Candy gets comfortable

Jack and Mike followed Candy's lead, taking a swig of their hard lemonades and settling into the bubbling water. Each tried in their own way to seem casual. With great effort, they sought to make it seem like it was no big deal to be sharing drinks, in a hot tub, with a woman who looked like the result of an AI trained on the phrase "huge tits porn star."

Jack, who had one arm on the rim of the hot tub, the other holding his drink above water, was faring better than Mike at this act. Mike had placed his drink into a built-in drink holder, and had both hands under the water, obviously angled to cover his groin. After a few seconds, Jack broke the lull.

"So, Candy. What do you know about Harley Quinn?"

"Who?"

"The character, from Batman. The one your bikini is based on."

Candy, after a second's pause, squeezed her shoulders up and forward, lifting her F-cup breasts slightly up from the water. She scanned the now-soaked triangles of synthetic fabric just barely covering her areolas. Seconds passed as she stared at her own chest, trying to grasp onto something she swore she'd known just a second ago. Jack tried not to notice. Mike looked away at first, then angled his body slightly as he watched the odd spectacle.

"She's ... isn't she ... she's not with Batman, but ... the ... "

"Joker?" Jack offered.

"Right!" Candy smiled, the tension broken. "She's his girlfriend?"

"Well, kind of," Jack said. "She's obsessed with him. She's a good woman, she was his psychiatrist ..."

"Psychologist," Mike said. "At Arkham Asylum. At least in the animated series. Now she's kind of a he-"

"She's complicated," Jack interjected, while also holding out his free hand to Mike in a subtle back-off gesture. "She was a good person, treating people at an asylum, but the Joker woke up something inside her."

Candy took another sip from her bottle, then exhaled deeply, caught up in her relaxation. "What ... inside her?"

Mike's eyes widened. Jack jumped in. "It let her explore her wild side. She started living in the moment, started being wild, breaking the rules, realizing it's all about being in on the joke."

Candy's mouth slid from a smirk to a wide smile, but she slid up slightly in the tub and **** herself to speak. "Speaking of the, uh, the rules, this stuff"--she raised her nearly empty bottle of hard lemonade--"I don't think you should ... that I should let you ... this stuff is ..."

"It's good, isn't it?" Jack said. "We just wanted you to feel like you were one of the team. This is what we drink on tabletop night, right Mike?"

"We don't usually drink ..."

"That much! We only have a bit," Jack jumped to say, "but this is a special night. Candy, you've done roleplaying before, right?"

The question seemed to sail past Candy's head, then turn around mid-air and lightly thump her in the head on the way back. Her eyes brightened, and she said ...