Author: Jack
Keywords: .
Summary: Jenny in Baywatch mode struggles to "save" a thrashing boy...
Jenny leaned back in her tower chair and closed her eyes for just a moment, savoring the feeling of the sun and the cool afternoon breeze on her skin. She was glad she’d taken this part-time job over the summer, she decided. Lifeguard at the local country club wasn’t as prestigious as a high-powered office job, but it had some advantages. She could spend her days in the open air . . . and she knew that because she was on the job, she might be able to make the difference between life and death some day.
And, too, her last couple of office jobs hadn’t gone so well. That horrible incident where her boss had sent her to spy on the chemical company . . . and of course the job before that, which she had left after word got around of her little accident with the skirt and the automatic door. Jenny needed some time to think before she committed herself to another full-time job. She needed to figure out what she really wanted to do with her life . . . and maybe find a way to change her luck somehow.
Doing duty by the pool was perfect for that kind of quiet introspection . . .
Shouts and screeches made her open her eyes and lean forward suddenly. A couple of teenagers with a video camera were tormenting a girl a few years older than them. One had swiped her bikini top after she had opened it while sunbathing on her stomach, while the one with the camera was trying to get a shot of the girl’s bare breasts when she tried to get it back.
"Hey, you two!" Jenny shouted. She started down the ladder in a hurry. "Stop that!"
The two teens looked at her as she stormed along the edge of the pool, furious. These kids had no business disrupting things around the pool . . .
Besides, if there was anyone on the planet able to sympathize with a girl having trouble with her clothes, it was Jenny.
She held out her hand to the kid with the bikini top. "All right, hand it over."
"Aw, we didn’t mean nuthin’ by it," the kid whined, reluctantly passing the offending article to Jenny.
"Yeah. Right." She turned to the blossoming Steven Spielberg. "And you – give me the videotape."
"Hey, no fair, I paid for it. It’s mine."
"That’s okay, you’ll get it back. Tonight, when the pool closes. See me at the office." After I’ve erased his footage, she added to herself. "Now you two go find something better to do. No more stealing swimsuits. And no more videotaping in the pool area. Okay?"
"Okay," the first boy said. The other kid remained silent, his eyes not meeting Jenny’s at all.
She was used to that. Like most males from fifteen to fifty, he was busy studying her chest. Jenny figured him for no more than sixteen, and plainly a slave to hormones. She felt herself blushing under his wide-eyed scrutiny, but she wasn’t going to let her shyness take away from her authority as a lifeguard today. "What about you? You promise to behave?"
Young Spielberg nodded slowly. "Uh, yeah, sure, lady. Sure. Scout’s Honor." Jenny took a step back, suddenly eager to be done with the conversation. She didn’t like to think about the Boy Scouts if she could help it.
To cover her embarrassment she turned to the girl, who by now was sitting up with a towel wrapped around her. "Here’s the rest of your suit," Jenny told her, handing the bikini top to her. The girl took it with a grateful look.
"Thanks, uh . . ."
"Jenny." She smiled at the girl, who seemed almost as shy as Jenny herself. Looking to be in her early twenties, with blonde hair that was longer than Jenny’s and a figure that nearly matched the lifeguard’s, the girl seemed to be suffering an intense reaction to what she’d just gone through. Jenny could sympathize. She recognized all the signs of someone mortified by an accidental public exposure.
"I’m Heather. Thanks for helping."
"Part of my job. But look, you should be more careful." She held up the 38C bikini top. "These things can be awful flimsy. If you don’t want to get into trouble, skip the skimpy bikinis and get something like this." She touched the front of her red one-piece suit. It was cut a little high around the hips for Jenny’s modest taste, but it had been the only one-piece in stock at the swimwear shop when she’d gone looking for something to wear on this new job. And it did have the decided advantage of security, and a reasonably conservative cut across her chest.
Heather nodded. "I think I will," she said. "I’d almost forgot what it felt like, being caught like that." Recognizing a fellow hard-luck case, Jenny gave her another smile and returned to her tower. Maybe she wasn’t so alone after all . . .
The afternoon passed with little incident. She had to warn some grade-schoolers to stop running on the concrete once, and later she warned an overweight country club member off from the pool when he started toward it right after downing four hot dogs and a plate of nachos from the snack bar, but other than that it was a quiet day. She was starting to feel a little drowsy when a loud splash brought her instantly alert.
Someone was thrashing around in the deep end, close to the diving board, every move uncontrolled, wild with panic. Jenny recognized the figure when he surfaced and gulped air before losing control and going under again – one of the two teens from the incident with Heather. It was the one with the video camera. His friend was nowhere in sight, and there were no other swimmers close by to help him out.
Jenny was down the ladder in a flash, diving into the pool with perfect form just as she’d been taught in the lifesaving class she’d taken to qualify for the job. She cut through the water and came up only a few feet from the boy, who seemed to be thrashing and flailing even harder now.
She swam to him, diving down as he sunk toward the bottom and trying to get a firm hold around his chest to haul him to the surface. But he was still going wild, and kept slipping from her grasp. Jenny reached out for him again, and this time he seemed to realize that she was there to help him. He reached out for her . . .
His hands caught at the straps of her one-piece suit, holding on for dear life, and Jenny made the split-second decision not to try to shift him and possibly set off another round of panic. So she used one arm to support him, and started for the surface, kicking powerfully.
About halfway to the surface she realized that he was losing control again. He was tugging madly at her swimsuit, the wild thrashing motions made more powerful by his panic. As her head broke water and her ears cleared, the first sound Jenny heard was one she really hadn’t wanted to hear ever again.
Rrrrrriiiiiiiippppppppp!
She didn’t need to look down to know that the top of her suit was ruined. She felt it slide down her chest and back, leaving her breasts exposed. But there was no time to be concerned with modesty or shame now. The boy seemed to have used up his last strength in that last outburst, and now floated limp in her grasp. She had to get him to safety, suit or no suit.
Jenny towed the teenager alongside her as she headed for the shallow end. When she could get her feet under her she stood up, lifting the boy, and carried him up the steps. Her water-soaked, tattered swimsuit was heavy around her hips, slipping down, down with each step she took. By the time she was completely out of the water it had fallen around her feet, and Jenny almost fell. But she stepped free of the encumbering cloth and then lowered the boy in her arms down to the hot concrete, oblivious to everything except her duty.
He had a strong pulse in his throat, but he didn’t seem to be breathing, so Jenny quickly began to administer mouth to mouth resuscitation, just as she had been taught. It wasn’t until she had given the boy his first life-giving breath and pulled back to study her patient that she realized that his eyes were open now, and he was grinning up at her. For a long moment Jenny just knelt there beside him, stunned, gradually realizing that the boy had been shamming.
That she’d been had.
He reached up suddenly and squeezed both her bare breasts, then rolled away, scrambled to his feet, and started to run.
"You little monster!: Jenny shouted, springing to her feet and running after him, furious and determined to catch him. "Stop! Don’t you realize you can’t just fake an accident like that . . . !" Suddenly Jenny stopped. She was at the edge of the country club pool, in front of a crowd of the community’s elite.
And, of course, she was completely naked.
Her cheeks going red, she turned and fled for the safety of the office. Waves of applause rose from satisfied male club members . . . all except for old Jim Vickers, who was wheezing and grasping his chest. Luckily his son was there, and knew CPR, since the lifeguard was no longer on duty and probably wouldn’t have been good for Mr. Vickers anyway.
Outside the chain-link fence that surrounded the pool area, the teen who had proven that he was as good at acting as he was behind the camera met his friend, who was crouched in the bushes with the video camera cradled in his hands like a hold icon.
"Did you get it?"
"Oh, man, did I ever. His partner wore a grin from ear to ear. "Now we can get back at all the rest of those guys in ‘C’ Troop. They won’t be telling us about the show we missed at the kite-flying competition after they see this tape."
As for Jenny, she quit the next day. She had decided that it might be safer, after all, back in an office job somewhere.