Chapter 11

Bethany and I soaked up the sun after Mark ran off to play volleyball for a while. We lay next to each other with our pinkies linked and sometimes she’d squeeze my finger. Eventually we got sweaty and decided to go swim for a bit.

As soon as we hit the cold surf, we splashed each other and squealed as we waded in deeper. Once we got about up to our necks Bethany swam over to me and grabbed on. We were in the trough of a wave and invisible from the shore, when she gave me a salty kiss. I kissed back running my hands up her back to hold her closer.

“This is fun,” she laughed as a wave lifted us up.

“Yeah, but I’m getting hungry. I wonder what they have to eat back at the house?”

“You can eat me,” Bethany suggested with another kiss.

“Count on it,” I said as I gazed into her gorgeous blue eyes. “At some point this weekend I’m definitely gonna have some of my Bee’s honey.”

“Good,” she laughed and ground her mons against mine. I reached down and cupped her ass to tickle from underneath.

“Don’t you get sand in my crotch,” she warned with a grin and pushed away to swim. “Race you back?”

“You’re on!”

We both body surfed back as far as we could, then ran through the shallow waves to the beach. We were out of breath and laughing like idiots when we got out. The current had pushed us closer to the volleyball game, so we wrung out our hair and wandered up to watch.

Most of the guys were fairly athletic and their sweaty muscles made me tingle all over. Bethany’s smirk indicated she enjoyed the view as well. Joe and Mark were on the same side with a few guys I didn’t know. The other side was jock central, with Dan Smith and Zack Harrington leading the pack. Both guys had bad reputations with all the girls I knew; bad attitudes, selfish lovers, and stuck up as hell.

“Five serving three”, Dan yelled. He clubbed the volleyball straight overhead, missing the top of the net by inches. One of the guys in back jumped up to bump the ball up to the front. Joe finger-tipped a perfect set, then Mark spiked it right down on the opposite side of the net.

“Mine,” Zack called as he dove. He barely managed to dig the ball off the sand and get it up to the net. Another guy tried to spike it down and had both Joe and Mark up at the net blocking his shot.

“I love how the muscles flex when they jump,” Bethany whispered to me.

Most of the guys were shirtless and wearing board shorts, but a few daring guys had on tight swimsuits that left nothing to the imagination.

“I’m suddenly craving hot dogs and bananas,” I whispered back in a deadpan.

Bethany cracked up and pulled my arm. “Come on, I think you’re delirious from hunger.”

We made our way back to our towels, slipped on our flip-flops, and gathered our things. The soft sand made the walking difficult, but we made it to the back patio of the beach house. A few of the pep Nazis were hanging out on lounge chairs catching the rays, but barely cracked an eye at us walking by.

The kitchen had six large coolers full of drinks on the counters, a keg in a black trashcan full of ice, and the fridge was full of submarine sandwiches that had been sliced into three inch sections. After we stashed our beach bags under the stairs, we went into the kitchen to wash up and make some lunch.

We took our paper plates full of sandwich slices and chips to the kitchen table and sat to eat when the whole mob from the beach hustled through the back door.

Most of the guys lined up at the keg and most of the girls went for the coolers full of sodas and fruity alcoholic drinks. No one I knew was old enough to drink legally and many weren’t even old enough to drive. Bethany and I raised our bottles of water up to toast not being idiots.

Dan and Zack came over to the kitchen table with a red cup of keg beer in one hand and a slice of submarine sandwich in the other. They were laughing at something and dropping bits of lettuce and tomato on the tile floor. Then they saw us.

“Hey man, check this out. Fresh meat!” Dan dragged a chair out and spun it around to sit backwards, spilling even more of his sandwich on the table.

“Hey Bethany, check this out” I mocked him. “Drunk assholes.”

A few of the other people in the room heard the exchange and busted out laughing.

Dan flushed and frowned, but I couldn’t stop my smart mouth. I smiled sweetly and said, “I just call ‘em like I see ‘em.”

“A smart ass like you needs someone to fu—”

“To what, Dan?” Joe growled from just over Dan’s shoulder. “Tell me what my little sister needs someone to do.”

“She needs to watch her mouth,” he said and pushed away from the table, leaving his sandwich mess but taking his beer. Zack shrugged and left with an amused smirk.

“Stay away from them,” Joe said to me with a frown. “I’m serious, Steph.”

“We were here first,” I said with a dismissive wave.

“Just be careful,” Mark said as he sat down across from me, taking Zack’s seat to eat his sandwich and drink his beer.

“Look,” Joe said as he took Dan’s seat. “Things are gonna get wild tonight. There’s way more liquor than I thought there’d be. Usually it’s a case of beer and a bonfire on the beach. I have no idea how Sophie pulled this one off.”

I raised my water bottle. “Not a problem for me.”

“No, it is a problem because of assholes like Dan. Drunk and stupid are a bad combination.” Joe sighed and looked over at Mark for a moment. “It’s not worth bailing yet, but I don’t want either of you going off alone without either Mark or me coming with you.”

That pissed me off. I knew he was just looking out for me so I let it slide. “I promise. After lunch we’re gonna go back and hang out on the beach for a while. If we go for a walk or come back to the house, we’ll drag one of you along.”

“When they light up the bonfire tonight it’ll be easy to get lost in the crowd. Can you please hang close to one of us? I know Mark doesn’t want Sophie dragging him off anyway, so maybe you two just hang out with him. You cool with that, man?”

“Uh, sure,” Mark said without quite meeting Joe’s eyes. “Not a problem.” How he said that with a straight face, I’ll never know.

I froze my expression to keep my excitement hidden. “Yes, Joe, I promise we will stay with Mark all night long.”

“Good,” Joe sighed and took a bite of his sandwich.

Mark’s eyes met mine and I could see the wheels spinning. Bethany clamped her fingers around my knee under the table. It was going to work out. Holy shit!

After lunch, Mark followed us back to the beach. We’d had enough sun for the day, so he grabbed one of the large folding beach umbrellas and used his manly muscles to make a little shade for us so we could watch him play volleyball.

At one point later on Sophie called for a coed game, so Bethany and I took off our cover-ups, put on some more sunscreen, and bounced in to play on the girls’ team.

I noticed Mark watched us both closely, but wasn’t obvious about it. He didn’t want to blow his cover as our secret boyfriend, but I was pleased he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off my puffies and Bethany’s apple ass despite all the older girls around us.

Unfortunately, Dan kept looking at me as well. I didn’t enjoy the way he smiled at me at all. Mark was always kind to me, even before I kissed him. He looked out for me and treated me like I was a person. Dan just made me feel dirty.

The guys clearly had the advantage of height and strength, but we worked together better to cover our zones. And none of us were testosterone inspired show-offs like Dan and Zack.

The game went back and forth with the guys colliding as they demonstrated their masculine superiority. Our team kept to our zones, called out when we had the ball, and only lost if the guys spiked too hard for us to dig the ball out. Sophie grumbled about that and Joe called on his team to take it easy, but Dan kept spiking hard, especially when I rotated to the front.