Chapter 25

Cassidy was laughing and clung to me as we surfaced. She looked into my eyes and I could see it like a physical thing in front of me - she loved me. I could see it because she had that grin that reached up into her eyes, but she also had a hint of worry for me.

“Don’t push yourself,” she whispered to me. Several more people were jumping into the water with big whoops and splashes. “I love you.”

“I know,” I said, and kissed her lightly, tasting the lake water on her. My fiancee’s deep, vibrant violet hair got darker when it was wet, almost like her natural colour, and it reminded me of that first party we went to as a couple - it was a celebration for our high school swim team, and there’d only been maybe a dozen of us. I’d jumped into the pool with her clinging to me and howling with laughter.

Now, in Lake Powell, I smirked as I tickled her side for a moment and she squealed a laugh and jerked away. I made some space with a couple of strokes and called out, “Cassidy is it!”

“Oh, you cheater!” Cassidy laughed. “Fine.” She closed her eyes and shouted, “Marco!”

We had to adjust our rules on the fly. Marco Polo is usually played in a pool, not an open lake, and pools have walls. Usually the person who was ‘it’ would yell ‘Marco!’ and would have to try and find and tag one of the other players by listening to their response yell of ‘Polo!’ The first rule addition was no one was allowed to duck underwater. The next came soon after when Cassidy managed to work together with Wanda to get me tagged It by Zenya - I was just plain faster than all of them. Being in a championship high school swim team will do that, even a couple years after college. To compensate, the girls were allowed to dunk under water while I was It to try and even the playing field.

And that’s when things started to get interesting.

There were six of us playing - Wanda, Leia, Zenya and Ami had all jumped into the lake after us. Once the rules had changed, it seemed like the girls had made an unspoken pact to try and get me tagged. They started bunching up, trying to stick near me to get whoever was it to move in my direction.

Wanda was It, slowly rotating in the water as she listened to us splashing around. “Marco!” she called.

Immediately we all called back, “Polo!” and started to move, except Cassidy was on one side of me and Zenya was on the other. When I went to try and swim backwards to escape Wanda, who was tearing towards us through the water, Cassidy pointed off to one side, “Tiger, look.”

I looked. If I was being competitive about the game, like we would be back on the swim team (put a bunch of swimmers in a pool and all sorts of competitions start), I wouldn’t have fallen for it. But I wasn’t, and I looked, and I was glad I did.

Ami was off to the left, and when I looked she propelled herself higher out of the water, squeezing her bare breasts and making an exaggerated winking face with her tongue stuck out at me. Now, I’d been well aware that she was topless the entire game, but we mostly only had our head and arms out of the water as we were swimming around. Now I got a full flash as the lake water rolled off of her accentuated tits and her tan nipples pointed and jiggled with her movements and shaking.