I'd known Josh Drake since 4th grade, and all the kids in the neighborhood were happy when his parents obliterated most of their backyard and replaced it with a big swimming pool. I spent lots of my middle school summer days and occasional nights in that pool. His parents even let us use it when Josh and his sister Kate weren't around, as long as there was some adult around to make sure no one drowned.
The pool was where I first realized that girls had interesting bodies, worth watching as they jumped or dived back into the water, and where I first got to enjoy some random (and not so random) collisions with them. It was a crazy place to be for a lot of reasons. Josh's parents seemed uptight and conservative, but Josh knew where his father's stash of Playboys was, and we always marveled that he even had a subscription.
I had no hope of finding a girlfriend back then, as I was (probably still am) a truly hopeless geek, but wow - girls were interesting. Somehow I could see the connections between the girls in the pools and the girls in the magazines, and the combination gave me a lot more to think about than school and science fiction. It was just thinking, though.
Sometime around the beginning of high school, though, Josh got mean, not a lot of fun to be around. After a fight, he disappeared to a private school for a while, and then came back for his senior year of high school. Fortunately, he was calmer, and we all started hanging out again, even enjoying that pool during a sweltering summer.
Celeste and I spent a lot of time there, especially the summer after graduation. Celeste was my girlfriend, sort of, for a while, but she was going to a college far away from where I was going. Even though I hoped we could stay together, she shattered any illusions I had on that score, telling me two weeks before we were both leaving that she was happy we'd never gone beyond a simple kiss.
Why?
Something to do with looking forward to the delights of a women's college.
I was pretty pissed off, and didn't feel like going home. My parents were away for the weekend, and I'd had some high hopes for the weekend, all of which were shot. Even my little brother was off with friends. Instead of being an exciting lovenest it would just be dark, empty, and annoying.
I drove kind of aimlessly until it was just about sunset, and finally decided to see if there might be anything going on at Josh's, maybe a pool party of random friends. That'd be better than sitting home alone, and even if I wound up crying again, a pool would be an easy place to hide it. Tears disappear and everyone's eyes are a little red.
The pool lights were on, and I rang the doorbell. Mrs. Drake answered it, wearing a thick terry robe over her suit. She was on the phone, this giant tan brick of a cordless she used so she could talk in the pool.
She opened the door, covered the phone's mouthpiece, and said, "Come on in. Your bathing suit and Celeste's are down in the laundry room." Then she wandered off again, talking about a long-ago wedding or something.
Down in the laundry room there was a pile of bathing suits. Mine was off to the side, with Celeste's blue bikini on top of it. I picked up the bikini top, wishing it was on the floor of my bedroom instead. The tag inside read "S". Small. Small but perfect, small but exactly what I'd dreamed of for months. Probably years, actually. I gave the top one last sad squeeze and grabbed my suit, heading to the bathroom to change.
The pool was empty when I got out there. I'd figured Josh would be there, but maybe he was just late getting home. Or maybe Mrs. Drake just saw my car and figured Celeste and I had come by for a weekend swim. Whatever. I could swim for a while and see if anyone showed up, and it was better than going home.
I dived in off the board, swimming up to the stairs in the shallow end. I hadn't been alone in this pool for a long long time, and it was kind of weird. I never quite figured out why Mrs. Drake was content to hang around all day in it, in the water or in a floating chair. During those middle school summers she'd been our perpetual lifeguard, leaving only to bring us all food and drinks, but she was in the pool even when we weren't.
It was nice, though. The water was warm, and the air was finally cooling off, with a breeze kicking up. I swam some laps, played on the diving board, and kept wondering how the tiny slide by the side of the pool had once seemed so big.
Floating around, I couldn't stop thinking about more recent things. Playing with Celeste's bikini had been a big mistake. I hadn't ever seen underneath it, but I knew what was there, and that I wanted to touch. More than wanted to touch - I wanted to kiss, fondle, play - and hear Celeste going wild. Just thinking about what she might sound like made me crazy. Angry, too - but I couldn't do anything about that.
Bathing suits do a lousy job of hiding a hard-on, and it was getting just plain crazy swimming around. I stopped by the steps into the water and sat for a minute, letting the jets of water bounce off my back. Then I remembered something about how I'd liked those jets way back when.
I looked around - nobody was there. The lights blazed from the house, over the pool fence, but it was quiet, except for the breeze. I turned around, making it look like I was going to pull myself out of the pool, but quietly dropped the front of my suit. It felt good, even though it wasn't Celeste. I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling the warm water at just the right distance and
SPLASH! I pulled away from the wall a bit and looked behind me. Mrs. Drake was walking into the pool, still holding the phone next to her ear but looking at me a little strangely. I squashed down into the water and kicked away, hoping to get my suit better adjusted before she realized what I'd been up to.
When I'd reached the middle of the pool, suit on and treading water, I looked back. She was sitting on the stairs, still talking.
"That's okay Kate, just be home by your curfew.... Eleven, dear, yes, eleven... I know, I know, but your father and I agree. No, he's at the trauma ward tonight. Okay, then, see you later." She hung up the phone and rested it on the side of the pool, then dived in and started swimming.
Should I flee? Had I just shown a lot more of myself than was forgivable? Had she actually seen anything? Would leaving be even weirder? She was just swimming along the side of the pool, nothing unusual so far.
She came up to the surface, leaned against the the side, and looked over at me.
"How are you tonight, David? Where's Celeste?"
I sputtered a bit, finally coughing up "She's at a film festival."
She nodded. "Is everything okay? You don't usually come here alone."
"I was thinking Josh might be around."
"He would have been, except that he's off helping Bill Jenkins move into his new apartment in New York. Bill's father had to cancel at the last minute, but I suspect Josh just wanted to go down there and meet girls."
I smiled, relaxing a bit. "Probably," I said. "He seems to enjoy that."
"He's always with someone new. It worries me, but I guess he's eighteen. You, on the other hand, seem to be pretty steadily around Celeste."
My face fell. The wind was blowing harder now, and I felt a chill, but she knew that wasn't the problem.
"Sorry - I didn't realize..."
"No, that's okay. You couldn't know. We just broke up this afternoon."
"Really? I'm - I'm sorry about that."
"Thanks," I said. "It was a good summer, I guess."
She thought for a minute, still looking at me, and left the side of the pool, treading water a bit further out.
"You're going to college in a couple weeks, right?"
"Yeah, about a week before Josh goes."
"How long do you think you'll remember Celeste with all of those other girls to turn your head?"
"I don't know. She still wants to be friends, said she'd write."
"I like Celeste, but it sounds like she did the breaking up. Is she really going to write?"
I kind of shrugged, not sure what to say. The wind was stronger and it was getting darker, faster than the usual sunset. I looked over to the west and there were dark clouds.
"I think your dark clouds for the day already came through," she said. "That's just a storm, but we probably don't want to be in the pool if there's lightning."
It wasn't even raining yet, and I didn't feel like getting out of the warm water into the colder air quite yet. My hard-on had come back, more than I felt comfortable about, so I nodded, and swam around a bit collecting things while watching the clouds, and Mrs. Drake. She got out and started gathering all the stuff around the pool, getting it into the shed before the wind picked it up.
"Could you help bring these things to the shed?" she asked.
Waiting for my hard-on to go away hadn't helped - actually it was probably worse now, but I couldn't really hide. I picked a spot at the side of the pool by a big float and pulled myself out, lifting the float to cover myself.
We managed to get everything in as the wind got worse and the first raindrops were falling. She hadn't seemed to notice my suit or my embarrassment, and as we were locking up the pool she turned to me.
"Have anywhere to go tonight?" she asked.
"No, not exactly."
