Thinking back to last fall and the near disaster we almost encountered, Jamie and I worked out in advance what we were planning to do with our summers. We had long since decided not to be 'possessive' about each other when we had to be apart. Jamie had a co-op research job waiting for her down south, and I was going home to work with a friend of my father's, his company needed someone with mechanical drawing skills. So we knew, as March came around, that we wouldn't have much longer together. We were determined to make the most of it.
It wasn't going to be quite what we expected, though. I came in from the rain looking like a wet bear. I'm a medium sized guy, 5'11' and about 180lbs, but what really made the image work was my shaggy brown hair and the beard that hadn't quite grown in yet. The beard had been a major source of friction between us in more ways than one, but Jamie was being pretty good humored about it so far. I went back to my room, stripped to the waist, and dried myself off. When it hangs straight, my hair goes right down to my shoulder blades. That's never an issue, though, because my hair could no more hang straight than I could flap my arms and fly. Straight or rumpled, though, it holds a lot of water. A few minutes later, feeling much drier, but now looking like a bare-chested caveman, I strolled down the hallway to the washroom, to get combed and presentable again.
In the hallway was Tina Brauer. She was dating Shawn (Woody) Woods, the guy who lived across the hall from me. She went to an all-women's college about 20 miles away, and she often stayed with him on weekends. She was wearing her bathrobe, and walking towards the bathroom just ahead of me. She had long brown hair and nice, slender legs. The bathroom was shaped like a hallway. Facing me, there was a giant mirror covering one wall from hip level, up to a height of about 7 feet. It had a row of sinks in front of it, and the shower stalls were on the opposite wall. Tina went into one of the shower stalls, and pulled the plastic curtain closed. Nonchalantly, I selected the sink almost directly opposite her shower stall, so I could watch the mirror for any interesting action. I didn't know why I did stuff like that. If she were to throw the curtain open, and expose her entire naked body, I'd probably hide my eyes, and scream for her to cover herself. But for some reason, I was hoping for a glimpse of a bare thigh, it would turn me on with its silky shine. Inside the stall, I heard her slide out of her bathrobe, and I saw a slender arm reach up to hang it on a hook in the stall's changing area. Then there was the sound of another sliding plastic curtain, and the water started.
Meanwhile, I trimmed my beard with a pair of tiny scissors I had bought for that purpose. I knew that if I was going to see anything interesting at all, it wouldn't be until she came back out of the inner cubicle. Sometimes women left the curtains open a little. I wondered if they didn't know about the mirror trick, and were just taunting us.
Suddenly I heard a wet thump in the shower stall, and then a loud and repeated coughing, choking noise. I put down my scissors.
"Tina?" I asked, in a mid-tone between 'concerned' and 'no-I'm-not-being-nosy.' Then there was a fairly loud noise, like someone vomiting.
"Tina?!" I called, much louder and less-worried-about-being-nosy. There were more choking sounds and a wet thrashing on the floor of the stall. Ok, so this is where normal, socially polite behaviors get dropped, you can't hesitate about saving a drowning victim because he's skinny dipping, and you want to respect his privacy. I ran into the shower stall, on fire with 'rescue fever.' I tore open the inner curtain to see what was happening, and... there was Tina.
Well, of course there was Tina. I knew that before I went crashing into the stall. The trouble was, she didn't really look all that distressed or anything.In fact, she was kneeling on the floor of the stall, with her legs tucked under her, swishing her hands and thumping the floor to simulate the thrashing sounds I had heard. And she was grinning at me.
"Well," she said, "this is what you wanted to see, right?"
Oh shit.I made a little choking sound of my own then, as I tried to make up about 5 different lies at once, but couldn't choose one quickly enough.
"What are you doing?" I managed to get out at last, "Are you crazy?"
She looked like a water nymph there, with her brown hair soaked and laying on her shoulders, and small drops of water running down her olive skin.
