It was a family campsite, set around a cove on the Spanish Mediterranean, north of Barcelona. The pitches were under pine trees, essential shade against the hot mid-day sun.
There was a beach bar, restaurant, minimart and swimming pool, although why some campers chose the pool above the beach was far beyond me. I would rather have a towel on the sand than a plastic lounger by a man made pool on any sunny day, and sea water will always beat chlorine and the other 'ine' you always get in family pools.
Besides, the calm water around rocky outcrops on either side of the small bay was perfect for snorkeling. Nothing as colourful as on a coral reef, but still a good way to pass the time. You can snorkel in a pool, but it does not impress, could be misunderstood, and you just might get punched in the snorkel tube, or worse.
Taking the summer holiday as a single guy would not have been my choice, but my ex-girlfriend and I had broken up after a rocky patch. Well, not so much rocky as a grand canyon of a relationship breakdown. The sex had been superb, even during the grand canyon. Volatile women are great to fuck, but not so great to live with. The prospect of a holiday together accelerated the desire to go our separate ways, but left me without anyone to relieve my healthy libido with, and the memory of that superb sex did not help with my frustration.
In spite of that, a few weeks of sun and sea seemed like a good way to get over things. Being a teacher, I had a long summer holiday but not a lot of money. I also had a beat up but reliable old car, and a tent big enough for two to stand up in, although it was just myself to occupy the space. Now I had my pitch beneath the pines.
Any thoughts that I might find someone to take up with at the camp site soon evaporated. I rapidly realised that I was on the wrong camp site to be so lucky. There were families, and couples, and not much else. The first night at the beach bar, there was not a single women without a guy. Next morning, in the campsite minimart, the women shopping on their own all wore gold rings on that finger.
There were plenty of good looking women around, mind you, and they were exposing plenty of themselves. On the beach, most wore bikinis. Of those, most wore only the bikini bottom. Of those, around half wore only bikini strings, the hair trimmed from their pubic mound to all a small triangle to be sufficient, and then string ties around their waist and down between their buttocks. Maximum tan. Maximum frustration for the single guy. If a husband was not in sight, their kids were playing close. Making a move on any of these delicious women made no sense.
It was the fourth day of working on my own tan, that I noticed pixie and the whale. I had not seen them arrive, or noticed them around the campsite until then, but taking a look around me I saw them were lying on a large orange patterned sheet maybe twenty feet from my own blue and white vertically striped beach towel. Why pixie and the whale? Well, that is just what came to mind as soon as I saw them there.
Pixie looked good. When I say that she looked good, had I rated the women at the camp site she would have come out pretty much top, but then I prefer petite, and pixie was extreme petite, tanned to a stunning nutmeg brown, with jet black hair cut so short she could have passed for a boy, had it not been for the curves of her hips and the fullness of her breasts.
Pixie would have looked amazing in a string bikini bottom. She would have looked amazing in anything. She did look amazing in the one piece, black, cling tight swimming costume that she was actually wearing, helped by the high cut thighs and the way it molded itself to her breast, with no inner cups to conceal the outlines of her nipples.
The whale, by comparison, was enormous. Pixie did not need a beach umbrella. If she wanted shade, all she had to do was move to the other side of this guy's body. He was maybe a foot and a half taller than his wife, difficult to judge when they were lying down, but even horizontal, the top of his paunch was maybe a foot and a half higher than her concave stomach. Slight exaggeration for effect, but only slight. Heavily built, but with slack muscles and a stomach that strained both belief and his pale blue shorts, the whale was not as tanned as pixie, but still had Mediterranean colouring, olive skin, black unkempt hair and thick black stubble. Pixie was wasted on the guy.
Pixie saw me looking. She held my gaze. No smile. No frown. Just a gaze. Then, slowly, she looked away, leaving me to wonder what she saw in him. I still do.
From around eleven, until four, the sun is hot enough to make you sweat, and every so often getting in the water is essential. While I liked to snorkel, I also needed to just wade in one in a while, until I was chest deep, and stand, float, or swim as slowly as I could without actually sinking, just getting cool again, ready to laze in the sun until the next time.
Time came for a cool down. I got up. I walked to where the water lapped on the sand. There was a sudden drop of two feet just after it was calf deep, and suddenly you were in to your thigh. Then it leveled out, and you had to walk thirty feet before the water reached your chest. I handled the drop, walked on, and stood, looking out to sea at the horizon.
I heard her before I knew it was her. The steady rhythmic sounds of arms cleaving sea water, feet kicking. She went past a few feet from me, a perfect front crawl, recognisable by the size of her body, the colour of her limbs, and the black one piece costume.
Dead centre of the cove there was a stand where you could hire windsurf boards, sea kayaks, or water skis. To make sure swimmers and motor boats did not get mixed together, a set of red buoys bobbed in the water, tied to create a channel from the hire centre, out a couple of hundred yards, and then across the beach on both sides, parallel with the water's edge. That was where she stopped, at one of the red buoys, two hundred yards out, her pixie black hair visible over the calm water.
I just watched. I can enjoy hard exercise, and I can enjoy watching other people exercise, especially if their figure is as good as hers. So I watched as she hung around the buoy for a minute or so, and as she disappeared beneath the surface, for a good thirty seconds, before her dark head reappeared.
I turned, starting to wade back to the beach. I glanced back, and she was swimming, the same strong front crawl. Some people like to laze in the water to get cool. Others like to exercise their bodies hard. Pixie was a swimmer. Except that the sound, as she got closer, changed, and when I glanced back again I saw her swimming slowly, an easy breast stroke, head and tanned shoulders breaking surface.
It was a slow, casual stroke, designed to allow her to look around as much as to move through the water. She was on course to pass me by again, and was looking directly at me as she approached. I should have noticed straight away, even in that half second glance back at her, but I failed to pick upon the obvious. Something about her was mesmerising. The pixie, street urchin hair, ski slope nose, full lips, bare shoulders just above the water, hands thrusting out in front, then sweeping wide as she glided towards me.
The tanned, bare shoulders should have told me. I could still picture them as I turned back, not wanting to stare, and still wading towards the beach. But it was not until she was overtaking me, passing me five feet on my right, and I saw not just her bare shoulders above the water, but her bare back and naked buttocks just below the surface, that I realised what I had failed to until then. There was no black one piece. That was why her shoulder had been bare above the water. Pixie was swimming stark staring naked.
As she passed, she looked straight ahead. She had to know that I could see that she was naked. She could have swum anywhere, but she had chosen to come that close. Pixie was streaking. I was being flashed. Pixie was a tantalising, teasing little exhibitionist.
