, sometimes Lia and Carter and I… well, we like to have little adventures.”

“Kim and Jess, too,” Lia put in. “Don’t forget them.”

“I don’t,” Carter chuckled.

“Yeah. Adventures,” Heidi said again, glancing at Carter. “Just the kinds of shenanigans that red-blooded American kids get up to, scantily-clad on a hot summer day…” She wiggled her eyebrows. “Know what I’m saying?”

“We like to fuck him in public places,” Lia said bluntly.

I stared back and forth among the three of them, the breeze off the ocean stirring my hair, looking for signs of mockery and seeing… nada. “You fuck him,” I said slowly. “Both of you fuck him.”

“And Kim,” Heidi snickered, “and Jess.” Carter just drew himself up, looking at my chest in my off-white jogbra. She sighed happily. “Carter is equal-opportunity.”

“Let’s walk, ladies,” he said, his voice smooth, confident. He stepped out into the deeper stand, tipping his head back up to the sun, his skin gleaming. “Time’s a-wasting.”

“His penis is famous,” Lia told me as we followed him toward the surf. I laughed.

“Famous?”

“Famous,” she replied firmly. Heidi, gathering her hair back into a ponytail, moved up to walk beside him with her whole body swaying in a most un-community-service sort of way. “All the sororities talk about it.”

“Tell her why your penis is famous, Carter,” Heidi teased, her hand squeezing his ass fondly.

“Nah.” He walked with a masculine swagger that made my blood race. “I’ll let you guys fill her in.” He turned and pulled his shades down so he could wink at me. “I’ll fill her in later.”

I laughed. He knew I’d laugh. I wanted to fuck him.

“It’s got a curve to it,” Lia murmured, “like, a curve in just the right spot. If you know what I mean.”