The Pool

"Wake up, buttmunch. It's time to take Mom and Dad to the airport." I dropped down on the corner of my kid brother's mattress, hoping to make his splayed limbs flop for my amusement. I think it's terribly unfair that Jason got all the height in our gene pool, so I try to make it look ridiculous where I can. His face remained stuffed in his pillow, and he bellowed something indecipherable from its center. "Come onnnnnnnn," I stabbed the tips of my fingers into the exposed skin between the hem of his t-shirt and the waistband of his boxers, "we're going to be late if you keep laying there like a slug. I've been knocking on your door for a half an hour."

His right arm swatted at my poking fingers, King Kong trying to get some alone time at the top of the Empire State Building. "Dammit, Kate! Knock it off! I'm getting up already. Jesus." He heaved one shoulder back, tangling his lower half in the sheets and glaring at my from under his shaggy black bangs.

"You sleep in this much every day? Do none of your classes start before noon?" He yawned, stretching both arms out, then tried to sort out the bedclothes and sit up next to me on the side of the bed.

"Not if I can help it, no." Another prodigious yawn and leonine stretch, "but most engineering classes start early. Guess if I wanted to sleep in, I should have majored in English, right?" He elbowed me in the ribs just hard enough to let me know it was payback for poking him before.

"Yeah, because none of my classes ever actually met, per se," I played along with his light mocking of my major. It deserved to be mocked, at the moment. Not being able to get a job with my liberal arts degree was why I was here getting my brother out of bed, why he and I were spending the next three months together house sitting for our parents. "I got all my credit hours from sitting in coffee shops and reading Foucault."

"Why do we have to leave so early, anyway?" He heaved himself off the bed and searched the floor for a pair of shorts, back hunched, arms hanging slack from his shoulders. "The airport's only, like twenty minutes away and their flight doesn't leave for three more hours."

"International flight, doofus. They have to ask them if they're terrorists for a half hour before they can fly to London." Jason pulled on a pair of khaki shorts, squinted in the mirror a moment and opted not to change into a fresh t-shirt. His long, shuffling feet slid into a pair of athletic sandals.

"I wouldn't," I warned.

"What? You criticizing my fashion choices now? Think maybe I should have a pair of cowboy boots? Or bowling shoes?" It was another gentle dig at me. In college, I realized that a rockabilly style suited my taste in music and tattoos and flattered my pear-shaped figure, so I wore a lot of flared skirts, cigarette pants, and yes, cowboy boots. Jason's style, on the other hand, had always been Abercrombie & As Little Effort As Possible.

"No, I just think you'll want to wear something with some arch support. Mom packed half the house to take with them to Europe, and you're the one loading it in the car." I jumped up and grabbed his hand, pulling him with me. "Come on, the sooner we get them checked in, the sooner we can come back and jump in the pool. This is going to be the last sunny day for a while."

A three month trip to Europe is the kind of thing people talk about doing, but my parents are the only people I'd ever heard of actually doing it. They were going to all of the great museums and palaces, with side trips to Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, and other places I'd only ever read about. It should have been the kind of thing that makes you proud about your parents when you tell other people. Not me. I knew what it cost.

Dad had a successful machine parts business, and was semi-retired, able to take a few months off with careful planning. He met Mom long before that, when he was stationed in Okinawa and she was a waitress at a traditional restaurant. They married there two months later and have been together ever since.

Dad used to go to her restaurant every day he could get off base, just to see her. His spoken Japanese was passable but his reading was terrible. He didn't want to let on to her, though, so he kept ordering things by pointing to them without knowing what they were. He ended up eating squid, frogs, snails, everything on the menu. She just thought he loved Japanese food until he finally asked her out to dinner - at a hamburger joint. It's a cute story, and he told it to great effect at their thirtieth anniversary party two years ago, about an hour before I watched him getting a blowjob in the coat check from Deb Hansen, accounting department.

For practically as long as they've been married, Dad's been an uncotrollable cheater and extravagant apologizer. The European trip was the result of my mother sniffing out a close-call pregnancy scare with a mistress younger than me.

Deb Hansen's what got Mom the pool.

As Dad's apologies go, the pool was a good one, much better than a designer handbag or even the little sports car that Mom could barely drive. The pool took up most of the back yard, when you included the patio, half shaded by palm trees, and the stacked stone grotto at the far edge, trickling musically into the shallow end. Kidney shaped, tiled in bright blues and greens, and twelve feet down to the bottom of the deep end, which is where I dropped in as soon as we were home from the airport. I sank down halfway, then folded my legs like I was sitting Indian-style. I looked up at the bubbles racing to the surface and settled deeper into the pressing blue. I started the exercise I'd been doing every day since I came to stay for the summer.

I am building a time machine in my mind to save myself from making a very particular kind of mistake.

Kate, when you are a sophomore in high school, an outgoing guy named Matthew with beautiful hazel eyes is going to ask you to the homecoming dance. You should go with him. Making fun of the other couples booty dancing or too nervous to actually touch each other is what will start you out being best friends. He's going to give you your first kiss later, under the yellow glow of the porch light. You should probably let him do that, too. It's sweet, he's a good kisser.

Kate, when you are a senior in high school, Matthew will have been your boyfriend since that first dance. On prom night, he'll get an amazing hotel room but he's not going to be drunk enough to have sex with you in it. You'll want to ignore the fact that the four times you've had sex before then, he's been plastered. You'll still be planning on going to the same college in the fall to stay together Don't do it. Tell him you love him, then break up with him. He's gay.

Kate, when you are twenty, Matthew will take you on a candlelight picnic and surprise you with his grandmother's diamond ring. You'll want to say yes, because you love him and can't imagine not seeing him every day for the rest of your life. He's going to look so handsome in his tux, waiting for you at the end of the aisle with tears of joy in his eyes. Don't marry him, even though it'll break both your hearts. He's gay.

Kate, when you are twenty-three, Matthew will get up enough courage to tell you on your first anniversary that he thinks he's bisexual. You should take him at his word, since he knows what's in his own heart. What you shouldn't do is keep telling yourself that it's alright that every time you have once-a-month sex after that, you have to tell him how hot you think it would be to see him with another man and describe it in detail first. It's not progress, it's not improving. He's gay.

Kate, when you are twenty-five, Matthew will sob and shake in your arms, confessing that he's broken his marriage vows several times with men he's met online. You'll be shocked and destroyed. You can't be, not if you've been paying any attention or heard any of these warnings. The signs were all there. He's gay.

Kate, when you are twenty-six, you and Matthew will get divorced. In some ways, he'll still be your best friend. You'll leave him the dog and drive three states away to move back in with your parents. You will try to figure out how you lost ten years of your life and figure out the only way to get them back is to go back in time and send these warnings.

I unfolded my legs and pushed off against the bottom of the pool, my lungs burning for air by the time I popped back up to the surface. I paddled over to the side of the pool and propped myself up on the tiled edge, resting my chin on my forearms. Jason was draped over a lounge chair in his swim trunks with aviator sunglasses covering half his face. I couldn't tell if he was looking at me, or if he was even awake. Jason got Mom's black hair and intense brown eyes. His tan is always going to look better than mine, though we both have a spray of chocolate freckles across our noses and cheeks. Where Jason is long and lean, an inch taller than Dad, I got a totally different genetic combination. I'm taller than Mom, but only by a few inches. I got her petite shoulders and small, pointed breasts, but the full hips and round ass of Dad's Midwestern ancestors.

Jason had been a track star in high school, but wasn't good enough to make the cut later on. It looked like little brother had put on some muscle in the two years he'd been away at college, thickening up through the shoulders and chest. His torso was hairless, but I didn't know if it was natural or if he shaved. The last time I'd lived with Mom and Dad, Jason had been twelve. That's where my mind had him set, it just kept scaling him up when I saw him grown taller and taller at holidays. I had been thinking of this summer together in some ways as babysitting my kid brother. Now I was looking at the man with whom I'd be sharing the house instead. I was about to say something about how grown up he looked when Jason interrupted.

"Is that seriously your bathing suit?"

"Huh?"

"That thing you're wearing. I mean, what is that? Some kind of dress? You look like an eighty year old at the Y who doesn't know she's not a pin-up anymore."

I looked down at my suit, which I thought was pretty cute before. It was meant to look like something you'd see on a 1940s pin-up girl: a one-piece with a black and white striped strapless bodice and a high-waisted bottom with a sheer outer layer that looked like a skirt skimming the bottom of my butt cheeks. "I look like what? I do not!" I huffed, splashing water out of the pool at him and falling far short of his lounge chair. "At least I don't look like a...a..." It was so hard to think of an insult with his smooth, brown chest and shoulders, his casual posture in the lounge chair. What he looked like was a picture in a brochure about how fucking amazing it would be to have a pool. He belonged out here; I was the one who spent the last ten years getting reluctantly fucked by the love of my life. My brother's banter usually slid off me, but this time it stuck in me, barbed, hot, and poisonous. "Jase, that was just mean." I slipped miserably back down below the water.

When I came back up, he was kneeling over the pool with his sunglasses pushed up to the crown of his head, waiting for me, worried. "Hey, Kate, I'm sorry. It didn't come out right. I didn't mean anything other than that I think you'd look great in a suit that's not so...old-fashioned." I took a deep breath and went under again, looking up at his rippling face, framed by blue water. I came up again. "Seriously, I didn't mean it that way and it definitely wasn't my intention to hurt you. I'm really sorry about that. Can you forgive me and let me take you to the mall to apologize and show you what I'm talking about?"

"Not today," I pushed off from the side of the pool, skimming through the water away from him, marveling at my little brother's very adult apology. I tried not to think about what it meant that his first instinct was to buy something for me to soothe hurt feelings.

"Is it because you're still mad at me?"

"It's because there's still sun today. We'll go tomorrow when it's rainy."

We spent the next few hours not saying much, just enjoying the sun and the cool water. When I wasn't in the pool, I was reading. Jason mostly played with his phone and worked on his tan. Every time I came up for air or finished a chapter, I glanced over at him. Perhaps I'd built that mental time machine after all, but it had missed fixing me and instead turned Jason from a lanky, clumsy kid with the nerdiest black bowl cut in the county to this tousled, lazy Dionysus who smelled like Banana Boat. We went inside when it started clouding over around three. Jason made tacos and we watched Law & Order: SVU re-runs, cracking each other up by repeating the most melodramatic lines in squeaky cartoon voices. By the time I went to bed, my cheeks were hot from the sun and from laughing.

I was sprawled on top of the sheets in black boyshorts and my Ramones t-shirt, staring up at the plastic glow in the dark stars I'd tacked on the ceiling as a teenager. My half-sleeping mind, worn out from building and building my time machine all day, settled on another mistake I'd made that I wished away often.

It was the week before high school graduation and I had skipped class for the first time. I'd already gotten As on all my exams and was just coasting to the final ceremony, summer, college. Mom had borrowed my car to take on one of her all-day outlet shopping binges with her best friend, Ai. I had caught a ride with a friend just before lunch and come home to eat cold tonkatsu, watch TV, and get a jump start on primping for a party Matthew and I were going to later that night. If I was really lucky, I could get a half empty bottle of vodka out of the liquor cabinet to take with me and Mom wouldn't notice so long as there was already a full one there for her tonight.

I was upstairs in my room, holding dresses up to my bare chest, trying to figure out which one I thought Matthew would like best when I heard Dad's car pull up in the driveway. Momentary panic subsided as I realized my car wasn't in the driveway and he had no reason to come anywhere near my room. He was probably just home for lunch. All I had to do was stay quiet for an hour and I wouldn't get caught on literally the only day I had ever skipped class. I was debating the merits of walking very slowly over to the bedroom door and closing it when he came in from the garage and I could hear immediately that he was not alone.

"Damn, look at that ass. I can't wait to bury my face in it! Head on upstairs, gorgeous." There was a loud smack and a feminine moan. "No, not the bedroom on the left. Second one on the right." My stomach dropped to my toes. The first bedroom to the right of the stairs was Jason's and the second one was mine. My bedroom. My bedroom where I was standing in nothing but a pair of panties with a sundress clutched to my chest, skipping school and unintentionally catching Dad cheating on Mom. I bolted for the closet hoping the sound of them coming up the stairs covered me. I pulled the slatted doors closed just as Dad's latest rounded the jamb and started pulling off her shirt.

I knew Dad had messed around, you couldn't have ears and not hear Mom yelling at him about it. But why the hell would he bring her into my bedroom? Then I remembered our trip to Jamaica. Mom had found long blonde hairs on the pillows of their bed at the end of last summer, so Dad took us all to Jamaica in September. How long had he been using my room? Was he using Jason's? It was completely gross.

The woman Dad had brought home was thick and curvy, her athletic thighs framed by her short white tennis skirt. Her skin was the color of cinnamon and her hair was twisted into dozens of long braids, tied back. When she stripped her sports bra off over her head, her breasts sprang out, the nipples were dark brown, like mine, but the areolae had to be three or four times bigger. They tipped her sloping breasts like the nose cones on a pair of missiles. Dad wasn't far behind her, ripping his tie out of his shirt collar and fumbling with his buttons, giving up with only the bottom one left and virtually tackling her onto my bed. They didn't so much kiss as hungrily mash their mouths together while she pulled his shirt out of his pants and went for his belt.

"Oh, Sara. You want the belt? Or my dick?" He asked her sardonically. I wasn't sure why yet.

"You know I want them both...Daddy," she replied, her voice low and husky. I realized who she was then: the director of the summer camp at our country club. I'd met her once last year when I was waiting to pick Jason up from swim lessons.

"Good, 'cause you're going to get them both," he pushed away from her and stood up, between my closet and the bed. He was only a few feet away. If he'd looked closely at the slats in the door, he'd have seen me for sure. I shrank back against the wall with my knees pulled up to my chest, heart hammering at my ribs. He took off his dress shirt and t-shirt and unthreaded his braided leather belt from his linen trousers while she got on all fours on my bed, her heart-shaped ass pointing at me. I could see a wet stain spreading in the middle of her white panties. He grasped the belt with his hands shoulder-width apart and dragged it slowly back and forth across her thighs.

"Please, Daddy, I've been so very bad. Punish me!"

"What did you do that was so bad, baby girl?"

"Well," Sara grinned at him over her shoulder, "I have been sleeping with a married man."

"That is bad." He pulled the belt away from her and held it by the buckle in his right hand, wrapping the leather once around the back to improve the grip. "You're definitely getting a spanking for that."

Even though I knew what was going to happen next, even though I could see they were having fun and this was a regular game, I cringed. Dad was a bear of a man with broad shoulders and thick, sinewy forearms. He had never, ever hit me or Jason or Mom, but I could imagine how it would hurt. He peeled her panties down to mid-thigh and gave her a few teasing taps of the belt across her cheeks. Sara's exposed vulva was hairless and her inner lips were the same dark chocolate as her nipples. I could see the light reflecting off her wetness and realized I was wet and tingling in the same place. I clamped my hands over my mouth to muffle whatever sound was going to come out of my mouth when Dad really laid into her with the belt.

He reared back from the elbow and brought it across her thighs, she moaned and wiggled her ass. I had thought it would sound like Indiana Jones' whip, but it was much quieter. Three more quick, sharp blows and she was keening with desire. Dad had obviously done this before, a thought that both made my stomach flop over and made butterflies spread from my clit to the rest of my mound.

"Please, Daddy, spank me!" Sara cried. She was rewarded with a rain of blows, two so hard I could see the end of the belt wrap around her hip and inner thigh. Though most of what I could see of dad was his back, when he turned sideways to hit her I could see the heavy bulge pressing against the front of his pants.

"You ready for the big one, baby girl?"

"Yes, Daddy. Please, Daddy." He pulled back and whacked her square across her swollen pussy. She shrieked and tipped over on her right side, her thighs clenched together. I couldn't see her face, but I could imagine the expression of pain and pleasure well enough. Mine probably looked the same, under my utter shame at enjoying what I was watching.

"Oh, honey, did that hurt? I'll make it feel good now." He dropped his pants and underwear in one smooth motion, his erection popping up out of the waistband. He sat down on the edge of the bed closest to me and leaned all the way back, splaying his knees. She pulled off her panties and straddled his face. He kneaded her ass with both hands while he vigorously tongued her inner lips.