Chapter 3
THREE
LENNON
I burst through the surface of the water laughing.
I don’t stop myself or lower my voice or make myself smaller in any way.
That’s my new thing, starting now: I don’t stop myself. Jake isn’t here to do the hand signal—that small, practiced lowering of his palm that means volume, Lennon, we’re in public, lower your volume.
I am technically in public, but nobody’s around in the little RV Park plaza with a pool and closed-down café.
And I just left my husband and I am in a hot tub with neon lights going underneath the water like a disco. It feels like a spa after the day I’ve had, and I will laugh as loud as I want.
I cackle, actually. Full, unhinged witch cackle because I’m off-script and who the hell cares? It bounces off the pool deck.
I’m going to get a cat in whatever place I rent. Jake hated cats and never let us get any. What if it scratches the baby? he’d always say.
There was no baby. And it felt like punishment for the miscarriages, when he wouldn’t even let me get a cat to snuggle with when I was already so damn sad.
I’m going to get two cats.
The thought arrives fully formed and I laugh harder, feeling so free.
There’s no more Jake. There is just me and the bubbles and the neon and the completely deranged fact that four hours ago I was driving south on I-35 with no destination, having just told my husband of nine years that I wanted a divorce.
Four hours ago. It feels like a different century.
Three and a half hours ago I called my mother to tell her, and she said congratulations, honey, that man never once tipped a waitress in his goddamn life with the same energy she generally uses to comment on the weather.
Mom’s been a waitress most of her life. I always hated Jake’s no-tipping thing and it’s embarrassing Mom knew about it, too. I kept extra cash in my purse to slip onto the table when Jake wasn’t looking every time. You don’t grow up as a waitress’s daughter and not tip well. I mean, c’mon.
It was also during that phone call when I learned Mom had moved to an RV park in Uhland last summer without mentioning it to me. Which was why she’d been dodging my calls for months.
But it’s a really nice RV park, as it turns out.
Nicer than it has any business being, frankly.
There’s a pool, and alongside it, this fabulous hot tub I’m currently lounging in.
Plus a little café, the office they’ve Spanglished into the Officina so it’s welcoming for all clientele, and they also have two cabins on site, like little hotel rooms.
An hour ago, I sat on the edge of a surprisingly comfortable cabin bed in the surprisingly nice RV park and listened to the silence of a room that had no Jake in it. Mom had to disappear for a shift so it was just me, myself, and I.
I reached for the TV remote on instinct, the same way I always do when I’m alone and the quiet gets too loud.
And put it back down.
Because I just left my husband. And if I turned on the television and stared at it until I fell asleep, what was any of it for?
So I’m in a hot tub instead. In gym shorts and a camisole because I packed for flight, not leisure, and the hot tub was right here.
I never get to enjoy hot tubs because they’re another thing Jake has always hated, and now I never have to care about that ever again.
I found the switch that turns on the jets and the neon lights and I clapped my hands together like a delighted child and did a small shimmy on the pool deck in the January cold. For once I didn’t hold any of it in.
Because I don’t have to hold anything in ever again.
And then I submerged myself completely—eyes open, the neon rippling around me in blue and purple and green, bubbles streaming past my face—and I stayed under until my lungs made their opinion known, and then I came up laughing.
I’m still laughing now. I can’t remember the last time I felt so delighted or free.
Oh my god, I’m finally free.
When I was seventeen, the pastor at Mom’s church held me under the baptismal water and everyone clapped when I came up gasping. I had to wear a white robe that smelled like mothballs. The water was so cold I couldn’t catch my breath.
I didn’t know the pastor was going to hold me under for a full three seconds and I panicked, genuinely panicked, and came up sputtering while forty people who had just become my friends smiled and called it rebirth.
I remember thinking: Is this it? Because I just feel soggy.
This, though.
I sink back down to my shoulders, the heat wrapping all the way around me, the neon doing its slow color-shift underneath, bubbles rising up through the water and popping softly against my palms. I tilt my head back and look at the moon that’s coming out now as the last of the twilight goes, and I feeling —
Okay.
I think I might actually be okay.
Not fixed.
Jake is still in our house right now, probably, on his knees on the rug I hate. Or, more likely pouring out all his troubles to his mother. But none of it is my problem anymore.
I have a carry-on and a laptop bag and a single suitcase full of clothes and no plan past tonight.
But I’m warm. And the lights are pretty.
And I finally did the impossible thing.
I close my eyes and let the jet at my lower back do its work. I’m so deep in the sensation of just existing in my own body without a headache for the first time in recent memory that I almost miss the sound.
Almost.
A soft displacement of water. Rhythmic. Coming from—
My eyes shoot open.
In the pool beside the hot tub, there are ripples cutting a clean line down the center of the water. Moving fast. Like something very large and very efficient is underneath them.
I watch, confused, until the shape at the end of the lane resolves into a man—a very large man—who does a flip turn off the far wall with the ease of someone who has done this particular thing ten thousand times, and pushes back the other direction.
Steam is rising off the surface of the pool around him.
Not from the pool. From him.
I stare at this for a moment, working out the physics. The pool is unheated. It is January in Texas, which means the water is probably somewhere around—
Cold. Very cold. And this man is generating enough heat that his body is steaming in it, which means he has been in there long enough to—
He reaches the shallow end and stands, and several things erupt in my brain simultaneously.
Four hours ago, I told Jake I wanted a divorce.
Now there is a massive, tattooed man swimming in the freezing pool beside the hot tub I’m in like he was summoned by a genie granting every wish I’ve never allowed myself to make.
He reaches the shallow end and stands, water pouring down a gorgeous body covered in inked gargoyles, demons, and enough muscle to make me forget every rule I’ve ever followed.
Then he looks directly at me.
I drop beneath the surface of the hot tub.
Apparently freedom is going to require a learning curve.
Hiding under the water is a completely involuntary response, pure animal, the same instinct that makes you duck when something comes at your face even when you know it’s not going to hit you.
One second I was sitting there openly staring at a stranger in the pool who exudes pure fuck-boy energy, and the next I was crouched on the floor of the hot tub with my eyes open and the neon lights going around me and the muffled underwater silence pressing in, thinking:
The fuck boy absolutely saw you staring. He also definitely saw the shimmy.
Only when I can’t hold my breath any longer, I come back up.
And oh my god, he’s swum to the edge of the pool closest to the hot tub. His arms rest on the pool deck, chin level with the surface, and he’s watching me with an expression he’s working to keep neutral. Except there’s a shimmer of something at the edges of it that might be amusement.
“Hi,” he says.
The steam is still rising off him. Just curling up off his shoulders into the cold air.
“Hi,” I say back, all my nerves suddenly alert and alive.
Up close I can see the tattoos better. The chest piece is enormous and intricate—gargoyles in stages of agony against a stormy sky, perched on castle parapets—and below it, something that continues down his sternum, his ribs, disappearing into the water.
How much of his body is covered? The ink goes all the way down both arms, which I can see now that he has them folded on the pool deck.
I realize I’m staring at his chest.
I look at the pool.
I look at the moon.
I look back at the pool, which is where he still is.
The thing is—I’ve been married since I was eighteen to the first and only boyfriend I’ve ever had. I met him when I was seventeen, which means I haven’t navigated this particular situation, the situation of fuck boy, hot tub, evening, steam, in approximately a decade. Or like ever, in actuality.
Suffice to say, it’s been a long time for the general occurrence of hanging out with a hot fuck boy with even the potential to flirt—
Jake, says a voice in my head. You’re married.
Right. Except, I left Jake. Four hours ago.
I informed him of my decision and packed a bag and walked out the door, which means that technically, as of four hours ago, the rules—
What are the rules?
Can someone please hand me a new script? ’Cause I know blah blah blah, liberated woman, I threw the old one out… but I could really use some fresh stage direction.
Is there supposed to be a waiting period? I understand there are divorce proceedings, which in Texas take a minimum of sixty days, but in terms of the norms about looking at someone, or the implications of what it means that I noticed this man’s chest before I noticed anything else about him—
Could somebody please just let me know how close I’m allowed to get to the sexy, shirtless man while still getting to call myself a good, normal person?
Oh lord, I’m clearly not nearly as liberated if I think all I want is to throw out one script and grab for another. Wait. Do I care more about being good or being free? And by whose standards am I trying to be good anyway?