In Which Steff Goes Under
Maybe I was just expecting something to go terribly wrong after spending all that time pondering the mystery of the suite change, but it seemed like I was ready for it when I heard Steff scream from the other end of the suite. I sprang into action, moving with as much speed and determination as I could.
Two pretty expensive looking vases and a door frame later, I skidded to a stop with my face on the tiled floor of a large room on the opposite side of the central column from the living room.
“Khersis, Mack, don’t kill yourself,” Steff said, bending over to help me up.
“What happened?” I asked. “I heard you scream.”
“There’s a pool!” Steff said, stepping to the side while holding onto my hand.
She gestured with her free arm at the rippling surface of the water, illuminated with green light from below. Despite being in a glass dome on the roof of a ginormous building, the whole room had a subterranean feel… like a hidden grotto. Around the edges, it was set up as a garden with glistening glass fruit hanging from jade-leafed bushes and trees.
It was a very tranquil scene, which only made me even more confused. Had she really frightened me half to death because she was excited?
“I see that,” I said. “What were you screaming about, though?”
“Uh… there’s a pool?” she repeated. My reaction must have shown on my face, because she rocked back about a yard and a half. “What, sweetie?”
“You scared the shit out of me, screaming like that… that’s what,” I said. “I thought you were being murdered or something.”
Steff put her arms around me, pulling my head onto her shoulder.
“Oh, hon… I know you’re all worried about stuff, but you have to realize that this place is safe… I’d say ‘as houses’, but really, it’s safer,” she said. “One, controlled access… two, nobody knows we’re here…”
“Somebody knows we’re here,” I said. “Somebody actually went so far as to pay for us to be here.”
“Which only suggests that they mean us well, or that they’re not very bright because… well, see number one,” Steff said. “The staff would have given the place a thorough going-over since they had to get it ready for us right after another group left.”
“Or they gave it a less-than-thorough going-over, because they were in a hurry to get it ready for us,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s a little suspicious that the previous guests just up and left as soon as they got here?”
“Oh, the kind of people who can afford places like this probably leave in a snit over trivial things all the time,” Steff said. “And it’s probably usually booked far in advance, which means they might have cut the rate for our benefactor. I mean, an empty room doesn’t do anybody any good, right? I mean, looking at it that way, it doesn’t even have to be that somebody wanted us in this suite in particular. Imagine if somebody gave them a holler and said, ‘What’s the best room you have available for tonight?’ and they said, ‘Well, we have… oh, look at this. I don’t believe it. The Empress Suite is actually open. If you book it right now…'”
“That sounds a little far-fetched,” I said.
“Is it? I think it’s a lot more plausible than some nefarious person giving us a free night in paradise for nefarious reasons,” Steff said. “Either way, the missing puzzle piece is who… but it’s kind of hard to imagine somebody wishing us harm via free room upgrades, you know?”
“I guess…” I said.
She took my other hand, and stood there in the eerie green twilight, with reflections from the water shimmering all around us, and looked right into my eyes, her eyelids rolling slowly down and then up.
“Mack, hon, if you don’t want to be here…”
“I want to be with you, Steff,” I said.
“But if you’re not comfortable here, if you don’t want to be here, we’ll leave right now,” she said. “If they don’t feel like changing the delivery address again, they’ll get paid by Viktor anyway and we’ll chalk it up as a loss. We don’t have to stay here… we didn’t pay for the room, so there’s nothing keeping us here except the food.”
She was putting on a brave face, but with her big, blue eyes so close to my own, I couldn’t help but notice how they kept pulling to the side… towards the pool.
If it had been as simple as me not wanting to be there, I would have said so… but there was nothing wrong with the suite. It was just my stupid misgivings, and if I’d let those stop me then I never would have ended up with Amaranth in my life, much less Steff.
“You know there is a pool back on campus, right?” I asked. “Free. Twenty-four hours.”
“Yeah, but this is private,” Steff said, turning her head and looking with open longing at the small pool. “I couldn’t do what I want to in the school pool… well, I could maybe do it once, but then I think the guards would ask me to leave.”
“Is this like when you asked me to have sex in the fountain?” I asked, and she went rigid. “What?”
“I… um… I’m just getting antsy, standing around,” she said. “You want to go for a swim, or do some dancing first?”
“Uh, it seems like I keep telling people this… but… I don’t have a suit,” I said.
“So? We’re alone, silly,” she said. “I’m going to keep my underwear on for, you know, aesthetics, but there’s no reason you can’t be naked.”
“How about the fact that I’m cold enough to begin with? The air in here is like way cooler than the living room, and I bet anything the water’s even colder” I said.
“You only think it’s cold here because you insisted on turning the living room into the elemental plane of fire,” Steff said. “You just need to take some time to get used to it.”
“Or, we could go back to the living room and cuddle by the fire,” I said. “Anyway, I haven’t been swimming in a long time…
“It’s like four feet deep on the deep end!”
“It says five,” I said, pointing to the painted number on the side of the pool.
“That isn’t even over your head,” she said.
“It’s over my mouth,” I countered.
“So go around to the shallow side,” Steff said. “Anyway, if you drown I’ll just pull you out. If this afternoon was any indication, you’ll be fine once you get air again.”
“Unless I only revived because Callahan didn’t feel like holding my airway shut for as long as it would take me to actually die,” I said.
“Well, I didn’t come here tonight to argue… so you can go sulk by the fire if you really want to,” Steff said, pulling her dress up over her head to expose her silky ivory panties, stretched thin in the front over her, uh… Steffly attributes… and her form-fitting and expertly shaped bra. “But we’re only here for one night, and while we have a private pool, I’m using it.”
She tossed her dress aside. I almost screamed at the way she casually threw the beautiful garment in a ball in the corner. I did shriek when she made a headfirst dive into the pool we’d just established was only five feet deep, but then her head broke the surface near the other end of the oval-shaped pool.
“Relax, I dove forward,” she said. She had her legs and back bent so that she could half-float with only her head above the surface of the water. “You going to join me, or do I have to drag you in?”
“Don’t you dare,” I said. “Is it cold?”
“Try it for yourself,” she said. “Just put your toe in.”
“I’m not putting my toe in if it’s cold.”
“It isn’t,” she said.
“Then why are you staying all hunkered down like that?”
“So I can get used to it quicker.”
“What’s to get used to if it isn’t cold?”
“How wet it is,” she said. “Come on, just get in and get it over with… the sooner you get all wet and freezing, the sooner we can warm up by the fire or in the tub after.”
I sighed. I stripped off my shirt and stepped out of my skirt, then started to peel off my fishnets.
“Leave them,” Steff said. “But take off your bra.”
I unhooked my bra, then turned around while I slipped it off my shoulders and let it fall to the floor. I turned back to face Steff with my hands over my breasts.
“Shy, all of a sudden?” Steff asked.
“Fuck you… I’m trying to be sexy here,” I said, and she threw back her head and laughed. “That makes me feel real good, Steff,” I said.
“Honey, your kind of sexy just doesn’t work that way,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “You’re adorable, Mack, seriously.”
“No, really, what does it mean?”
“The sexiest you’ve ever been or ever will be is when you blush and try to bury your head inside one of Amy’s tits,” she said.
I blushed bright red. The temperature in the room seemed to shoot up all at once. Right in that moment, I could have stood to have something to bury my face against.
Steff let out a joyous peal of laughter, standing up and throwing back her head. Her wet hair whipped from side to side and droplets of water ran down her face and dripped from her shoulders and chest. If she could have done it all in slow-motion… and without the penis that was very visible through her soaked panties… she could have been a commercial for just about anything.
Even with the penis, I’d still buy it.
Maybe especially with it.
I felt a sudden stab of sadness at the thought that she could take off her bra and there would be nothing underneath, though… then I felt massively shallow.
Steff was Steff, and she was beautiful. I couldn’t believe I’d even thought about letting a lot of nebulous fears and second-guessing come between me and her. This was our night… the night we’d dreamed about for so long, the night we’d fought for, the night I’d endured the threat of torture for. It was time to get serious.
I tiptoed around to the shallow end of the pool, sat down near the edge, and started to scoot up to the water.
“You know… if I splashed you… then you would be warmer in the pool than out of it,” Steff said.
“If you splash me, I’m going back to the fire,” I said.
“Just come in.”
“I am coming in,” I said. I reached down to dip my fingers into the water. It wasn’t cold… it wasn’t very warm, either, but it wasn’t cold. I sighed, closed my eyes, and braced myself. One little push forward and I’d be in…
“Wait!” Steff said, almost startling me into falling forward. “Don’t come in yet!”
“You just told me to come in!” I said.
“Yeah, but I want you to look around and see if we can get some music in here first.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. There was a cupboard in the wall. I opened it and found big fluffy towels. “Oh, awesome,” I said, grabbing a couple. “I would have felt really stupid when we went to get out if I had to hobble around dripping and freezing to death because we didn’t find these first.”
“What’s that on the door, though?” Steff asked, and I looked and saw a small diamond-shaped mirror hanging on the inside of the cupboard door.
“I don’t know, let’s find out,” I said. I held up a hand in front of it and instantly felt the magical energy surrounding it, waiting to be invoked. It only took a little nudge before it was vibrating with the same music Steff had put on in the living room, which then spread around the room.
“How’s that?” I asked Steff, who’d rolled over onto her back and was kicking off from one of the walls.
“Just about perfect,” she said. “The only thing missing is you.”
It was such a sweet thing to say that I didn’t make her ask me again… I hurried carefully over to the pool, turned around and started to climb backwards into it. Steff’s hands on my ass startled me, and I slipped and banged my knee on the edge as I tumbled backwards into her arms.
“Ow! Steff, my knee…”
“Shh,” she said, spinning me around and taking little slippery steps towards the middle. The water felt colder now that I was in it, but I felt so light in her arms, with it all around me. “Mack, I love you, but there’s going to come a time you’re going to have to quit going to pieces over every little bump and scrape.”
“But it really hurts,” I said.
“Shh,” she said. “You’re fine.”
I shrieked and clung to her as she let go of me, but of course there was less than four feet of water around us. I let my legs bend a bit, so I was sort of bobbing there on my tiptoes, and my knee didn’t hurt as bad as I’d thought it would.
“Come here,” she said, and she gave me a kiss, her lips wet and slippery against mine. She nuzzled my nose and giggled. “You’re going to have to get your hair wet before this evening’s over, you know.”
I shook my head.
“Nuh uh, no thank you, no,” I said. “I’ve already had enough near-suffocation-experiences for the day.”
“You don’t even remember the first one,” Steff said. “So it doesn’t count.”
“It doesn’t have to,” I said. “Zero is exactly the right number.”
Steff sighed.
“Hon, you know if you said the word I’d have you swinging from a rafter just as soon as I found some rope… and a rafter… but putting your head under the water doesn’t have to lead to fun with asphyxiation,” she said. “I’m talking about cutting loose a little. You said you haven’t been in a pool since who knows when… and while there’s all sorts of fun you can have in a pool, one of those sorts is, oh, I don’t know… swimming?
“Why?” I asked. “I’m having a good enough time just being with you.”
“Do you really mean to tell me that you can’t swim, at all?” Steff asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” I said. “But didn’t you tell me it was up to me if I wanted to dance first?”
“You don’t want to get out of the pool already?”
“No,” I said, putting my hands on her hips and pulling her in closer to me. “I want to dance.”
you know, Makenzie might be such a clutz because her grandmother never let her do childish things. She never really got to run and play as a child. That’s usually the time we really get a sense of coordination and balance…
No, she was 9, well into her childhood development, before she went to live with her grandma.
That said, the theory isn’t without some merit, albeit of a different kind… puberty changes the body a lot, and this is her first taste of freedom since before puberty struck. And who knows what changes turning might have brought, that she also wasn’t really able to get used to?
Or maybe she’s just a klutz 😛 I certainly used to be that bad as a kid, before I took up dancing and ninjutsu both. Now I’m just not *quite* that bad XD
Well it does appear that her powers manifested around the time she started to live with her grandmother. That increase in physical strength combined with puberty could be really disorienting for someone who never got the playtime required to get used to her new body.
Also bear in mind that, not only does she have it programmed into her mind on a “I tell you three times” basis that she is uncoordinated (and “EVIL”), but she is also going through what can be considered basically a second puberty. Due to her starting to eat on a regular basis and her body using the new materials to develop. She has gone from a very underdeveloped boyish girl to a young lady halfway into her womanly figure in only a few months, and has yet to come to grips with that.
Her grandmother has a lot to answer for. Though, I suspect she knew what she was doing. “For everybody’s good.”
For some very twisted definitions of everybody.