BANG OUT

Nick got naked right away. Seriously. Within the first thirty seconds of walking into the bedroom, all of his clothes were off — Santa pants, Santa jacket, black Santa boots, and even the little Santa hat — all scattered across the floor. It was just Kate and Nick and his boner, which was not diminutive.

“There’s something you should know about me,” he breathed into Kate’s ear as he slipped his hands underneath her shirt. “I like to get naked. Right away.”

“You don’t say,” she mumbled drunkenly, looking over his freshly-revealed flesh in the dim, creamsicle-colored light from the street. “Hey, that’s not fair.” Now that all his clothes were off, Kate felt duped.

“What’s not fair?” he asked. He thumbed the button on her jeans and pushed it through the hole.

“You’re, like, all cut and shit,” she said. His giant biceps and sculpted chest looked too perfect, like George Micheal’s foam muscle suit in the first season of Arrested Development. Nick’s body was hard, thick with real muscle that cut deep lines into his abdomen and down the curve of his pelvic bone, even in the mostly-dark of Kate’s three AM bedroom. She crossed her arms over her naked chest, self-conscious of her fleshier flesh in the presence of Nick’s Adonis-like physique. “You’re all… muscle-y. And I’m not.”

He pushed her onto the bed then, sucking up her bottom lip, her left earlobe, her right nipple, halting any protest about the fact that his Santa costume was misleading — Kate had been under the impression that he was an average guy under all those clothes, but now she could see that he was muscular. Too muscular.

But he didn’t seem to agree. He seemed to like Kate’s body, and let his eyes run over it slowly when he lifted up the sheet and held himself in the plank position over her while he gazed, and gazed, and… gazed.

“Stop,” she finally said. “You’re letting all the cold in.”

Kate had never been a “naked” person. Even as a kid, she had feared the thought of her own funeral. Not because she was afraid to die, per se, but because the thought of the hospital staff or the mortician or the coroner seeing her exposed body was terrifying. At the age of ten she had committed to wearing nothing but black, to be prepared for her own funeral, just in case she died. She didn’t know, of course, that nudity was inevitable.

Eventually, Kate got older and acquired a raging set hormones that made her want to do things that generally required her to be naked, with men, and she found herself in a quandary: have sex or remain clothed? She would simply have to succumb, shed her clothes, and slink back into something immediately afterward.

Fortunately, one summer afternoon, Oprah offered a solution in the form of a guest: “I love being naked!” the woman gushed on national television, to a largely female audience who smiled at her with mixed awe and envy. The guest leaned forward to tell Oprah her secret. “It’s easy, really. You just have to practice. Take me for example — I didn’t always feel great without clothes on, so I just started taking them off more. I started vacuuming, doing laundry… really just picking up the household chores. Eventually, I was so used to it, I stopped even wanting to put clothes on. If I can love being nude, anyone can!”

So, the next time Kate noticed her floor needed vacuuming, she yanked her shirt off, flung her pants and underwear on the bed, and swished the vacuum around, for about three strokes. Then, she caught sight of herself in the mirror.

“Jesus.” She grabbed her cast-off clothes and scurried back into them like masturbating teenager, busted by Mom. And that was the end of Kate’s nudity practice.

It was this time-faded memory of Oprah’s pontificating nudist that Kate first thought of, oddly, when she was jolted from her leaden drunk-sleep the morning after San Francisco’s annual Santa pub crawl. She pushed Nick’s arm off of her body, but he pulled her back. “Where are you going?” he mumbled into her hair.

“To put some clothes on,” she said, liking but also not liking the feel of his thighs and calves, tangling between and around her own.

“You don’t need any clothes,” he said. “Go back to sleep.” He ran his fingertips over her stomach, trailing light patterns around her belly button. She felt her skin shrink away. Was it because it tickled? Or was it that she hated that part of her body? The bit that existed, say… just between her neck and her ankles?

“I can’t go back to sleep,” Kate said. “It’s late.” It was late — almost noon — so Nick pushed himself out of bed with a groan, but not before kissing Kate, seemingly not concerned at all with morning breath, the lingering stench of mass alcohol consumption, or any other post-drunken-hookup issues commonly cause for concern.

Kate pulled the blankets up around her body, tucking the edge of the sheet modestly over herself and leaned against the pillows. Despite her own bodily insecurities, she felt no shame in watching Nick while he sifted through the pile of discarded clothes on the floor. “Okay, boxers. Shirt? No, this is yours. Here’s mine. Okay, and where’re my pants? Oh, fuck. I have to walk home in this Santa costume.” He smiled up at her, sheepish, his thick arms resting against muscled thighs in his still-naked squat.

Kate smiled back at him, amused that he was embarrassed to walk home in a Santa costume, but seemed perfectly at ease with his junk bared and dangling, in the middle of a near-stranger’s bedroom. Maybe, she decided, she could be comfortable disrobed, too.

When the front door finally slammed shut and Nick was out of her house (and maybe her life), Kate threw the covers back and tiptoed across the carpet to the window. She drew the curtain back to watch Nick and his perfect body, now shrouded by Santa’s jolly red suit, meander up the street. “Santa baby,” she sang to his back, swaying her hips, daring him to turn around. He didn’t. There was a sharp whistle, though, and a catcall from some guy on the fire escape across the street: “Work it, baby, you know what daddy likes.” Mortified, she yanked the curtain shut and listened to his laughter, penetrating her single-paned window.