Kayla was disappointed when she discovered that all four of them, even JJ, were going to sleep out on the patio that evening. The experience of sleeping nude under the stars had been wonderful, and she’d hoped to repeat it. As it was, she had to wear shorts and a T-shirt, and kept a blanket within reach for when it got chilly in the early morning hours. As it happened, sometime after midnight the power came back on, but it would still be hot in the house until the air conditioner could catch up, so everyone just stayed outside.

After everyone got up, Kayla’s mom called over and asked Andrea if she’d like to work at the store today, helping get stuff back together. Andrea did, so that wrecked any chance of going for a run with her.

Still, she thought maybe she’d better get out and get a run in while it was still cool, so she went by herself, which wasn’t anywhere near as much fun. She went about as far as the two had the day before and came back home to find the house empty – she’d hoped that JJ would be there so she could use the pool again, but he was up at Brandon’s or with some other friend of his. She had to be content with a shower, which wasn’t nearly as much fun as frolicking nude in the pool with Andrea had been.

With no idea of what to do, she called over to her friend Shannon’s house, but Shannon wasn’t home. Megan and her family were gone on vacation she knew, so that was out, and Bree’s mom said that Bree had gone to her grandmother’s to wait out the power outage, and was probably going to stay an extra couple days. Without any better ideas, she thought maybe she’d go out on the patio and lay out in the sun – a look at her nude reflection in the mirror showed her just how much white there was on her body, even with the time in the sun yesterday. With the bikini, the tan lines from the one piece would really show. Again, it wouldn’t be as much fun as lying naked out in the sun with Andrea had been, but it would be something.

She hadn’t bothered to get dressed yet after her shower, so she went to her room for the book that she’d been reading when she heard the door open and JJ’s voice – and another boy’s voice, too. She quickly grabbed shorts and a T-shirt and pulled them on, then headed out to the living room. Maybe they wouldn’t be there long.

But no. JJ was getting the X-Box hooked up to the TV in the living room. “Hi, Kayla!” he yelled. “Brandon and his folks are heading to Hawthorne. I called Mom and she said Lute and I could play video games here.”

So much for that great idea, she thought. Lute was the most boisterous of JJ’s friends, and he made JJ pretty wild, too. But darn, it would have been so nice to be able to keep her clothes off and lay out in the sun. There ought to be some place she could go …

There was! She went to the phone in the kitchen and called the store. “Mom,” she said. “JJ and Lute are here, I guess you knew that.”

“Yes, he called,” her mother said. “It’s just till Brandon’s parents get home.”

“Well, if it’s OK with you I think I’ll go for a walk in the woods. Maybe an hour or two.”

“Wear some bug dope,” her mother replied. “And you might want to take a bottle of water with you; it’s still pretty hot.”

“OK, Mom,” she replied. “I won’t be all day.”

There was a small field a couple hundred yards wide in back of the house. It was planted to corn this year; the stalks weren’t very high yet. There was a small patch of woods on the far side of the field, as her dad had once said, “maybe ten acres.” Even when she’d been very little her dad or mom had taken her for walks out there, and the last couple years they’d let her go by herself. It was a peaceful place – they hardly ever saw anybody back there except during hunting season, but she’d seen lots of birds there, occasionally some turkeys or deer. It could be a little buggy, but she really hadn’t noticed much of a problem at this time of year. It would be the perfect place for her to go out, take her clothes off, and work on her tan.

She told JJ that Mom had said it was all right for her to take a walk, then grabbed a bottle of suntan lotion and a bottle of water. She stepped out on the back porch and sprayed herself down with bug dope, even under her T-shirt and shorts, then headed out across the field. She had to walk carefully to avoid stepping on any corn plants but she’d had to do it often enough before and it was no great trick. Walking across the soft soil was a treat in her bare feet. One of the things that she liked most about being barefoot was that she got to feel the various textures she was walking on, and soft dirt was just about her favorite, the way it squished up between her toes.

It only took her a few minutes to get to the other side of the field. There was a place there that had the faded remnant of an old two-rut lane so she wouldn’t have to walk through the taller grass and scratchy brush, and she turned down it. In a hundred yards or so the lane turned and went down a small hill; once she had made the turn she was out of sight of the houses of the town. It was still fairly open here, and sunny. This was the spot she’d had in mind. It only took her seconds to peel her clothes off – she’d gotten dressed so quickly that she hadn’t even put on panties. She spread her clothes out on a grassy spot on the ground, then took the suntan lotion she’d been carrying and started to spread it on her body. It was hard to do her back but she was pretty sure she got all of it.

She lay down on her clothes and just let the sun wash over her, enjoying the peace of being by herself, being nude in the sun. It would have been nice to have her book, she thought, but she didn’t. As she lay there being warmed by the sun she thought about the conversation in the pool last night. She’d heard hints that that trip to Scott and Sonja Tyler’s had been a little wilder than her parents had told her, but until last night she’d been unaware of the details. It was really difficult to imagine her mom and dad being naked in that hot tub with their friends! From the way they’d talked last night it was the first time her mom had done something like that, but apparently they’d done it at least one more time since.

To top that off, Jason and Vicky were talking about getting a hot tub once they weren’t doing knife work in the back garage anymore, and Jason had teased Vicky and his folks about having to start the same tradition. Her mom had protested that they could do something like that in Mason, but not in Bradford, but her protests didn’t sound too serious. Kayla wondered what it would be like if she got to go along to Scott and Sonja’s sometime? It’d be sort of like last night, just sitting around the pool talking, but with everyone naked, men and women and her. Lying nude out in the sun, it seemed like she’d be able to do it, and it would be sort of interesting, and probably fun.

As far as that went, she remembered Jason telling them about Grandma being one of a bunch of kids who went skinny-dipping up at Coldwater Lake that time! Grandma! She could barely imagine Grandma being naked in the shower, but maybe when she’d been a teenager … Jason had said something about that being back in the hippie days, and people weren’t quite as uptight about it, but still! As far as that went, what would it be like with, oh, Shannon and Bree and Megan and her, with, oh, Travis and Chad and Burke and Trevor, who were among the nicer boys in her class? So dark you couldn’t see anything, but she could imagine the teasing and splashing and yelling. Who knew, something like that might happen someday … well, maybe not Megan, it was hard to imagine her doing anything like that.

She explored that thought for a while, until she began to feel a little warm on one side. There wasn’t the room to just roll over on the little patch her clothes made, so she had to stand up to do it. Once she was standing up, she realized that she didn’t want to just lay back down with nothing much to do and no one to talk to. She’d told her mom that she was coming out here for a walk, so she might as well take one. There was no reason she had to wear her clothes, after all.

She picked up the tanning lotion, her water bottle, and her clothes and headed slowly down the lane, just enjoying the feeling of the sun on her skin, the smell of the pine trees, the sounds of the insects in the grass. Her clothing and bottles added up to more than a handful, and was a bit clumsy, and soon she began to wonder why she should carry them at all – she wasn’t likely to see anyone out here. It seemed like an awful brave thing to do to just put her clothes and stuff down and walk away from them, but she’d been doing things in the nude that required some bravery … finally, courage overcame fear. She found a hidden spot back in the grass under a pine limb, and hid her clothes and bottles under it. On a whim, she thought that as long as she was nude she might as well be all the way nude, so she took the scrunchie out of her hair and left it with her clothes. Now she was as nude as she could get.

Gathering her courage, she stepped carefully out of the tall grass and out into the rut of the woods lane, and started walking slowly along it, just taking her time. In the last few minutes a light breeze had sprung up, rustling the leaves overhead, although it didn’t reach down through the trees to her. In a few moments, she was through the close patch of woods, and into a small opening.

All of a sudden she saw a flash of motion, something white moved. What? Was someone watching her? she thought with a bit of a fright. She took a closer look. It wasn’t a someone, but a something … three somethings, in fact, a doe and two fawns still in white spots. Instantly, Kayla froze like dad had taught her, not moving a muscle while watching the deer. The fawns were really more interested in their mother, But the mother was obviously not too sure about Kayla being there. She put her head down, ate a few bites, then raised her head, staring at her, her tail flickering while she made up her mind whether to run or not – then put her head down, took another couple bites, and went through the cycle again. Kayla wondered if the doe didn’t know what to make of her without any clothes on; she’d probably never seen a nude person before, and she was as naked as the deer – even more so, since the deer had hair all over …

It would be hard to say how long Kayla stood there watching the deer, but it was not a short time. All the time she scarcely dared to move a muscle for fear of frightening the deer away, and it was nice to watch the three of them, and so close, too! It was a magical sight, just to watch them like that. Eventually the doe got over her fear of the silent intruder watching her and just concentrated on eating, with only an occasional glance in her direction. It was the first time she’d ever had that happen, and she felt like she was really a part of nature, rather than being an intruder. It probably wouldn’t have happened if she’d had clothes on, or even been carrying them, she thought.

Eventually the three deer wandered off into the taller pines, and Kayla felt like she could move again. Very slowly, she walked on down the lane, hoping the doe wasn’t watching and take fright at her movement. It took her three or four minutes to get across the little meadow to where the woods closed in on the far side.

Here the trees were high overhead, and there wasn’t much undergrowth in their shade. She could see a long way through the open area of these woods. All too soon, she reached a place where the lane through the woods split. She knew that going one way would soon take her out across a field that was behind the school – not far from the cross-country course, in fact. The other way would take her a ways farther through the woods and come out on a little hill.

She took the path to the hill. It wound around a little bit, and climbed a ways. Eventually the path came out of the woods and worked its way up through tall grass to the top of the hill. It was on the far side of the woods from town, and there weren’t any houses near, so she slowly made her way right to the top of the hill where she could see a long ways. Here, it was out in the open enough that the breeze could pick up her hair and blow it around a little; it felt good on her bare skin, which had gotten sweaty in the heat. She stood there, feeling the grass, the breeze, the warmth of the sunshine, the openness of the grassy hills surrounding her. She tried to picture in her mind what she must look like standing there in the open like that – just as nature intended – not even a scrunchie in her hair. It felt … absolutely perfect, like things were supposed to be, like she was some mystical wood nymph and only lacked wings.

She was more comfortable than she could have ever imagined being out here without clothes, and she dreaded the thought of having to put them back on; even just the shorts and T-shirt hidden under the pine branch now seemed oppressive in her mind, hot and restrictive. There was the thrill, too, of doing something that she knew she probably shouldn’t be doing, that her mother wouldn’t have let her do if she’d known about it.

A short ways down the hill away from the way she’d come there was another patch of woods, one she’d never been in, one that she’d like to explore some time – but crossing that open corn field in the nude just made it seem a little too likely that someone might see her. Maybe when the corn got taller she could do it, or maybe there might be another way to get there if she tried it from back somewhere around where she’d left her clothes. She knew right then she’d have to take a look at it some time … but it couldn’t be today.

There was a lot of summer left, and even as she turned to head back down the hill she knew that this wasn’t the last nude walk she’d be taking out here.

A couple of months later, the day that many of the new seventh grade girls (and boys for that matter, although they didn’t say much about it around the girls) had been dreading came on the second day of school. As the third period was nearing an end the teacher sent the class to the showers.

Getting dressed for gym class hadn’t been that big a deal, since it was mostly a case of taking off their outer clothes and putting on T-shirts and shorts. Some girls were shy about that, even though the bras and panties some of them wore clearly covered more than the swimsuits they’d been wearing over the summer, at least if the tan lines were correct. They went out to the practice field and paired off into two oversized teams and kicked a soccer ball around. That involved a lot of running and Kayla worked up a sweat. She was on the far side of the field when the whistle blew, so she was one of the last ones to get in the locker room, to find a wild scene of increasing consternation. There was no one in the showers yet; while a couple of the girls had their bras off, there were obviously some that had elected to not bother with a shower, and just sat staring at their gym bags, unable to do what needed to be done. Several of the girls had pulled on long T-shirts and were trying to put bikinis on under them; those who were stripping mostly had their backs to the room in embarrassment.

Kayla shook her head and smiled inside – this was just what Andrea had predicted would happen. She went to her gym bag, next to where Megan was trying without much success to put on a swimsuit under a towel wrapped around her. That didn’t surprise her much; Megan had been doing more whining than most about having to change clothes in the locker room. “Oh God, Kayla!” Megan whined, her eyes almost full of tears. “I can’t do this!”

“Sure you can,” Kayla grinned as she pulled off her shirt and tossed it on her gym bag. “Don’t think about it, just do it.” Without a second thought she unhooked her bra and tossed it on the pile – it was a real bra now, not a training bra, but she didn’t bother with padding like most of the other girls. With a quick motion she slid her gym shorts and panties off her hips together, then stepped out of them and tossed them on her other clothes.

“Kayla!” Megan gasped. “You’re naked!”

“That’s the general idea,” Kayla grinned. “I don’t shower in my clothes. What’s the big deal? We’re all girls, after all.”

“But Kayla,” Megan protested. “How can you …”

“Like I said, don’t think about it, just do it,” she grinned, remembering Andrea’s advice. She pulled on a shower cap, not wanting to get her hair wet, then turned and headed for the shower, pretending to not notice Megan’s astonished stare, or that of several other girls. She glanced at the clock; plenty of time. She turned the knobs and immediately got a blast of spray a lot harder than their shower at home. It took a moment’s fiddling to get the water about the right temperature, then she started to soap down good – no point in a quickie.

She was getting rinsed off before two or three other girls sheepishly filed into the shower room, two of them naked, one wearing a bikini and one just the lower half; the one in the bikini was Sarah, a stuck up girl she knew was going out for cheerleading. “Here, take this one,” she cheerfully said to the girls. “I’ve got the temperature about right.” She just got stares as she headed back out into the locker room.

Megan was still standing in front of the locker, back to the room, still with the towel wrapped around her. “My God, Kayla, how can you do that?”

“Do what?” Kayla shrugged, knowing full well what Megan was talking about but having her fun. As far as she knew, only Andrea knew about the sunning and skinny-dipping in the back yard, and even she didn’t know about the nude walks in the woods and some of the other stuff she’d done. And she hadn’t mentioned a word of it to her friends her own age, like Shannon, Bree, or Megan.

“Run around here naked like you don’t have a care in the world!” Megan replied with astonishment.

Kayla was not about to tell her the truth – Megan was a friend but she was a gossip, too. She didn’t need to know that three months before Kayla would have been as shy as she was, just like she didn’t need to know that she’d gone skinny-dipping and laying out sunbathing nude with Andrea a dozen times or more over the summer. Megan also didn’t need to know about the nude walks out in the woods two or three times a week, or laying out under the stars nude, or sleeping nude. Most especially, she didn’t need to know about the three times that Kayla had sneaked out of the yard in the wee small hours and ran in the nude – the first time had seemed quite daring, and she’d just gone around the block. That went so well that a few nights later she did it again, this time going several blocks, mostly down streets and alleys where there wasn’t a lot of light. She’d gotten up to do it a third time just last week, to discover it raining. She’d almost decided not to do it, but reasoned that skin was the best rain gear of all – she could go out in the rain and get as wet as she wanted, since she could easily dry off afterwards. That time she stayed out even longer, and the rain made it better yet.

What she did say as she dug the towel out of her gym bag and began to dry herself, facing Megan and most of the room, was, “Look, Megan, you have to do it. It’s easier if you just do it and don’t agonize about it. The longer you put it off the harder it’ll be.”

“Oh, shit,” Megan shook her head, then unwrapped the towel, to reveal that she’d managed to get her panties off but not her bra. “God, this is embarrassing.”

“Like I said, just do it,” Kayla smiled, lifting a leg up onto the bench to dry it off.

“Yeah, but I’m the one who has to do it,” Megan protested. “You don’t.”

“That’s right, because I already did,” Kayla grinned, taking her time getting dried off, mostly to enjoy the look of astonishment on the other girls. “Ahhh, that shower felt good! I feel like I can even face a math class before lunch.”

“You’re weird,” Megan shook her head as she slipped out of her bra and headed for the shower, trying to keep her back to the room as much as possible.

“Kayla!” she heard from across the room. “Where did you get that tan?”

She looked up to see that the question came from Carol Lynn, another girl who was planning on cheerleading, and even more stuck up than Sarah. She smiled at the sight; Carol Lynn was wearing bikini panties, and had almost as good a tan – except on her boobs and the visible part of her butt, which were as white as a sheet of notebook paper. It really looked funny, but she knew better than to laugh – Carol Lynn was the kind of girl who had to put everyone down in order to make herself feel superior. “Oh, just laying out in the back yard some,” Kayla shrugged.

“You’ve got such an all over tan it looks like you spent a summer in a nudist camp!” Carol Lynn teased – well, no, with her it was more sniped.

“Afraid not,” Kayla said, although thinking that it might have been interesting if she had. “We only got away for a few days, just camping out up north and riding with my folks.” Just to stick in the needle she added, “Mostly I had to wear leathers on the Harley. Other than that I was stuck here in Bradford.”

“That’s still quite a tan,” Carol Lynn shook her head. “You’re way dark!”

“I guess,” Kayla nodded, pulling on her bra, leaving her bottom bare. She glanced around the room – yes, she really was dark; the only girl that was darker was Connie Gonzalez and she was that dark all the time.

She was pulling on her shirt – still with no bottoms – when Megan came back from the shower, dripping wet, trying and failing to keep from showing her intense embarrassment. “I guess you’re right,” Megan said. “But God, I so hate that!”

“You’ll get used to it,” Kayla grinned. “You only have to do it the next six years, after all.”

“God, I don’t know how I can do that,” Megan said as Kayla finally pulled on fresh panties from her gym bag.

“You did it once, you can do it again,” Kayla smiled, pulling her jeans from the gym bag. “Now you’d better hurry up, or you’re going to be late for class.”

In a minute or two more, Kayla had the rest of her clothes on, her stuff jammed in her gym bag, and had stuck her feet into the flip-flops which were the minimum shoe that she’d learned she could get away with around the school. The clothes felt constrictive and uncomfortable – it had felt good to get a few minutes of nude time to help her get through the day. It had felt even better to watch the big pile of embarrassment in the locker room and go through it with a grin – and be the subject of some astonishment.

Mrs. Halloran, the phys. ed. teacher was waiting by the door as Kayla headed for the hall. “Kayla,” she said quietly, “thanks for being a good example there.”

“No big deal,” Kayla shrugged.

“It is a big deal for most of these kids,” Mrs. Halloran said in a confidential tone. “They’ll get used to it in time, but they’d get used to it quicker if they have a positive example. So thank you. But Kayla, don’t you have gym shoes? I saw you running around barefoot out there.”

“I’ve got some somewhere,” she admitted. “I don’t wear shoes if I can help it. I haven’t worn shoes all summer, and I’ve been getting in five miles a day or more running barefoot.”

“You really should wear them,” Mrs. Halloran said. “They do protect your feet.”

“They’re hot and heavy and uncomfortable,” Kayla protested. “On top of that, they slow me down.”

“I think Megan was right,” Mrs. Halloran smiled, “you’re weird. But thanks anyway.”

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