Danni laughed. Then she disappeared toward the foot of the bed. I began to tongue Andrea’s ass. I did what I could for her, but I knew her moans of pleasure were not from my feeble tongue.
I felt Danni’s mouth on my cock. Oiled hands massaged my sac. A finger slipped between my cheeks. God, it should have been heaven. If my body had not betrayed me, it would have been.
My neck got sore. I had to let my head fall back, had to let Andrea go. Eventually, Danni gave up on making me hard.
Andrea turned herself around. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “It’s OK. It’s not your fault.” She kissed me then started to lift herself off me, but she stopped, straddling me, ass high, supported by one extended leg, kneeling on the other. Her eyes rolled upward and her back arched. “Shit,” she said. “Danni. Oh shit.”
Between Andrea’s dark legs, I saw white hands pinching nipples on white breasts glistening with oil. Danni’s blond hair had come loose from her clip. It brushed at those hands and breasts. Her face was in my wife’s ass. The wrinkles on the bridge of Andrea’s nose, the way her eyes rolled upward, the tension in her belly muscles. I could see my wife was about to come.
Poised above me like that, she screamed a woman’s name. I wanted to be happy for her release. I wanted to be a man who loved his wife so much that he felt joy in her pleasure even when he couldn’t be the source of it.
I wasn’t the man I wanted to be.
Danni and Andrea rolled away from me. They made love on the bed beside me, oblivious to my pain.
It was the last time I saw Andrea nude, the last time I touched her, tasted her.
Andrea and Danni had stayed until I started gaining weight, until I was working for the gym part time. They had helped each other through until my hair came in enough to cut close for that Bruce Willis look Andrea said was sexy. The day I managed my first pull-up, I came home to an empty house. Andrea and Danni took my dog, the living room furniture, and exactly half my remaining bank account.
I continued my recovery without them, at least physically. I fought until I could do 20 pull-ups. I cursed my wind and skinny legs until I could run for half-an-hour. I fought to improve, to live. Now, I was cured. The fight was over.
Without Andrea, the fight had been all I had.
I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel between my hands and started to shake. I was alive. I was coming home a cured man. It was supposed to be a wonderful moment, a celebration.
Instead, I had no idea who I was. My new life was empty. My body betrayed me. It left me with a wiry, stranger’s body. My wife betrayed me. She left me a house full of ugly memories.
An impatient driver behind me laid on the horn.
I yanked the wheel left and headed for the interstate.
Three days later, I was in Glenwood Spring, Colorado, standing on top of the ladder of a three-metre diving board over an Olympic-sized pool. I hadn’t stood on a board since diving in high school. My skin was oil slick from the minerals in the hot spring-fed pool. A ballet of steam danced across the surface of the water below. The sun was high. A fresh mountain breeze caressed my chest and arms.
The view could touch the soul, if a man had a soul to touch.
In front of me, three wings of chalet-style resort hotel wrapped around the steaming pool. Beyond and above the red-tiled roofs, snowy Rocky Mountain spires reached for the belly of a sky deeper and bluer than the pool below. Even I paused to stare.
“You afraid of heights?” the woman on the ladder behind me said.
I stepped forward onto the fibreglass diving board, then I turned to face her. “Sorry,” I said. “The mountains are so…” I let it trail off, suddenly aware of how skinny I felt, of how explanations had become so complex, so tiring.
She smiled. “I know,” she said. “It’s a stunning view.”
The dancing freckles on her smile-wrinkled nose held my gaze the same way the view had. I hadn’t seen a woman smile like that since my first few weeks with Andrea, since before…
She stepped up onto the board with me. Her dark hair was wet and smoothed to her shoulders. Her dun eyes flashed with humour under the high mountain sun. The lines near her eyes suggested maybe 30 years of well-lived life. Her dark-blue one-piece was a swimmer’s suit, not a sunbather’s advertisement for attention. She reminded me of a sleek, happy river otter in a Speedo.
Her smile faded. She cocked her head to the side, pulled her hair away from her neck, and twisted it until water dripped onto the board. “You don’t want to stand up here too long,” she said. “The breeze is cool, but that sun’ll give you cancer.”
I almost laughed. She wouldn’t have understood. I wanted to say something else, to say something that would make her smile again. But I knew better. My blond hair was still close-cut. I knew I was still pale. I was getting stronger, but I looked more like a tofu-fed yoga instructor than the pommel horse, rings, and high-bar man I had been.
I wanted to run and jump from the board. I wanted to hide in the deep blue water.
“I’ve never seen anything -”
“New eyes on ancient beauty,” she interrupted. The otter’s smile returned.
I nodded.
“It reminds me to appreciate the things I see every day,” she said.
“You live here?”
“Assistant manager,” she said. “You going to dive?”
Dive? I was on a three-metre board for the first time in maybe 17 years. An otter woman was flirting with me. The sky was suddenly bluer and the air colder. A breeze swept in from the snowy peaks. Gooseflesh covered me.
“Breeze makes me a little cold up here,” she said. Goose flesh rippled up her legs and under her suit. Nipples suddenly stood from the modest rounds of her breasts. She crossed her arms. Her breasts swelled.
My chest and legs were chilled, but my crotch moved, stretched, and warmed for the first time since… I wanted to reach out and touch those hardening peaks.
She caught me staring. Her smile was gone.
I knew the flirt we had shared was gone, too. “You go ahead,” I said. I stepped aside.
She strode to the end of the board, tugging at the bottom of her suit to seat it under the muscled curve of her ass.
At the end of the board, she turned around. The otter’s grin came back. She nodded to me. Then her eyes changed. The spark left, replaced by a distant focus, by a look that turned inward, that found some quiet centre.
I knew that look. She was about to mount the beam. She was going to spike a new vault. She was fully in herself, and she was beautiful.
She lifted her arms in a ritual of balance I knew well. She set the toes of her right foot, then her left, on the very edge of the board. The mountains beyond her seemed to lean inward, anticipating her, preparing to spot her if needed. I wondered what it would be like to put my hands on those hips, to hold her aloft, to help her move through lithe, stretching tumbles.
She tested the bounce of the board.
Automatically, I stepped back onto the ladder so my weight wouldn’t kill her spring.
I watched her breathe. Her breasts grew, stretched her suit, then relaxed. She lifted on toe tip. A muscled line appeared in her thigh, pointing upward to the hem of her suit. The blue fabric wrapped her flexing abs and curved under her, gripping her mons and cradling her sex in mineral dampness. She dropped her weight through her heels. The board flexed low, then rose. She lifted upward. Glossy thighs snapped up against perfect breasts; muscled arms embraced bent knees. She spun backward, hair spraying. She had more than a full rotation before she dropped below the level of the board. I saw her otter’s eyes flash, and I swear she winked at me.
Two-and-a-half reverse. She stretched full out and her hard body slipped through mineral mists and disappeared without a splash.