Monday morning, 7 am, I was at the early morning lane swim as I do three times a week. The usual group of swimmers were there. Some of them had been regulars for years and a few had just been coming recently. One had caught my attention from her first appearance.
It’s not easy for women to look good in a pool, what with wearing a bathing cap, no makeup and the regulation one-piece suit, but she was the exception. She was a woman just entering the time of life when the tolls of life were beginning to show. She was stretching the limits of her bathing suit in a sexy way. I am not saying this in any judgmental or derogatory way. I actually find older women’s bodies very appealing, far more so than the perfect women so common in porn. Full disclosure, I am in a similar stage. My abs and ass are not as taut and firm as they were ten years ago and the hint of some padding on my hips is getting hard to deny.
Lane swim is a friendly place. Over the past couple of weeks, I’d said hello a few times and she answered with a brief nod. Sometimes she seemed not to have heard or noticed me, as if lost in her own thoughts. This morning she was leaning against the wall and adjusting her goggles. I stopped and asked how she was doing, thinking she would say fine, and I would push off and keep up my rhythm.
“I wish my whole life would be different,” she said to my surprise.
“Ah, now that is a big ask,” I said. “Especially on a Monday morning.”
She did not say anything more, so I pushed off from the wall and continued to work towards completing my daily goal of 80 lengths.
When I returned to the shallow end she was still standing there and I got the impression she was waiting for me.
“You asked how I am,” she said. “And I gave you an honest answer. You have nothing more to say?”
Picking up on the irritation in her voice, I searched for a more serious response. I wondered what I could say that might offer some solace.
“If you can’t change everything, what one thing would you like to be different?”
“The one thing that would really make a difference is the one thing that I cannot change. So, no use in thinking along those lines.”
She did not give me a chance to respond, rather she dove in and headed down the pool. I dove in after her and followed. She was a strong swimmer and I had to work hard to keep up. I could see her ahead, her slender, long legs that ended at the dark strip where her suit covered her lady garden and then the “V” shape as her suit ran up over her cheeks. We both swam the breaststroke, which allowed me to keep that view every time I put my head below the surface.
After a few more laps, she climbed out of the pool and I stood watching her as she walked to the change room door. She paused and took off her bathing cap and shook out her hair, which was dark and fell around her shoulders. She paused for a moment and then disappeared into the change room.
The whole episode was over in a flash but the impression on me was fierce and I immediately felt my cock getting hard, trapped down the leg of my bathing suit. I needed to do a few more laps before I could get out, and besides I needed ten more to complete my work-out. I turned, pushed off from the wall and headed to the other end. Swimming laps is a highly regimented and often monotonous activity!
I went into the change room, entered one of the shower stalls and slipped out of my suit. I absentmindedly went through my morning routine… shampooed my hair and rinsed and then rubbed in some conditioner. I pumped some bodywash into my hand and massaged it all over my body and then rinsed off completely.
I felt an ache just behind my balls, which is the first sign I am horny and I thought of her swimming ahead of me. I pumped some more body wash into my hand and spread it all over my cock and balls and in the crack of my ass. Using the soap as a lubricant, it wasn’t long before I was completely hard.
I slowly stroked my cock, pulling back the foreskin with each stroke. I cupped my balls with my other hand and pressed my finger onto the sensitive spot between my balls and my dark star. I stroked slowly while rolling my balls between my fingers. The soap made everything so slippery and the surrounding steam added to the mood. I closed my eyes and remembered the sight of her sexy body in the pool and the noticeable mound between her legs covered by her suit. I could feel the initial signs of orgasm and so I slowed down and loosened my grip, so as to prolong the pleasure I was feeling and delay orgasm. I switched my hand to making a “cage” with my fingers and thumb and caressed just the head by squeezing it as I pulled up. With the warm, wet soap, it simulated being sucked. I revelled in the feeling of getting close but not going over the edge. I slid my finger over the slit at the end of my cock as a tongue would during fellatio. It all felt so good and my whole body tingled with pleasure.
As I age, the drive to orgasm has been somewhat replaced by wanting to linger in the pleasure that leads to orgasm. There was a time when I could cum 3 or 4 times in a day but I was in a different stage as I approached fifty!
I stopped touching myself and let my cock slowly return to its flaccid state. I let the warm water rinse away the soap, lifting my sac so it ran between my legs. I turned around with my back to the shower nozzle and let the hard spray massage my back and stood so it focussed on the top of my ass crack. I spread my cheeks and felt the water run down my crack and tease my hole.
Then I dried off, got dressed, packed my bag and headed to the exit.
A car was parked near the entrance and as I made to walk in front of it, the passenger window rolled down and she was looking out at me. I walked over and bent into the open window.
“I think I was a little rude in there. Can I buy you a coffee and maybe we can chat?”
“Yeah, sure. I’d like that.” I threw my bag into the back and buckled up. I thought she would start driving but she didn’t put the car in drive. Instead, she looked at me and I mean she looked at me.
“I am being very serious right now,” she said. “I have been given some really tough news and I hope that a conversation with you could be helpful. You look to me to be a mature and compassionate man and I don’t have someone in my life like that right now and I need it.”
I felt a little anxious hearing the intensity with which she just spoke but how was I going to say, “No thanks,” sitting in her car. So, I said what I thought she wanted to hear.
“I hope I can be helpful. I want to try.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Maybe we could go to my place. I don’t live far away and it would be quieter and more private. Is that OK with you?”
I nodded.
“Make yourself comfortable,” she said as she went into the kitchen to make coffee.
You can learn a lot about a person by being in their home. Hers was very tastefully decorated and comfortable. There were large, striking pictures on her walls and a magnificent view of the lake in the distance through the big windows that ran the full length of the room. Her living room furniture was three couches arranged around a large coffee table. There were Persian style pillows and throws carelessly placed on the couches and the whole place smelled like jasmine or some other Indian spice.
You can learn a lot more about a person when you learn what they are reading, and amidst the art books strewn across the table were two paperbacks about battling cancer. Her comments all made sense to me now. I picked up one of them just as she came back into the room and I turned to her. She immediately knew that I knew and she too hurriedly placed the tray she was carrying on the table and started filling the cups.
“I am so sorry."
She turned her eyes down and I could see tears running down her cheeks. “I just got the news a few weeks ago and it hasn’t really sunk in, I don’t think.”
She wiped her eyes and looked up. “If I believed in a god, I would say that our meeting this morning was preordained, but I don’t believe and this recent news has just confirmed the reasons why.”
I looked straight at her and quietly said, “You should know that my wife died of cancer two years ago. Not to be arrogant but I think I might know a little of what you are up against.”
She took some time to share with me her personal history of a rough upbringing, two failed marriages and the damage all that had on her self-esteem.
“For the last ten years, I have withdrawn from people and let work take over my life,” she shared. “And now this. Jesus.” Then she shared some details about her diagnoses and the time she was told she had left.
“You know how people say that they have no regrets when they die? Well, that’s not true for me right now. I have many. I was successful in my work and made lots of money, but so what? I shut myself off from people because I feared that they would hurt me. I wouldn’t let anyone get close to me and I regret that. Now there isn’t time.”
I was aware that within an hour we had progressed from a few flippant comments in a swimming pool to being engaged in a deeply intimate conversation about the tragedy of life and death.
“My wife had some similar feelings when she was diagnosed,” I said. “We thought we had wasted some of the best years focussed on our careers and we had both played around with other partners, which caused a lot of heartache and pushed us apart. When she was diagnosed, we had similar feelings of regret. A close friend told us something that made a huge difference for us.”