Chapter 5 Deep End
FIVE
DEEP END
DECLAN
Troy had been prowling around the house for three days like a caged animal looking for weak points in the bars.
I'd watched him circle from room to room, restless and edgy, moving like he was trying to walk off energy that had nowhere to go.
The walls were closing in on him and he was about five minutes from doing something destructive just to feel like he had control over anything.
I made the decision over coffee while watching him stare out the kitchen window for the third time that morning.
“Get dressed,” I said. “We're going out.”
He turned to look at me with suspicion already written across his face. “Going where?”
“Out.”
“Riveting. Really paints a picture.” He crossed his arms. “Do I get a destination, or is that classified?”
“You'll see when we get there.” I set my mug down and grabbed my keys. “Just get dressed. Bring a jacket.”
“You planning to kidnap me?”
“If I were kidnapping you, I'd be doing a better job of it.”
“That's not actually comforting.” But the corner of his mouth shifted, the closest thing to a smile he'd allow this early in the morning. “What if I don't want to go?”
“Then you can stay here and keep wearing a hole in the floor. But I'm leaving in ten minutes either way.”
He stared at me for a long moment, weighing whether this was worth the argument. Then he pushed off the counter and headed upstairs without another word. I took that as agreement.
Twenty minutes later we were in my truck heading west out of the city. Troy sat in the passenger seat with his arms crossed, watching the buildings slide past like he could figure out our destination through sheer force of will.
“You going to tell me where we're going, or is the mystery part of the experience?”
“Athletic club. Guy I know lets me use the pool.”
“A pool.” He said it the way most people would say a crime scene. “You're taking me swimming.”
“That's generally what people do at pools.”
“Yeah, generally.” He turned to look at me. “That's a weird call for someone who could've just said, hey, do you want to go for a swim.”
“Would you have said yes?”
He opened his mouth and then closed it again.
“Right,” I said. “We're going swimming.”
He turned back to the window. “I don't swim.”
“You're about to.”
“I can't wait.” The flat delivery made it worse. “Truly. This is everything I hoped this morning would be.”
I kept my eyes on the road and said nothing. He'd be fine once he was in the water. He just needed to burn something off and this was the cleanest way I could think of to make that happen without it turning into a fight.
“So this is what, physical therapy?” he said after a beat.
“This is me trying to keep you from going insane in my house.”
“I'm fine.”
“You've walked past the same window eleven times in three days.”
“I like the view.”
“There's a brick wall and a dumpster.”
He didn't have anything to say to that. He went quiet in the way that meant he was done arguing but not happy about losing, which was good enough for me.
The drive took another twenty minutes through neighborhoods that got progressively quieter and more residential. The athletic club was tucked into an area that straddled the line between commercial and private.
I pulled into the parking lot and killed the engine. Troy looked at the building like it had personally let him down.
“How old is this place?”
“Sixty-eight.”
“It looks sixty-eight.” He got out of the truck and stood there surveying the facade with his arms still crossed. “I feel like this building has opinions about me.”
“It's a building.”
“Old buildings have energy. This one's suspicious.” He followed me toward the entrance anyway. “Does anyone actually know we're here, or is this where you take people when you want them to disappear?”
“I take you swimming,” I said, “and this is the thanks I get.”
“You didn't ask. You abducted me from my coffee.”
Inside, the place smelled like chlorine and old concrete. The front desk was empty but I had a key card that got us through the turnstile and into the locker rooms without having to explain anything to anyone.
“There's suits in the bins if you didn't bring one,” I said. “Should be something that fits.”
Troy looked at the bin like it might bite him. “Community swim trunks.” He said it slowly, working through the implications. “You want me to put on a stranger's swim trunks.”
“They're washed.”
“You hope.”
“They're washed,” I said. “Just pick a pair.”
He made a sound of deep personal suffering and started digging through the bin. I grabbed my own suit from my bag and moved to the other end of the lockers to change, giving us both the space to pretend we weren't paying attention to each other.
Except I was paying attention and I hated myself for it.
I heard him moving on the other side of the lockers. The pull of a zipper. The shift of fabric. And I made the mistake of glancing over just as he was pulling his shirt off.
Broad shoulders. Muscle earned through years of hard living, not a gym. Old scars across his ribs I didn't remember being there, evidence of a life I hadn't been part of.
I looked away fast and focused on getting changed. This was practical. Normal. Just two people going to a pool. Nothing about this required me to notice the way Troy filled out space now, and nothing about the sharp twist of guilt that hit me for noticing was ever going to be useful information.
I finished changing and grabbed a towel. “You ready?”
“Define ready.” He came around the corner wearing swim trunks that were a size too big and looking deeply aggrieved about the entire situation. “I want it on record that I'm doing this under protest.”
“Noted.”
“Also these trunks are humiliating.”
“Nobody's looking at you.”
“You're looking at me.”
“I'm trying not to.” I headed for the pool before I could make this worse.
The pool was Olympic-sized and mostly empty at this hour. A few lap swimmers were working the far lanes but otherwise we had the place to ourselves. The water was clear and blue under the overhead lights, chemical-clean and colder than most people kept their pools.
Troy stood at the edge and stared down at it like it had wronged him in a previous life. “You seriously do this for fun.”
“I do it because it works. Keeps the joints loose and doesn't put impact on old injuries.” I dropped my towel on a chair and dove in before I could think about it too hard.
The cold hit hard, but my body adjusted fast. I surfaced, shook water from my eyes, and looked back at Troy still standing on the deck with his arms crossed.
“You coming in or are you going to stand there and supervise?”
“I'm deciding if this is worth my dignity.”
“Your dignity will survive.”
“Easy for you to say. You're already hypothermic and you don't care.” He looked at the water. Looked at me. Looked at the water again. “If I get sick, this is on you.”
“You're not going to get sick.”
“I'm from London. I've adapted to cold as a climate. This is a different category.”
“Troy.”
“Fine.” He sat down on the edge with a very specific kind of resignation, the kind that said he was doing this but he was going to make sure I knew the cost. He lowered himself in slowly, and when the water hit his chest he made a sound that was half gasp, half genuine grievance. “Declan. This is actual ice water.”
“It's seventy-eight degrees.”
“That is a lie and you know it.”
“Move around. You'll warm up faster.”
“Or I could get out and we could go somewhere that serves hot coffee and doesn't smell like a high school.”
“We're already here. Just swim.”
He gave me a look that promised he was keeping a running tab of all of this.
Then he pushed off the wall and started swimming with strokes that were technically correct but stiff, like he was forcing his body through each movement against its better judgment.
I watched him make it to the other end and back before he stopped and grabbed the wall again, breathing harder than the effort warranted.
“When's the last time you swam?” I asked.
“High school, maybe. I don't remember.”
“It shows.”
“Fuck you.” But there was less heat in it than there would have been an hour ago. The water was already doing its job, pulling the tension out of him whether he wanted to admit it or not.
We swam for a while in silence. I stuck to my usual routine, working through laps and let my body take over. Troy stayed closer to the shallow end at first, moving through the water like he was still deciding whether to trust it.
Then something changed in the way he moved.
He stopped fighting it. The stiffness left his stroke and he started remembering how to do this properly, his body taking over where his stubbornness had been getting in the way. He swam past me on one lap and shot me a look that was pure competitive edge.
I took it.
We raced the length of the pool and back without either of us announcing it, both of us pushing harder than we needed to.
He was faster than I expected but I had more endurance and a better sense of how to pace myself through the turns.
We hit the wall at the same time and he came up actually laughing, water streaming down his face and his guard down in a way I hadn't seen since he'd come back.
“You're slower than you look,” he said between breaths.
“You started early.”
“I absolutely did not.”
“You were already pushing off when I turned.”
“That's called being fast. You wouldn't know.” He shoved water at me. It hit me square in the face and I retaliated without thinking and suddenly we were both acting like idiots, splashing each other.
It felt good. It felt easy in a way that nothing between us had felt easy in years.
Troy drifted closer at some point, close enough that I could see the water beading on his eyelashes and running down his jaw. He reached out and grabbed my shoulder to steady himself without thinking about it, the contact completely automatic, no weight behind it.