“Uh, no,” a deep, masculine voice answered.
“Who is it?” Llona was suddenly very aware of her nakedness and alarmed at the presence of a male stranger.
“Just call me the Buff Diver,’ ” the voice answered. “Don’t be afraid.”
“The ‘Buff Diver’?”
“Yes. You see, I’m diving across the county in the buff. Diving from pool to pool, that is.”
“Why?” Llona asked.
“Huh?”
“I asked you why you’re doing it.”
“Because it’s there.”
“Because what’s there?”
“The pools. The diving boards. All of it. It’s all there. You know. Like that’s why the mountain climber climbs the mountain. Because it’s there.”
“I never did understand that logic either,” Llona confessed.
“Well, let’s just say it’s my means of travel to get home. I’m making my way home by ‘buff diving.’ ”
“You can’t go home again,” Llona pointed out.
“Gee, that’s very profound. It would make a great title for a book, or something.”
“Anyway, if you want to go home, why don’t you just take a train or a bus?”
“When it comes to public transportation, they get sticky about people riding in the buff.”
“Well, you could go by car, drive yourself.”
“I don’t have a car. I lost it along with everything else.”
“How? I mean, how did you lose everything?”
“Lechery was my downfall. I leched my way out of home, marriage, children, friends, business, everything.”
“The wages of sin—” Llona left it hanging.
“-- is an appetite for more sin.” He finished it. “And that brings us to the other facet of my journey.”
“What do you mean?”
“Lechery got me into this condition and lechery will get me out. Not only must I take the plunge in every pool along my route, I must also score with at least one mermaid at every stop.” He vanished quite suddenly beneath the water and the next thing Llona knew her legs were entwined from below and a hand was sliding up her water-slick thigh.
“Now wait a minute!” She pulled free and swam hastily away. “I don’t see what one thing has to do with the other. I mean, if you want to dunk your way home, well fine. But I don’t buy your reason for kanoodling in the drink.”
“Be reasonable. Turn it around and look at it,” he told her. “Without sex, this whole pool pilgrimage would be nothing but a way of getting waterlogged. I mean, take away the erotic aspects, and what have you got left? Just a broken down man doing a solitary breast-stroke—sad! sad!—and getting older but no wiser as he wends his weary, watery way home. What would be the point?”
“Damned if I know,” Llona admitted.
“Then you’ll cooperate?” He swam toward her.
“Who’s that in the pool with you, Llona?” Bowdler called.
“It’s me.” The man’s voice was defiant.
“You!” Evidently Bowdler recognized the voice. “You’re trespassing! Get off my property!”
“Parvenu!” the diver retorted.
“Snob!” Bowdler responded. “You blackballed me from your country club and now you expect me to let you swim in my pool? Get out of there!”
“I think you’d better go,” Llona whispered, anxious to avoid trouble.
“You know why I blackballed him?” the man whispered back.
“No. Why?”
“He wears argyle socks. Well, I mean! We had to maintain some standards.”
“Get out of my pool, you snooty lecher!” Bowdler shouted angrily.
“People with nudes in their pools shouldn’t throw stones at other people’s glass houses!” the diver retorted.
“Get out!”
“I’m going!” The diver swam the length of the pool to the other side and pulled himself up to the patio. As he vanished into the darkness, his voice trailed back with one final insult. “It is better to have lusted and lost,” he taunted, “than to betray oneself as a multicolored heel."
“Where are you going?” Bowdler ignored the parting shot to confront Llona as she climbed out of the pool and started for the cabana.
“It’s too risky to swim this way,” she replied. “I’m going to get dressed.”
“He won’t come back,” Bowdler protested. “And nobody else will both us.”
“I’m not going to take the chance.” Llona was firm.
“But I was looking forward to our having a swim together.”
“Not this way! If I had something to wear-—”
“Wait! I think I have something.” He followed her into the cabana and rummaged in a bureau there. “Here we are.” He came up with two rubber skindiving suits.
“I’ve never done this before,” Llona said. “I don’t know anything about how to—”
“It’s simple. I’1l show you.”
About fifteen minutes later they emerged from the cabana, the rubber suits clinging to their skins, an oxygen tank strapped to each of their backs. Bowdler slipped into the pool and Llona followed. He showed her how to fit the mouthpiece of the hose over her gums and to clasp the mask over her cheeks and nose so that no water could get into it. Then he took her by the hand and they submerged.
Llona’s fear passed as she realized it was relatively easy to breathe. Bowdler had turned on the underwater pool fights and as she looked around her, she became fascinated with the experience. It was—-well—sensual was the only word to describe it. And there was a sense of unreality about it that seemed to establish a rapport between the two of them-—the only living organisms in this eerie underwater world.
Bowdler sensed it too; and then he acted on it. Through the clinging rubber. Llona felt his hand grasp one of her buttocks firmly. At first she thought he was simply trying to guide her. But as his fingers insinuated themselves more intimately, she recognized his real motive,
Now, Llona had had quite a lot to drink, much more than she was accustomed to having. Also, she’d been quite stimulated by the French movie. To these factors should be added the prospect of several sexless weeks while Archer’s leg mended, plus her anger at Archer over the way their marriage was working out, plus the fact that Llona had always had a healthy sex appetite. The unreal underwater setting helped as well. And the result of the combination was that Llona did not pull away from the increasingly ardent explorations of Bowdler’s hand.
Encouraged, he swam around in front of her and embraced her. The one hand stayed on her derriere, holding her tightly against him. His other hand squeezed one of her large breasts, searching out the swelling nipple straining against the rubber. Then it rose to her neck, found the zipper and pulled it down. Both hands widened the opening now and grasped her free-bobbling breasts eagerly.
The oxygen was making Llona lightheaded. The caresses were making her body tingle. It all seemed so harmless here, under the water. She let herself be carried along on the mounting sensations.
Each of the suits had two zippers. Now Bowdler reached for the lower one on his own suit. His manhood sprang out as if from a speargun and lodged between Llona’s thighs.
It was too much for her. She let his weight push her down to the floor of the pool. There, at the deep end, he struggled with the second zipper of her suit. The water rippled over her breasts with their excited, quivering nipples. Her hips writhed with the sensations washing over her. She wasn’t thinking now, only reacting to the macabre, sensual situation. When she felt his bare hand touch the area the zipper had laid open, her breasts swelled mightily with the gasp of oxygen she sucked into her lungs. The touch of the water . . . The touch of his fingers . . . The tickle of the down covering her womanhood . . . Like some undersea anemone, she opened wide to the sensations.
Frantically, she grabbed his spear of love with both hands. She tugged urgently, trying to pull him over her. But Bowdler was too slow to suit her. It’s not so easy to shift from one delicate position to another underwater with a thirty-pound tank of oxygen on your back. Moaning her need, Llona tried to hug him as he floated over her, tried to pull him closer, to establish the yearned-for contact. Her arms reached around his back, around the oxygen tank, and then-—