Eight
BEANIE CALLED THE next morning and woke me five minutes before my alarm.
“It’s time to do another one,” she said, like she would accept no protests.
“ Another one what?”
“I gave you a grace period because you’ve been adjusting, but now I’m cracking down. We really are doing this.”
“What are we doing, again?”
“Making your beauty list.”
“Oh, god,” I said, turning over. “You sound like you’ve trademarked it.”
“It was your idea.”
“Was it?”
“Yes. As usual, you’re your own worst enemy.”
“Can I get an extension?”
“No. Just pick something.”
“I’m still asleep!”
“That’s clearly false.”
“Maybe I’m dreaming.”
“Quit stalling.”
“Fine,” I said, rolling up into a sitting position and scanning my body to just pick something at random.
“And don’t just pick something at random,” Beanie warned.
“I wasn’t!”
“You have to mean it .”
I rubbed my eyes. “What’s the assignment again?”
“You’re making a list of things you genuinely love about your body. Things you think are beautiful. Not things that you think other people would see as beautiful. You .”
“Right,” I said, still scanning.
“Don’t overthink it,” Beanie commanded.
“Fine,” I said. “I could’ve saved this for the grand finale, but apparently you have me cornered, so I’m picking ‘ankles.’”
“Ankles!” Beanie protested. Then she made a buzzer sound, like Wrong! “You cannot pick ankles .”
“Ankles,” I said, doubling down.
“Do you even have ankles?” Beanie demanded.
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“I don’t remember anything about your ankles. They’re completely unremarkable. I’m calling bullshit.”
“My ankles,” I declared, awake enough now to feel protective, “are exceptional.”
“Prove it.”
“I will,” I said. And before anyone could stop me, I’d leaned back onto the bed like a pinup girl and taken glamour shot after glamour shot of my feet in the air from every angle I could muster. And then I texted them all to Beanie in a burst.
“Did you just send me”—she paused to count—“seventeen photos? Of your ankles?”
“Read ’em and weep.”
But Beanie did not weep. Instead, she Jedi-mind-tricked me into standing up for them even harder. “I don’t know,” she said. “They look like ordinary ankles to me.”
“Ordinary?” I asked. “Are ordinary ankles that mesmerizing? That sleek? That sophisticated ?”
Before she could answer, I cut her off.
“These ankles,” I went on, “could live in Paris! And wear berets! And drink champagne for breakfast every morning!”
“Okay—what are you even saying right now?”
“ Look at that taper near the arch! And the curve above the Achilles tendon! Not to mention the…” I hadn’t brushed up on my ankle anatomy, so I had to google for a second. “Hang on. Not to mention the…”
“Please tell me you’re not googling parts of the ankle,” Beanie said.
“The lateral malleolus ,” I supplied then, triumphantly, “and how symmetrical it is with the medial malleolus . You don’t see that every day!”
“I guess you don’t.”
“I’m telling you, these ankles are lethal. They could work for the CIA. You could gouge somebody’s eye out with these babies. You could cut glass !”
“Wow,” Beanie said.
But I was fully awake now. She’d started this—and now I was going to finish it. “Can you cut glass with your ankles?”
“I don’t think so,” Beanie said, like she was happy to be defeated.
“There you have it, then. Case closed. You may add ‘ankles of death’ to my résumé.”
“Ankles,” Beanie said slowly then, like she was writing it down. “Adding that to earlobes makes a grand total of two things that you love about your body.”
“Two down, infinity to go,” I agreed.
“We’ll get there,” Beanie said then, her voice warm. “You’re definitely getting the hang of it.”
BUT WAS I?
After we hung up, I blissfully admired my ankles for about three more seconds before remembering with horror that today was a swim- lesson day. Hutch—I checked the time—would be arriving here in under an hour, and I hadn’t prepared emotionally in any way. Much less brushed my teeth, or had breakfast, or showered.
Wait— did you shower right before getting into a pool?
A quick search turned up a not definitive yes and no . Depending on how you felt about showering. And pools.
You might think that the prospect of hanging out in a swimsuit with Hutch might seem less appalling to me now that I knew him better. Or now that we’d formed a fragile alliance at the air station and agreed to carpool. Or possibly now that I’d met my humiliation deductible with that splinter-removal situation.
You might think that, but you’d be wrong.
It wasn’t less mortifying to see Hutch now. It was more .
Plus, we were meeting back at the same place—the Starlite pool. We were revisiting the scene of the crime. We wouldn’t be moving away from the memory of what he’d been forced to do to me, we’d be reviving it.
Add to that: now he was my subject. Officially. I’d spent a whole day with him—following him around, arguing with him, psychoanalyzing him, studying him, filming him, and noting his surprisingly charming habit of humming “Heart and Soul” to himself all the time.
Now I was a hundred times more aware of his shoulders, and the length of his stride when he kept a few paces ahead of me, and the exact spot on his nose where his aviators rested. Now I had noticed the dimple in his chin—more of a groove than a dot—and couldn’t un-notice it. Now I knew how much everyone seemed to admire him, how he chewed on his lower lip when he was thinking, and how, even when he was smiling, he never fully erased that serious darkness in his eyes.
Now I liked him more, I guess.
Which made me want to prance around in front of him in a bathing suit so much less .
Though, at this point, what I did or didn’t want had kind of ceased to matter.
Because Lieutenant JG Carlos Alonso had just emailed me yesterday with the date of the scheduled SWET training required by my company’s insurance.
So, of course, I googled SWET training—and realized it was the upside-down-helicopter, escape-hell training that Cole had mentioned back at the start. Training I’d been hoping he’d made up to scare me. But nope. It was real. SWET stood for Shallow Water Egress Training—aka seat-belting people into a fake helicopter seat welded inside a metal frame and then turning it upside down underwater .
Oh—no. No, no, no.
They couldn’t really be making me do that.
I rifled through my file folder on Hutch and found his number, making a new contact for him so that I could send the text: SWET training??????????????
To which he replied: You’ll be fine
To which I replied: Or DIE IN A WATERY GRAVE
And that’s when my phone rang. And it was Hutch.
And I didn’t even say hello. I just answered with, “Don’t make me do this.”
“ I’m not making you do anything. Your company is.”
I shook my head. “I’m dead. This is the end.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Hutch said.
“How, exactly?” I demanded. “I can’t even dog-paddle ! You want to turn me upside down like Houdini?”
“We’ll work on some tricks.”
“Okay, look, I didn’t mean to,” I confessed then, my voice starting to tremble, “but after I googled SWET training, I accidentally wound up watching a few videos of exactly how it works… and I don’t think…” I took a deep breath. “I’m really not sure that I can actually do it. I suspect I’m going to have a genuine panic attack. And then I’ll cry and confess everything, and then I’ll get fired for being a totally unqualified liar—and rightly so, because I am —and then that’s it for the rest of my life: I’ll be a bitter, unemployable outcast who never reached her potential because she couldn’t swim.”
“I guess that’s one possible outcome,” Hutch said.
“I’m sort of joking—but also really, really not. You know?”
When Hutch spoke again, his voice was softer. “You’re not that unqualified. It’s not like you’re making a scuba video.”
Okay, that was oddly helpful.
Hutch went on. “You can do it. I’ll help you. Tomorrow’s my day off.”
But his kindness just surfaced the tears I’d been suppressing. “What was I thinking taking this job?” I asked, pawing at my eyes. “I’m one hundred percent going to drown.”
“You’re not going to drown,” Hutch said then.
“You can’t know that.”
“Yes, I can,” Hutch said, and then unwittingly quoted Beanie: “It’s a pool full of rescue swimmers. You couldn’t drown if you tried.”
ALL TO SAY: now I really had to learn to swim.
There’d be no weaseling out of this swim lesson—or anything that would follow.
As I showered and got ready— blow-drying my hair , of all things—I formulated a plan. I’d wear my Day-Glo orchid-print caftan in hopes of temporarily blinding Hutch, and then, when it was time to slip out of my new, voluminous, maxi cover-up to get into the pool, I’d create a distraction—maybe accidentally-on-purpose knock over a pool chaise?—and then slip unseen into the water while Hutch was dealing with it.
That could work, right?
But, as it turned out, no furniture had to be harmed.
The real scene played out very differently than I’d imagined.
I’d pictured Hutch and me arriving at the pool alone—facing off like gunslingers. But we weren’t alone. Rue and The Gals were already there, drinking coffee, wearing their raffia sandals, and all seated on one side of a table like a panel of judges—saying they thought it would be “fun to watch.”
We were also not alone because Hutch brought George Bailey along.
George Bailey, who once again launched into a full-tilt gallop as soon as he saw me in hopes of catapulting himself into my arms—and ended up shoving me backward into the pool, and then landing on top of me in the water.
Remember ten minutes before, when I was blow-drying my hair ?
Yeah.
Fortunately, it was the shallow end. I only had to splash around in panic for a handful of seconds before feeling the rough pool floor under my now-bare feet—and then noticing that George Bailey was standing next to me, smiling and panting, head and shoulders comfortably above the waterline while my flip-flops bobbed upside down beside us.
I stood up, water pouring off me in a deluge, and pawed my flattened bangs away from my eyes.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Rue said.
Then Hutch, looking down at me from the edge, asked, as if I’d know the answer, “Why does he keep doing that?”
I took so long to attempt a reply that Hutch gave up waiting and took off his T-shirt, peeling it up over his head.
I’m sure in real life it happened in an instant. But in my memory, it unfolded in slo-mo: Hutch reaching down to grab the shirt hem, and then stretching out all his shoulder muscles like a cobra before tossing the shirt over a nearby chair, and standing resplendently shirtless before me and all of Rue’s lady friends.
I should clarify: I wasn’t an ogler, normally.
I’d interviewed many, many men for many, many videos—and not had a problem with accidentally ogling any of them. I had been nothing but professional with the quality-assurance manager at Altman Foods, and the VP of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, and the regional environmental manager for Hanson Homes. I was a total pro.
But this was different.
This was some kind of perfect storm of job requirements, physical proximity, removal of clothing, and… Hutch.
Who was, as Beanie had foretold… just scientifically… just mathematically…
Very good-looking.
Though I should point out that he wasn’t some bodybuilding, man-chesty, wall-of-muscle he-man. He was just a standard, incredibly fit swimmer dude who was now suddenly half-naked—and wearing swim trunks that I think we’d all approvingly describe as rather snug .
I mean, The Gals and I hardly had a choice. Who wouldn’t be rubbernecking in that situation?
If anything, we were all hapless victims.
Rue noticed us all watching him, and then she said, “Do a trick for The Gals, Hutch.”
Hutch looked like he’d heard a few requests like this before.
He shrugged over at the ladies. “Handstand?”
They all cheered, and Ginger wolf-whistled.
“Okay,” Hutch agreed. “One handstand, and then I’ve got to teach this one”—he hooked his thumb in my direction—“how to swim.”
“I’m just brushing up on my—” I started to correct him.
But then I fully lost my train of thought as Hutch walked that unclothed torso of his over to the deep end, clasped his hands over the lip of the pool edge, lifted and stretched his entire body up into a straight handstand, and then launched himself into a totally feet-first backward dive into the water.
We all stared as an awestruck group.
The ladies all cheered as he disappeared under the surface, skimmed low and deep along the bottom, like a marine mammal, and then surfaced right in front of me. What on earth must it be like to just live in your body so comfortably and enjoy it like that?
“Hi,” he said, shaking out his buzz cut.
“Hello,” I said, still dripping.
“Do you want to get rid of that?” he asked, gesturing at my sopping-wet cover-up.
I looked down, puzzled—as if I’d forgotten my body was even there.
Then I started trying to unwrap myself from the wet fabric. But all the yards of fluttery cotton that had seemed so floaty and freeing in the air were something different in the water. The cover-up was twisted and tangled around me like wet gauze.
I wasn’t immobilized, exactly, but I was struggling enough that Hutch decided to help out. The ladies watched, and so did I, to be honest, as Hutch moved his hands all around my body, tugging, peeling, and unwrapping. At one point, he held a stretch of fabric up at an angle and unwound me like a top. Then, for a grand finale, he stripped the limp wet cotton up over my head, positively disrobing me in broad daylight.
I mean, he left the swimsuit in place. But still.
When he finally tossed the wadded-up pile of fabric to the side of the pool, the ladies clapped. George Bailey, for his part, climbed up the steps, shook the water out of his fur—and decided to sun himself on the patio.
“I really am sorry,” Hutch said, watching me watch the dog. “I’m baffled over why he keeps doing that. Do you have this effect on other dogs?”
“Never,” I said, now trying to neaten my hair by tucking it behind my ears.
Hutch started walking toward the deeper water and gesturing with his head for me to follow.
When the pool surface was just above the waist, we stopped.
“Are you nervous?” Hutch asked.
There was no way to fake it at this point. My hands were cold. My breathing was tight. He knew I was in deep. There really was no turning back.
I met his eyes and nodded.
“Have you done any swimming at all before?” he asked.
Now we were in diagnostic mode. I gave him all the information I could think of, like I was visiting the doctor. “My mom used to take me to the pool all the time when I was a kid—but there was no real swimming involved. Just splashing and getting wet and cooling off. I mostly stayed on the steps in the shallow end. We went to the beach, too—but again, it was mostly splashing and making dribble castles. I was supposed to take proper lessons the summer after fifth grade, but my parents got divorced and that whole plan fell apart.”
Hutch nodded, like he was adding all that up. “Do you have any happy memories of being in the water?”
What a funny question. I thought back. “I remember my mom carrying me on her hip in the water. She liked getting in to cool off, and she’d chat with the other moms, and I’d ride along. I remember cuddling against her like a baby koala bear.”
Hutch held back his reaction a second, like that was not the answer he’d expected.
“So,” he asked next, “no formal instruction at all?”
I shook my head. “But I’m sure I’d have forgotten it all, anyway.”
Now Hutch shook his head. “We don’t forget muscle memory. It’s implicit. Anything you could do back then, you can still do. We just need to jog your body’s memory.”
“Not sure how much there is to remember.”
Hutch nodded, like, Noted . “Don’t worry. Even if it’s for the first time, everything we’re about to do, you already know how to do. It’s just that now, you’ll be doing it in the water.”
First, he just wanted me to walk around in the pool. To just get used to the feeling of being submerged, of the resistance and drag, of how the water swirled and eddied.
All easy.
Then he walked us both to the edge of the pool where the ladies were watching. They lifted their coffee cups and croissants in a toast, calling out things like, “You got this!”
He held on to the edge of the pool with both hands and squatted down to submerge his head, blowing bubbles as he went.
When he came up and waited for me to copy him, I said, “I’m so sorry.”
Hutch frowned. “What for?”
“This is utterly beneath you.”
But Hutch shook his head like I was nuts. “Everybody has to start somewhere.”
“You jump out of helicopters for a living,” I countered. “And now here we are, blowing bubbles.”
“I love blowing bubbles,” Hutch said, and there was that frowny smile again.
By the end of the lesson, I’d mastered the arts of bobbing, relaxing, and floating. All of which are harder than they sound. We’d also spent a shocking amount of time doing exercises that forced Hutch to put his hands all over my body.
Floating, in particular, required him to give graduate-level lessons on buoyancy, hydraulics, water temperature, and muscle mass—all while propping up the stiff frame of a student who he just could not convince to relax.
“Relaxing is hard ,” I kept saying. “I don’t know what to do.”
“That’s the point,” Hutch kept explaining. “Relaxing means not doing anything .”
“Not doing anything isn’t my style.”
“Be a jellyfish,” Hutch suggested.
“That’s easier said than done.”
Hutch’s point was that once I could float—and once I knew that I could float—it would change everything. “The lungs are basically air balloons,” he said. “And what do air balloons do in water?”
“Float?” I ventured, wondering if it was a trick question.
“Exactly. Your body isn’t going to sink like a stone because it’s not a stone. It’s a living, porous, air-filled thing. It wants to float.” Then he told me to take a deep breath, hold it, and lean back to rest on the water. Which I did. And it worked: my head and shoulders stayed up at the surface. “Now gently kick your feet,” he said, and, as I did, my legs rose toward the surface, too.
And then there I was, floating.
Which felt amazing for a second—before I exhaled the question “What if I need to breathe?” and then started to sink.
But Hutch’s hands were there to catch me in a flash—one under my shoulders, and one under the backs of my thighs, keeping me steady. “Exhale fast and then inhale again quick,” Hutch said. “You’ll have time. Water is forgiving.”
I inhaled, and then I kicked my feet back up toward the surface, and then Hutch took his hands away. “See how easy it is? Plus it helps that you’re a woman.”
Good god. I guess he’d noticed. “Why?” I asked, trying not to let out too much air.
“Women have more body fat than men do.”
“Where are we heading with this?”
“And fat is more buoyant than muscle. Arnold Schwarzenegger would sink like an anchor in the ocean.”
“Really?” I asked.
“It’s true. Women actually are statistically less likely to drown.”
“Because of the fat?”
Hutch nodded and patted his belly. “That’s why I keep a few extra biscuits in the tin.”
Was he serious? “I don’t think you know what biscuits are.”
“Feel it,” Hutch said, patting himself again like an invitation.
That broke my float. “No, thank you,” I said, going vertical and touching my feet to the bottom.
“Do it!” Ginger called from the dugout.
“Life is short!” Benita agreed.
“Feel how nice and soft it is,” Hutch urged again, demonstrating.
“ I’ll feel it!” Nadine offered.
But I just kept shaking my head, like No way .
Hutch nodded, like You got this . “For educational purposes.”
I glanced at the ladies. They gave a thumbs-up in unison. Then I moved my palm toward him, and as it got close, Hutch pulled it to him and pressed it against the flesh at his belly button. I swear, as soon as he touched my hand, everything shifted into slow motion. I saw his big hand covering mine as he pulled it toward him—and then I anticipated the feeling of his skin slicking under my palm for several suspended seconds before it actually happened.
“Feel that sponginess?” Hutch said, pressing both our hands against his torso like we were bouncing on a mattress. “That little layer of blubber is my best friend in the ocean.”
Layer of blubber ? Were we just making up the meanings of words now?
“That’s hardly a layer of blubber ,” I protested, my eyes locked on my hand and what it was doing.
“It helps me float, it protects me from hypothermia…” He let my hand go. “And it makes me a really good snuggler.”
Wait! Hold on.
Was I detecting a note of flirting? Was the love hater flirting with me?
He was supposed to be all muscle, no heart.
Except, I guess—the heart is a muscle.
Still. It couldn’t be flirting. I’d have to research it later. It had been so long, I wasn’t sure I’d recognize it in the wild. Though what would that search question even be? “What’s the difference between flirting and not flirting?” “What does it mean when men talk about snuggling?” “Should you touch a man’s extra biscuits?”
Next, without my permission, my hand brought itself over to my own tummy, pressing against my own buoyant, insulating, life-saving sponginess with a new appreciation.
And then the funniest thing happened.
As our lesson ended, and Rue and the ladies dispersed from their courtside seats, and as Hutch started freestyling toward the edge of the pool, his shoulders churning the water, I felt something shift in my psyche.
All day long, I’d been dreading asking this guy to do a “Day in the Life” video with me—an idea I was 90 percent sure he’d hate. I’d been trying to force myself to do it the way you make yourself do homework: I knew I needed to. But I hadn’t wanted to.
Now, suddenly, I wanted to.
Suddenly, I was truly, deeply curious about a day in his life.
Hutch hoisted himself up in one virile motion and flipped around to sit on the pool’s edge. Then called over to me to ask, “Any questions so far?”
“Yes,” I answered, sloshing my way closer to him.
Hutch waited. Then, when I got close, I stood there, half-submerged, and said, “Would you by any chance be willing to do a small, extra mini-documentary with me for YouTube—on top of the one we’re already doing?”
At the question, Hutch dropped his head in that aw-shucks way of his and then lifted it again to frown in my direction.
“Why would I want to do that?” he asked.
Was that a no already? But I wasn’t finished. “It’s just a series I do—on the side—about… heroes?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Oh. Right. “Because it could be powerful and inspiring?”
Hutch didn’t react. So I added, “And profound. And beautiful. And it could capture… deep truths about your life.”
“What if I don’t want to capture deep truths about my life?”
How to answer that? “Then you don’t have to watch it?”
“But other people will.”
“Yeah. That’s called being famous.”
“I don’t want to be famous.”
“Too late.”
Hutch thought about that. Then he nodded. “Maybe. But I don’t have to make it worse.”
We didn’t have to keep going. There were no signs of hope in this conversation.
“So that’s a no, then?” I asked.
Then, as friendly as pie, Hutch said: “That’s not just a no. That’s a no way in hell .”