Sarah hoisted herself up on the side of the pool, and swung her legs over the side with the rapid precision that only endless repetition can instill. She stood up, and walked to the discrete door in the corner of the large room, and walked through it, feeling the peculiar tang of humidity dropping precipitously. She walked past the endless rows of lockers, grabbing a towel from the public cart as she passed it. She dropped the towel by locker, and smirked as she saw the nearby clock, its arms nearly meeting between 2 & 3. One of the advantages to living on campus is that everything stayed open nearly 24/7. And one of the advantages of exercising during the witching hour was that the reason for that--frantic students--was exactly why one could have an Olympic sized pool to oneself on a campus with 10,481 undergrads.
With the deftness of regular routine, Sarah flipped her left arm behind her back, and undid her strapless bikini's clasp, giving yet another silent thanks to heredity and Darwin for the doubled joint. The bikini top slid off, and her relatively small [though, she always though, pleasantly firm] breasts made a motion, not precisely a flop, nor a dip, nor any other word that Sarah could properly ascribe, as gravity took over with the absence of the skimpy piece of fabric. That motion was the one--and only--reason that she wore a bikini, despite the fact that she swam alone, from 2:15 to 3:15 AM exclusively. During the two tenths of a second from when she undid the clasp until the bounce completed, Sarah felt like the most beautiful woman in existance, and that momentary feeling was well worth any inconvience that the bikini provided, of which Sarah had yet to notice one.
Sarah was five steps away from the entrance to the shower area, now, and she could see the blue button on the inside wall. That blue button, as with all such buttons on all such campuses in the country, called in campus police with startling agility when pressed. Very few colleges had the audacity to put one in a locker room--to say nothing of a shower room--but a rape two years ago in another college in the city called in the civilized fury of the President--both of the college, and the one of the country, being as the detestable politician lived barely six blocks away from where Sarah now stood.
Using the grace given her by five years of ballet in her childhood, and the two of Tae Kwon Do since her arrival in the nirvana of higher education, Sarah seemlessly stepped out of the bikini bottoms, the same dandelion yellow as the top, as she took the last two steps to the linoleum doorway of the shower room. She then frisbeed the entire bikini toward her locker, landing it on the bench in front with almost frightening accuracy. Sarah turned into the doorway, and walked into the shower room, feeling the reverse twang as the humidity abruptly spiked. This, the fourth shower room in the main pool's locker room, and the one closest the door, was a straight hallway, with pairs of curtained stalls on each side, six deep, with a pair on the end, their entrances opposite the doorway in.
There was a woman walking towards the doorway, probably from one of those end stalls, drying her hair with her towel as she walked, wearing nothing else. She was distinctly muscular, but probably not noticably so when clothed. Her figure was somewhat square, adding to the somewhat masculine look, with her hips not terribly exaggerated in width versus her waist, as with most women. Her breasts where pert, though average in size, with softly colored pink nipples almost invisible six feet away. With her shoulders upward nearing full extension, Sarah could see that the woman obviously shaved her underarms, and, as unexpected motion caught her eye, she could see more that was clearly shaved. Sarah's eyes flew south, drawn by an expected input, and quickly caught what was between the newcomer's legs. Rather more succinctly, what dangled between them.
The other woman's face turned to horror when she saw Sarah enter, realizing what was going on. Sarah reflexively stepped towards the button, but the plaintive "
Wait!
" from the woman's throat stayed Sarah momentarily, as the soprano voice, echoing conceptually between the two very clearly feminine bulbs on the body they came from, reiterated the gender of the other in the room.
"Wait," she repeated. Then, with her internal questions perhaps intruding on what she intended to say, "Damn, how was I supposed to know anyone else was in the gym at this hour?"
Still not entirely sure of what was going on, Sarah edged towards the button, but kept her gaze fixed on the other woman's eyes. "I'm always here at this time. 2:15 to 3:15, every day since Freshman year, except when I'm scurrying to do a term paper or whatnot"
"Fuck, is it 3:15 already?" for a moment the other woman's face contorted in a combination of rage and surprize, but she composed herself. "My shower doesn't usually run this long... I'm always on the bike from 1:15 to 2:30 on Saturdays, so I can catch the Saturday Night Live they always show late night."
Now more inquisitive than afraid, and momentarily setting aside the peculiar dangle which the other woman was concealing with the towel, Sarah queried "Then why didn't I hear a shower when I walked into the locker room?"
"I've been drying off for five minutes. As I said, I usually don't take this long. I'm almost always out by 3:50, never after three".
"Why did it take so long then? And why five minutes to dry off?" suspicion was again rising in Sarah, and her thinking again began to focus on what the towel hid.
"Look, I had an enjoyable shower, allright?" the woman shot back. Sarah looked puzzled, so the other woman made a funny motion with the hand she had holding the towel, and a piece of white plastic, effectively invisible against the white terrycloth towel, twisted 180 degrees in her hand, revealing the words "Mr. Good Vibrations" in small black letters on the side.
"Ah. Okay, then. Care to mention what the
fuck
is behind that towel?"
Looking almost crestfallen, the woman responded "No, but I don't see that I have a choice. Sit down on one of the benches," she said, gesturing out of the shower room.
Sarah, feeling mostly at ease, but still trying to keep an eye constantly on the woman now behind her, obeyed, and sat on the bench nearest the showers--and thus the button, just in case. The woman followed, sat down on the bench across from it, perhaps three and a half feet, but no more than four away. She extended a hand. "Julia."
"Sarah. I would say I'm pleased to meet you, but at the moment, I'm not."
"Okay, look," she said, sitting back. Her feet were together, and after saying 'look' she pulled her knees outward to maximum separation, so that her legs formed a diamond, her toes at the bottom, and her vagina at the top. There, dangling, perhaps three-fourths the legnth of her slit, and originating at its top, was the phallic tube that initially caught Sarah's attention. "My parents were fucking crazy hippies, even though they came a decade too late. They got married at 18, and joined one of those cult-communes there's occassionally a TV movie about. The 'Egalitarianists' or some shit," the stark fury on Julia's face, despite her calm words, gave omens about what was to come in this particular rant.
"Anyway, their little cult was dedicated to total sexual equality, but their group's whackjob leader decided that the best way to achieve such equality was by a blending of the goddamn genders. Being as he had no scientific training or education, he believed the best way to do so was," Julia extended her arms outward, mocking a standard cheerleading pose, "hormone therapies."
All ironic cheer left Julia as abruptly as it arrived. "Lunatic had intravenous testosterone injected into my 'feminine' areas--clitoris and nipples--at birth, and regularly for six months thereafter, until the cult, despairing the narrow defeat of the ERA in July of '82, went suicide pact. In her one fucking motherly act, my mother downed the dose she was supposed to put in my bottle. The only reason I know any of this is the police kicked in the door 15 minutes later--turns out the cult leader was being hunted for a series of murders in Oklahoma five years earlier. Fuckjob..." Julia trailed off, her lip curling in disgust.
"Anyway, rather than bore you with every sordid detail, the cult leader was an imbicile. As it always does when confronted with a preponderance of unused estrogen or testosterone, the human body, in this case, mine, quietly converts one to the other. Needless to say, sheer blood flow ensured that the effect on my genitals and breasts was very little more than anywhere else; regardless, all that happened was that my body is vaguely less feminine than it should be, stronger and less lithe than normal, with the only major change being in my clitoris. See, the problem there was that every time the bastard gave a shot there, he had it tied off with a tiny tourniquet, just as though it were an actual medical procedure. As a result, some of the hormones were actually converted and absorbed in unusual quantities before the tourniquet was removed, and they could disperse, and it must have changed
