Late Ten
By Systematic

“Are you ready for the game?” Kylie asked me.

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

“I heard you got hurt.”

“Brett mistook me for the Superbowl.”

The place: my house. More precisely: my pool. But it wasn’t just me and Kylie. Edie and Sandy were behind us as we leaned on the side, knocking an inflatable ball back and forth. It had already hit me in the head once; it was an exercise in bravery to keep my back to them.

Sandy had invited himself over to swim, and brought Edie along. Edie had brought Kylie without an explanation. They were friends now, and that was just weird. Even though they were both on the student council, Edie’s the mousiest, most unnoticeable girl in our school, while Kylie is the most striking. She’s got the looks, the grades, and the sports record to make anybody feel inferior. The boys want her, the girls want to be her. So why would she be hanging around Edie? And why follow her to the home of her hated rival?

Maybe someday I would find out. Probably not today.

“That guy is intense,” Kylie said. It was rare for us to be civil with each other. Or rather for her to be civil to me, and for me to not be sarcastic. But we were having a normal conversation, and I found it refreshing. Sandy and Edie continued to splash around behind us.

“Brett’s not so bad,” I said. Though he was missing his opportunity to see Edie in a swimsuit. I should have invited him. She was wearing the least revealing red bikini I’d ever seen, but there wasn’t anything to reveal anyway. Edie had the kind of body that would drive a pedophile wild, but the rest of us wouldn’t look twice. Now that I thought about it, I wondered if she and Brett were even physically compatible. “What about the big race?” I asked.

She chewed her lip. “I don’t know.”

“Where’s the confidence?”

Kylie sort of wiggled her shoulders. “I’m going through some stuff.”

I happened to know exactly what she was going through. Frustration at her inability to reach orgasm was building up, and she’d apparently experimented with another girl, which had left her feeling guilty and strange. Then by chance I’d witnessed an innocent massage from her swim coach turn into a very intimate one that ultimately led to what might’ve been Kylie’s first orgasm.

I was guessing she hadn’t had one since then, and couldn’t without the hands of Miranda, our PE teacher and swim coach, or someone equally skilled, to help her along. And that was weighing on her mind, which was slowing her down in the pool, and threatening her chances in the next race.

“You’ll work it out,” I predicted. If she could just learn to get herself off, she’d be good to go. There was some splashing behind us, and I turned to see Edie’s rear protruding from an inflatable donut, and her front half underwater.