Part Three -- Mom's Third Best Friend
After a month of intense training at ASU's facility in Tempe, I made the tryouts for the Olympic training center's summer program. It had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the drastic increase in talented competition. Despite shagging mom's Second Best friend five nights a week for four weeks and Naomi on the weekends, my performance in the pool improved steadily and dramatically. I bested all my old records by a full five seconds, almost exactly as predicted by the coaches. Far from being a hindrance or sapping my strength, sexually servicing Second Best helped relieve stress and tension in my body and the ego boost of having a regular lover AND a girlfriend did wonders for my self confidence.
So when the Olympic tryouts came I made it, but I should be clear that these weren't team tryouts. It wasn't an Olympic year. They were tryouts to be accepted for a month-long training program at the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, competing with the best young high school & collegiate swimmers from around the country. Better yet, it was an opportunity to be trained by US Olympic coaches and training staff, meaning the best coaches and physiologists. Mom and dad returned from their month-long vacation just in time for Mom to drive up there with me, her intent to visit her Third Best Friend, cook my huge breakfasts and provide moral support during my training.
Mom's Third Best and her husband had a house in the foothills overlooking town. They called it a cabin even though it had six bedrooms, six baths, a family room, ski room, billiards room, library, sauna, jacuzzi, formal dining room, kitchen, summer kitchen and three levels of decking. Steep roof lines shed the heavy snows of winter with ease, a well-used snow blower sat in one corner of the four car garage and one shed held what appeared to be a year's supply of seasoned firewood, cut and stacked. Why call this palace a cabin? Because it was a vacation home. Nineteenth century robber barons called their Berkshire mansions "cabins." Why buck the trend?
The view over the city was spectacular, especially at night with the lights twinkling below. The view west was an eye-popping panorama of the Rockies. I had been there many times before on family vacations in summer and ski holidays in winter. Often the house was packed with guests. Not this trip.
We took three days to drive there from Phoenix and I really enjoyed the road trip. Not only two full days off from pool and gym, it was two days off EVERYTHING, a mini-vacation where I allowed my mind to wander as my eyes gorged on the some of the most spectacular natural scenery in the world, from Monument Valley, Arizona thru Northern New Mexico and up the spine of the Colorado Rockies. We took backroads the whole way. No interstates.
We arrived on Sunday night with training set to begin early the next morning. Mom's third best friend was already there to greet us, happy to let us use a few bedrooms. Her husband worked in Phoenix but might get away for a weekend if he could. At thirty-five, she was the youngest of mom's close circle, but unlike them she had no children. She and her husband were DINKS, double-income no kids, he a high-powered attorney, she a school teacher who had gone to UC and now spent her summers there at "the cabin" in Colorado Springs. They lived a few miles away in our swish Phoenix suburb.
Third Best was a petite woman barely five-two. At six-six, I towered over her. Thin and athletic, she tipped the scales at one-ten. With brown hair, brown eyes and the cutest little butt of all mom's friends, she looked more like twenty-five, not thirty-five. A cheerleader & gymnast in high school and college, she continued to stay fit through a mix of Pilates, running, mountain biking and cross country skiing. Add the seasonal exercise of hiking and downhill skiing and everyone knew she was an outdoor fun-hog. She maintained a great tan from nine months of the year in Phoenix and summers in Colorado. Mom and her other friends often remarked that they hated Third Best for being so tiny, so slim, so fit and so tan, wishing they had her little butt. Little did they know, as I would learn, that Third best was jealous of them for being "real women" with full hips, full breasts, and the dangerous curves of narrow waists in between.
I hit the pool first thing Monday. While my long days where filled with training, orientation, coaching and weight room, mom and Third Best tooled around Colorado Springs, hiked Pike's Peak, shopped and ate out every night. I was free in the evenings, but spent my time eating, relaxing in the jacuzzi and playing piano. Mom got bored after a week and decided to fly home leaving me with her tragically uncool minivan to drive. I dropped her at the airport, my last promise being that I would not bother or in any way be a nuisance to her Third Best Friend. With my schedule it was an easy promise to make.
That same evening I was soaking in the jacuzzi out on the deck when Third Best popped out the sliding glass door, removed her robe and slid into the water across from me.
"Mind if I join you?" she asked, not giving me a choice.
This surprised me. At first. Then I realized it was a rite of passage. A year earlier she never would have disrobed in front of me, let alone climb nude into a hot tub with me while I was nude. Only adults did such things and Third Best was treating me like one. I had secretly shagged mom's Best throughout February, March, April and May and mom's Second Best all of June, but here for the first time a woman treated me as an adult. For the first time in my life I felt like one.
"Not at all," I replied.
"I'm surprised you're in here on a warm night," she said. "Haven't you had enough of the water for one day?"
"Normally," I replied, "but I have some tightness in my upper back I'm trying to work out before tomorrow. And this jet feels great."
She smiled as I moved side-to-side in front of one of the water jets.
"Is it helping?"
"A little," I said, tilting my head side to side like Roberto Clemente and a thousand other ballplayers who imitated him.
"Do your coaches know?" she asked.
"Yeah. They cut my pool time short and had me on a training table all afternoon."
"Are you injured?"
"No. Just tight and a little stiff."
"Want me to massage it for you?"
"That would be great," I sighed. "If it's no trouble."
"No trouble at all," she smiled, drifting across the tub to me. "Turn around."
I turned and knelt on the floor of the hot tub, leaning diagonally across the bench seat so my chin rested on my forearms on the rim of the tub. Awkward, it was the only way I could expose my back to her and relax at the same time. The next thing I felt was her leg brushing against mine as she stood behind me.
"Um, I'm going to have to stand on either side of your legs to reach you."
"Should I move?"
"Um, no. I think I can work on you right there,
"Okay."
I felt the insides of her calves against the outsides of my lower thighs as she stood straddling me.
"Scoot your legs together a little," she ordered.
I did, breaking contact, but she moved her legs until they made contact with mine again, standing more upright. I hadn't realized how far apart my knees had been on the floor.
"That's better," she said. "Now. Where do you want me to start?"
"On my trapezius," I replied, touching the large muscles which sloped from my neck to my shoulders on each side.
"God! You're so tall I have to stand while you kneel."
"Sorry," I said.
"It's okay," she soothed, her hands finding the muscle group in question. Fingers and thumbs began kneading. "I can't believe how much you've grown."
I remember thinking how strong her hands seemed for such a tiny woman. I slumped, resting my chin on my hands on the lip of the tub, then turning my head sideways. The pump roared, the jets jetted, the water bubbled and swirled around us and summer crickets chirped in the night cool night air.
"My God you have a lot of muscle," she said. "Do you take steroids or something?"
"No. They're dangerous. They test us. This is just weights, swimming and vitamins."
"And genetics," she added. "I mean, look at your father."
