4. #2
I spend an hour, maybe more. I’m in a trance, lost in the story world.
It may not be high art, but that isn’t the point.
It’s about that feeling of getting lost in a story.
That’s what everyone is really after. An escape.
And if I’m losing myself writing it, there’s a chance the reader will experience that too.
I feel a crick developing in my neck from staring at the screen too long.
The light through the blinds has shifted again, that last hour of afternoon gold that comes in nearly horizontal and lights up the dust on the desk.
I check the word count. 2,654 words. Nice.
I met the goal I set for myself and then some.
I love my job. Back when I was one of a dozen writers in a room, I could never just clock out when I was done for the day.
You always had to look busy either writing or rewriting or staring pensively at the screen thinking about what you were going to write or rewrite.
Now there’s no one to perform for. Time for a swim.
Nope. Not yet. Because as soon as I strip down, I can see that I’m visibly stiff.
Not fully hard, but definitely still awake after that last writing jaunt.
Alright, don’t get ahead of yourself. Take a seat on the bed, relax.
You don’t want to go out there half-cocked. Or ya know. Whatever the phrase is.
If I go out there, something’s going to happen between the two of us.
I don’t know exactly what, but there’s going to be some flirting at least. Maybe a little kissing.
Maybe more. Maybe a lot more. Physically, I’m ready for that, sure.
But emotionally? I still haven’t been with anyone since Olivia and Ava.
It’s been a year. More than a year. And while I still haven’t figured out how to put the two of them out of my thoughts, I should be ready to at least experiment and see where things go.
Maybe she doesn’t want to start some holiday fling anyway.
Maybe she’ll be the one to slow things down, to say she’s not ready.
Because sometimes when a girl is shy and emotionally vulnerable, she swims naked in a stranger’s pool.
Yeah, that makes sense.
If nothing else, sitting here wrestling with myself has caused my erection to recede. I’m ready to go out there, and I’ll hate myself if I hold back now. The sun is past its peak for the day. I think I can get away without sunscreen.
Stepping outside, I find her swimming lazy laps, one arm over the other, no particular hurry. The pool is fully in shade now, the hillside behind it already dimming. She stops and swims toward me when she sees me.
“Finished?”
“For now,” I say. “I was a little blocked there, but I managed to get through it.”
“Getting in?”
I step off the concrete edge and drop straight in, making a small splash. My feet touch the bottom of the pool and I stand, wiping the water from my eyes. It’s not a big pool and there’s no deep end. But she’s there in front of me, floating so close that she’s almost orbiting me.
“I love your house,” she says.
You should stay the night, then.
“I know, I can’t believe how lucky I am,” I say.
“It’s paradise.”
“Nope,” I say.
She eyes me curiously.
“It’s not paradise. But I’ll still take it.”
She treads water, risking getting just a little closer to, her eyes wide and curious, watching me.
“I wish I could stay here,” she says.
I don’t say anything. We’re looking at each other, and we both know what’s about to happen. The words are just there to cut through the tension. My heart’s thumping, and it’s not just from excitement. I know that what I do next will be the start of something, but there’s no other way.
She floats to me and I wrap my hand around the small of her back, pulling her toward me. Those soft, puffy pink lips slightly open, ready. She sighs gently as her body folds into me, our lips so near.
The kiss is quiet. That’s the first thing.
Not the aggressive thing I’d been half-expecting, half-dreading from myself.
Just her mouth finding mine in the water, her hands coming up against my chest, and the sound the pool makes when two people stop moving and the water settles around them.
She tastes like sunscreen and the faint chlorine of the pool and underneath that something warmer, something that is just her.
I don’t rush it. I don’t think either of us expected that, that we would both just stay there in it. Her fingers curl slightly against my sternum. I can feel each one.
When she pulls back it’s only an inch or two, her face still close enough that I could count her eyelashes.
They’re wet and slightly clumped together from swimming.
She blinks once, slowly, watching me. That expression isn’t something I would have written into Gimme Goblin Girls.
It’s not lidded or smoldering or telegraphing untold pleasures.
It’s a little bit surprised, I think. A little bit like she’s figuring something out.
“Okay,” she says quietly. Not yeah or yes or any of those words. Just okay.
I laugh, I can’t help it. She laughs too, the sound bouncing off the water, and then we’re kissing again and it’s less quiet this time but still not rushed, still not the thing I sometimes worried I would do, which is be too hungry and ruin it.
Her arms come around my neck. She’s shorter than me and she rises onto her toes and then gives up on that and lets me take some of her weight, her legs drifting to bracket my hips, not quite wrapping around them, just hovering there in the water like she hasn’t fully decided yet.
That indecision is, for some reason, the thing that gets to me most.
I move us toward the wall of the pool without really deciding to, just finding the resistance there and using it.
She lets out a slow breath against my ear when her back touches the tile.
I pull back to look at her. Her hair’s half out of its tie and sticking to the side of her face and neck, dark against her skin, and the late shade coming off the hillside has flattened the light so that the green-blue of the water is reflecting up under her jaw, her throat, her chin.
She looks at me the same way she looked at me when she said she didn’t believe I was really that cynical.
Like she’s still in the process of cataloguing.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing,” she says. “Just looking.”
Which should be a throwaway line and instead it makes something tighten in my chest in a way I’m not fully prepared for.
There’s a version of myself that says the right thing here, the charming and practiced thing, the line that a character in one of my books would say.
I don’t use it. I put my hand against the wall above her shoulder instead and she tilts her head up and we find each other again.
The water moves around us when she shifts.
I feel the length of her against me and for a moment my carefully maintained composure does a thing, flinches a little, stutters.
She feels it. Her mouth curves against mine, not a smirk, something softer than that, more like recognition.
She puts her hand on my jaw. Not to direct me, just to hold.
The straps of her bikini top are thin, just two ties looped at the back of her neck, and I find them without looking but I don’t pull.
I just rest my fingers there, at the nape of her neck, at the knot, asking without asking.
She shifts, leans her head forward until her forehead rests lightly against mine.
“Yeah,” she says. Same word she said before when I brought the water. That vocal economy I’d noticed about her. But the way she says it. Yeah.
I pull the tie loose. The fabric loosens and she lets it fall between us into the water.
She doesn’t move to cover herself. She looks at me looking at her, and the water catches the last of that horizontal late-afternoon light and throws it upward so everything is gold and green and soft.
Whatever I wrote upstairs, I understand now how far off the mark it all is, how much the language cheapens rather than captures it.
There’s nothing to describe that isn’t rendered false and small by the act of describing.
Her skin is warm even in the pool. I didn’t expect that.
She shudders slightly when I touch her, not from cold, just from the contact, and makes a small sound that she seems to decide not to suppress, that she just lets exist in the air between us.
I stay close. I stay slow, deliberately slow, because she is not in a hurry and I don’t want to be the one to break whatever this is, this careful undiscovered thing.
“You’re thinking,” she says.
“I do that,” I say.
“Stop it for a little while.”
There’s nothing teasing in it. It’s just an honest request, and I honor it.
I stop being somewhere else in my head, I stop performing a check on myself and wondering whether I’m ready and cataloguing all the reasons why not, and I’m just here, in the water, with her.
My hands at her waist. The birdsong from the hillside. The last sunlight going off the basalt.
She reaches for the tie at her hip and pulls it, and the other side, and she’s in just the bottom half of the bikini now, her hands moving to my shoulders for balance as she works the knot loose.
There’s something matter-of-fact about the way she does it that I find more disarming than any studied seduction would have been.
I lean my head down to her shoulder and stay there a moment. Her hand comes up and she rests her palm flat against the back of my head. Neither of us moves. The pool water rocks quietly against the tile walls.
“Hi,” she says softly, into my hair.
“Hi,” I say back.
Which is, I realize, maybe the best thing either of us has said so far.
I work my swimsuit down and off and let the current take it to the corner of the pool where it won’t matter.
She watches me do it. When I move back to her she wraps one leg around the back of my thigh, not urgently, just drawing me in, making the geometry of it clear.
I put my hand beneath her in the water, finding her first, making sure.
She inhales slowly through her nose and holds it.
Her hips shift forward the smallest degree, an involuntary thing, honest in a way that undoes me more than anything deliberate could have.
When we finally come together she exhales completely, a long quiet breath like she’s been holding it for some time, possibly longer than just this moment.
I hold still. She holds still. Her forehead drops against mine and we stay like that, both adjusting to the fact of it, the water lapping at the tiles. Her fingers curl against my back.
Then she moves, a slow rolling motion from her hips, and I move with her, and we find a rhythm that the water seems almost to assist, each small wave we generate returning to us, the pool a kind of collaborator.
It is not acrobatic. It is not anything like the cave wall scene I wrote earlier today, the claws and the tearing and the effortless lifting.
It’s just the two of us in the shallow end of a shaded pool, her shoulder blades against the tile, my forearm braced above her, her face turned up toward mine.
The sounds she makes are quiet but unguarded.
The sounds I make surprise me. At one point she laughs softly at something, I don’t know what, some small imperfect human thing, and I laugh too, and we don’t stop.
Her breath changes as I move against her, the slight hitch of it, not dramatic, just the honest involuntary catch in the throat.
Her nails find my back. The water swirls and eddies around us with each small adjustment.
I can feel the tile wall cool against my forearm.
She shifts and arches and makes a sound that curves upward at the end, a question and its answer at once, something only really possible in the body, not on any page I’ve ever written, not in any form I’ve managed to find language for.
Her face against my neck, one hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades, her breath warm and ragged at my ear.
The hillside above us is going gold and then copper and then the shadows slide over the pool edge completely and the water turns that darker green. Somewhere down through the valley the longtail engines have gone quiet and there’s just the birds and the sound of the water and her.
Afterward we float there awhile, not talking. The silence doesn’t need anything from either of us. She’s on her back, arms out, hair spread on the surface of the water, staring up at whatever sky is left above the hillside. I float beside her, near enough that our shoulders nearly touch.
The pool filter kicks on somewhere beneath us with a low mechanical hum.
“I’ve still got forty percent of your book left,” she says.
“Take your time,” I say.
“I will,” she says. She turns her head to look at me, cheek resting against the water. “The Emerald chapters are my favorites.”
“Just wait until you meet Giselle, and Mora and Brynn, and Ulket,” I say. “Oh, Ulket.”
“Why do you always do that?” she says.
“What?”
“Deflect with humor every time I say something genuine.”
I look at the sky. There’s one first star visible through the canopy of a palm that hangs over the corner of the wall.
“Old habit,” I say.
“Okay,” she says. That word again. And she looks back up at the sky, and I listen to the water, and we don’t say anything else for a long time, and it’s the most unforced thing I’ve experienced in longer than I can honestly remember.