Chapter 3 #2
“Is that pool heated?” I ask, because I need to say something instead of spiraling silently in my head, and this is apparently what my brain has produced.
“No.”
I look at the steam still rising off him, happy to be distracted. “That water must be—”
“Sixty-two degrees,” he says. Like this is a completely reasonable water temperature to voluntarily be in.
“That’s not—” I try to work out if that’s dangerous. “Is that safe?”
A shrug, unhurried, those enormous shoulders lifting and dropping.
“If you keep moving.” He nods toward the far end of the pool, where the evidence of his laps is still rocking in slow waves against the wall. “I like the extremes. Cold plunge, then warm up in the hot tub, back to the pool. It helps regulate me.”
I look at the hot tub. Then back at him.
He’s shivering. Just slightly. It’s the controlled shiver of someone who has made peace with shivering as a temporary condition.
“Come warm up then!” I say, gesturing to the hot tub. And then wonder if you’re supposed to say that to strangers. Really hot strangers. “I mean—you said that’s the whole point. The back and forth, right?”
He looks at me for a moment, like he’s trying to figure out whether I mean it or if I’m just being polite. I’m not. The problem with me is my mouth runs away before I’ve figured out the polite thing to say most of the time.
Then he’s lifting himself out of the pool in one smooth motion, water cascading off his muscular chest and abs and—
And I’m now looking at the moon again with great focus.
He stops, dripping, at the edge of the hot tub.
“You sure? I don’t want to interrupt.” His pause holds the hint of a smile. “Whatever it is you were doing.”
He saw the shimmy. He definitely saw the shimmy.
“I was celebrating,” I say, with as much composure as I can assemble. “I made a significant life decision today.”
“Congratulations,” he says, and steps in.
He settles on the bench across from me and sinks down to his chest. He exhales long and slow in the bubbling hot water, then he’s still. Like he doesn’t have to work at performing ease or filling the space. And he doesn’t ask follow-up questions about my significant life decision.
I like that.
I like how he’s doing nothing except existing, quiet and all but meditative, in the hot water across from me like he does it all the time. Maybe he does. I did clock him as a fuck boy. So maybe this is just a normal fuck boy move.
The question is… how do I feel about it?
Not how do I feel required to act in this situation… but if it’s just me, making up the rules and writing the story as I go along… how do I feel about being in the hot tub with a hot stranger?
Well, it’s definitely nice to just be able to sit with someone without the expectation of talking. Usually I get really anxious around new people and have a lot of difficulty just letting myself be me.
It’s unusually easy with this stranger, though.
I play with the bubbles at the surface like I was before, determined not to let his presence affect my enjoyment of the hot tub experience. I like the way they pop against my palms. And how the light of the neon bounces in shifting light as I airplane my hand back and forth through them.
“I’m August,” he finally says, breaking the quiet. “I live here. Just so you know you didn’t end up alone in a hot tub with someone who appeared from the void.”
“I would certainly appreciate it if you’re not a serial killer,” I say, because I’ve decided I’m just saying whatever thought comes into my head instead of shoving it back down inside and judging if it’s normal or not before I let them out of my mouth. Just like I’m not lowering my volume anymore.
“I’m Marie.” My middle name just pops out of my mouth even though I haven’t used it as a first name since high school. Usually I go by Lennon, but there’s something freeing in using the older name tonight. “I don’t live here. I just needed somewhere to be tonight.”
He nods.
A couple cuts across the far end of the plaza, and the man calls out without breaking stride: “August! Laps in January, man, you’re crazy.”
“Always,” August calls back.
The couple moves on. So he does live here. Good. And now I’ve got witnesses in case of, you know. It would be my luck, the first day I finally decide to choose freedom, I end up in a hot tub with a handsome serial killer.
We sit for a while. The neon lights shift underneath us, blue to purple to green. I’m aware of him across the water the way you’re aware of a fire in a room. Even when you don’t look directly at it, you’re aware of the location of the warmth.
“Did it hurt?” I ask out of nowhere, gesturing vaguely toward the wall of ink across his chest. Apparently my mouth has decided that subtlety is for people who have their lives together and I am not currently one of those people. “The tattoos.”
He looks down at his own chest.
“Yeah,” he says. “They hurt like hell.”
“Most people avoid pain at all costs.”
He looks up.
“Most people,” he agrees, in the tone of someone observing an interesting pattern in a species they, too, have observed, but do not feel entirely part of.
Something about that makes me want to smile, which I cover by looking at the water.
“Do they mean things?” I ask. “Or is it more about the art itself?”
He considers this with actual seriousness, which I notice, the not-giving-me-the-easy-answer-first.
“Both,” he says finally. “The early ones were more, like… feeling things I didn’t have language for yet. Later they got more intentional. Both the art and the meaning.”
He glances down at his chest and arms. Then looks back up.
“You want the tour?”
I shouldn’t. I’m in a hot tub in gym shorts with a stranger and I have no script and tomorrow I have to figure out the actual practical logistics of having left my husband. I should absolutely get out and go back to the cabin and sleep. Right now.
Instead, I say, “Yes.”
So he walks me through his tattoos and I’m fascinated.
“I got my very first one when I was sixteen here.” He points at his bicep. “But it was total shit, so I got it covered up. If you look really close, though, you can still see some of the original line work of the shitty barbed wire.”
He leans his bicep across the bubbling water, and fascinated, I lean forward. I’m not sure I can make any sense of the lines, because the “cover up” is an amazing black and gray dragon. I can’t imagine there was anything except it inked on his skin.
He keeps walking me through the art on his skin like a map of his life. And I see what he means. The early ones that haven’t been covered up are rawer—all feeling, with less control. The later ones have a confidence the earlier ones were reaching toward.
“My back piece was the first time I actually planned the whole thing before I started,” he says. “I was finally thinking about the whole canvas.”
He turns in the water.
And my breath catches.