P Deutermann - Darkside

“You don’t take your scull out of the river, do you?”

“Did it once,” he said, rubbing on some sunblock. “On one of those dead-calm days you talked about. Then came fog.”

“Yow,” she said. “I’ll take some of that.”

He obliged by standing behind her while she sat at the wheel and rubbing the sunblock cream on her shoulders, upper arms, and back. “And you under way with oars? What’d you do?”

“One of these enormous ‘stinkpots’ came by, idling in on radar,” he said. She had wide shoulders and surprisingly taut muscles for such a petite woman. Then he remembered that she swam regularly for exercise. He stopped when he got to her waist. “He was going really slow, so I fell in behind him, following his wake. Ended up in a marina, hoisted out, and took a cab home to get my car and trailer. Felt like a proper idiot.”

“I’ll bet they never knew you were back there.”

They were passing the Naval Academy on the port hand as they headed for the entrance of Spa Creek, another river estuary. Bancroft Hall rose in gleaming splendor beyond the landfill hump of Farragut Field. They could see tourists swarming around the visitors’ center, and there were several knockabout-class sailboats trying not to collide with one another around the Santee Basin on the Severn side. When they pulled abreast of the Triton Light monument, which memorialized all the lost American submarines now on eternal patrol, she brought the speed up and pointed fair for the bay itself.

Ev wedged himself into a corner of the pilothouse and watched as she concentrated on maneuvering the big cruiser through all the smaller powerboats, dinghies, fishermen, yachts, channel buoys, and even two YPs out into the more open waters of the bay. He could see a large tanker plowing its way up toward Baltimore about five miles out, seemingly motionless until he lined it up visually with a distant buoy and saw the buoy appear to move.

“Get yourself a beer and bring me up a Coke, if you would, kind sir,” she said, checking the radarscope. “We’ll go down past South River and then anchor for a swim and some lunch, if that’s okay.”

“This is glorious,” he said, looking around at the sparkling water and grateful that his sunglasses were polarized; the glare was very strong. “Whatever you want to do suits me.”

She flashed a mischievous smile over her shoulder and then went back to her driving. He went below and got the drinks. The interior air conditioning was on, and the salon was already wonderfully cool.

An hour later, she turned in toward the bluffs below the South River estuary and began paying attention to the depth finder. She asked him to go forward and release the anchor stopper chain. When the depth finder read twenty-five feet, she slowed, stopped, backed the engines gently, using them to point the yacht’s bow into the breeze, and then released the anchor. She backed slowly, veering chain until she had it set, veered more chain, and then shut down the engines.

“This is good holding ground,” she said. “But we’ll just watch for a few minutes to make sure.”

Now that the boat was no longer under way, it was suddenly hot and muggy up in the pilothouse, even with the sea breeze. “How will you tell?” he asked.

“And you were in the Navy how long?” she asked, staring down into the cone of the radar display.

“I was a naval aviator. Navigation, piloting, that’s black-shoe stuff. Shipboard duty, that is. Our idea of a boat was ninety thousand tons, a thousand feet long, with a crew of six thousand people who did the nautical stuff.”

“I see,” she said archly. “So your ignorance of seamanship, navigation, boat handling, rules of the road-”

“Is damned near infinite,” he said before she could continue. “Hell, all we did was fly our trusty, if aging, warbirds onto the flight deck at a hundred and eighty knots and hope the frigging arresting wire didn’t break. The ocean was just something that kept the carrier afloat and provided a soft spot to land in if we had to eject.”

Liz laughed at that and shook her head. She checked the radar again to make sure the range rings weren’t moving downwind. Satisfied the anchor was holding, she suggested a swim. He got his suit and went below to change while she deployed a sea ladder and a buoyed line off the stern. By the time he came back topside, she was in the water. He looked around to see if there were any other boats in view, but they had the shoreline to themselves. As he headed for the transom, he spied that red halter top on the aftermost cushions. He went over the side and swam toward her, coming up alongside her fifty feet from the transom of the yacht. She was treading water, with only her neck and face bobbing above the slight chop.

“What’s this for?” he asked, grabbing the buoy line with one hand. He tried not to look at anything other than her face.

“For just exactly what you’re doing. Also, if you get tired, or catch a cramp, you can pull yourself back to the boat with a minimum of effort. You’d be surprised at how often the Coast Guard finds perfectly intact boats out here with no crew aboard.”

The waves were just big enough to require some effort to keep his face out of the water, and he found himself having to work his legs to stay in one place. She was doing the same thing, and their legs touched from time to time. The water was cool, almost cold, and a nice relief from the humid air. The upper part of her body was a blue-green blur. He felt a flush rising in his face that wasn’t entirely due to the sun.

“I was a swimmer back in my Academy days,” he said, determined to keep things totally normal. “But I never once went into the bay.”

“Why not?” she asked. There were little beads of water glistening on her forehead, and he wanted to wipe them off her perfect complexion. He realized what he really wanted to do was touch her. She’d left the sunglasses back on the boat, and her eyes were laughing at him.

“Didn’t like the thought of all those creatures swimming around down there and looking up at their lunch. Plus, we used to go hunting for sharks’ teeth along these bluffs. Some of those teeth were serious.”

“And all a hundred million years old, too,” she pointed out. “Biggest problem out here are the damned jellyfish, but it’s too early.” She ducked beneath the water for a moment, then came back up, flipping her hair back. Her bare breasts nearly popped out of the water, and this time he found himself staring. She was wiping the water out of her eyes. “Ready to go back?” she asked.

“Yep,” he said, a slight catch in his throat. They pushed off together, their legs and hips touching again, just for an instant. He was the more powerful swimmer, arriving at the ladder first, but he moved aside to let her go up. She rose out of the water like a sleek mermaid. Those white shorts were now thoroughly transparent. She was sufficiently well made to carry it off, and he almost forgot to climb the ladder himself once she was on deck. Realizing he was getting an erection, he hesitated at the bottom of the ladder long enough for things to calm down. It had been two years since he’d really even looked at a woman, and he was surprised at the strength of his reaction.

“You coming aboard?” she called from the top of the ladder. He forced himself not to look up.

“Uh, yes, right,” he answered, and pulled himself up the ladder, trying to turn sideways as his own wet trunks clung to his thighs and exposed his arousal. When he got on deck, she was rubbing her face and hair with a towel, and her breasts swung gently in time with her efforts. He reached quickly for a towel and unconsciously, and absurdly, began drying off his middle.

“Dry my back, please?” she said, turning around. He used his own towel to dry off her back and shoulders. She stood there, slightly bent at the waist, and it was everything he could do not to reach around to her front. Then before he knew it, she had turned around and was pressing her towel up against his chest and around to his upper back, their faces inches apart. He held his breath as he felt her fingers rubbing across the back of his neck and her warm breath close to his face. In their bare feet, the difference in their height was very obvious, and suddenly, as a wave rocked the boat, she was standing very close, the tips of her breasts touching his stomach and her hands coming around to run the towel slowly across his chest and then his stomach. He closed his eyes, swallowed once, and took a deep breath.