There were two kids sitting on his rock. Two kids with fishing poles had claimed his territory. That was bad. Fishing was illegal on the pond, so was swimming. Sunbathing would have been okay, with a bathing suit on, but most of the sunbathers slipped over into the illegal category. The fishers and the skinny dippers tolerated each other, but they kept their distance. Damn! He looked at them more closely. They were a lot younger than the typical fisherman, high school age, maybe early college, it was getting hard to tell. They were all starting to look young to him. He frowned. He really didn't have time to start scouting out another place to swim. In a few hours the family was off to Sesame Place. This was his last taste of freedom for a week or so.
He thought about his options. The boys had poles, but they looked more like props. They weren't doing any casting. They were just letting the lines sit in the water. There was no indication that they had a serious intention to harm a fish. They were both wearing bathing suits. In a way, that made it easier to approach them. He didn't think they'd spotted him as he'd run in naked from the road. He pulled his shorts back on and moved out closer to the shoreline. In the middle of the path to the rock, there was a little blue tent he hadn't noticed. Damn! They were campers! Camping wasn't legal either, but if the campers weren't naked themselves, they usually turned out to be crazy rednecks, like those bikers the week before. He started to slip away, but it was too late. They had seen him.
"Hi," one of them said. He sounded friendly enough.
"Hi." He looked them over cautiously. They seemed like normal kids, not too big, not aggressive. No beards, no tattoos, no beer bellies. Not at all like the bikers.
"How ya doing." The other boy was eyeing him with gratifying apprehension. Well, he was bigger than they were, a lot more muscular. He recalled with some amusement how the bikers had stayed a safe distance away from him, once they had gotten a good look at how he was built.
"Okay. How about you?"
"Not too bad, now that the sun is out."
"A lot of rain last night," he ventured.
"Tell me about it."
"As soon as we got here, it started to rain."
"Today is supposed to be okay. Maybe some showers late. Would you mind if I swam off the rock?"
"Why not? We're just here admiring the scenery."
"Over there," the other boy waved at a cliff across the cove. "They've been over there all morning." He was pointing out two girls, naked, draped across the boulders. One of them was throwing a ball into the water for a little dog to fetch. The dog came back, presented the ball, and then shook itself dry, provoking squeals as cold water splattered sun baked skin. It looked as if this process had been through a lot of iterations already. The other girl reached to take the ball. Even from a distance, you could see her trembling as their bodies touched.
"Look at that!" The first boy poked his friend. "You owe me five!"
"They haven't done it yet!"
"What's the bet?" he asked.
"Five if they kiss, ten if they eat pussy. Man, she fucking kissed her! You owe me five!"
"She didn't fucking kiss her! She touched her cheek!"
"And her pussy. She fucking touched her fucking pussy!"
"Her leg, she touched her leg. Anyway, that's not part of the bet. They can fucking finger fuck each other and it doesn't count."
"She just touched her boobs. She hugged her fucking boobs and she kissed her!"
"Boobs aren't part of the bet! She can suck her fucking nipples and it doesn't count!"
"She fucking kissed her!"
"On her cheek! She can't kiss her mouth if she's behind her like that!"
"Fuck you, fucking weasel!"
"Only if you suck my dick first. Gotta be mouth man! Lips on lips, one kind or the other."
"What if they just kind of grind their pussies together? That's lips on lips."
"Fuck you."
"Only if you eat me first."
"Shut the fuck up. They can hear what we're saying. They're fucking looking at us."
"Nice," he sighed. Just his luck, the one time something really interesting was happening, he didn't have time to enjoy it. On other days he certainly would have lingered to enjoy the show. Today, he was in too much of a hurry. He slipped off his shoes, his socks, then his shorts again. No gasps, no groans. The guys looked like they were okay with it, even though they both still had their suits on. They looked like they were hiding hardons, hopefully inspired by the girls and not by him.
"How far do you swim?" One of the boys was looking at him with a frank admiration that was a little disconcerting. He wondered, fleetingly, if their banter about blow jobs had been all in jest.
"Out around the second island. Want to come along?"
They shook their heads, and he slipped into the water and set off. Eighty strokes freestyle, eighty strokes backstroke, repeat. That gave him a nice even tan, it kept him from getting too tired. He would be swimming that way for about an hour. There was nothing more relaxing than clear calm water, blue sky, the warmth of the sun on the side that was facing up, the smooth power of his muscles as he moved without a ripple. One perfect stroke followed another, building speed until he was flying with an effortless grace. The pond had never been so smooth and calm, the water so clear it seemed like air. When he was on his stomach it seemed like he could touch the boulders below, thirty feet or more away. When he was on his back, he was staring up into a blue so deep it was almost purple.
His mind narrowed to the repeated tabulation of the strokes, the concentration on each one to make it perfect, to pull the water down from his head, to thrust it back behind him, to push out all the air in his lungs with each breath. Eighty on his stomach, eighty on his back. Eighty on his stomach, eighty on his back. He was more relaxed with each iteration. He wondered, dimly, how he was going to get through the next week. Vacation, he was on vacation, and that was supposed to be relaxing. But vacation meant sharing a motel room with two toddlers, it meant swimming squirrel cage laps in a tiny little motel pool, it meant furtive sex in the bathroom, his wife bent sullenly over the lavatory counter fretting that one of the children would awaken, or that he would fail to resist the temptation to go up her asshole. Vacation meant that he was going to have to wear a bathing suit, maybe even develop a tan line. Vacation was going to suck.
He'd had an unexpected reprieve this morning. His wife had decided at the last minute that the kids needed some more summer clothes and she needed a better bathing suit, and the three of them had gone off shopping. So he'd been able to slip off for one last solitary swim. He'd promised to be back before them. He was relishing every precious moment of freedom.
Eighty on his stomach, eighty on his back. The rhythm was lulling him to sleep. Nothing could have been more luxurious than the still, sweet water. It was strange to be out so early in the morning. Usually he stopped after work, an hour or so of freedom carved out of the daily schedule. The sun angle was completely different. The water still had a bit of chill to it. In the evening, everyone was leaving. Now, they were just starting to show up. It looked already like it was going to be a very interesting day at the pond, and he was going to miss it.
He started to daydream. What would he have done, if those bikers had actually gone through with their threats? A rock, maybe he would have thrown a rock at them. He had a very accurate arm -- he might have been lucky enough to score a hit. Of course, that might have just enraged them more. Maybe a big stick, use it to beat their stupid brains out? They'd been too drunk to put up much of a fight. He felt a sudden surge of blood lust, he started to stroke more violently. Then he laughed as the absurdity of it hit him.
In truth, he'd never been much of a fighter. There was that one time just before he got married, when he'd tripped that black kid running away with a stolen grocery bag. The old lady who owned the bag had been overjoyed, he'd felt like a hero. Then suddenly the kid was back, confronting him. He remembered being totally dumbfounded that the kid could be so far away from him, and still reach his nose with a jab. Once, twice -- and he had just stood there, in a daze. Dimly, he began to realize that the kid might have a knife, or a gun, that if he moved in to return the blows he might be getting into a lot of trouble. He'd thought about all the work they'd put into to getting the wedding set up, how a groom in the hospital or the morgue was going to really screw things up. While he'd been thinking about these things, belatedly, his nose had started to bleed from another impact. He'd finally worked up the awareness to move a bit further off, to block the next jab, and to tell the punk to get out before the cops arrived. And that had been the end of it.
The way he had handled the bikers, talking his way out of it, had probably been the best. Not heroic, not satisfying. He really would have liked to leave them dead or maimed. Too many hassles, though. Legal problems, maybe a trial, maybe even jail time. Not worth it.
Not worth it. That was the story of his life. He was going to look back on a lifetime of safe choices, good decisions, and boredom. He remembered how he'd envied that couple out on the island last week, the guy sitting there like a little god while his lady sucked him off for all to see. They'd known damn well they'd had an audience, and they'd played to it.
