The splash of faint blue light across the walls woke Serge from his usual restless sleep, nothing but the empty space beside him to keep him company.
If Sierra was still around, he wouldn't have given it a second thought and rolled right back over. She used to love midnight swims, especially when she was too wound up to sleep. But this was the first time the pool lights came on in over a year.
He rose, nude. No point in sleeping in any clothes, not when the only visitors to his house now were delivering food. Sierra wouldn't have wanted him to starve himself, so he ate, mechanically and without much pleasure. On what had been their date nights, he ordered in, because they always ate out or ordered in on date nights. The tradition was one of the few building pillars left of his sanity.
Same with working out, the hikes, the jogging. All in memory of Sierra, though at least the physicality of it all felt good, one of the handful of pleasures that cracked through his shell of bewilderment at being a thirty-year-old widower.
He went to the big sliding glass doors. Someone was out there, testing the waters with her foot. The curves of her made him suck in his gut on instinct. But it was the finely detailed face that drew him in. The narrow, almost pointed chin. The strong cheekbones. The wide forehead, framed by black hair caressed by the light. Her lips were full, but narrow, small, almost, and she wore heavy, precise makeup that looked professional. It gave her a sultry vibe, especially combined with the pearls she wore around her neck and the long, dangling earrings.
Wispy black lingerie clung to her full teardrop breasts and slung low over her sex. Her dark nipples peeked through the fabric. Closer, and he might have seen the pink of her lips through her panties too, but before he could think to focus his attention there, she raised her hands over her head and dove into the water.
Sure he was dreaming, Serge felt around with his feet for the towel he'd carelessly dropped on the floor after a shower the previous night. He pulled it around himself as the woman reemerged, languidly cutting through the water. She was good. Not as good as Sierra, but there were only thirty or so people in the world that had been faster than Sierra in her prime. The big pool was a huge part of why they bought the place.
He stepped out into the night, and the woman came to a casual stop. She blinked up at him, water coursing down her face. It stripped away some of her makeup, leaving her face looking like some Fauvist painting. Trails of makeup streamed behind her in the water. Serge didn't care.
Without a word, still watching him, she started to swim again, cautious this time, keeping an eye on him. He thought she'd get out of the pool and leave when she came back to the shallow end, but no, she kicked off the wall and started another lap.
The concrete around the pool still held the warmth of the day, but the night had chilled considerably, nearly thirty degrees. Serge shivered, and thought about walking back inside. He didn't think this woman meant him any harm, and even if she did, so what? What could she take? What could she do to him?
As he watched the swell of her ass flexing through the water, he thought... well... why not?
He headed for not for the pool's ladder, but the hot tub occupying a corner of the pool. It was shaped like a seashell, fanning out wider closer to the pool. He didn't get in, not quite yet, but by feel alone, toed the big button that turned on the jets. He plodded back towards the house, this time for the mini-bar built into the stone L under an awning. From a small fridge, he withdrew a bottle of beer, at least a year old, and from a cabinet, a bottle of wine. No glasses out here anymore, but who needed them? He headed back to the pool and knelt, leaving the bottle of wine halfway to the hot tub.
She stopped swimming again, watching him curiously as he headed for the warmer waters. He really should have had the pool shut off and drained, but he kept meaning to go back out there, to swim laps for Sierra's sake. It hurt too much, right up until this very night. She would have had a hell of a laugh at this. A gorgeous stranger, nearly nude, or as good as, and swimming in their pool. She probably would have invited the woman right in, and doubtless would have buried her tongue in the stranger's pussy in all of about ten minutes. Sierra was always adventurous like that.
The woman paddled towards the bottle of wine. She looked at it, then him, and drew in a sharp, audible breath when Serge dropped the towel, revealing his long, thickening prick. He hopped in, and she still watched him even as he ignored her, settling onto one of the stone benches under the water and sighing at the jets burbling against his back. It was a better massage than he could pay for.
A clink. The wine bottle's cap being tossed aside. He turned his head just in time to watch the black-haired woman bring the tip to her lips. They stared at one another as she drank deep, then set the bottle aside, licking an errant drop off her lips.
"Thank you," she murmured.
"Mm hm."
She kicked off again, coursing lazily through the water, sometimes on her back, sometimes on her stomach, sometimes under the water for such long stretches of time Serge wondered if she might not be trying to drown herself. But every time she'd come up, and six or seven laps in, he thought he heard her cry.
He leaned his head back, staring up at the sky. Stars peppered the cloudless night, and he lazily tried to count them as he sipped his beer. Another clink, this one closer, and he glanced over to see the strange woman settling the bottle of wine between them on the stonework between the pool and the hot tub. Gone were the remains of her makeup, save a few splotches of color here and there and her lipstick. She leaned over the divider just far enough that he could see the fine details of her neck, and for an odd moment, he wanted nothing more than to kiss and suck up the moisture there. He looked back up at the sky again.
"I used to dream about this place," she said, almost tonelessly.
Serge glanced over again, sharply this time. With shaking hands, he drank half of what was left of the beer, not daring to breathe. Thoughts of Sierra. Thoughts of one of the last lucid sentences she spoke. I'll send her to you. The forever woman.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Your wife," the stranger said, and Serge's lungs stopped working. "She was the swimmer, yes?"
Yes, he almost said, and the model, and the clothing entrepreneur, and the cookbook writer, and the motivational speaker. Everything they had, everything they were was because of her. He was just the lucky bastard who she liked to serve her coffee until he worked past his butterflies long enough to ask Sierra out.
"Yes."
"I read about her in the newspaper. Her fight, the articles she wrote... it was..." She clicked her tongue, and added, "Beautiful. I come by this house every day. My driver, he knew I was fascinated by the story, and pointed out the house to me. I'm sorry about her."
"Thank you," he said, wondering why he meant it now and not the thousand or so times he'd said it in the last year.
"Can I join you?"
He sat upright, and scooted over for an answer. She walked around the edge of the hot tub to the pool's shallow end steps, and he openly stared at the way her lingerie no clung to her body , nothing hidden. She glanced down, and without a word or a look at him, peeled off her bra and cast it aside, then dropped the panties. Her hair was well trimmed into a thin line, as black as her hair. Her pussy lips hung full and slightly crooked.
She dropped down into the water, and sat near him. Not exactly right beside him, but they could have reached out and easily touched one another, if that was what they wanted. And Serge did. God help him, but he was so hard he ached.
"Your house started to creep into my head," she said, taking the wine bottle off the ledge again. She offered it to him, and he accepted. It was a good wine. One of Sierra's, of course. He had no such taste. "I don't know why. I mean, it's a nice house, but this whole street is full of them."
He sipped again, and handed the bottle back. As he opened his mouth, an engine revved nearby. Someone shouted a name. Evely. It sounded like Eva Lee.
