After Jack and I remade the bed, I woke up later and immediately ran upstairs to avoid further embarrassment with Jack. On the fourth floor overlooking the usual gray sky and matching dirty gray ocean, Brett was doing his usual pushups in a tank top he had found in one of the bedrooms belonging to one of the sons of the house who we presumed had come back for the holidays from med school (we deduced this by seeing a stethoscope under his bed). Brett invited me breathlessly over by the window where a clouded ray of light illuminated the room in a dim shade. His shirt was soaking with sweat and it wrapped around him, sticking to his rounded pecs and each of his eight abs. I had trouble gaining the energy to start my pushups because I was distracted by my hunger, and, plus, his heaving and breathing hot body was making me dizzy and faint. After three pushups, I collapsed to my stomach on the floor.

"What's wrong?" said Brett, walking on his hands and knees to crane his head over me when I rolled onto my back under his gaze on the floor. Brett said, "I thought you were starting to get really good at these exercises."

Brett, his hair wet and beads of warm sweat trickling down his forehead, jawline, and neck, looked like a lifeguard who was about to give me mouth to mouth. His lips were wet with salty sweat, and his lips were slightly parted as well. (When I was younger, I always thought sweat was gross, and I don't remember what age I was when sweat on a man suddenly turned into a simulative desire. It probably had to do something with hard work. . . or athletic abilities. . . or manly qualities. . . Or it's hormones.)

I don't know why I did what I did next, but it felt as though gravity, which always pulled me down, for an instant switched on itself, and pulled my hand upwards. My fingers daintily releasing up into space, pulled in by Brett tight mass, touched the lowest part of his set of abs, and all of a sudden, a slight drip of sweat from Brett's lips descended from his radiant face, and touched the very parting of my own lips, and I could taste the sweet salt, as I licked them instantly.

His eyes were wide as he contracted his stomach even harder while feeling my fingers, who now had lackadaisical minds of their own, stayed in their place feeling his lower stomach through his soaked shirt through the finger tips, and I lost sensation in my body as my head lit with a delirious spark but only a waning fire.

It took me a second for my fingers to stop moving, and they stayed in their place on his lower, rock-hard stomach. He raised an eyebrow at me, and a confused smolder appeared over his face.

But before Brett could say anything, I closed my eyes and my hand dropped back down from his stomach to mine, gravity regaining on me. I shook my head and frowned behind the darks of my eyelids. Trying to save my integrity, I remembered Jack, who was sleeping only one floor below us, and said, "I'm so hungry, I feel dizzy." After a moment of zero response from Brett, I opened my eyes again, but to find that Brett wasn't staring confusedly at my eyes anymore, but had dropped his eyes now, in a sudden hungry way that a man can at a piece of meat in an Argentinian restaurant, and his eyes wide open and haphazardly caged as though registering to control himself or take a hard bite or a nibble, were staring down at my chest, from breast to breast. I realized at that moment, I had come directly upstairs from Jack's designated room, in my white tank top and white short shorts, never having changed into something more descent, never having put on a bra, and my skin showed, possibly so did the rest of me as my breath became heavier as this physically powerful man made his decision over me, and my chest fluctuated under the thinnest white fabric like two breathing hills. Paralyzed, I simply listened to our hesitating breaths sync, as his hand moved suddenly off the ground, and onto my lower stomach. His hands were big and his fingers firm as they rode up over my rib cages, slowly up my shaking diaphragm, and up my sternum between both my breasts. And I could tell, as he felt the rising and falling, rising and falling of my breaths, that he was deciding right then and there while his fingers were together in a cup between both fleshy mounds, whether it was right, or whether it was worth it, to spread, and expand his fingers, and touch me.

His tongue was touching his lips, and then retreated back into the dark, when he closed his eyes for one meditative moment and listened as we both realized the consistent washing sound of the rolling waves outside the breezy window. His eyes still closed, I turned my head ninety degrees onto the soft white carpet, to find the white curtains blowing in the dim hue of the cloudy day, and I might have seen a plane or a seagull, but decided it was just mirage of want, that I wanted to be rescued, and that I felt I was losing myself to the waves of an uncertain path, and I felt a hot knot in my throat as I closed my eyes and thought about how I would have felt, if instead, Jack was upstairs here on his back, with a beautiful girl with her hand on his chest, and I was sleeping downstairs thinking he would never go against my back that way, dreaming dumbly that he was all mine, and nothing could break that, not even being stranded to die, wondering how death would take me, and the only solace, a house full of four other girls besides me. I felt I had to make a decision now, to choose what type of girl I wanted to be.

But I didn't have to, when I felt Brett's hand lift from my chest, and I opened my eyes. I turned my head, and thought he would be staring down at me with the shaking of his head, that he had decided to do the right thing just now. . . but that wasn't the case, he wasn't shaking his head, or looking down at me at all. His head was turned, and he had suddenly stood upright on his knees, staring with a pale white face as though he had just seen a ghost pass by the landing to the stairs. I gasped in fear that it was Jack and immediately lifted on my hands to an upright position and turned my head. It wasn't Jack though.

Standing with his mouth in the shape of a vertical oval, his eyebrows raised, and his eyes wide as though he had just seen something that would make the headlines of celebrity People magazine, was none other than George, and after a silent, bitterly tense moment of ice stares, George's face changed completely, and he stepped forward toward us into the living room, felt his stomach, as we heard his tummy gurgle, and he said with a nod that meant he knew exactly what was going on here, and that he had all the leverage over us from this moment on, he said with a strangely hoarse voice:

"I'm sick today," he said, "And I think now, is the perfect, opportunity, for the both of you, to give me your designated breakfasts, maybe fast even though you're both probably very hungry after your—er—workout, and so you can think about what it is you two have just done."

My arms were shaking under me as I tried to keep myself still as I stared up at George. When I heard the muscular Brett shift onto his feet with a suddenly angry grumble, and turned my eyes and detected the aggravated furl between Brett's two brows, I knew Brett was about to tell George to screw himself, and realizing that George could be a political slime ball even when he wasn't hungry, I decided quickly that letting George have my meal while he was feeling sick would be a kind thing to do anyway, and if that was a way to keep George quiet about his suspicions, even though, they were obviously false because nothing had happened between Brett and me, I said with a slight, revealing stutter-- "You can have my meal for today, if you're feeling sick. I'm not feeling too well myself but I'm not that hungry anyway."

George nodded, and looked satisfied at Brett, who glared at him for a moment but then dropped his threatening expression when he realized I was trying to avoid a confrontation. Before George could ask Brett if Brett was going to give up his meal, I added, "I don't know what you mean though, George, about what it is we've done. . ." (I was going to say something after that, but in the awkward moment, I couldn't think of what else to add to that.)

George merely looked at me, then at Brett for a hard second, then at me again, looked me up and down to find that I was wearing no bra, hardly anything of modesty to hide my skin as I was lying on the floor underneath the crane of Brett's gaze when George had entered, and although I don't know what George had really seen, if he had seen Brett firm hand on my tender, hot chest, but by the arrogant smile and the lifting chin that George suddenly presented to me, George said, with a vague, but powerfully rat-like tone:

"Okay," he nodded, "whatever you say. . ."

George finally diverted his eyes from us, and walked through the dim gray lighting over to the kitchen fridge to grab a long yellow banana from the bulk Costco bowl on the counter beside it. He peeled it on his way around the granite island and stopped at the window to overlook the gray sky and sea with a glint in his eyes and devious smile. About to take a big long bite from the banana, George turned his eye to me, and with a look that read, I'm starting to get the kind of girl you really are, Zara, he took a big devouring bite from the huge banana, and the fallic symbol left a bulge in his cheek as he chewed it slowly.

I suddenly felt my body shaking with unjust fear as I stood to my feet, and I might have even sympathized for tiny second as I remembered the women of Hollywood and in politics, under the power of men like Harvey Weinstein, the prominent film producer and executive man famous for his sexual abuse. As George swallowed the banana, and it's shaped crawled down his throat, my eyes lowered, and I don't know why, but I looked out through the white curtains to the gray sky. . .

And in those dark clouds, as they shifted and made different shapes in passing, there was one shape that wouldn't change. The cloud formation was long and threatening, and in that moody sky, in my mind. . . the clouds looked like a chainsaw.