When I think of the particular days in my life which completely changed my sexual world-view, it’s hard not to recall the day I met Melissa. I'd seen her walking past our house several times, and eventually we ran into each other at the corner store, where we discovered we both liked the same chocolates, and we had gone to the same primary school and so on from there.
Melissa was 21, three years older than I. She was studying Human Movements at the nearby University of Queensland, the same institution I expected to join shortly. As we walked back together from the shop, since it was a typically hot and dry afternoon in mid-January, she invited me over for a swim at her house. My family didn't have a pool so I was glad to accept, and since I hated being held up by my parents while they asked me about where I was going, who I was going with, and so on, when we got to my house, I ran in, shoved my togs and towel into a bag, scribbled a quick note for my parents and ran out again.
I was wearing a singlet and shorts with sandals, sunglasses and a broad-brimmed hat to protect my pale complexion. In those days, it was common for me not to wear a bra near home, particularly in summer, and I rarely wore a shirt or blouse over the top of a singlet. Apart from comfort reasons, I was a late developer physically and didn't really look 'womanly' in my opinion until my late twenties.
Melissa, on the other hand, was immediately attractive to the male eye, with naturally blonde hair reaching well down her back and an impressive bustline which made her T-shirt stand out quite a way from her chest. She had beautiful wide blue eyes and I remember thinking she had particularly full lips. She also had remarkably long and smooth tanned legs over which she wore a tight denim skirt with sandals quite similar to my own.
Just before we got to her house, we passed two good-looking guys who looked like older uni students. They were also wearing sunglasses but as they walked past, their heads definitely swivelled towards Melissa. A few seconds after they passed, I glanced back to confirm they were also appreciating her rear view. This sort of casual perving from males used to drive me up the wall, but as I would soon discover, Melissa's attitude to male attention was very different to mine.
As we walked through her front gate, I could hear rock music coming from a stereo inside the house with several people talking loudly over it. As she led the way around the pool which was next to the short driveway at the front of the house, Melissa told me her brother was having a party with some of his rowing friends.
"Don't worry about the guys," she said. "They're stuffing themselves with pizzas at the moment. You'll be glad to know most of them are pretty spunky, but there's only one who's really got something to be proud of, you know what I mean?" At the time, I wasn't sure what she meant at all, so I examined my new surroundings instead of responding.
The pool was hidden from the street by a high white wall and had a rectangular changing area near one corner enclosed in vertical wooden planks with an inward-swinging gate in the middle. As Melissa led me inside, I saw a few chairs and some shelves filled with the usual pool-cleaning gear and various pieces of gardening equipment. There were a few bags hanging from hooks near the gate and my new friend took one down and put it on a chair. Closing the gate, she immediately began to undress.
Having just left a private girls’ school, I was used to changing with other girls for sport, but I still felt a bit funny about undressing in front of someone I had only just met, so I stacked my clothes neatly on another chair and stood behind it to step into my fairly ordinary navy-blue one-piece suit. Melissa had no such inhibitions, kicking off her sandals, peeling off her T-shirt and unzipping her skirt to reveal burgundy satin panties cut high at the waist and a matching liquid satin bra. She quickly removed both of these garments as well, placing them in the bag, and paused to examine the clearly defined tan-lines on her now nude body before putting on her two-piece swimsuit which had been hanging beside the bag. I avoided looking at her too closely, but her fit, well-honed physique suggested she did a lot of cardio exercise, and perhaps some weight-training too.
To cover my embarrassment, I looked away and concentrated on putting my own togs on. When I looked again, her suit appeared at first to be a very brief strapless fluorescent pink bikini, struggling to contain her ample breasts and pubis, but when she turned around and reached up to put her bag back on the hook, I'm sure I gasped silently in shock.
She turned around again to find me still standing in a frozen position, probably with my mouth open. She looked puzzled and then followed my gaze down at herself.
"What's the matter? The G-string? I bought it at Brian Rochford after Christmas. The first time Dad saw me in it, he banned me from wearing it anywhere except here, and even then, I'm not allowed when we've got visitors. That was after his boss came over and nearly had a heart attack!" She laughed and shook her head. "Dad doesn't know I wear it to parties sometimes too, except when I don't need it at all, you know what I mean?" She turned around again and tugged on the waist band to pull the thong snugly up between the cheeks of her bottom, which looked as tanned, smooth and firm as the rest of her. "Haven’t you ever worn one?"
I could only shake my head, blushing.
"Well, you don't know what you're missing. They're really comfortable, and you can wear them under tight dresses with no line poking through. They can feel a bit tight when they pull up between your legs, but sometimes that can be good too, you know what I mean? And I love seeing the guys' faces when you wear one under something sheer, or something short that flies up when you're dancing - anyway, let's get in now before the boys come out."
Feeling somewhat shy at the gap between her obvious knowledge of how to deal with men and my own lack of experience, I followed her into the pool. The water temperature was just right and we spent at least half an hour swimming from side to side, giving ourselves funny hair-styles with the water, and mostly just floating and talking about uni. Eventually Melissa asked if I'd ever been in a spa bath. When I replied I hadn't, she climbed out of the pool and I followed suit.
We walked around the side of the changing enclosure farthest away from the house, through another lockable wooden gate to a small square spa on the far side of the enclosure fence, big enough for perhaps four people at most. We were now completely out of sight. Melissa flicked a switch on the control unit at one side of the spa and the water began to foam and bubble.
We slipped in and sat on ledges which left just our heads and shoulders above the surface and I mirrored the way she moved into a corner to rest her head and arms on the edges of the spa. We occupied opposite sides to give ourselves maximum space and I discovered powerful streams of water were jetting out from the wall into my back, massaging it strongly. It felt wonderful and I wiggled around to let the jets hit everywhere that felt good. I closed my eyes for a few minutes and when I reopened them, I discovered Melissa was facing away from me, resting her head on her hands over the spot where the jet erupted and her bikini top was now lying on the tiles next to her head. She turned around again and by this time there were so many bubbles in the spa, nothing could be seen beneath the surface.
She smiled at me and explained casually, "It feels really good all down the front, too."
It took a few moments for the implication of what she was saying to sink in, but when it did, I could only blush again and manage a weak smile. Surely she didn't mean she used it to...
Melissa settled comfortably in her corner. "The best fun I ever had in one of these was last year when we were staying in this high-rise down at the Gold Coast, with a pool and spa outside. Every day when I went out to sunbathe, I saw this same guy always get straight into the spa and stare at me for the whole time I was there. Anyway, after a couple of days I thought, hey, maybe he was using me to give himself some cheap thrills underwater, you know what I mean?
"So what I did was, the next day I got into the spa before he arrived, and I was wearing my normal bikini and tucked my spare one through the top and bottom I was wearing, O.K.? With all the bubbles you couldn't see anything at all, and there were a few other people around but not that many. Then the guy turns up, sees me and comes straight over and gets into the spa too. He's just sitting there staring at where my boobs would be and I let him look for a while then I ran my feet up and down his legs and said straight out, "Hey, stud, how would you like to do something really horny in here?" He just sat there with his mouth hanging open and I could see his right shoulder moving so I was sure he was having a good old wank right there and then. So I said "Let's start by taking our togs off. I'll hold yours and you can hold mine."
She paused for a second to dip her head under the surface, flicking her long blonde hair back over her head before continuing.
"So I said "I'll start", and pretended to take my top off and then the bottoms, looking around as if I'm worried about people seeing me. Both of my bikinis were strapless so there was nothing to see on my shoulders, and I gave him the spare bikini underwater and he just held it there - talk about a stunned mullet. I said, "Your turn, honey," so he looks around as well and then he lifts himself off the ledge and pulls down his board shorts and hands them over. And that's when I said "Bye bye", jumped out of the water and raced off upstairs with his togs, killing myself laughing."
She laughed again at the memory. "I don't know how he got out of it but he must have been so angry he threw the bikini away towards the building 'cause that's where I found it the next day just before we left. He probably stole someone's towel while they were in the pool or something."
She laughed some more but then suddenly gave me a penetrating glance as if assessing something. She leaned closer to me and said conspiratorially, "Hey, do you want to see something REALLY secret? You have to promise not to tell."
I was still coming to grips with the concept of doing to a man what she'd just described, so I nodded in a non-committal way and waited to see what she had in mind. She glided over to the side of the spa nearest to where the smooth wooden planks formed the back wall of the changing enclosure. Facing the fence, she knelt up on the spa's edge, her virtually bare bottom poking out towards me, and began to wriggle out a nail which had been hammered only partially into one of the boards. The fact she was still topless didn't seem to bother her in the least while I tried to avert my eyes from the sight of her large wet breasts with nipples which seemed almost too dark for such a blonde girl. To add to my embarrassment, her dark nipples were also very hard and pointed, whether because of the cold or something else I wasn't sure, but I was even more surprised to discover by feeling them that my own nipples were also pointing out stiffly.
After a few moments, she pulled the nail out, and as she did so, used it to pry away a small section of the plank immediately below it in the wall. She put the small piece of timber and the nail on the edge of the spa to her left and beckoned me. "Come and have a look."
I stepped through the spa as she slid aside to make space for me and kneeled as she had done to discover that removing the wood section left a cavity of about half the depth of the timber and at the back of the cavity was a small round hole about one centimetre in circumference. Placing my right eye to the hole, I found I now enjoyed an uninterrupted view of the area inside the enclosure from about a metre to the left of the gate to the same distance on the other side.
The possibilities of the peephole were slow to dawn upon me as I lifted my face from the fence to ask her if the round gap was visible from the other side. Melissa smiled wider than ever.