Chapter 5: The Pool and the Predator
The morning after the dinner at Teon's house, Uma woke Yuma with a text that said only three words and a picture of a swimming pool, empty and blue and waiting.
Pool date today. 2pm.
Yuma lay in bed staring at the ceiling of his penthouse, phone against his chest, and realized he was smiling before he was even fully awake. Two months ago his mornings had been silent. Now there was a message waiting for him from a girl who had promised to make him the happiest man in the college, and so far she was beating the deadline.
He texted back: I'll bring my appetite. Teon's rules.
Her reply came in four seconds: That's for food dates. This one you bring your cute shoulders.
He put the phone face-down on the mattress and laughed into the pillow.
The outdoor pool sat on the far side of the athletics complex, past the tennis courts, ringed in white concrete and tall hedges so the whole space felt like a private blue square cut out of the sky. The water was perfectly still. The afternoon sun lay on it like a sheet of glass. There were maybe six other people in the whole area, a few swimmers doing lazy laps, a girl in a one-piece reading on a lounge chair.
Uma was already there when Yuma arrived, sitting on the low wall by the entrance in her street clothes, swinging her heels against the concrete. She spotted him and lit up, that whole-body brightness that still caught him off guard every time.
"You came!" She hopped down and took his hand without ceremony, her fingers warm. "I've never actually used this pool. Shirley trains here sometimes but she says the coach is a tyrant, so we're going during the tyrant's lunch break. Clever, right?"
"Very strategic," Yuma said.
"I learned from the best. You're the market analyst." She tugged him toward the changing rooms, which stood in a low white row at the pool's edge, separated by a partition and a row of open stalls. "Okay, you take that side, I'll take this side. No peeking."
"That rule goes both ways."
"It does not, I'm the girlfriend, I have privileges." But she went into her stall anyway, and Yuma heard her giggle through the partition as he pushed into his own.
He changed quickly. Swim shorts, his towel, his folded clothes on the bench. Through the thin wall he could hear Uma humming something tuneless and happy, the rustle of fabric, a small grunt of effort that was probably a bikini knot. He caught himself smiling at the wall like an idiot and made himself focus on tying his drawstring.
"Ready?" her voice called.
"Ready."
They came out of their stalls at almost the same moment, and Yuma stopped walking.
Uma stood on the sun-warmed concrete in a white two-piece bikini with little frills along the edges of the top and the hips, and the afternoon light had clearly been waiting all day for exactly this. Her brown hair was pulled back with a small clip. The bikini top sat over her chest like it was under permanent negotiation, the frills trembling slightly with her breath, her breasts full and firm and round, the tops of them soft and smooth and tan. Below, the bottoms rode up on the roundest, perkiest ass he had ever seen in his life, the white fabric framing each cheek perfectly, her thighs soft and gleaming.
And then there was the front. The white fabric at her crotch was already full, stretched, a heavy weight of cock and balls outlined through the material, the shape of her thick shaft visible even soft, pushing the bikini into a strain of fabric and frills. It was enormous and it was hers and she was smiling at him like she didn't even know.
"You're staring," Uma said, and her cheeks went pink.
"You're wearing that on purpose."
"I bought it on Tuesday. It has frills. Frills are for joy." She looked down at herself, then back up at him, and her blush deepened. "Also, um. You're staring very specifically."
Yuma realized his own swim shorts had gotten noticeably tighter at the front. He didn't even try to hide it. "Sorry. Not sorry. You look... Uma, you look incredible."
Something in her face went soft and pleased and a little hungry all at once. She stepped closer, and Yuma watched, in real time, the white fabric at her hips shift and begin to fill further, her cock thickening against its confines, the frills stretching. She bit her lip.
"Okay," she said, her voice a little higher than usual. "Okay, we are going to get in the water right now before I do something inappropriate at a school facility."
"You started it."
"I know. I'm not sorry either." She grabbed his hand and pulled him to the pool edge, and they jumped.
The water was cool and clean and the shock of it made them both shriek, and then they were laughing, surfacing, splashing each other like children. Yuma swam after her and she swam away, her ass flashing white and wet above the surface when she kicked, and he chased her the full length of the pool and back before catching her waist from behind. She squealed and turned in his arms, and they bobbed there chest-deep in the blue, her arms looped around his neck, water streaming off both of them.
"This was a good idea," Yuma said.
"Mm. I have those sometimes." She rested her forehead against his. Her eyes were warm. "I wanted to do something just us. No factions, no cafeteria drama, no Clayton Verne. Just a pool."
"Just a pool," he agreed.
They swam races, which Uma lost gracefully and then challenged again, best of five becoming best of nine. They floated on their backs near the lane line and she pointed out cloud shapes, incorrectly on purpose, insisting one cloud was clearly a tamale. Yuma laughed so hard he inhaled water and coughed while she thumped his back, mortified and giggling. It was, he thought, the best afternoon of his life so far, and it was not even complicated. It was just a girl and a pool and the sun.
Eventually their fingers pruned and the shadows of the hedge had stretched long across the concrete. They climbed out, dripping, and gathered their things.
"I'm starving," Uma announced. "Pool swimming burns everything. There's a café by the genetics building that does the good melon bread."
"Lead the way."
They walked to the changing rooms and ducked into their respective stalls. Yuma toweled off and pulled his white t-shirt and baggy black tech pants back on over his pink lace panties, ruffling his wavy hair dry. Through the wall, Uma hummed her tuneless song again.
They came out into the late-afternoon light together, bags over shoulders, and Yuma glanced at her again in her clothes, the fluffy brown sweater and the short black skirt, and felt that quiet constant warmth he now carried everywhere.
That was when the other girl came out of the women's side.
Yuma noticed her first because she was beautiful, tall and blonde, in a brown leather jacket over a lace bra, leather shorts and boots, long blonde hair in a blowout and a body that looked engineered, thick thighs and a full chest, the kind of woman straight men on this campus apparently built shrines to. And something felt off immediately, some wrongness in the set of her mouth as her eyes swept over them.
She stopped. Her gaze traveled from Yuma's face, down to his hand in Uma's, and then over Uma, and then down, deliberately, to the front of Uma's short skirt. Her expression curdled from neutral to disgust, slow and deliberate, like she wanted them to watch it happen.
"Oh," the girl said. Her voice was smooth, low, confident. She looked at Yuma. "You're with this Tofu?"
Yuma blinked. "With the what?"
"Tofu." She said it like tasting something rotten. "Fake protein. A fake woman." Her brown eyes flicked to Uma, who had gone very still. "You're with this perverse Futanari. That's what I'm asking."
The word perverse hit Yuma somewhere cold. He heard himself speak before he'd decided to. "Take that back."
"Take what back?" She tilted her head, blonde hair shifting. She turned fully to Uma now, looking her up and down with theatrical care. "I mean, look at her. From the neck up, she reads like a pure-blooded woman. Pretty face. Nice figure. And then you look down," she gestured, two fingers pointing, "and there it is. That crude girth bulging out the front of her skirt. A cock. On a woman. So no, sweetheart, I don't think I'll be taking anything back. She's not a real woman."
Uma's hand tightened in Yuma's. He could feel her trembling slightly, and it was not fear, it was the effort of holding still. Her melodic voice came out quiet. "We haven't done anything to you."
"You existing is enough," the girl said pleasantly.
Something in Yuma went very calm and very clear, the way it had when he'd bowed to Teon. He stepped forward, half in front of Uma, and looked the blonde in the eye. He was five foot eight and she was five six and it did not matter at all.
"You're wrong," he said. His voice didn't shake. "Futanari are real women. They're women with extra gifts and attributes, things that let them live their best lives. That's all it is. And Uma is one of the best people, Futa or otherwise, that I've ever met. I love her. She means the world to me." He heard his own voice sharpen slightly. "Even if she does have a little extra package. And hey, maybe I like it. So that's none of your concern."
The girl's eyebrows rose. Then she scoffed, a short ugly sound.
"Extra gifts." She folded her arms under her chest. "You know how the Futanari race got here, right? Some perverted guy's sick mind, making deals with devils. That's your girlfriend. A wish. A fantasy some degenerate had, stamped onto reality." Her eyes went to Uma again, disgusted and lingering. "And I'd bet anything she hasn't let you anywhere near her pussy. Has she? You've never touched it, never fucked it. Because that's how they all operate. They want to fuck ass. They take, take, take, and the man never gets to express one natural biological desire."
Yuma opened his mouth, and then paused, because an uncomfortable thing happened in his head. A inventory, automatic, the analyst in him running the numbers. Shirley and Matthue, the chastity cage. Mynia and Timmy, may only finish from her. Uma, kind of traditional, not until marriage. Teon and Rosé. In every couple he knew, the Futa gave and the boy received. He couldn't name a single one where the boyfriend had fucked her pussy.
The pause lasted maybe a second. The blonde caught it, and her smile widened like a knife coming out.
"Oh, he knows," she said. "Look at his face. He knows exactly what I mean."
"Even if that were true," Yuma said, and the calm held, "you're attacking me instead of my argument. Ad hominems are meaningless against me. I'm secure in myself. All of me." He glanced back at Uma, at her frightened, shining eyes, and turned forward again. "Especially her."
The girl sighed. Long, theatrical, bored. She looked around, and Yuma followed her gaze: two students had stopped by the hedge, a mother and daughter walking the path outside had slowed. She was aware of the audience the same second he was, and he watched her tally it, watched her decide she had better uses for a crowd than a scene.
"Fine." She stepped in close, close enough that Yuma could smell expensive perfume, and her voice dropped to something private and cold. "Listen carefully, both of you. Don't cross paths with me again. Don't mess with me, don't talk about me, don't sit anywhere I might want to sit. Or I will make sure neither of you ever graduates from this school. And I will make sure you don't stay together, either. I have the reach. Ask anyone with a faction pin." She held his eyes a moment longer, then stepped back, adjusted her jacket, and turned to go.
At the corner of the changing rooms she paused, half-turned, and looked Yuma up and down one last time.
"And if you ever want a real woman," she said, "I'd love to help you find one. My guarantee."
Then she was gone, boots clicking on the concrete, around the hedge and out of sight.
The two students by the hedge drifted away quickly. The pool deck was quiet again. Water lapped at the tiles.
Yuma let out a breath he felt like he'd been holding for ten minutes. His legs felt strange. He looked at Uma, whose face was pale and tight, and the guilt landed in his chest like a stone.
"I'm sorry," he said. They walked to the bench by the pool edge and he sat down heavily, and she sat beside him. "Uma, I'm sorry she did that to you. Said those things about you, called you that, in front of me, I should have..."
He didn't get to finish, because Uma grabbed him and hugged him so hard the air went out of him.
Her arms wrapped around his shoulders and her face buried into his neck and she was shaking, and when she spoke her voice cracked against his skin.
"Thank you." A wet, small sound. "Thank you, thank you. You stood up for me. You didn't hesitate, not even for a second, you just... you said all of that, out loud, to her, for me." She pulled back enough to look at him and her eyes were brimming, a tear slipping down her tan cheek. "Do you know what you were like in that locker room two months ago? You could barely look at me. You apologized for existing. And now you stood in front of me and told a Largann, told Elianna Sogran, that you love me and maybe you like it." She laughed wetly. "Yuma, you've grown so much. You've become so brave. I'm so... I'm so proud of you I can't even..."
"Elianna," Yuma repeated quietly. "That was her name? That was Elianna Sogran?"
"The Largann leader. The thigh rankings. All of it." Uma wiped her cheek with her wrist. "And you just told her off. To her face."
Yuma absorbed that. The blonde had felt dangerous in a way he hadn't fully named, and now the name arrived: she led eighteen percent of the school, and she had memorized their faces.
Uma took both his hands suddenly. She pulled back and looked into his eyes, and the tears were still there but something else had arrived underneath them, something that made Yuma's pulse change.
"I can't give you my pussy yet," she said. Her soft melodic voice was steady now, every word placed deliberately. "That's very special to me. I'm waiting until we're married. I want to save it for you, for your first ever pussy, and I want it to be mine. That hasn't changed."
"Okay," Yuma said. "I know. That's... okay."
"But." She squeezed his hands. "Yuma, when we get home, I want you to tell me your desires. All of them. Let me give them to you. I will suck your sweet cock until you cry. Or I will fuck you until you can't cum anymore. Either. Both. Whatever you want, I want to hear you say it out loud for once." Her voice dropped lower, warmer. "You've never been more attractive to me than right now. Standing up for me like that. You've made me so horny I can barely think."
And as she said it, Yuma watched it happen: the front of her short black skirt shifted, the fabric strained, and the fat weight of her cock pressed up against it with a force he could see, the hardest erection he had ever seen her have, the hem of the skirt lifting and catching, her thighs pressing together around it. The fluffy sweater rose slightly with her breathing. Her G-cup chest heaved.
Yuma's whole body went hot. His own cock, two inches and small and his, hardened instantly inside his pink lace panties, straining against the soft material, and he didn't hide it and didn't want to.
"When we get home," Uma said, "I'll take you to a place you've never been before."
She leaned in close, her lips brushing his ear, her breath warm, and whispered.
"The place where I fuck you until the ocean dries out."
Yuma sat frozen on the bench by the pool, the chlorine-blue water glittering behind them, and his mind went white. He saw it in fragments, her hands, her voice, her nine thick inches, the word married, the word pussy, the promise of tonight. His heart slammed. His mouth went dry.
"Uma," he managed, and his voice came out cracked and small and utterly unashamed. "I want to go home right now."
Her smile, when she pulled back, was the most dangerous and the most loving thing he had ever seen.
"Yes," Uma breathed, and pulled him up off the bench, her fingers laced tight through his. "Let's go. Right now."
She tugged her bag onto her shoulder, the front of her skirt still tented and shameless, and did not adjust it once as they crossed the pool deck. At the gate she turned and looked at him, brown eyes bright with promise.
"You're going to have the time of your life tonight," she said. "I promise you that."
The walk to the penthouse had never felt so long.