The Gulf Coast Move

While this story draws on some real experiences, it is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any real person or institution is coincidental and unintentional.

*****

It was one of those moments when you think "yes, things have worked out pretty well." My wife, Carol, my daughter Gwendolyn, and I were standing outside our newly-built home on a barrier island on the Florida Gulf Coast. We were actually moving in to a small piece of paradise. We would learn what was on offer in that paradise, and a great deal about ourselves, in the coming months.

Carol and I had met in college. Despite being a second-string football player (scholarship you know), I managed to get a BS in electrical engineering and computer science. Carol got her degree in economics. We both stayed on. I got my Master's in EE while Carol got an MBA. I got a job with a small tech firm in the Midwest. Carol was from the East Coast and had a job offer from a big name New York investment bank. Instead, she took a job with a much smaller venture capital firm to stay in the same city with me. While most of Carol's decisions are patently sensible, I've never really understood her thinking behind that one.

Carol and I got married a year out of grad school. Not long after that, I started playing around in my spare time trying to devise solutions to some technical issues I was seeing at work. Due, probably, more to luck than skill, I found solutions. Carol's advice was not to simply turn my spare-time work, funded with our money, over to my employer but to monetize it myself. Thus, at age 26, Carol and I became entrepreneurs.

Due primarily to Carol's business and marketing skill, several companies started buying my products. Seemingly satisfied with those, I began getting requests to devise solutions to other problems and to devise ways to improve upon the technology my clients already had in place. While not 100% successful in fulfilling those requests, I did succeed on far more than I failed on. Again, due to Carol, more companies began buying my solutions and my support. We worked like dogs, but, in ten years we had a real company with enough revenue to support 50 highly qualified employees and we no longer worried about how to pay our bills.

Early on in our efforts to build our company, I added to Carol's burdens by getting her pregnant. Gwen was born when we were both in our late 20's. She sort of grew up with our company.

Carol is about 5'5" and, while not petite, is slender. Despite teasing me for being a dumb jock, Carol has always stayed in shape. Her figure is not imposing, but is perfectly proportional. Her face, framed by her brown hair, ranges from beautiful in repose to exquisite when she smiles. Gwen inherited her mother's face and proportional figure, but has it a bit more on my scale. Gwen is simply a bit bigger in the chest, shoulders, and hips than her mother. Both women are beautiful. Based only on seeing the two walk past, you would probably conclude that Gwen is sexier.

By the time Gwen had turned 18 and graduated from high school, both she and the company had grown up very well indeed. Gwen was a beautiful young woman. She had been a moderately successful diver and tennis player in high school and graduated second in her class. She had also been accepted to college at our alma mater, which had become much more selective since it gave me degrees. The company had grown to around 150 people split between an office in the Midwest and one in Silicon Valley. During Gwen's junior year in high school, a much larger, worldwide, tech company offered to buy us. The offer was way, way too good to refuse.

Carol and I found ourselves, in our late 40's, financially set for life with our child about to fly the nest. Carol decided that this was the time for us to relocate to a place where we could worry about a hurricane every decade or so instead of multiple blizzards per year. I wasn't really thrilled about leaving the Midwest, but Carol had left her part of the country for me so I figured that I owed her.

With Carol's usual very systematic approach to major decisions, we looked into a number of warm-weather areas domestically and elsewhere. For a number of reasons, we decided on the Florida Gulf Coast, not the least being that Tampa and Ft. Myers were both reasonable duration plane flights from where Gwen would be in college. We made several trips to the region before we found a reasonably-sized lot with an older, poorly maintained, house for sale on the Gulf side of a barrier island. The land was expensive and the old house would have to be replaced, but we could now afford it.

We wanted Gwen to finish high school where she was. Gwen graduated at the end of May. We took occupancy of the new house a week later. Gwen struggled with leaving her high school friends two months earlier than necessary, but the lure of beach and pool won out.

Our new house had neighbors on both sides. However, as seemed customary on the island, the lot had been landscaped so that you did not see the neighboring houses or the road. We added to the existing landscaping added some landward of the dunes to screen our pool and patio. The beach was public property. Having walked the beach several times before, we saw that our neighbors had done the same thing.

Carol and I had been down to see to finish items several times that spring. However, Gwen had been in school and had last seen the new house just as the framing was being completed. It was largely a surprise to her.

We parked our two cars in the ground level garage and carried our bags into the new house. The moving vans (yes, plural) were due later that day and the next. Carol and I were quietly pleased. Gwen walked from room to room making exclamations of approval.

Back in the central hall, Gwen asked, teasingly, "Why did you guys wait until I'm leaving for college to build this?"

"So you'd have some place warm to come on breaks," Carol replied.

Gwen stepped out onto the back patio and looked it and the pool over. "This is wonderful," she said. "I can't see another house. I can lay out here and work on my allover tan."

"Not so fast, young lady," Carol replied. I figured that my daughter talking about getting an allover tan was not a conversation which I should join.

The move went more smoothly than I expected. We spent the following week getting our things situated in the house "just right" and learning the important facts about our new neighborhood: where to get good wine and the best fresh fish. It was hard not to fall into "vacation mode" on the island so we were not working too hard.

Since we could not see the entrance to our driveway at the road from our new house, we had installed a sensor at the end of the drive. Anyone determined to get past it undetected could, but it set off a buzzer in the house if a car pulled in. That buzzer went off around 4:00 p.m. on our first Friday in the house.

The buzzer was a surprise since we did not know anyone on the island or the adjacent mainland. Carol and I both went to the front door to see who was coming in. We saw a new Mercedes convertible with the top down and two people inside. The car stopped. A man and woman got out and rang our doorbell.

I opened the door to an attractive couple who were, I guessed, a few years younger than us. The man was about Carol's height, with short dark hair and a deep tan. He had the thin and ultra fit look of a distance runner. His face created showed intelligence. The woman was about the same height as the man. She was blonde and also had a deep tan. She was also looked very fit but a bit more solidly built than her companion. Her face was more towards cute than beautiful.

As I opened the door, the man extended his hand. "Hello neighbor," he said. "I'm Ian Woods and this is my wife Kirsten. We live over there." The man gestured towards the house that I knew to be just north of ours but which I could not see.

"We knew, of course, that someone was building a new house here and we saw a moving van last weekend," Kirsten said. "We thought that we should come over and introduce ourselves."

"Thank you. Please come in," Carol said.

"I'm Harry Stone and this is my wife Carol. Our daughter Gwen is around here somewhere."

Ian's brow furrowed slightly. "Not the Harry and Carol Stone of...?" he asked, giving the name of our company (which I'm not allowed to use anymore).

"The same," I said smiling. "You have me a bit worried though if our reputation has preceded us."

"Oh no," Ian replied. "A big part of my business is cyber security. Some of my clients use some of your products." Gesturing at the house, Ian added, "I infer that the story that you cashed out in a big way was true."

"Close enough," I said, showing my Midwestern reticence about discussing personal wealth.

"May we see what you've built?" Kirsten asked.

"My pleasure," Carol replied.

We showed Kirsten and Ian around the house and the back patio/pool area. Gwen swooped in long enough to be introduced. The tour ended in the kitchen/breakfast area. Since it was about that time of day, I offered Kirsten and Ian a drink. They both expressed gratitude for glasses of wine. I poured four glasses of an Italian red and we sat and listened to Ian and Kirsten tell us about living on the island for about 45 minutes.

Kirsten and Ian were both, to my perception, intelligent and articulate. Each of them also had a quality that I can best describe as charisma. You found yourself liking them and trusting them.

Finally, Kirsten said, "I'm sorry. We're probably keeping your from your dinner. Ian we shouldn't intrude any longer."

Ian responded, "I forgot something. Back in a moment." He went and was back quickly carrying a bottle of wine. He handed it to Carol and said, "A housewarming gift." Carol and I thanked them.

As they were standing to leave, Kirsten said, "We thought it would be nice to have a little cookout by the pool to welcome you to the island. Just us and our son Jason who's home for a short while. Say next Saturday at 6:00? Would you, and bring Gwen?"

Carol looked at me. I nodded. "We'd love to," Carol responded. "Thank you very much."

As Kirsten and Ian started down our front steps, Kirsten turned and said, "Oh, I should warn you: we never wear anything in or around our pool. I hope that doesn't scare you off." Without waiting for any response from us, Kirsten and Ian got into their car and drove off.

Carol and I went back inside. "They seem like very nice people," Carol said, "but that last bit was odd."

Gwen had come into the foyer. "What was odd?" she asked.

"Kirsten and Ian invited us to their house for a cookout by their pool," Carol said. "That was nice enough, but, just as they were leaving, Kirsten said that they don't wear clothes around their pool."

"Are we going?" Gwen asked.

Carol looked at me. "I don't know," she said.

"The going naked part threw me," I conceded. "However, they didn't ask us to. As your mother said, they seem like nice and otherwise reasonable people. Part of me doesn't want to be seen as rude to the first people here who have reached out to us."

"If we go, are we going to be naked?" Gwen asked.

"Like your father said," Carol responded, "they didn't ask us to go naked. They just said that they do and that they hoped that didn't scare us off. Do you want to go naked?"

Gwen did not immediately respond to Carol's question. I could see some nervousness in her face. Whether that was over the idea of being naked in front of strangers or in front of Carol and me I didn't know. By tacit mutual consent, Carol, Gwen, and I tabled a decision on whether to go to the Woods'.

I didn't think of Carol or myself as prudes. We had a pretty active sex life exclusively with each other. Carol and I enjoyed being naked together, but we'd not gone naked with anyone else since a little drunken skinny dipping during undergrad. I certainly hadn't seen Gwen naked since I'd changed her diapers.

Carol brought the subject back up over dinner that Wednesday. "Kirsten and Ian think that we're coming Saturday," she said. "If we're backing out, we simply must tell them."

"I want to make friends down here," I said, "they they mostly seem like good people. I'm just not sure about spending an evening with Kirsten, Ian, and their son walking around naked."

"Son?" Gwen asked.

"Yes, their son is with them for a while," Carol replied. "They said he goes to school in Boston and is working on some research for a professor over the summer. The professor went to Europe for a month, so Jason came to stay with his parents."

"I'm more interested," Gwen said. Gwen had dated a boy semi-seriously through her sophomore and junior years of high school. The relationship cooled during her senior year. Gwen said that she was backing it down in preparation for the split up when they went off to college.

"I suppose," Carol said, "that we could go and leave our clothes on. If it gets uncomfortable, we can make-up an excuse and leave."

"I like that idea," Gwen said. "I'm curious and I know that we're, sort of, starting a new life here. I'm just not sure that I'm ready to be naked in front of the Woods or them." We adopted Carol's plan.

Since it was a pool party, I wore a tee shirt over a pair of the long, baggy trunks. Carol wore a sleek one-piece under a beach cover-up. Gwen wore a fairly conservative bikini and a cover-up. The three of us walked down our drive to the road, up the road a couple hundred yards, and up the Woods' drive to their front door.

Ian answered the door and was, indeed, naked. "You should have come up the beach and just walked over the dunes to our pool," he said pleasantly.

"Well, having not been here before, that seemed too familiar," I said.

"No problem!" Ian said. "Kirsten's out back. Jason's upstairs working on something. He'll be down in a bit. Come on back"

We followed Ian's bare ass through the Woods' house. Ian's nudity confirmed my initial impression of a very fit, compact man.

As we walked out onto the, Kirsten turned from what she was doing to face us. "Good evening. I'm so glad that you came. Can I get you all something to drink?"

Seeing Kirsten nude was astonishing. Clothed, she was attractive; naked, she was beautiful. I was looking her up and down before I even realized it. I quickly averted my eyes.

"It's ok to look Harry," Kirsten said. "If I'm intentionally nude in front of you, I'm giving consent for you to look. Being looked at is part of the fun of going nude. Now, what would you like to drink?"

Kirsten got the three of us drinks. (We allowed Gwen to drink, moderately, in our presence.) Ian asked, "Would you like to get undressed?" When none of the three of us said anything nor made any move to strip off, Ian said, "No? That's cool."

We sipped our drinks and talked about everything except Kirsten's and Ian's nudity while they started on grilling the dinner. Over her shoulder, Kirsten said, "Please, feel free to use the pool."

It was a warm evening. Gwen took off her cover-up, went to the pool, and gracefully dove in. Carol took off her cover-up and walked down the steps in the shallower end. Ian and Kirsten had both been watching Gwen and Carol. "You have a very beautiful wife and daughter," Ian said to me.

"Thanks," I said. "We're lucky that Gwen seems to have gotten mostly Carol's genes instead of mine."

Kirsten turned towards me, giving me another view of a firm abdomen and one firm, perfectly-shaped breast. "You're not being fair to yourself Harry," she said. "You're a very attractive man. Gwen is very beautiful and I see a lot of you in her." I glanced at Ian, who seemed pleased at his wife's compliment to me.

Carol and Gwen swam a few laps while I stood chatting with Kirsten and Ian. Kirsten had said that it was ok to look. Gwen was pushing herself out of the pool when we heard a fairly deep male voice say, "Mom, Dan, anything I can help with?"

Looking towards the house, I saw a dark-haired young man walking out. He was slightly taller than me, although obviously lighter. He has the male swimmer build: broad shoulders tapering to narrow waist and hips. He was tan, although not as deeply tan as Kirsten and Ian. He was also naked. Because of that, the first thing I really noticed was his impressive dick, long and thick. Glancing at Carol and Gwen, I knew that they had noticed too.

Kirsten introduced us. Jason walked over to me and extended his hand. As we shook hands, Jason said, "It is a pleasure to meet you Mr. Stone."

"Likewise," I said, "and please call me Harry."

Jason went to Gwen and extended his hand. Gwen shook his hand while very noticeably looking him over. Jason had to have noticed but was unfazed. "Good evening Miss Stone, thank you for coming," Jason said.

"It's Gwen, and I'm pleased to be here," Gwen responded.

Carol had gotten out of the pool. Jason went to her, extended his hand and said, "Good evening Mrs. Stone. I'm glad that you came."

Carol was looking Jason over too, although not as blatantly as Gwen had. Knowing Carol, I was pretty sure that she was enjoying what she was seeing. Carol thanked Jason and added, "I'd prefer that you call me Carol."

Kirsten, Ian, and Jason prepared and served an excellent meal. Jason added intelligently to the conversation. Like his parents, had subtle charisma and magnetism.

A fair amount of wine was consumed with dinner. That, and the fact that the Woods just naturally put you at ease, led Carol to address the elephant on the patio.

"Why do you not wear clothes and aren't you uncomfortable being naked around clothed people?" Carol asked.

"To answer your second question first," Ian said, "the simple answer is 'no.'"

"Being nude around people who are dressed heightens my sense of being nude and exposed, which I find very pleasurable," Kirsten added.

"I'm not going to explain this well," Jason said, "but, when I'm naked around people who are clothed, it's like I have a privilege which you don't. I don't have any clothes on. You do."

"The answer to your first question is multi-faceted," Kirsten said. "On one level, not having any clothes on is simply more comfortable, especially in a hot climate such as we have here. The feeling of the sun and breeze on my bare skin is exquisite. Once you have swum in the nude, you will never, ever want to swim wearing anything again."

"And the other level, Dear?" Ian asked with a smile.

Kirsten smiled back. "The other level is that I take pleasure in having people see those parts of my body that most people think should be concealed. The human body is the highest art." Kirsten stood up and pushed her chair back a small ways with her leg. Facing us, she said, "I've put a lot of work into my body. This may sound conceited, but I think that I look pretty good and I'm proud of my body. All of it." Kirsten then turned around so that her back was to us. She spread her legs slightly and bent way forward, exposing herself fully.

As Kirsten straightened up and turned back to us, Carol surprised me by saying, "Yes. You are correct. You are a very beautiful woman."

I glanced at Gwen to gauge her reaction to Kirsten's exposure. I doubt that she saw it. She and Jason were having their own conversation. Gwen was leaning forward looking, I imagine, at Jason's dick. She had put her cover-up over the back of her chair. Gwen still had her bikini on. However, leaning forward as she, she was giving Jason a good look at some very nice cleavage.

"Are all of your friends nudists?" Carol asked.

"Not all," Ian replied. "The preferred term today is 'naturist' although I can't tell you what the difference is. We have a few friends who come over knowing that we will be nude and who stay clothed. We certainly try to encourage the people with whom we want to be close to go nude."