Daniella and I walked into her backyard. Tall pine trees lined the skyline, and the grass matched their shade in green. Near the pine trees, a large hammock was suspended between two wooden poles. The patio of a large, glistening swimming pool hugged the back of the house. It was my first time seeing Daniella's backyard in person; I had seen it in photographs of the numerous pool parties that her parents were know for throwing every summer, including the annual pool party on Memorial Day.
Today, however, there were only the two of us in her backyard. I had swim trunks on, and Daniella was wearing a light green swimsuit that moderately covered her body. She had pretty, red hair that ended a bit below her shoulders, and her skin was completely white all over. A few light freckles dotted her face. Her nose was pleasingly round, and her lips were pretty average. At times, you could make out the faint outline of a circle on her lips; I knew that the coloration was from playing the trumpet. Above her deep, dark eyes, her eyebrows always sat in a slightly raised position, as if she was always prompting you for an answer when she spoke to you. Although her ears were hidden behind her hair, I could see that she had small, ring-shaped earrings on.
We aren't girlfriend and boyfriend; our friendship is totally platonic, and we would never hold hands or kiss each other on the lips. Even though I am not sexually attracted to her and she doesn't take my breath away or make me weak in the knees, I still find her very beautiful. She accidentally became friends with me when she coached me on how to talk to this other girl a few months ago; since then, our conversations moved to a number of other topics, some of which I can't repeat here without having to change the content rating in the options.
I was just visiting Daniella on a hot summer day. She and I talk a lot on the Internet, but our high school schedules prevent us from seeing each other much in person during the school year. This was an opportunity to have a real chat without the limitations or inefficiency of non-face-to-face communication. We sat down on the edge of the pool and started talking about our lives and our plans for the future, and we let our feet dangle in the water.
Over the course of the next half an hour, we somehow moved from the pool all the way across the lawn to the large hammock on the far side of Daniella's backyard. Neither one of us can remember what we were talking about that got us there, but we somehow ended up next to each other on the hammock. Now, in case that you have never seen a hammock, it's basically a rectangular cloth with cables attached to the short ends. The other ends of the cables are then attached to two points above the ground, thus suspending the cloth in a way that makes the edges curve up from the middle when there is a weight on it. Daniella's hammock didn't have the horizontal bars that help to flatten the cloth out, so when she and I got in it, the cloth immediately started pressing our bodies against each other.
She and I didn't mind being that close to each other; we were two very close friends who trusted each other enough to lie down together. Eventually, our conversation smoldered into a tranquil silence, and we simply relaxed our muscles and rested, shoulder to shoulder, in the hammock, staring up at the expansive, blue sky with the sunlight shining down around us.
Suddenly, she sat up. "Oh, gosh," she started, "the sun's out."
She got out of the hammock, disappeared for a few minutes, and then returned. She got back into the hammock with me. A distinctive smell reached my nose, and my arm, abdomen, and leg rubbed against a slick, oily liquid on her body. I could tell that she had put on sunscreen to protect her white skin. (Well, at least, I was 99% sure that it was sunscreen. I don't know what else it could have been.) Daniella started to squirm; only then did she realize how sunscreen would feel between two bodies.
More time passed. Our conversation was broken into short bursts of excitement when one of us thought of something to talk about. After a few exchanges, thin clouds move overhead in the sky and dimmed the sunlight slightly. The color balance in my vision shifted towards a less vibrant, less saturated mixture. The sky became painted with clouds, and the trees and grass became darker.
