Unlike previous stories I have posted here, this one is not entirely factual. The events unfolded as described here up until a certain point, but did not go quite as far as the story takes them. Wish they, had, tough. Names, of course, have been changed to protect myself. Note: This story includes male and female homosexuality/bisexuality, so if that isn't your bag, please move on.
* * *
Things were different then.
We were all younger, and more energetic, and more willing to explore and experiment. We had grown out of the stage where we were all intimidated by the new and the unknown, and hadn't yet grown into the stage where we knew precisely what we liked, and don't vary from it much.
A bunch of us -- pretty good friends -- all hung out with each other. Every Saturday night, we played games. Board games, card games, role-playing games, and we had found that the games were (mostly) an excuse for us to hang out together. Of course, the RPG's were the majority of our gaming -- they allowed us almost unlimited creativity, and made us use parts of our minds that we didn't get much excuse to play with in real life. And we meshed pretty well as a group.
There were six of us in the group -- our 'leader' (less because we had elected him than his just being a natural leader and a complete game fanatic) was Andy, who was openly gay, but not blatant. He could have fit in with any military force I'd ever been in (several during my tours), and the only way anyone knew he was gay was by watching him and his boyfriend, or by asking. He was almost 6 feet tall, with sandy blonde hair and grey eyes and a ready smile.
Spence and Patsie were a married couple. Spence was smart but quiet, and Patsie was vivacious and energetic, and if Andy was the brain of the group, Patsie was its heart. She figured out things she wanted to do, and Spence made them work. He worked out the practical aspects of the things we had to do -- making sure there was enough food and drink for everyone, mostly, but also looking after paper and pens and rule books and that kind of thing. He was about 5'9", with dark hair and eyes, and had some sort of office job. She got us into gaming conventions. She planned cookouts. She was about 5'7" with red hair (whose shade changed constantly) and green eyes. She and I had intense chemistry, but because she was married we were fighting it ... though we still flirted outrageously. And he put up with it because he wanted to keep her around.
Chrissy was the other female in the group. She was Hollywood starlet beautiful, raven haired and dark eyed, and
very
self-conscious about it. She was about 5'4" with a curvy but firm shape, and legs that went on for
days
. She'd made it clear from the start that she was in the group for the company and the mental stimulation, and was not even vaguely interested in dating anyone there.
Danny was Andy's polar opposite. He was the only one in the group who was not in decent or better shape, and he was blatantly, flagrantly gay. He was a little over six feet tall, but about 25 pounds overweight, and often scruffy, with dark stubble. His RPG characters were always bizarre or extreme in one way or another and he loved to flaunt how he broke the rules, but deep down he was always a coward -- he wanted to look bold, but never took the steps needed to really step outside of the box.
And I was the newcomer. I'd been with the group for only a year and a bit. I'd learned RPG's in the service (several different definitions of them), and once I got out, I looked around to find a group I could continue play with, and found these people. I was, at that time, 5'10", on the thin side, with shoulder length black hair (my reaction to getting out of the navy after 10 years) and hazel eyes.
So one weekend, Patsie said she had a friend who had a cabin up in the desert near Palm Springs, and she'd asked him if we could use the cabin for a weekend. Get out of our rut. Do something different. She also mentioned barbecuing and running around naked, and the only one of the group that even flinched at that was Danny, but he laughed it off as a joke.
So the second Saturday afternoon after that, we all met up at Danny's place, as it was our gaming central, and piled into two cars to caravan up to the desert. It was a drive of about two and a half hours, and we used Danny's car and Spence's, as they owned the cars that ran the best, and we reached the cabin at about six PM. As promised, it had a barbecue grill, a kitchen (with very little in the fridge) and one bedroom, but it also had a large, open-plan living room with a fireplace. While Danny and Chrissy and Andy tidied the place up and opened the windows to let in a breeze to cool it down (one thing it did not have was air conditioning), the rest of us drove into town and visited a grocery store to get food and drinks and ice and that sort of thing. We'd all brought beach towels and swim suits and sun block and a change of clothes, but not food, which would have cooked in the trunk of the cars anyway.
By the time we got back to the cabin, it was cool enough that we all changed into swimsuits. The grill had been fired up, so we cooked some burgers and chicken and made salads and stuck some ice cream into the freezer in the kitchen, and when we were done with the food we sat at the picnic table in the back yard and watched the sun set and marveled at the stars, which were almost invisible back in the city.
And then we went inside to get our game back on track. On regular weekends we generally met at around sunset and played until midnight, and I'd begun running an adventure two weeks before, so I'd brought my laptop computer along with my rule books, character sheets, dice, M&M's and all the rest. We set up our map board on the coffee table in the living room, topped off our drinks and bowls of munchies and resumed play where we'd left off the week before, shipwrecked on a haunted coast.
It didn't take long before we were doing battle with a variety of coastal monsters (giant crabs - Patsie commented that they probably went well with giant butter, and it was too bad we'd only grilled burgers), and apparently I was doing a fair job of keeping it active and exciting, because a half hour into play, Patsie looked across the room at me, dressed only in cutoffs and sandals, with my computer on my lap, and declared "Look at [me]! He looks like he's naked!"
Well, to be honest, all of us were lightly attired -- though cooler than it had been before, it was still in the mid 90's -- we were all wearing shorts, and the girls and Danny were wearing t-shirts, and I have to admit I had been taking advantage of that to picture the girls nude, but I hadn't imagined that anyone else had been doing the same thing to me. But everyone commented on my apparent nudity with laughs and cat-calls, and Danny said "Ooh, baby! I can see everything!"
Well, I was more than a bit warmed up by then anyway, so I reached down and slid my cutoffs off while keeping my laptop on my lap, and tossed the shorts across the room to Patsie.
"Here you go!" I said, and she cheered and squealed and waved them like a captured battle flag, scattering the contents of my pockets to the four winds.
The others laughed and cheered, except of course, for Danny, who felt I'd stepped over the line, and demanded that Patsie give me back my shorts. He grew very red in the face and very loud and did his best to kill the buzz, but we were having none of it.
"This is wrong!" he kept shouting. "We shouldn't be doing this!"
But Andy shut him down cold. "If you don't like it, you don't have to be here. But the rest of us are having fun, Patsie has been talking about running naked in the desert for the past two weeks, and the rest of us just don't have a problem with that."
Danny just sputtered and flailed around, and the rest of us laughed at him (including, I was happy to see, Patsie), and when we didn't knuckle under to him, grabbed his overnight bag and keys and stomped to his car and drove away.
"Well, that's better" said Andy.
"Can we kill his character off?" asked Patsie.
"I can do better than that" I answered. "I can have him captured by Ogres or something ... but none of your characters would let hat happen. That's the down side of not allowing evil characters in the game."
"Then what can we do? He is the only cleric in the game, and we need his healing skills."
"We can play some other game" volunteered Spence.
Everyone looked at Andy, as he was the real Game Master in the group, but he just shrugged. "I didn't bring anything else -- I thought we'd be headed up the coast, and didn't want to bring a heavy bag."
"I have a deck of cards in my bag" I said. "We could do something with those."
"We could," cooed Patsie. "Why don't you go over there and get them?"
She was obviously trying to get me to put my laptop away, but I wasn't quite ready for that yet. Though I have some very strong exhibitionist tendencies, I didn't want to be the only one in the group without clothes. I'd been taken advantage of before, and played for a fool, so I just looked around the room at the others, who were still mostly grinning. I turned off my computer, but kept it on my lap.
"All righty, then -- cards are out. What other games can we play?"
"Twenty questions?" suggested Patsie.
"Trivia?" suggested Spence.
"Truth or Dare!" suggested Andy, which got an almost universal "oooooooh!" in response.
"Strip Truth or Dare!" announced Patsie, to universal laughter and applause. The mood of the room had set since Danny left, and the party was determined to end up going where we had not even imagined before.
"Then please give me my shorts so I have something to bet with!" I laughed, and Patsie tossed them close enough to me that I could snag them, though not without leaning far enough to the side that all could see that I was still wearing my skivvies.
"Cheater!" she yelled, but I just smiled back.
"How do we start?" asked Patsie.
"It's usually done with spin-the-bottle or something, isn't it?" asked Spence, and then he looked around the room and saw that each of us was drinking from a can, none of which were empty yet.
