Nudist Cruise

by Hailey McPherson

  “風向轉變時,有人築牆,有人造風車,” he said to me.

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said.

  He pushed me down onto the floor and hovered over me. A long, slimy tongue came out of his mouth and licked me from my feet to my face, leaving a trail of slime on my body.

  “This is unacceptable,” I said as I grabbed his tongue and used it to pull myself to my feet. I stood in front of him with my hands defiantly on my hips. “If you want to fuck me, turn back into a person. Otherwise, I’m out of here.”

  I walked to the door of the banquet hall and opened it. I could not see anything beyond a bright light, and even though I was naked, I walked through.

  I woke up suddenly. It was one of those times when you are fully awake when you open your eyes. I knew exactly where I was and what just happened. I did not understand the dream, but I knew it was a dream and I did not like anything about it.

  I looked at Liam lying next to me in the bed and peeked at his naked body under the sheets. I thought I may have had the dream because he was trying to have sex with me while I was asleep and that was how my brain wanted to tell me what was going on, but Liam was soft and down for the night. He was also very much asleep. His mouth was open and he was making nasal breathing noises, almost snoring.

  I was too awake to go back to sleep right away, so I decided to take a walk. I was only wearing a short camisole and panties in bed but I did not want to get dressed, so I grabbed my sarong and sandals and left the cabin.

  The hallway was just as deserted as it had been earlier and I did not see or hear anyone on the way to the elevator. When the elevator doors opened, I almost got in but stopped and decided to go back to the cabin. In the cabin, I took off my camisole and walked back out into the hallway. I walked topless a few steps away from the cabin door and changed my mind again. In the cabin yet again, I took off my panties and went back out. None of my going in and out of the cabin had any effect on Liam’s sleep.

  I was naked on the way to the elevator except for the sarong around my waist and the sandals on my feet. As I waited for the elevator, I took off the sarong and stood there fully exposed. If someone had been in the elevator when the doors opened, they would have seen everything.

  “Why do I even have to wait for the elevator?” I asked myself. “Wasn’t it just here a minute ago?”

  There was no one in the elevator when it finally arrived and I got in. Once inside, I wrapped the sarong back around my waist.

  “Maybe it automatically goes down to the lobby,” I told myself. “Or maybe this is another dream.”

  It did not feel like a dream, but it did feel different. I was not sure what time it was, but I knew that it was the middle of the night. If Liam was asleep, it could not be long before dawn. The ship seemed exceptionally quiet, as if everyone on board was asleep except me.

  I went down to the promenade deck because that was a good place for a walk and I did not want to go up to any of the top decks. I was worried there might be people there. The promenade deck seemed safer this late at night. It felt like a ghost ship where I was, but on a ship this big you never know when you are going to run into other people.

  I did not see anyone while I walked topless on the deck. The ocean looked calm even though the ship was moving quickly. Since we left Hong Kong late, it was probably going at top speed.

  I stood at the railing and watched the dark ocean for a while. Anywhere else in the world and I would have been freezing, but the Chinese summer wind on my bare breasts and sneaking up my sarong was warm. It felt refreshing, and I was comfortable, mostly because the ship seemed completely deserted. So I took off the sarong and stood at the railing completely naked.

  “It’s funny,” I thought to myself. “If this was the middle of the day and the deck was full of people, there’s no way I’d be naked.” I looked around at the empty promenade deck. “But when there’s no one around, I’m ok with it.”

  I went back to walking on the deck. “Either way, I’m naked. So what’s the difference?”

  As if to answer my question, a couple walked out onto the deck toward me. They were walking hand in hand and just as naked as I was.

  “Oh, shit,” I said to myself. I might have said it out loud.

  I wanted to quickly wrap the sarong around my body and cover every inch, but the couple was facing me and I would have looked like an idiot scrambling to hide.

  As we approached each other, they said hello and I said hello back while trying not to die of embarrassment. They were not out on the deck in the middle of the night for conversation with strangers, so we all kept walking our different paths. I was thankful for that. Had they wanted to stop for small talk, I don’t know what I would have done.

  When they were out of sight, I wrapped the sarong around my body and hurried back to my cabin. Being seen completely naked by one couple was enough for one night. I was still not convinced that this was not a dream, but I was starting to get tired again.

  Chapter 17: Girlapalooza

  My second trip to a nude beach had nothing to do with Liam, which is a little surprising since anything related to public nudity is usually Liam’s idea.

  In July 2012 my friends Livia and Hiram wanted to go to the nude beach that Liam and I had gone to about a year earlier, but I could not tell them how to get to it. I’m still not sure how we got there with all the twists and turns we ended up taking.

  “I know it’s on the far end of Lantau Island,” I told Livia. “But that’s about it.”

  So Hiram got directions from Liam, but Liam was not entirely sure where it was either.

  “I’m not really sure where it is either,” Liam told Hiram.

  Summer is the rainy season in Hong Kong, and it rained more than usual in 2012. So Livia and Hiram decided to wait a few months for the typhoon season to end. Livia also usually has to work more in the summer.

  By the time the weather got better and Livia had more time, they were not sure if Hiram could go or not.

  “Usually whenever I work less, he works more,” Livia told me.

  She wanted me to go with them, but I did not want to get naked in front of Hiram and I did not think that Livia wanted him to get naked in front of me. She said that she would not mind. He had already been in various states of naked in front of me during the course of all three of us living together in a tiny Hong Kong apartment, but I could never really see much of anything. I have seen pretty much everything he has to offer now, but at the time I had not. If we all went to a nude beach, I was sure to see everything.

  Eventually she convinced me to go with them and I decided that I would just wear a bathing suit while they got naked. At that point, the odds were 50/50 that Hiram would even be able to go. I thought that if he did not go then maybe I would get naked, if it felt right at the time. Since that beach was completely empty when Liam and I went, I assumed that it would be empty this time. I was in for a surprise.

  It turned out that Hiram could not go. Livia and I decided to carry on and we borrowed a car from a friend of a friend of Hiram’s. I had to drive because it was a stick shift and Livia can only drive automatic transmissions.

  I’m really not a fan of driving in Hong Kong. They drive on the left side of the road and the steering wheel is on the right side of the car. Driving on the wrong side of the road is an easy enough adjustment. You simply follow everyone else. The streets are so crowded that there is always someone in front of you.

  Driving from the wrong side of the car is a little harder. Instead of shifting gears with your right hand, you use your left hand, but the clutch is still on the left. So instead of clutch left foot and shift right hand, it is clutch left foot and shift left hand. Just like a lot of things done the British way, it’s weird.

  Hong Kong traffic rules are also very different from American traffic rules.

  “The main rule in America is that you never hit anything,” I said to Livia.

  “In Canada, it’s that moose have t
he right of way,” Livia told me.

  In Minnesota, we are naturally courteous people, so we let others go first even when we have the right of way. The main rule in Hong Kong seems to be that everyone tries to go first all the time. Nobody has right of way and there is no such thing as courtesy.

  Hong Kong traffic is also much worse than Minneapolis traffic. I have driven Minneapolis to St. Paul during rush hour. That’s like a Sunday morning leisure drive compared to any day in Hong Kong. Minnesota driving is relaxing, with lakes and natural beauty. Hong Kong driving is frantic chaos. You can’t see any of the steel and concrete scenery because you have to watch out for all the people trying to crash into you.

  The good thing about driving in Hong Kong is that if you go far enough, you will be out of the city sooner or later. Kowloon is an urban jungle, but it is surrounded by mountains and parks. The New Territories are still more green than developed, and Lantau Island is almost all nature, with small bits and pieces of city.

  Getting to Lantau is fairly easy. There are three or four bridges from Kowloon to Tsing Yi and only one bridge from Tsing Yi to Lantau. You can’t miss it.

  Once you are on the island, it’s another story. The main street is designed to go to the airport and Disneyland. There are two smaller roads that cut through the island north and south, and another that covers the south side. Beyond that you have to take tiny rural routes, some less paved than others. The smaller the roads get, the fewer signs there are. Most of the streets in Hong Kong have signs in Chinese and English, but when you get to the tiny roads on Lantau, even Chinese signs are hard to find.

  “We should leave early in the morning so we’ll have enough time to spend at the beach and still be back before the traffic gets really bad,” I suggested to Livia.

  That was the plan anyway. It took us a lot longer to find the beach than we expected. Lantau is maybe twelve miles across, but we drove around it for hours. Eventually we found a dirt parking lot that looked like the same dirt parking lot from the last time I was at this beach, at least as far as I could tell.

  “Dirt parking lots all look the same to me,” I told Livia.

  We walked our way to the shore, and as soon as we reached the beach I could tell that we were at the right place. It was as beautiful, and deserted, as I remembered. We found a nice spot to make camp and Livia got naked pretty easily. The weather was good and no one else was around, so I followed her after I took a few minutes to get comfortable.

  When I told Liam about this later, I exaggerated how much sunscreen we put on each other. We did each other’s backs, but I made it sound more arousing than it really was. I told him about rubbing lotion on each other’s legs and stomachs then moving on to butts and boobs. Before I got too carried away, I admitted to him that my description of events were not entirely accurate. He liked hearing about us oiling up each other’s naked bodies anyway.

  After maybe half an hour of naked time on the beach, we heard someone coming closer. Two girls walked right up to us. I kind of casually covered myself with a towel while Livia just stayed naked. I’m not sure what the nude beach etiquette is in this situation, but I thought they could have easily stayed away from us. There was plenty of room on the beach. I’m a friendly person and I can understand introducing yourself in other settings, but it seems like a nude beach is a place where everybody keeps to their own personal space. I was wrong about that.

  The other girls both got naked right away. They were not shy at all. Right in the middle of small talk, they took off all their clothes in front of us. I did not want to be rude and move to another part of the beach, but it suddenly seemed out of place that I was the only person covering myself. Putting my clothes back on at that point would have been awkward.

  Pretty soon another girl came up to us. She did not seem to know the other girls, and she definitely did not know Livia and me, but she came right up to us just like the others had. She also got naked while introducing herself. I was still trying to get used to people getting naked right away, but this was a nude beach and I guess there is no point in going there if you are not going to get naked.

  I was still wondering what to do about covering myself while everyone else was naked when Livia said that she wanted to try out the water.

  “Let’s go swimming,” she suggested. “I bet it’s really warm.”

  It was October, but still very warm. It never gets cold in Hong Kong until December or January, and even then it is never particularly cold.

  The water in Victoria Harbour is gross. You could not pay me enough to swim in it, but the water looks pretty good around the outskirts of Lantau. Hong Kong rates the water quality at beaches and they will tell you if it is bad that month or season or however they do it. When Livia and I went into the water, that took care of my embarrassment. You can’t tell how naked someone is in the ocean from the beach.

  While we were in the water, some other girls came onto the beach. The first time I went to a nude beach, possibly this same beach, Liam and I were the only people there the entire time. No one else ever showed up. This time it was getting more and more crowded. They were all girls, which I suppose made me less uncomfortable than if there were guys, but it was still a lot more crowded than I would have preferred. Some of the girls got in the water with us. Most of them stayed on the beach. But every one of them got naked.

  At least everyone was no longer huddled around our stuff. As more girls arrived, there were more groups spread out all over the beach. By the time we got out of the water there were enough people on the beach, and all of them naked, that I was not feeling as self-conscious about being naked.

  “When everyone around you is naked, it’s not so weird to be naked yourself,” Livia decided.

  I think having clothes on in that situation would have made me feel more out of place than I did being naked, just like walking around the cruise ship with clothes on when everybody else is naked.

  When we walked out of the water and toward our towels and bags, I expected everyone to stare at me every step of the way. They did not because they were all just as naked as I was. I was not completely comfortable being naked in front of everyone, but it felt more natural the longer I was.

  While we were sitting in the sun, a girl came up to us and introduced herself.

  “Do you want to go somewhere more private?” she asked Livia.

  It was like I was not even there.

  It took both of us a while to figure out that she was hitting on Livia. That was when we both wondered why there were no guys there. Another girl told us that this was a field trip for an LGBT group in Hong Kong.

  “We’re surrounded by lesbians,” Livia told me.

  It was only after I got home that I thought about how much Liam would have loved this. A beach full of naked lesbians would be a jackpot fantasy for him.

  I don’t know much about lesbians, and even less about discrimination and equality laws in Hong Kong. I know that discrimination against people who are not Chinese is legal, or at least widely accepted. I know that it was illegal to be a gay man in Hong Kong until just recently, but being lesbian was never illegal. Gay marriage is still illegal, and if you are gay in Hong Kong, you probably don’t tell many people. I know a few guys who are probably gay, but they have never told me that they are. I have never heard about any violence against the gay community, but being gay is mostly frowned upon. People in Hong Kong are not the violent type no matter how alien or unusual they consider you and your people.

  “It probably takes a lot of balls to join a gay organization and march in parades,” I once told Liam.

  “I couldn’t do it,” he said.

  “That’s because yours are so small,” I replied.

  The lesbians at the nude beach were taking a big risk. Not only were they announcing that they were gay by being in their group and having a field trip, but they were doing it at a nude beach in Hong Kong, where public nudity is illegal. There was a mix of Chinese and white people. I assumed most of them
were foreigners. There was even a black girl. It is probably especially difficult to be a black lesbian in Hong Kong. You have three things going against you as far as Chinese patriarchy is concerned – you’re black, gay and, worst of all, a woman.

  Once we realized that we were in the middle of a lesbian field trip, I started to get offended by the girl who was hitting on Livia. How did she know we were not a couple? We were obviously there together, and if she assumed we were lesbians, why not assume we were a couple? And why hit on just Livia and not me?

  Once we realized where we were, it was more obvious that a lot of the casual conversations we were having was flirting and girls hitting on us. We could not see it at first because it never crossed our minds. When a guy I don’t know comes up to me out of nowhere and starts small talk, I assume he is trying to flirt. When a girl does it, I assume she is just making small talk. I have always known I could be wrong about the guys. They are not all trying to get laid all the time, after all. But now it turns out that I was sometimes wrong about the girls.

  One hairy girl came up to us and stood with one of her feet on a basket the way a guy would, trying to give us a clear view of her crotch, just the way a guy would. When I say she was hairy, I don’t just mean her big afro bush. It looked like a razor had never touched any part of her body. She was not the kind of lesbian about which Liam spends so much time fantasizing.

  “Yeah, smooth,” she said, looking down at us. “Just the way I like it.”

  I chose not to say anything, but I thought that if she likes it smooth then why not shell out a couple of bucks and get a Gillette. I guess she was the butch lesbian in the bunch. You need some diversity, otherwise everybody is the same, and where’s the fun in that?

  Another girl only talked to Livia and would not even look at me. I was not even there as far as she was concerned. More girls hit on Livia than me. Livia has blond hair and bigger breasts. She is prettier than I am by most definitions. Everyone says that she could easily be a model and she does, in fact, do a little part time modeling on the side. So I could understand why she was more popular. It never mattered anyway. None of them were going to get anything from us. I could see Livia maybe doing a little experimenting, but I have always been firmly in the I-like-penis camp.