I love sun dresses. You know, those simple, utilitarian, elegant, and yet scorchingly sexy dresses that women wear in warm weather. They’re usually simple, clean-lined, and colorful, but they show a woman’s body off to absolute perfection. On a little girl, they’re nothing more than an everyday play dress, but when a grown woman wears one, my God. It always seems to speak of a certain girlish innocence and playfulness, but overlain with a very grown-up awareness of her sexuality. A woman with a nice figure wearing one of these dresses is just unspeakably sexy. The low cut in back. Those two precariously thin straps holding the whole affair up. The way the dress shows off a woman’s collarbones, then an expanse of skin, and then just a little cleavage. The lines of her legs, and maybe a simple pair of sandals. It takes a lot of confidence to wear something like that, knowing that for all practical purposes, you’re nude, and every guy in a ten-block radius is imagining you that way.
I remember one summer, ten or so years ago, I was living in Washington, DC as an underpaid intern with World Wildlife Fund. One day I got a phone call from an old friend from my alma mater. Was I around? Could she come up and see me? I gave her directions, and we planned to meet at a local watering hole that was easy to find. When the day came, I was just a few minutes late, and I saw her sitting at the bar. She was a tiny woman, barely more than 5 feet tall, but with a compact, curvy body perfectly displayed in this satiny, silky yellow sun dress with a plunging back that made her look more undressed than she would have if she were sitting there stark naked. She was spectacular.
Now, we’d never been in a relationship for various reasons, but we’d always had a flirty kind of friendship. After a few beers and a lot of catching up, though, our conversation kept getting more and more flirtatious. Later that night, at my cheap, crappy apartment, I got the opportunity to take that sun dress off her. With me lying on the bed, and her straddling me, it seemed that all I had to do was touch her shoulders, and those delicate straps came untied and sent her dress sliding smoothly and miraculously over her breasts and stomach, to gather at her waist. It was magical, almost mysterious, and I hope that age never robs me of that particular memory, because it was very, very sweet.
God, I’m cold. Spring could not possibly come too soon.
