Early Retirement (The Expat's Harem #1)

1.

When you come home after a long day of travel, the last thing you expect to find waiting for you is a half-naked woman swimming in your pool. I’m not saying it’s unwelcome, but it’s definitely unexpected.

After arriving at the airport two hours early, having fought Bangkok traffic, then waited another forty minutes at the gate, an hour in the air, another thirty minutes on the tarmac, and then having to take a taxi for an hour, all I really want to do is take the bag off my shoulders, take these shoes off my feet, have a beer, maybe a dip.

Do I have any right to complain? Honestly, not much.

I have it pretty good, I’ll admit. A nice-sized house on the side of a hill overlooking the Andaman Sea, teak shutters and terracotta tiles, a garden that somebody else trims, neighbors who are mostly millionaires and don’t spend much time in their luxury second homes anyway.

And best of all, I get to live in Thailand, where the living is cheap, easy, and comes with a spicy little kick that makes me remember how much better things are here.

But I can’t deny that the trip I took for a change of scene really only helped to remind me of how much better I have it in Phuket.

Bangkok’s a hell of a city—food capital of Southeast Asia, gorgeous temples and palaces, shopping malls, the whole thing.

The sky train threading between towers of glass and concrete, the smell of pad krapao floating out of every food stall door, tuk-tuks ripping through traffic like hornets.

There’s plenty in the city to delight a man, some of it wearing tight shorts and skimpy little bikini tops while waving beer signs and dancing around in high heels on the neon-lit streets.

But even so, I found myself spending most of my time just wandering around wondering why I came.

I’d wake up in the morning in my thirty-dollar-a-night room, get some breakfast at a little noodle stall, the plastic stool putting my knees up around my ears, an iced coffee in some air-conditioned shop for an hour or two, then take the MRT to some other part of town and do the same thing.

Solo travel has its perks, but at the end of the day you always take yourself with you.

When you get on a plane hoping to leave your old life and heartbreaks behind, you quickly find that you take yourself and all that you’re trying to escape with you.

So, you say to yourself, okay, I’ll break the pattern and stay home this time.

Which just means you end up right where you started.

For me, that’s a villa on an island in the south of Thailand called Phuket.

This is, for the past year, my home. And I don’t know why I ever left it.

I open the iron gate at the foot of the steps and walk up to the front door, that big camera’s eye on the door frame monitoring everything.

The tiles on the steps are cream-colored, hand-painted with small blue fish along the borders, slightly worn at the center from foot traffic.

I step in, kick off my shoes first thing as I’ve started doing, Thai habit, and give my bronze Singh statue a little pat on the head.

A Singh isn’t exactly a lion. More like a mythical creature, but you can see the resemblance.

He—and it’s definitely a he, with the balls to prove it—is the only thing in this whole turnkey villa that didn’t come with the place, and I’m proud of him.

He stands on four legs just inside the door, maybe eighteen inches high, lacquered brown-gold all over, looking fierce and making me lucky.

When I bought him at a shop in Phuket Town, the owner told me they’re usually placed in front of temples to ward off evil, sold as a pair.

But someone else came in and bought only one, so this one was the leftover.

That appealed to me somehow. He’s flying solo too.

Someone looked at him and decided he was unnecessary, a leftover.

Well, not to me. I sleep better knowing he’s standing guard.

He’s better than a real dog even, since I can go away for a few days and don’t need to worry about finding little bronze turds all over the tiles.

I switch on lights as I make my way from the hallway into the kitchen.

The kitchen’s the best room in the house, all white tile and pale wood, one long bench running the length of the wall with a deep double sink at the end, copper hooks above it where the pots hang.

The fridge is covered in magnets from places I don’t remember visiting.

A Singh, that’s the thing. Besides being a part of this country’s rich cultural history, the Singh also serves as the mascot for its oldest and most beloved beer brands.

I open the fridge, grab one of the extra-long brown bottles, and peel off the cap with my opener.

I look out the kitchen window. It faces the sea but I can’t see a thing through it with the overhead panel shining and no light outside except the faint amber of the neighbor’s wall lamp two hundred meters away.

I can barely even see the little solar-powered lights the gardener set up around the pool, eight of them in a row along the low hedge that separates the pool deck from the hillside drop.

The switch for the pool light is just behind the fridge, a small toggle in a brown plastic housing that’s been there since the villa was built, probably.

I flip it on and there she is—a black silhouette splayed across the top of the pool.

She splashes, thrashes, then dives down.

The beer almost slides from my grasp, but luckily I already have the bottom resting against the lip of the marble countertop. I put it down and hurry over to the French door at the rear of the house. The door’s already unlocked. That’s a thing I’ll need to think about later. I step out.

The pool runs along the far edge of the deck, maybe ten meters long, lit from underneath now in the familiar blue-green that turns everything else around it invisible.

The deck itself is pale poured concrete set with river stones along the border wall, where someone planted birds of paradise that are doing better than they have any right to in this heat.

She’s swum to the edge by the time I get out there, and she’s trying to climb up and out, both hands on the lip, bare arms shaking slightly with the effort.

Her long brown hair is dripping in loose strands across her back.

She pulls herself up and out—and it’s at this point that I realize she’s topless, which I hadn’t seen through the window.

She covers her chest with one arm and attempts to run past me, legs alternating between a skip and a run, bare feet slapping the wet concrete.

She doesn’t look at me, but I can see her eyes are full of terror and maybe some embarrassment.

“Wait!” I shout.

She doesn’t, of course. She just runs even faster across slippery tiles.

That’s when she slips, pitching forward and hitting her knee against the big rock that the pool area was designed around.

The rock is a natural piece of the hillside they kept when they built the deck, a rough basalt shelf about waist high with a flat top.

It’s lovely and impressive, especially at sunset.

But the rocks are jagged and a real bitch when they slice your knee open.

“Argh!” she howls.

I rush over and help her up.

“What the hell are you doing?” I say, grabbing her elbow. She yanks it away, using it to cover her breasts again.

I’m not angry. Honestly, not even mad. I’m just so confused that I’m hoping that if I help her up, this will start to make sense.

She rises unsteadily on her feet. There’s blood on her knee, a bright thread of it running down her shin and pooling at the arch of her foot.

The cut’s not deep, but a big enough scratch that it isn’t stopping on its own.

“Are you okay?” I say.

She doesn’t say anything. Just stares at me with wide-eyed terror like she’s not sure what I’m going to do next.

She’s shivering, partially because she’s wet, but also from the adrenaline, because the night is anything but cold.

The air’s twenty-eight degrees easy, that’s celsius for my fellow Americans, not fahrenheit. That’s around 82 degrees. Balmy.

“Are you Russian?” I ask.

She looks at me like I’m insane.

“No. Why? Are you?” she asks.

That accent. She’s Australian, I think. Queensland, maybe.

“Why were you in my pool?”

“Just… swimming,” she says, biting her lip in a way that in another context would be cute and which in this context… well, still cute, I guess.

“Why were you swimming in my pool when I wasn’t home?”

“Because you weren’t home?” she says, trying a smile. She’s not sure about it, but she’s got a face that tells me that playing innocent and a little cheeky has worked for her in the past and it’s probably going to work again. She’s right.

“You broke in?” I ask.

“No!” she says. “I just walked along the rocks, see?”

She points with her left hand—the one she’s not covering herself with—at the path from the rocks down to the water.

There’s no fence around the rear of the house.

It would ruin the view. The rock face goes all the way down to the little hidden beach below, a narrow wedge of dark sand that only shows itself at low tide.

It’s jagged going, and the waves lick the sides of the rock at high tide, but I can see how she would have made it up here.

Probably in the daylight, the first time. Probably wearing sandals.

“You’re trespassing?”

“Yeah.”

She’s clearly not proud of it. She’s like a kid who knows she’s been caught doing something she shouldn’t, something illegal, but doesn’t want to give you the satisfaction of gloating about it.

“Alright,” I say. “I have some alcohol inside.”

“Uh, is that supposed to be an invitation for me to join you?” she asks.

“Rubbing alcohol,” I say. “For your knee. Bandages too. You can come in and get patched up.”

“I’m fine.”