Naked Came the Vampire (Hypernaturals 1)

Nightwing

My curiosity about her ethnicity is only that: curiosity. I do not care where she is from. Only that she is.

Our things stowed and sealed I indicated the cooler "I used to use a cooler like that to tube on the Comal River: Great way to keep stuff dry."

"These are pretty good for beer too" she replied with a happy look. She led the way again and picked her way down the rocks, wading out into the lake and pulling the cooler along with her by the ropes. She laid out full length and started to side stroke towards the waiting houseboat.

She seems to enjoy life. She took such simple pleasure in beer coolers or showing her baby to a new audience. No show-offy, one-upping kind of thing in her attitude. Just infectious happiness. I realized that I fell happy too. A stark contrast to how this day started.

I followed her path and stepped down, slipped into the water, and started a long loping breaststroke so I could keep my head out of the water and follow. I also wanted to watch her swim. She has an easy grace in the water. Just seemed to glide. I lengthened my stroke to try to keep up. I am a good swimmer. I grew up around water. My parents being who there are, I was a water baby and had every water safety course there is. For all my training since childhood, I could barely keep pace with her, and she is towing the cooler. I blamed my personal beer consumption over the years and the bit of extra weight it gave me. Recalling her firm grip and seeing her swim now, she is obviously in good shape. I also think the water likes flowing over and around her. If I was water, and I had to choose who to flow over, she would win every time. I might be biased on that subject.

It did not take us long to close the distance to the boat at the rate we were swimming. Pontoon boats come in all shapes and sizes as long as the shape is rectangular and has at least a couple of pontoons. They are not for speed. To water ski behind one would require a LOT of motor and a lot of open water. They don't turn on a dime. They can be good dive platforms with their broad flat decks and open spaces and room for things like air tanks and compressors. Mostly they are party boats. When the Coast Guard admonishes about not drinking while boating, they have a pontoon boat in mind. Or a Bass boat. Those guys can drink.  It's usually light beer so I am not sure that counts.

Close up, and especially from a vantage point down low in the water, Jessica's boat seems bigger than it did from the shore. I have been on a lot of boats on this lake over the years, but I have never seen a pontoon boat this big. There are three more pontoons inside the outside set, for a total of five. Huge things. The shiny silver metal tubes each easily forty feet long, and the deck and cabin mounted on top of them lapped over them a bit. The deck is lifted off the pontoons at least a third of a meter as well. Probably for fuel tanks and plumbing and whatnot. Instead of having an awning over a mostly open and flat deck with a drivers station like a standard-issue boat of this kind, this one has a full cabin up front that takes up half the length and all the width of the craft.

The aft is an open deck like a regular pontoon boat. The blue and white striped Bimini cover currently folded back and set up as a porch cover for the cabin and pilothouse. The pilothouse is up high, over the cabin, the same way a cabin cruiser would have it.

A diving platform extends from the back of the unusual craft to the left of one of two center-mounted and large outboard motors. It seemed large from in the water anyway. That platform, in turn, is equipped with a boat ladder to get out of the water. To the right, there is another small deck/ladder combo. 

I guessed Jessica is a diver. A mental image of her in a mask, tanks, and flippers but nothing else came unbidden. I did not chase it away. That would not help with my problem, but so far nothing has anyway.

Painted in two lines on the transom are 'Nightwing', 'Austin, Texas', in what can only be described as a "Comic Book" font. I grinned. Jessica definitely would get the Kryptonite reference. Since all boats are she's, the Comic book 'Nightwing' is getting gender-flipped. That happens a lot in comics. I liked that too.