Girl Gear 3: Bound to Happen (22 page)

As it was, she finished off a chunk of pineapple, licked her fingers clean, then shifted around to sit on one hip, making eye contact with each woman before asking, "Is there anyone here who hasn't had sex?"

A moment of silence. And then…

"You mean in our entire lives?" Kinsey asked, innocently disfiguring her fig. "Or while here on the island?"

There was one in every bunch. "While here on the island, smarty-pants."

Lauren frowned, bypassing the fruit she'd leaned forward to inspect and pouring herself another rum and Coke. "What kind of nosy question is that?"

Make that two smarty-pants. "What do you mean, what kind of nosy question? How many kinds of nosy questions are there? It's just nosy."

"You need to be more specific," Poe stated.

Two smarty-pants and now a troublemaker. "How can I possibly be more specific?"

"What, exactly, qualifies as sex?" Poe asked, intently considering the tines of the fork she held. "Are you specifically asking about intercourse? Or do you want to know about
any
bodily encounter? Say, kissing. Or grabbing hold of a tight male ass. And—" she pointed the fork toward
Sydney
"—why do you want to know?"

"As far as what qualifies as sex…"
Sydney
arched a brow, narrowed an eye. She should've known this wouldn't be easy. Especially with the fuzzy state of all of their brains. "I vote for any bodily encounter." She had to. What she and Ray had done in the pagoda definitely counted as sex. And, oh, what sex it had been!

"As for the why, well—" again she glanced at each of her friends "—I know one of you is having sex because I heard you. And it's been driving me crazy trying to figure out who it was. I don't know any of you the way I would need to know you to recognize your more, uh, intimate … giggles."

Spearing a tangerine wedge with her fork, Poe turned her gaze on
Sydney
. "You don't know any of us biblically, you mean."

As Poe poked the tangerine into her mouth, Lauren snorted. Then Kinsey giggled. Poe tried, but the sound was more of a throaty laugh.

What a bunch of goobers!
Sydney
shook her head.

"Pitiful, all of you. Pitiful and not even close. Try again. This time forget being silly. And you forget being such a
putz
," she said to Lauren. "All of you, try to imagine yourself in the throes of wild hedonistic passion. Maybe I can figure it out."

Kinsey huffed, Lauren puffed, Poe blew the house down. All four women dissolved into hysterics.

"Maybe it was a guy you heard giggling. Have you ever thought of that?"

Sydney
stopped to consider Kinsey's question and considered, too, the type of sound Ray made. He rarely made any. He came silently. As if it was important, he didn't reveal a hint of vulnerability. She frowned and wondered why she'd never realized that before.

And then she wondered what part of him might be that vulnerable.

"Yoo-hoo,
Sydney
?" Poe prodded.

And
Sydney
blinked. "No, it's not a guy. Guys don't giggle."

"Now, that's not exactly true," Kinsey said. "I once knew a guy who giggled. It wasn't a silly girlie type of giggle. It was more like he was laughing at being tickled." She shrugged. "I guess it's like that for some guys. Supersensitive to the touch once they come."

As fuzzy as she was,
Sydney
checked to be sure she was on the other woman's wavelength. "You're talking about…"

Kinsey nodded, reaching for her drink. "Their penis. The head, specifically. All those nerve endings and everything."

"Come to think of it, pardon the pun, I did date a guy like that a few years ago." Poe now had pineapple, mango and plum stacked on her fork. "He loved blow jobs, but he never would get off that way. My tongue was unbearably delicious. He said the pleasure was almost painful."

"Unbearably delicious? C'mon." Lauren snorted, then snorted again for good measure. "Guys think all sex is unbearably delicious. I don't think they could have sex without coming."

"Oh, oh, oh." Kinsey raised her hand. "I read this book once on erotica. And the guy had learned to hold off so long that when he finally let go, he said his orgasm felt like it was ripping him in half. Very sexy."

"Or very painful," Poe added.

Sydney
sighed, suddenly wishing Ray was here, instead of her girlfriends. Sexy was sounding very good, especially after yesterday's encounter. "Can you imagine being a man and never having a single worry that you were going to get off?"

Poe double-sighed. "I don't know which is worse. Holding back to make sure your partner comes, or holding back because you're afraid your partner will leave you hanging."

"Why would any woman hold back?" Lauren asked, her huffy attitude at full tilt. "I've never understood that. Unless, of course, her sexuality scares all of mankind."

Perking up at Lauren's tone of voice,
Sydney
swore she was going to get to the bottom of what was going on with Ms. Hollister. "I don't think all women are as uninhibited as you are lucky enough to be."

"And that is wrong. Wrong, I tell you. We should all stand up and demand our sexual rights." Poe got to her feet, wobbling until she caught her balance by grabbing the back of her chair. "Men should not be the only ones having fun. And, whoa, but I think I'm over the legal limit here."

"I don't think there's a legal limit on fruit, Poe," Kinsey said.

"There should be when you've absorbed more rum than fiber." Crossing her ankles, Poe sank to the floor of the deck.

"But back to
Sydney
's original question." Lauren had obviously been pondering the matter. "Why can't women be the aggressors? Why are men so sexually threatened by a woman who enjoys sex as much as they do?"

Oh, now this was interesting,
Sydney
mused. Was it possible that it was sex, of all things, coming between Lauren and Anton? "That was a question, Lauren. That wasn't an answer."

Lauren pouted. And, of course, huffed. "Haven't you ever heard of answering a question with a question?"

"Sure. When the question is an answer."
Sydney
speared another pineapple chunk. "All you did was raise more questions."

"You know, I really hate to be the dumbass here, but I didn't follow any of that," Poe said, now leaning on the seat of her lounger.

"Well, it makes sense if you think about it." Here was where
Sydney
needed to step carefully. "I asked who here had been having sex. And Lauren asked why women can't be the aggressors. Which automatically leads me to believe that Lauren has aggressed."

"Aggressed is not a word,
Sydney
." Kinsey upended her rum and Coke, frowning into the bottom of the empty glass.

"Well, it should be." On a roll now,
Sydney
pried further. "C'mon, Lauren. Time to fess up."

"Yes, as a matter of fact I have aggressed," Lauren admitted, not looking too happy about it at all.

Before
Sydney
could dig even deeper, Poe raised a hand and said, "Me, too," to which Kinsey replied, "Me, three."

Sydney
looked from one woman to the next to the next. "Wow. I'm either impressed or envious."

"Does that mean you and Ray aren't having sex? By your definition, of course," Poe asked with an amazing amount of impertinence for someone having trouble standing on her own two feet.

"Yeah. Time for you to fess up, sister." Of course Lauren was equally bossy and brusque.

"What about it,
Sydney
?" When Kinsey chimed in,
Sydney
knew the gig was up.

She sighed. "Me, four."

"We are
such
a bunch of sluts." Pushing back to her feet, Poe fluffed both hands through her hair. "
Whoo-hoo
!"

"We are not sluts." Lauren punctuated her protest by thumping her glass on the arm of her chair. "We are Women on Vacation."

Funny,
Sydney
mused, deciding that, fiber or no fiber, she, too, had reached her legal limit of rum-soaked fruit. "Women on Vacation. That sounds like it should be a movie title."

Kinsey was still pondering her glass. "An X-rated movie tit
l
e?"

"Either that or a documentary."
Sydney
frowned, realizing she hadn't made any progress whatsoever. "But I still haven't figured out who it was I heard on the balcony."

"Well, that's pretty obvious." Poe's hands went to her hips. "It was one of us."

All four started laughing.

"Do you think the guys are talking about sex?" Lauren asked with a faraway expression on her face.

The expression worried
Sydney
. She was really beginning to be afraid things for the couple had gone downhill. "You mean sex with any of us or sex in general?"

"I don't think guys talk about sex." That earned Kinsey a pelting of several chunks of fruit. "I mean, of course they talk about sex. But not the way we talk about sex. They don't talk about feelings. They talk about the way it … feels. All that ripe and plump and juicy and suction-as-hard-as-a-vacuum-hose talk."

"Vacuum hose, my ass." Poe was winding up into rare Poe form. "I, for one, think we should act just like guys and talk about all that hard and swollen staff. I mean, does anything feel better than getting your hands on a really hard body? All those muscles and ripples and bulges?"

"Yum-yum." Kinsey clapped. "That really did sound like something a guy would say. Good job, Poe."

Sydney
was starting to have way too much fun due to way too much rum. "I watched the guys playing beach Frisbee the other day. Unbelievable. Y'all should've gotten a look at those
pecs
and abs in action. Talk about drool!"

"Ooh, ooh." Kinsey hopped up and down in her seat. "Naked beach Frisbee. Now that's something I would love to see."

"I don't know," Lauren groused. "I'd think there'd be a lot of stuff wobbling around."

"But we're thinking like guys here, remember?"
Sydney
said. "Don't they like to watch body parts bounce?"

"They must because they do that bug-eyed thing any time they see a breast move." Poe took hold of the strings of her bikini top and set her chest to bouncing.

"Oh, no kidding," Lauren said, filling her glass again with even more rum and less Coke than before. "I think they prefer a good jiggle beneath a sweater more than a set of twirling pasties."

"I don't know." Kinsey shook her head. "Have you ever seen a group of guys at a strip club? They definitely seem to be under the impression that the less clothing, the more skin and, as much twirling they can get, the better."

"And how many strip clubs have you been to?"
Sydney
asked.

Kinsey's perky little nose went up in the air. "Enough to know I could do a better pole dance than half the strippers I've seen."

"C'mon, sweetie. Let's do it." Poe stepped up onto the seat of the cedar lounger and began to shake her booty to the reggae rhythm, a rhythm that called for more of a figure-eight swivel than anything.

Sydney
rescued the platter of fruit, the bottle of rum and the remaining soda cans from the table, moving them to the deck beneath before Kinsey climbed on top. The umbrella was open, so she stayed on her knees, instead of standing upright. And then, like Poe, Kinsey got into the music with a sensuous bump and grind against the pole.