Chapter 4

She was good at picking a swimsuit that was really a swimsuit, rather than being primarily adornment for a woman at the pool. A lot of swimsuits aren't really utilitarian, in terms of actually working out in them. The one piece would have been very utilitarian, but of course she'd picked that one too. The one I chose wasn't for swimming. It was for sex. I knew that, and she did too, which was probably why she turned it down out of hand.

Of course that made sense. She wasn't here for sex, after all. And the suit she'd chosen, while it looked nice on her, was just that--nice--as opposed to revealing or sexy or whatever. It actually made it possible to swim with her (she relented and allowed me in the pool) without thinking constantly about the fact that she was female. Unless I saw her ass, anyway. Those boy shorts bottoms exhibited her ass to fine advantage. I also got to see the tattoo on her back, which was like a pen and ink drawing of a woman. She identified the woman as Mother Nature. The strap of the top made it look like Mother Nature was wearing a lavender sweat band across her forehead, but it was all right.

We swam some laps together, side by side, using various strokes and not paying attention to each other at all, except for the fact that we moderated our speed and stayed side by side. She had clean, smooth strokes, the same as mine, and designed to produce the most thrust with the least effort. She was a good swimmer.

We were both breathing deeply when we stopped. We got out and lay down on chaise lounges on the lawn, our towels used primarily to wipe face and head. It was nice to relax and just sit there, and we didn't spoil the comfortable silence with inane chatter. Eventually she sat up.

"Shower," she said.

"Knock yourself out," I replied.

"Might take me a while," she said.

"No problem," I said. "I have things I can do."

I didn't mind a little chlorine on my skin, so I just changed into a pair of gym shorts and sat down at the computer to do a little work of my own. I write stories as a hobby. After my wife left I'd basically decided not to get back into the romance game. I was a little bitter at first, and my preference was for younger women anyway. Younger women usually aren't much interested in horny geezers, except in my imagination, which was still quite buff, even if my body wasn't so much anymore. There was nothing wrong with my penis, however, and I had worked out with it pretty regularly over the years, usually aided by a book instead of a real live woman. It was quick and easy, whereas romance is neither.

There were plenty of places to get the kind of books that floated around in the Army, particularly overseas, and which were about as down and dirty as it was possible to get, and I spent some time in them. But the subject matter wasn't in tune with my own turn-ons. It seemed that secretary and motel maid sex was all the rage, unless you were into bondage or gay sex, and I wasn't. I knew there were websites that catered to just about any kink out there. I'd arrested a Major for having over two thousand pictures on his computer--his government computer--of girls having sex. The pictures themselves were a problem because it was a government computer, of course, but the real issue was that none of the girls were old enough to have grown breasts or body hair. And some of them were crying. It was pretty rough stuff and he got twenty-two years in Leavenworth by the time it was all over. He also got his asshole enlarged, and he was incarcerated in an all officer population. I didn't feel too bad for him. If you can't do the time...

But that didn't make all sex wrong, and I still had a healthy sex drive. So I did some snooping around on the internet and found more stories than could be read in ten lifetimes. Most of them were pure junk. It was literally like looking for a pearl in pig shit--which I did as part of a contest in Cambodia one time. I found that pearl, by the way, so I know what I'm talking about. And yes, I was drunk.

Anyway, I couldn't find many pearls amongst the shit on the net, so I just started writing out my own fantasies. I had about sixty or seventy of them in my little personal library when I happened upon a website that stood head and shoulders above any of the others I'd seen, both in terms of the kind of stories available and the quality of the writing. So, on a whim, I posted a few of the things I'd written. Since those were well received, I posted a few more. I'd been writing and posting ever since. It was both fun and relaxing. Plus I'd made a few friends. They were 'friends' in a new sense of the word, a sense that was unique to the electronic age, but one of the American military mottos is "Adapt, Improvise, Overcome," so I accepted these odd, very intimate but impersonal relationships in stride.

I was currently attempting to write a story in which a family was trying intentionally to film a video clip that would win the hundred thousand dollars on America's Funniest Home Videos. Somebody had postulated that the best videos had to do with sexy things, so they were trying to engineer something innocently sexy. First they tried the teenage girls dancing, and falling off of a coffee table, with their skirts flipping up embarrassingly. Which led to falling on Daddy's lap, the required squealing and squirming included. Somebody else thought that was going too far, so they gave up the dancing idea and went to practical jokes on sleeping people that caused them to leap out of bed naked. Of course they had to be naked for that, and since dad was filming the girls in his boxers (I hadn't figured out how to explain that part yet), when he got excited, his level of excitement protruded through the fly of his shorts and things got out of hand. It was supposed to get to the orgy stage, whereupon the baby would unknowingly and accidentally turn the webcam on and the family orgy would be broadcast for anyone interested to see and record.

I wasn't at all sure it was going to actually make it to the editing folder. I had at least a dozen stories half written that had hit snags too big to resolve, but I never threw anything away. It was all spare parts, the way I looked at things. And I hated to give up on something once I'd begun, even if it was a thoroughly bad idea, which this one was starting to resemble.

So I was hammering away at the keys, trying to make the thing stink a little less, when Anna came into the room. I glanced at the computer clock. I was somewhat astonished to find that two hours had passed. It was for that reason that I didn't look at her and find out that, in the intervening time, she had just dyed ... or maybe it was re-dyed ... her hair.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Nothing you'd be interested in," I said.

"How do you know?"

I wondered if there would ever be a time that she didn't question something I said.

"It's dirty old man stuff," I said. I was searching for a particular word. I knew it existed. I was pretty sure it started with a "P," but it was just beyond my reach. If she would leave me alone for another thirty seconds I was sure I could get it.

Of course she did anything but leave me alone.

"Let me see," she said.

I gave up on the "P" word and turned to face her.

"No." Then I saw the dark purple hair she was combing down over the right side of her face. "That's different."

"Why can't I see?"

"You'd be disgusted and think I was a pervert."

"I already know you're a pervert," she said calmly.

"You know no such thing," I said, insulted. "All you know is I like to go naked in my own house and that I consider my male urges normal."

"I know you look at my breasts every chance you get and you think about making me wiggly!" she said, her chin jutted forward.

I looked at her breasts. The new T-shirt said ACTUAL SIZE right across her breasts. I grinned.

"I repeat: I consider my male urges normal."

"I'm not a prude," she said, leaning forward to look at the screen.

"I know that," I said. "But that doesn't mean you're as kinky as I am."

"Oh, so you're not a pervert, but you're kinky?" she said. I closed the screen, but that didn't stop her. "That looked like lines of dialog. What is it? Why were you writing that?"

"Why do you insist on going where you don't really want to go?"

"Because you have no idea where I do and do not want to go."

She was as hardheaded as some of the officers I'd had to serve under. And just as clueless. Those officers often had to learn things the hard way.

I hit the OPEN button and searched for a particular title. I clicked on it and the story came up. I stood up and turned the chair towards her. At least she didn't gloat. She just sat down, leaned forward and started to read. I went to pour myself two fingers of whiskey, then remembered I didn't have any. Actually, as long as she wasn't a prude, the story I'd pulled up for her wasn't all that risky. It was about a sixteen-year-old girl with a brain tumor who goes to a sort of cowboy resort place as part of a last fling before she dies. A romance develops and she ends up pregnant, which bathes the tumor in hormones that cause it to go into remission. As fantasies go, it stretched things a bit, but it wasn't all that kinky.

I went back to see how far she'd gotten. I had plenty of time.

"I'm going to run to the store. I'll be back in a bit," I said.

She waved one hand at me and kept her eyes on the screen.

I decided to splurge and got a bottle of The Glenlivet. I also picked up a six pack of what I hoped she would consider beer interesting enough to drink, if she was so inclined.

When I got back she was still reading. I put the beer in the fridge and the Scotch in the cabinet. I thought about making Belgian waffles for a late dinner, since I probably didn't have much else she'd find appealing. I was pretty sure hotdogs were out and rare steaks would probably send her into tears, if the story she was reading didn't.

She appeared in the doorway. Her eyes were, in fact, a little red.

"That was beautiful," she said.

"Well thank you," I said, pleased beyond measure.

"But it was full of errors. Who is your editor?"

"It's not that serious," I said.

"I agree," she said. "But they distract the reader, and why do that if they can be repaired?"

"I meant my writing isn't that serious," I said.

"Your writing is fine," she said. "You just need an editor."

"The only editor I know is your mother, and I sort of suspect she'd look askance at text that describes sex scenes in such graphic detail."

"That was part of what made me like it," she said.

I wasn't used to women her age being quite as honest about things as I liked to be. I thought it was interesting that I often tried to shock people with my honesty, and had just been a little shocked by hers.

"Besides," I said, unconsciously veering away from things intimate, "editors always want to change things. If I had an editor we'd knock heads."

"I could be your editor," she said.

I blinked. The story she'd read had been pretty tame, compared to some of the others I'd written. I wrote a lot of incest. And I couldn't think of a single story I'd written where there was any safe sex and somebody didn't get pregnant. Like I said, these were all about my fantasies, and while I might recommend one thing in real life and mean it, all bets were off in a fantasy.

"Thank you for the offer," I said, for lack of anything else to say. "But the fact is that very few people see these, and I'm sure you're busy and have better things to do than pore through the equivalent of dusty old manuscripts."

"I liked that story, Uncle Bob," she said. "It made me wiggly."

The only way I could end the discussion was to just ignore her. She got the message after a while and quit trying. She moved from my computer to her laptop and started working again. I went over to watch and she said, "Go away!"

So I watched TV again, until I started nodding off and got up to go to bed.

"Good night," I mumbled.

"Are you going to check on me later?" she asked.

"What?"

"Are you going to run around naked in the night, turning off lights again?"

I sighed. "No."

"Why not?" she asked. "What if I fall asleep? I'll get a crick in my back."

"So now you want me to run around naked in the night, checking to make sure you haven't fallen asleep?"

"You can get dressed first if you want to. I mean that would be the polite thing to do," she said, as if that were a reasonable thing to say in a reasonable conversation ... which was not what was going on.

I woke up a bit. What was going on? Why was she talking like this? The dirty old man in me had an idea, but the conservative pillar-in-the-community uncle in me pooh-poohed that idea instantly. She was probably still trying to needle me because I wouldn't immediately adopt her as the editor I didn't need.

"I'll wear a cowbell," I said. "The noise will wake you up."

She giggled, which just about floored me. That giggle was completely out of character for a woman trying to torture a man. Unless, of course, she judged that she had been successful.

"Good night," she said in that fifteen-year-old voice.

I woke up in that alert way that told me something had caused me to wake. I listened, and heard the music. She probably thought it was soft enough, but that line I'd laid on her about losing my hearing because of gunfire was pure bull. My hearing was perfect.

The only stereo I owned was in my bedroom, so I wondered what was playing the music. And I heard other noises too, but couldn't identify them. I got up quietly and tiptoed into the hallway. I edged along the wall, where there were fewer squeaks. I was halfway down the hall when I remembered I was naked. But all I was going to do was peek to see what was going on. When I first looked into the dining room, I almost got whiplash when I saw sudden movement and jerked my head back. Then she sailed across my view through the open doorway, dancing.