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Jake led the way for most of the morning, his excitement over being able to show Strider around his island home infectious to the point of dominating his entire attitude. For his part, Strider was light-footed and almost surprisingly apt as a follower. It was obvious that he was unused to being in nature and wading through underbrush, but that he also had a natural awareness of his surroundings and picked up quickly on how to move and navigate behind Jake.
As partners in adventure went, Jake would admit that Strider was top-notch.
It was only mid-morning when they arrived at their destination, a small pool just far enough into the interior of the island as to be purely freshwater and which Jake was particularly fond of. The trees around it curved to create a natural veil, a measure of seclusion on an island that was already remote and private. Jake liked the effect because the pumpkin vines now profusely populating the island had invaded here too, creeping up the trunks of the trees and interweaving in natural curtains of green, coloring the light and giving it the air of a hidden place. It was like the vaunted final destination in one of his action movies, and Jake would be lying if he didn't admit that therein lay the bulk of the appeal.
Jake was used to the island's cloying humidity, the way the air was sometimes a palpable thing that one had to cut through lest the weight of it against the skin get to smothering. Strider was not, and when Jake looked to him with an eager sort of grin, Strider was peeling back drenched tendrils of hair from his forehead with two fingers. Strider's shirt had gone translucent with perspiration, clinging to the flat plane of his stomach and conforming to the visible shapes of his musculature, moving with him when he breathed from the sticking.
"It seems your devious plan to lull me into complacency with nothing more than the assistance of your home's unpalatable natural climate has not yet come to fruition," Strider remarked, dryly, in what Jake had to hope was a joking manner. "I can only imagine what exorbitant promises you might hope to extract if only I could be properly subdued."
"I daresay if there was anything I wanted, I would simply ask you straightaway!"Jake insisted.
Strider shrugged, subtly, so that Jake couldn't tell if his friend disbelieved him or simply didn't care enough about the fiction of subterfuge to beleaguer the point. Jake had learned already that Strider's expression was often inscrutable, but for a moment a frown flickered across his features, and his fingers wrapped into the material of his shirt near the waistband.
"Regardless, I can't recall ever feeling so thoroughly steamed by the simple expedient of walking," Strider commented, with some distaste. "In Texas, the heat is different. Maybe you should clarify the exact purpose behind this little excursion?"
Strider continued to pull on his shirt, untucking the bottom from its neat mooring inside his pants. It was obvious that he meant to alleviate the inherent discomfort of sweaty clothes and moist heat, peeling the fabric away from his skin to allow for a little much-needed air. Strider's jeans rode low on his hips – Jake was thinking the heavy material a bit impractical, especially considering that Strider had known they'd be tramping around out of doors – and Jake watched the material of his shirt crawl up along the small of Strider's back like it was the unveiling of some secret treasure cache. What was actually revealed was a smooth strip of skin and the red string waistband of Strider's underwear.
"After working up a jolly good sweat getting here I thought we could take a dip--" Jake began.
Red string underwear?
Jake's head tilted to the side without being bidden, responding to a puzzling stimulus by trying to deduce whether or not his eyes had been deceived. Continued unwitting staring only proved the veracity of his assumption, which seemed to be that Strider had something on that bore a suspicious resemblance to a ladies' thong, at least insofar as Jake had any experience with such things.
"Another opportunity for you to display your sheer rugged masculinity?" Strider asked. "Swimming may not be my forte, but I can't say that rapidly transitioning from hot and sticky to cool and wet sounds like anything other than a brilliant suggestion.
It was a matter of moments for Strider to pull his shirt up higher, if anything quite eager to alleviate his discomfort with a few laps around the pool. Jake remembered Strider's legendary showers, and concluded that whatever his friend said about being an unskilled swimmer, it was unlikely Strider would not feel at home in water. A better question was how Strider got his shirt off over his head without even taking his bloody pointy shades off.
Jake was used to the specimens of masculinity that inhabited his movies. They were rugged adventurers with chiseled physiques more often than not, and when an actor was less than physically enviable, the movies spent much less time gliding over their half-naked bodies on camera. He wasn't put off by Strider's escalating nudity any more than he shied away from shirtless heroes performing acts of badassery on the silver screen. Jake was simply a bit unprepared for the realness attribute inherent in the action of watching his best friend enacting a common movie staple.
For a long minute, Jake's eyes panned over Strider's chest, following the path Strider's shirt had taken upwards over pectorals that were not without definition, just as his abs were sketched out so that Jake could count them. Strider was still a skinny bastard, tall and lanky and with narrow, almost fragile looking wrists, yet his arms were equally toned and it was obvious from looking that Strider was fit. It was strangely analogous to a scene from a movie, seeing Strider stretch and regard him from behind those shades, limber and expectant. It made Jake think that Strider really would make as excellent a sparring partner as he did a brother in adventuring. It made him feel strangely anticipatory, like Jake was hoping for something more complicated than honest fisticuffs.
"As flattered as I am by your blatant eye-fucking," Strider began, "unless you wanted to sample resistance training through swimming against the clinging encumbrance of your clothes..."
Despite himself, Jake grinned. Strider was an ass sometimes and Jake knew the joke was at his expense, but Strider always did that and Jake could take a hint. Jake shrugged out of his jacket, tossing it off where Strider's shirt had been dropped in the beginnings of a pile. His shirt came next with an easy shrug, only a bit of compensation given to keep his glasses on his face.
Strider was still regarding him then, leaning back with his thumbs hooked in the waist of his jeans, not saying anything but presenting an indisputable challenge. It had to be playing into Strider's headgames, doing this, instead of just shedding all his clothes in a flurry of falling garments and vaulting into the watering hole with a whoop and a cheer. The thought spurred Jake on in kicking off his shoes and stripping off his shorts and puffing out his chest while he stood there in his boxers and bounced on his heels a little in anticipation of splashing through the clear water. Maybe Strider would race him.
"Carry on, old chap," Jake prompted. "It's only getting warmer."
Strider's expression didn't change, but he shrugged and stepped out of his shoes and pulled his belt free with only the faintest rustling sound accompanying its progress through beltloops, despite the complete silence hanging around them. And then his pants were on the ground and Strider was kicking them aside, loping towards the water with that lazy stride of his that ate up the ground fast enough for Jake to feel like he was being left behind. He'd meant to give chase and plow through the water and really get to enjoy the parts of the island that were FUN with another person, but the thought was abruptly derailed.
There was something about watching the even motion of his best bro's ass moving away from him, paced and casual but still a lot more cheek than Jake was used to in his movies, that arrested normal train of thought.
Strider slowed down when he hit the water, stirring up small plumes of water with his passage and wading in until little eddies lapped around his calves. It was the moment when Jake should have splashed after him, water spraying everywhere, carefree in his enjoyment of one of the few little nooks around Hellmurder Island worth relaxing in. There were no monsters, no reason for apprehension. But Jake had based his expectations off of idealistic scenes from movies, where the sense of easy camaraderie between the best bros engaging in clever hijinks was palpable. Those wholesome scenes in his mind's eye were now juxtaposed with Strider's waxing poetic about glorious plush rumps. The rump was Strider's rump. In women's underwear.
Jake came to the water's edge, slowly, diverted away from that earlier plan where he rushed Strider and pushed him face-first into the water. He'd let himself be distracted from the suspicious flash of red fabric over the waistband of Strider's jeans, had discounted Strider's lovingly crafted puppet narratives as nothing more than the absurd irony that he frequently was not meant to understand. Jake was remembering something Strider had said once, about how the root of truly elevated irony was a certain kernel of sincerity. It was somehow a novel thought that Strider's fixation on asses might be the genuine sentiment at the base of his bullshit, rather than inane trappings that were little more than cheap fuel for Strider's complex irony machine.
"I may be catching wise to the subtle machinations you have at work here, Jake," Strider said, without turning around. "You're waiting for me to blunder just a bit farther into this mirrored pool before hieing in yourself with the assumption that if there is some demon fishcreature lurking beneath the waves it'll have a juicy alternative target to your premium but increasingly played-out behind."
"You wound me!" Jake protested. He took a theatrically stumbled step forward and mimed receiving a shot, before dropping to his knees in the shallow water in an entirely exaggerated fashion.
As far as diversions went, it was a step in entirely the wrong direction. Instead of leading to anything like light-hearted tomfoolery, Jake realized he'd aligned his sight perfectly with the curve of Strider's ass. There was only so much mental deflection Jake could soldier through. The fact of the matter was that Strider had on aggressively-cut and undeniably-skimpy red underthings whose design could not have been conceived with anything other than the female form in mind. All of Jake's intermittent and messily-repressed attempts to understand Strider's choice in wearing them were generating nothing of value.
It was a choice remote from everything Jake knew about movie heroes. When guys in movies wore things meant for women, it was always as a preface to wacky hijinks and fun cases of mistaken identity. Strider was just Strider, no ambiguity involved, still frank and cutting and very much the person who had always been Jake's best friend. It didn't fit.
"What the devilfucking dickens are you wearing?" Jake finally asked.
Strider looked down at himself briefly, the face he turned toward Jake impassive, like he thought it was a trick question and was waiting for the inherent humor to resolve itself. "If you want to play amateur fashion police, highly unqualified as you are, next time give me a fucking heads up on our itinerary for the day and I'll scrounge up appropriate swimwear."
Jake pushed himself back up from the water, the eyeful of Strider's satin-covered crotch only serving to drive home that it was very much not what Jake had meant.
"Whatever irony lies in your choice of undergarments thoroughly escapes me," Jake confided.
Strider waded farther into the water, the conclusion that there was not some lurking seabeast lying in wait for them effectively reached. Jake splashed after him, at once enthused by the renewed interest in swimming and puzzlingly crestfallen by the thought that Strider would avoid explaining to him. When it came down to it, it was just another Strider puzzle, and Jake would confess his ignorance in exchange for having that confusion alleviated.
"They aren't ironic," Strider said, taking another absentminded glance down. The water was up to his waist, then, but so clear Jake could still see the red of the material through it. Nevertheless, it afforded Strider a bit of modesty. The panties didn't leave an awful lot to the imagination.
"Come again?"
Strider's face, previously impassive, resolved itself into patient amusement. "I believe Lalonde would have the perfect comment here. 'So naive, Jake, so naive.'"
Which only managed to make Jake feel like uncultured swine.
Strider took pity on him – or maybe grew fed up with the departure from their plan for swimming and fun – and spoke up again without Jake having to formulate a new question. "You wear Lara Croft's thigh-gripping gun holsters, and don't even waste your breath denying it because I am well acquainted with what 'illicit warez' inhabit your wardrobe." He shrugged. "I wear particularly abbreviated briefs."
Jake laughed in spite of himself. "Isn't briefs a bit over-generous? I thought the colloquial term here was 'thong'?"
"Nah. If you want to be colloquial you might do better with 'ass-floss,'" Strider suggested.
There had to be something said for delivering a line like that without missing a beat.
"If you feel suitably educated in the nuances of a dude's undergarment choices," Strider added, "there is still this quaint custom of public waterhole bathing to get underway."
Jake reached out and gave Strider a shove, because he really was a bit of an insufferable prick, even when he was right. Jake still found Strider in women’s panties to be a puzzling thing, but if he was understanding Strider's bothersome analogy correctly, Strider wore them because he had a reason to like them. It likely wasn't as sentimental as Jake's attachment to miss Croft, but Jake supposed the reason was still valid.
Jake splashed past Strider until the water was up to his chest, kicking off from the bottom of the pool with one foot so that he flopped over and performing a single breaststroke to get himself properly floating. Jake rolled onto his back so he could look at Strider. "Why do you fancy them?" he asked.
Strider waited until he was floating on his back as well – possibly imitating Jake as a form of respect towards his erstwhile host – to answer the question. "Guy needs a reason for absolutely everything?"
"No," Jake admitted. "But reasons keep everything civil. I daresay there must be some further logic at work within that head of yours."
"Or it could just be this rad process where neurons fire, cognitive processes tumble, and the ultimate chain reaction product of that staggering illustration of human development is a guy who elects to look good in a g-string," Strider countered.
Strider rolled neatly onto his stomach, giving a few slow, powerful kicks and slicing the water cleanly with his arm-strokes, cementing Jake's assumption that Strider was in fact quite the capable swimmer even as he carried himself away into the center of the pool. While Strider could be endlessly patient with his friends, Jake was inclined to interpret the dismissal of sorts as assumption that the topic had been well and fully addressed. If Jake was honest, he couldn't ask for better clarification. It wasn't Strider's fault if his reasoning, for all intents and purposes structurally sound, still left sizable gaps in Jake's understanding.
And maybe Jake didn't need to understand.
Jake flailed after Strider, aware that his swimming was nowhere near as efficient, but it got the job done. Giving chase quickly turned into an impromptu game of keep-away, a contest Strider indisputably won even if Jake put up a very valiant effort. Physical exertion was a thing Jake understood. Keep-away turned into structured races, turned into Jake showing off and Strider refusing to turn flips or attempt hand-stands under the insistence that he was not a fucking trained monkey, Jake was free to dominate the realm of useless acrobatics.
Past a point, it stopped mattering that the entire excursion included far more of Strider's ass than Jake had ever expected to see. There were a lot of things about Strider that Jake didn't expressly get. But Strider was Jake's best fucking bro, and maybe if his ass looked fabulous in a red thong, maybe then he should just be allowed to wear whatever the hell he wanted.
Which it did, which was perhaps the part Jake understood least of all.