Off The Deep End
Kim Little
Off The Deep End
by Kim Little
Copyright © 2023 Kim Little
Bookapy Edition
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Disclaimer: The material in this book is for mature audiences only and contains graphic content. It is intended only for those aged 18 and older.
CHAPTER 1
I was a member of the swim club in junior and senior high school. I had been training and competing since I was in elementary school, so I thought I was pretty fast. When I entered junior high school, I found out that I was one of the top swimmers in my age group, until Nao beat me one day. Ordinarily I wouldn't have minded if someone on the same team was better than me, but Nao was a girl.
Our school was a little different to others; it was a private school that combined junior and senior high schools together. The school had various agreements for extension and excellence programs which included an agreement with a private university that had a nationally ranked swimming club. For those of who had been identified as talented swimmers and accepted into the sports excellence program, it wasn’t uncommon to be developed from the school level and offered scholarships to stay on for university; a good situation for all concerned. That also meant that in our swimming club there were students from all six grades of the school during the school training sessions, spread out around the university’s aquatics centre.
Since the boy’s swim team practised right next to the girls in the same pool, the female body held little mystery for us. As perpetually randy teenage boys, we certainly appreciated the opportunity to spend hours in close proximity to swimsuit clad teenage girls. And as I found out later, the girls swim team didn't mind satisfying their curiosity about the male form either - competitive swimming costumes leave little to the imagination. Especially the swimming costumes of teenage boys who can't control their natural physical response to the firm form of a teenage girl in a swimming costume.
Girls who swim competitively have a low body fat percentage. The demands of the dry cardio and weight training along with hours spent in the pool left them with tight and firm posteriors, and despite being an asset in almost every other social circumstance, floatation devices tend to slow one down, so competitive swimmers' breasts tend to be on the small side. But due to the development of their pectoral muscles from training for hours each day, their perky boobs sat high and proud.
Our head coach was a man – how he managed to avoid being caught ogling the fine female specimens surrounding him on a daily basis, I'll never know. He was a great coach, and he took his job seriously, but that must have taken a supreme amount of self-control. The older boys used to joke that he might be gay, but then we saw him holding hands with a woman who we found out was his wife, and later found out she was an ex-Olympic gymnast. I guess he had a way to release all that teenage-inspired tension in a way that wouldn't find him in prison or on a sex-offender's registry.
We trained hard for three hours a day, five days a week. On weekends we either hosted swim meets at the heated indoor club pool at the university or travelled to other schools and universities to compete. Because we had one of the nicer pools in the region with proper locker facilities, we hosted more meets than we had to travel to, which was pretty good. Some of those other schools didn't have change rooms or proper showers. Have you ever been on a bus full of exhausted swimmers who haven't been able to wash the chlorine off their overheated bodies? The bus windows would steam up opaque, which meant that we had to open the windows – a really fun prospect at 100 km/h with wet hair in December. And hours spent on the bus were tiring and even though it wasn’t supposed to make a difference, it certainly felt like a disadvantage having to crawl off a bus after an hours-long ride and compete.
Still, we didn't mind the long hours of training, or the weekends lost to competitions. We all got on pretty well with each other, and as I've explained, there were plenty of fringe benefits for a hormonal (yet naive) teenage boy. It turned out for me, a big benefit was Nao. I first met Nao when I was in ninth grade. She'd previously lived in a different part of the country, so our schools had never directly competed. She'd moved because of her father's work. The first time I saw her was on the starting blocks.
We used to start our practices with a few challenge sprints after warm-up stretches. Coach would call out for us to marshal, and we'd gather in no particular order and line up behind the blocks. Then we'd face off against whoever ended up on the same starting line-up. Some people would jockey to compete with each other, bets and dares made during lunch breaks or after school, but usually you'd just take whoever came up. The day I met Nao, the whistle had sounded, and I'd stood up on the block.
"Your thing is hanging out."
"What?" I stared at this girl I didn't know. I thought she was trying to psych me out.
"Your thing. It's hanging out of your suit leg."
I looked down and saw that the drawstring of my speedo was hanging out through the leg hole. I tucked it back in, feeling embarrassed. I looked back at her, but she was focused on the finish line, her eyes shielded with dark-tinted goggles. I tried to think of what to say, and had almost decided on "Thanks," when the assistant coach called out.
"Take your marks." I had barely put my hands to the front of the block when the horn sounded.
I dove into the water, elongating my body. I shimmied through the water until I saw the first of the five dark-blue tile lines marking the ten-metre marks, then I kicked up and broke the surface. Counting in my head I tried to hit my pace, keeping track of the lane markers out of the corner of my eye. I hit the wall and turned, trying to keep my tumbling form compact as the coaching staff had been drilling us. Then I headed back up the pool. As I turned my head to breathe, I risked trying to grab a glimpse back at the competition. It looked like I was at least half a length ahead of everybody else. Still, I kept up the pace and as I passed the final marker I put on an extra burst of effort.
I hit the wall timer plate and burst up out of the water, breathing heavily. I quickly turned around to see how far ahead of the other swimmers I was when I saw that girl. She was floating up to her shoulders in the water, looking back down the pool with her goggles pushed up onto her forehead revealing almond-shaped eyes beneath fine-lined arched brows.
"Are you alright? Did you cramp up or something?" I asked her.
"What?"
I saw the last of the other swimmers slap the wall. "The race, did you bail because you got a cramp?"
"I didn't bail."
"But you didn't—" I stopped talking as I looked up at the time board. She hadn't bailed - she'd beaten me by almost two seconds. I was the best swimmer in my group AND I was a guy. I felt my face go warm. I turned back to her, but she was already ducking the lane ropes on her way to the ladder.
"Clear the pool," came the call.
I headed towards the ladder too. She climbed out of the pool in front of me. She had a perfect swimmer's body, but her bottom still had that feminine compound-curve where her thighs met her buttocks. Her flawless skin was a tanned very light coffee colour, which made it obvious that her costume had ridden up exposing half of one pale cheek. It was right at my eye level. In spite of my embarrassment, I felt myself growing hard. As she reached the top of the ladder, I caught a glimpse of the juncture of her thighs, and of a dark space visible for a split-second as her leg stretched her swimsuit and created a tiny cavity between thigh and crotch. She stepped out of the pool and unselfconsciously adjusted her swimsuit with a hooked finger, concealing paradise from my view.
I was at full mast. I lagged back, pretending to untangle my goggles' strap as I let other swimmers climb out before me, trying to buy enough name for my throbbing erection to subside enough for me to leave the pool without giving the rest of the team an eyeful. Finally, there was nobody left, and I had to exit the pool.
"Holy shit, dude!" Derek, one of my teammates, came up to me. "You just got smoked by a girl. A smoking hot girl."
"Shut up. It's just a warm-up sprint."
"Whatever. Owned."
I shoved him in the shoulder. He overbalanced and fell backwards into the pool, surfacing gasping and heaving,
"Derek!" shouted one of the assistant coaches, striding over to the pool.
"He pushed me," spluttered Derek, pointing at me as he splashed over the lip. The coach looked at me. I shrugged.
"He asked for it."
"And you just asked for fifty. On a five count. Drop, now."
The staff had zero tolerance for horsing around the pool. 'Safety first' and all that jazz. Behind the coach's back Derek finished climbing out of the pool and gave me the finger. I shot Derek a filthy look as I got down onto my hands to start fifty push ups, holding each for five seconds.
CHAPTER 2
I didn't actually learn Nao's name until a few days later. Each day after practice we had to haul in the lane markers, clearing the pool for the university water polo team to practise. Coach rotated through a different age group each day, and made boys and girls alike go through the process of heaving out the massive storage reels and hauling in the cables with the plastic floats.
Usually, the boys did the heavy work of turning the wheel whilst the girls made sure that the lane markers fed evenly onto the reels. Nao ended up working on the same end of the pool as me. It was the first time I'd seen her up close since she'd beaten me the few days previously.
There was that incredible bum, sadly fully covered by her swimsuit this time. Unlike most of the other girls on our swim team, her thighs weren't thick with muscle, even though she was proving to be an exceptional talent in the water. She was broad across muscular shoulders, like most of us were. Her chest was slight, her breasts barely swelling her swimsuit. However, as she turned to check the lane rope's progress, I noticed two small points. I felt a shiver as I realised I could see her nipples outlined. She'd taken her swim cap off and her wet hair was dark brown, almost black. She wore it in a short bob, and it hung in damp tendrils, framing her face.
I introduced myself.
"I'm James."
"Nao," she replied.
"Now? What now?" I was confused.
"No, Nao. My name. It's Japanese. From my mum."
"Oh," I mumbled. I felt really dumb. "Sorry."
She laughed. It touched her eyes, a deep soft brown.
"That's okay. I'm kind of used to it."
"So ... that was pretty cool the other day. You know, when you beat me in sprints."
"Yes, I remember," she said evenly.
"How long have you been swimming for?"
"Since I was old enough to hold my breath in the water."
"Oh, that probably explains it."
Her eyes flashed--something. I couldn't read it.
"Explains what?"
"How you beat me."
"I beat you because I got dropped in a pool earlier than you did?"
If I hadn't been fifteen years old, blessed with enough talent to have a bit of an ego, and had made a bit more of an effort to understand my older sister, I would have been better equipped to understand the warning signs. But I was fifteen, and a bit full of myself, so I ran straight into the firing line.
"Well... yeah."
"Oh, so it has nothing to do with years of disciplined training, or early mornings, or hours spent perfecting technique?"
With an epic level of adolescent male oblivious bravado I replied "Well no, but I mean–I only started swimming halfway through elementary school, so..."
"So?" The pool should have flash frozen into ice at this point, her tone was so cold. If I hadn't been entranced by Nao's eyes and hadn't been so stupid as to misread the lethal flames within them as a twinkle of her amusement at my line of questioning, I would have realised that all the conversation surrounding us had stopped and that people were staring at me like I'd grown a second head with a seven fingered foot sticking out of the forehead.
"I don't mean to be rude--" the perfect precursor to an insult, even an unwitting one "--but you beat me and you're just a girl."
So. Dumb.
CHAPTER 3
Nao didn't speak to me for the rest of the school year. She would occasionally shoot contemptuous glances at me across the pool. I would try not to let her catch me watching her. When she wasn't shooting telepathic daggers of ice towards me, she was warm and bubbly towards others. It made her obvious dislike of me that much harder to take.
I admired her from afar. I loved the way she tilted her head and folded her right arm across her body to hold her left shoulder whilst she concentrated on whatever the coaching staff were saying. I loved the way she shook her hair out after she removed her swimming cap. I loved the way her eyes would crinkle when she smiled. I loved watching her laugh, and it caused me strange pangs of jealousy whenever she laughed at something one of the other guys would say. I wished it was me saying those things, but any time I even got close to talking to her, she would enter another conversation or find some reason to move away.
The word through the team grapevine was that Nao was still pissed at me. She took her swimming very seriously; she'd moved a lot due to her father's work and, outside of family, competitive swimming was the one constant she'd had, given that she’d had to regularly change friends and move towns. In her eyes, I had made fun of her and been dismissive of the one thing she felt at most at ease with. And what was even worse, I had implied that girls weren't or couldn't be good swimmers; a dangerous assertion to make to a strong young woman who lived in the water. I doubted she'd spit on me if I was on fire. She probably would have poured petrol on the flames and invited everyone to piss on the ashes.
During the summer break I didn't see Nao at all. I heard that she'd gone to Japan with her mother to visit family. Even though we were officially on vacation, and the coaching staff were as well, most of the squad used to come to use the gym, to swim laps during the open training sessions at the pool in order to stay in condition or just to hang out at the pool since it was our turf. I passed the summer days at the campus pool, working on my technique and lap pacing, and spent the rest of the time hanging out with other members of the swim team at the beach or the houses of friends who were lucky or well-off enough to have pools. We used to laugh at the goons who would start hitting the gym at the end of winter to get 'beach ready'. Swimmers were ready to go three-hundred-sixty-five days a year!
Whilst I was infatuated with Nao, I was still a teenage boy. Hours spent poolside or at the beach certainly made for pleasant viewing and given that I had worked hard to earn a swimmer's physique, I certainly got my fair share of female attention in return. There was even a memorable episode with someone's cousin during a party at Derek's house. Derek's parents were pretty cool, so they would let him hold a blow-out once or twice during the vacation break. They'd been taking Derek to swim meets since he was seven, so they knew everybody in the team. Hell, they knew most of the swimmers our age in the state by now. No-one went too crazy; Coach had made it clear that illicit drug use or getting arrested were a one-way ticket off the squad, but there was a certain amount of alcohol consumption that went on at Derek's parties.
It was the final party of the summer. We'd been going at it since late-afternoon when the sun had gone down enough to be comfortable. As was usual with a Derek-party, most of the members of the squad were in attendance with various friends and admirers, including the seniors. A three-to-four-year difference in high school feels like a world of difference to most teenagers but when you’ve been drilled on burpees until you’ve puked together, there’s not much difference between a senior and a freshman. Especially when there can be less than a second between your finishing times. Derek’s parents had put on the obligatory BBQ, but we'd feasted on grilled chicken in place of the regular greasy burgers and mystery-meat dogs.
Derek and his dad had stretched a rope across the middle of their big inground saltwater pool as a makeshift net and that had consumed a good number of hours as we splashed around playing water volleyball. We'd played all-in together, then girls vs boys. Of course, with many of the boys having the height advantage, the girls decided that they would have to double-up on each other's shoulders to compensate. That led to someone suggesting a game where girls were on guy's shoulders and that's when I met Zoë.
I should explain something: I had made out with girls before, even gotten to second base (under the shirt, over the bra) at one point. I wasn't a prude, but I also carried a warning bell in the back of my head from my first year of junior high when two seniors on the swim team had left in less than salubrious circumstances. The girl had begun 'showing' through her swimsuit and had to leave the team. The guy responsible had to leave school to get a job in order to satisfy her shotgun-toting father. There’d been a sudden freezing of mutual interest between guys and girls that had lasted months, and (we’d heard) a rush of girls to the student health office for birth control. I'd vowed then (right before my hormones had really kicked in) that it would never happen to me. The cautionary tale had worked for everyone in the swimming circles I moved in as well, so due to the girls’ own sense of self-preservation I was never given the opportunity to make a stupid decision.
However, Zoë wasn’t from the swimming circles. She was someone's cousin, a cute junior from New Zealand who was visiting family for the summer. She was about half a foot shorter than me, petite but with a large bosom for such a short girl. She had strategically wrapped it in a sunshine yellow bikini which had strings holding the back and sides together, a risqué choice around boys who had included flicking bra straps in their repertoire of flirting up until recently. The yellow bikini contrasted nicely with her ash blonde hair and green eyes. When people had been pairing up to play shoulders-on volleyball, I had felt a tap on my shoulder.
"I'm Zoë. Help me up." Not 'Hi', not 'Do you want to team up?' - pretty forward compared to most of the girls I knew.
Since everybody else was pairing up around me, I shrugged and crouched down so she could clamber up onto my shoulders. She rocked, off balance for a moment, and giggled.
"Wow. The view from up here is great. Hey, hold on to me properly so I don't fall!" I had been holding onto her calves to stop her from sliding back off my shoulders. I tightened my grip, but she reached down and grabbed my hands. "Higher," she said and repositioned my hands on her thighs, just above her knees.
We played volleyball like that for a good while, laughing when people would overbalance and fall into the water, sometimes with the guy jettisoning the girl so he didn't get dunked and sometimes with the pair going under as the girl desperately windmilled her arms trying to stay upright. As we played, Zoë had obviously felt my grip on her wasn’t secure enough and had moved my hands up higher to mid-thigh and tucked her legs more firmly under my arms. I was painfully aware of her bikini-clad crotch clamped against my neck as her inner thighs rubbed against the side of my face. Eventually people tired of the effort of staying upright and the game broke up as people just swam around and enjoyed the company.
I'd had a few beers and done some tequila shots, earning myself a nice buzz and somehow I ended up down the side of the pool house with Zoë. She had apparently zeroed in on me pretty early in the afternoon before the volleyball games, but me being kind of oblivious to the signals she was sending had frustrated her to the point where she practically dragged me off later after the sun went down, when things at the party started to get loose.
She pulled my head down to hers for a passionate kiss and I smelled salty chlorinated pool water on her skin and sweet wine cooler on her breath. She grabbed my hands from where I’d awkwardly put them around the safe zone of her back and moved them down onto her bum, pressing them against her soft pliable buttocks. I gave an experimental squeeze of her bum through the fabric of her damp bikini bottoms and she moaned into my mouth. Zoë wasn't fat, but she definitely did not have a swimmer’s body. Not that I particularly cared at that moment. She sighed as we came up for air, then pushed me back against the wall. I felt warm metal against my legs, and I sat down hard on top of the pool house's air conditioner unit. She giggled and said in a husky voice,
"Oh, this is much more convenient."
She leaned in again to kiss me, and as she did, she straddled my leg and began to grind her crotch against my thigh. Our tongues duelled and she put her hands on my chest, running her fingers down my firm chest muscles to my stomach, made washboard-flat by hours of vigorous cardio and training each week. She groaned and began to hump her body against mine. I lightly traced around the edge of her bikini bottoms, and then emboldened by her own fervent groping, slid my hands up and around from her backside to cup her tits through her bikini top. I could feel her nipples standing up, and I pressed and rubbed them slowly with my thumbs as my fingertips felt the exposed naked flesh of her sides of breasts near her armpits. She purred as I worried her nipples and caressed her breasts.
Her movements had become more frantic, and I felt hot, wet heat on my leg. In my naivete I thought it must be a combination of wet bikini and the friction from her rubbing. She pulled away from my mouth and put her head against my chest, her hands now under my arms and clutching me to her as her hips began to buck violently. I became aware of something flicking against my ankle, and when I looked down, I realised that one side of her bikini bottoms had come untied, and that what I could feel on my thigh was her sodden bare pussy. I was already pretty hard from making out with Zoë, but when I realised where the wetness I could feel and the faint musky odour I could smell were coming from, my erection went diamond tipped. I suddenly felt cool air down below, and in the same moment realised that Zoë had stopped humping my thigh and that my dick had slipped out the leg of my shorts. She was staring at it with slightly unfocused eyes. She giggled.
"Your thing is hanging out."
If ONLY she hadn't said that!
It made me think of Nao, and immediately I felt a wave of guilt wash over me. I shouldn't have – it's not like Nao and I were an item, or even on speaking terms, but I'd been pining for her for so long, being here like this with someone else suddenly felt like cheating. I began to go soft, and Zoë looked up at me confused. I shrugged, helpless.
"I'm not really ... I'm not sure we should be doing this," I said haltingly.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean ... you've been drinking, I've been drinking, you're younger than me ... What if someone comes?"
She leaned in, slickly sliding further up my thigh.
"That's kind of the point," she said in a low voice, right into my ear. "And someone's come already. Now it's your turn." She reached for my dick, which had almost entirely retreated back into my shorts. I grabbed her hands and held them.
"I'm serious. We should get back before anybody misses us."
Zoë pouted and narrowed her eyes. For a moment I thought she'd slap me or scream or something, but after a moment she seemed to brighten again.
"Your loss." She stepped back and picked up the strings on her bikini bottoms that had come undone and re-tied them. She adjusted her bosom – I noticed her nipples were still standing taut against the fabric – and then shook out her hair. "If you want to pick up where we left off, you know where to find me." Then she turned and walked unsteadily back along the path that led around the pool house to the pool.
I sat back down on the air conditioning unit and leaned heavily back, closing my eyes.
What the hell was wrong with me?
CHAPTER 4
For a week after the party, I puzzled over the encounter with Zoë. A few minutes after she had left me, I had made my own way back to where the rest of the party was hanging out. It didn't seem like anyone had noticed us missing. I grabbed another beer from a cooler and stepped into the pool, washing away the traces of her musk that still shone wetly on my leg. I tried to figure out what had happened – a cute girl was hot and wet and ready to do… something amazing with me, but for some reason the moment I was reminded of Nao I couldn’t go through with it. What the hell was going on with my feelings for Nao? Why, after almost a year, was I still infatuated with this girl who obviously hated me? Was it something to do with her seeming so unattainable? Something to do with my competitive nature? Was it the challenge of pursuit, rather than her alone, that I really liked?
I didn't think it was just physical – sure Nao was smoking hot, and I would be lying if I didn't admit that seeing her in a swimsuit was a highlight of my day, especially when we were doing warm-up stretches – but I was also really attracted to the way she interacted with other people. She seemed to genuinely care about others and was so warm and considerate. She would spend extra time working with the junior high kids to help them master their turns and technique, and seemed to actually be interested in helping them, unlike other older students who only helped out for letters of credit or to lord it over the younger team members. She had a good group of friends, all of whom were friendly to everyone. With her ability, looks and popularity, she could have been the queen bitch of our age group in the pool, but she wasn’t.