Chapter 12
12
The temperature had dropped further and it was raining hard by the time they got back to the inn. Rose formed a tentative afternoon plan of sitting next to the fireplace and running search strings consisting of various products plus bird so as to tick off as many procurement tasks as possible before she lost her nerve.
She’d asked Tom to drive back because the change in weather was making her cough more. Now his left hand was on the wheel and the right was resting on her knee. She thought about objecting—especially since his fingers slid up along the inside of her thigh when he made right turns—but he’d focused so hard on the placement of his hand that he nearly ran a stop sign, and that gave her a little tumble of butterflies in her stomach. It was nice to feel worth the effort. To feel desired.
She hadn’t made him work for it last time, whatever he now told himself.
I have no idea what I’m doing. I always thought my first time would be with some experienced guy who’d tell me what to do , Tom had confessed, a little wild-eyed when he’d realized what Rose had planned.
We could see if that slutty ginger across the hall will come give us some tips , Rose had teased him.
He’s tragically straight, but maybe if you asked instead of me?
So even though Rose had been working off a Catholic school education— Don’t do it, you’ll die —she’d been put in charge of whether and when they were having sex, while Tom just got to be sweet and trusting and happy to be getting laid. But she’d been encumbered with fifty different hang-ups and contradictory expectations of her own: be sexy but not slutty; be adventurous but not dominant; blow his mind but make sure you come too!
No wonder it ended up being just one more thing they didn’t talk about, just like she hadn’t asked if he was dating Boyd Kellagher.
She didn’t know what she was supposed to do now with Tom, who was single; Tom, who was here ; Tom, who said he wanted her. But it might be nice to figure it out together this time. Start fresh.
Let’s pretend you’re absolutely dying to touch me. Let’s pretend you’re a construction worker here to tighten my screws. Let’s pretend I’m not your college sweetheart. Let’s pretend we just met and you think I’m beautiful.
Rose looked out the passenger window and saw a white cargo van parked in the front drive. Tom hadn’t mentioned any contractors appearing today. Rose decided to be unbothered about that. She was just a lady riding in a car with a handsome man. Tom’s in charge of all the repairs plus getting me into bed.
His hand gripped her thigh before he let go of it, and for the first time, Rose felt a little bit like she was on vacation.
A weather-beaten man in a poncho ducked out to meet them as soon as they parked.
“Heya, I’m the glass guy, here to see about some broken windows?” he addressed Tom.
“Oh shit,” Tom said, smacking his forehead. “Sorry, I forgot that was this afternoon.”
“I tried to call you, but it went to voicemail.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Tom apologized again. “My phone’s dead. Sorry if you had to wait.” He shot a worried look at Rose, as though she was unaware of what he was like.
She stopped and mentally kicked herself at that uncharitable thought. All Tom had done so far were all the things she’d wanted from him when they were married.
“No worries about the wait,” the contractor said, regarding Tom judgmentally. “I caught up on some invoices. I was calling mostly because it looks like you’ve got a little flooding going on around back, by the pool.”
Tom and Rose looked at each other in mutual consternation. She had no concept of pool maintenance, and she assumed he didn’t either.
“Thanks,” Tom told the window guy. “If you’re okay going up to the second floor by yourself, I’ll, uh, see about the pool. Careful of the closed doors—some of them are holding back our bees.”
Rose and Tom sloshed through puddles as they hurried around to the back patio. The inn’s pool wasn’t large, but it was located close to the foundation of the inn, and the water level was almost flush with the deck. From there, the ground sloped down a few feet to the inn and the fire exit of the basement, where Max had once run a small pub.
The pool was dark and fetid with months’ worth of rotting vegetation. A broken tree branch extruded on one side, and smaller clumps of broken twigs dotted the opaque surface. Rose had caught a glimpse of it out the window and placed it firmly in the Deal With Later category of unpleasant tasks. It was obvious that it needed to be drained and cleaned, but nobody was going to be swimming on Martha’s Vineyard until June.
“I bet the drain’s clogged with leaves,” Tom said.
“Is there someone we can call?” Rose said, eyeing the water level with trepidation. If it kept raining like it was, the window guy was right—water would flow down into the basement.
“Nobody’ll get here soon enough,” Tom said morosely. He looked skyward as though asking for strength.
“Maybe I could fish some stuff out with one of those basket poles,” Rose said, looking for a storage shed.
“Nah.” Tom sighed. “I’ll do it.”
“Do what?” Rose said, but then Tom bent over to untie his laces. “Wait, what? No.”
Tom lifted his head long enough to give her a tight grin. He stepped out of his shoes.
“No, Tom, what? You can’t go in the pool.”
“If I die, please remember I always loved you. I meant everything I said. I think you know how the speech goes now.”
“No,” Rose said more firmly, moving between him and the pool. “It’s almost freezing out here.”
“I did the Coney Island polar bear plunge last year. It’ll be fine.” He unzipped his jeans.
“Put your clothes back on,” Rose said, beginning to feel real panic. “Tom! I mean it. You’re not going in the pool. Anything could be in that water. This is a Florida Man moment. I am playing a Florida Man card. Tom!”
“I’ve got it, babe,” Tom said, shucking off more of his clothing. “I’m a very good swimmer. Didn’t you see me on the news?”
He wasn’t listening to her, his attitude growing downright cheerful as he stripped to his boxers and attempted to maneuver around her spread arms.
Rose’s warnings grew more fervent, a rapid, unheeded litany of No, Tom, no, you are going to get diphtheria, you are going to get hypothermia, you are going to stab yourself on a bunch of rebar and need fifty tetanus shots, Tom, no, stop I mean it, Tom, I am not going to have sex with you if your dick touches that stuff in the pool, no, Tom, Tom, TOM!
He slid into the water feet first, yelping when the oily, freezing sludge enveloped bare skin up to his neck.
“You are going to get an ear infection and die,” Rose told him, hands pressed to her temples. Tom felt around in the water with one tentative outstretched foot, wincing when it impacted something. “Tom! Get out right now before you drown.”
“C-could you bring me a couple towels?” he asked through teeth that had begun to chatter violently. “I’m going to need them in a second.”
Rose growled, closing her eyes and lips over the many bad words she wanted to call him. “Don’t die before I get back, because I am going to kill you,” she told him instead.
The towels in the inn could be full of mice and bees and God knew what else. She’d have to get them from the cottage. She turned and jogged for the front of the inn. God damn him. She hated running.
She was breathing in pants and gasps before she even made it back to the cottage, and she didn’t have time to catch her breath before she grabbed the entire stack of towels from the bathroom. She walked to work every day and made it a point to take the stairs, so she hadn’t thought her cardiovascular fitness could be that bad, but her asthma had been acting up, and she felt dizzy and lightheaded from the effort of making her lungs expand by the time she got back to the pool.
She spun around, looking for Tom. Had he gone inside? No. His clothes and shoes were still in a pile on the ground, getting soaked by the rain.
“Tom?” she called wildly. The rain was disturbing the surface of the pool, but she couldn’t see anything under the water. “Tom?” she called louder.
She’d been gone less than five minutes. Oh Christ, what if he had gotten caught on something?
“Tom?!”
She kicked off her boots in a panic and shuffled right to the edge of the pool, staring down into the black water. She could barely swim. The water would be over her head.
She was leaning over the surface, eyes frantically scanning the depths, when two events happened in exact unison: first, to Rose’s right, Tom’s shaggy head popped up from under the water as he victoriously thrust a rotting oak branch into the air, and second, to Rose’s left, a burst of light and sound like a flashbulb going off surprised and stunned her.
So she fell in the pool.
The shock of the cold, fetid water made her instinctively scream on impact, even though she should not have opened her mouth immediately after having fallen into a pool full of decomposing leaves and storm debris.
She choked on sludge, and her arms and legs kicked out uselessly for purchase. Before she could work through the panic, Tom grabbed her by the sleeve and pulled her upright. The next thing her hands hit were his chest and the side of the pool, and with these two anchor points, Rose got her head above the surface.
“Oh God,” Tom said, but the asshole was barely able to breathe through his loud howls of laughter.
Rose coughed the worst things she’d ever tasted out of her mouth, determined to get her airway clear if only so she could tell Tom, with her last words, how much she was going to murder him, but she couldn’t stop wheezing. She weakly smacked him on his bare chest instead. He laughed harder. She tried again, but she didn’t have any leverage, and her palm only bounced off the muscle. She let go of the side of the wall, delirious anger telling her that if she drowned while strangling him it would be worth it, but she nearly slipped beneath the water again.
Tom’s sputtering laughter was cut off at the moment when someone else grabbed Rose from behind, under the arms, and hauled her out of the water. This latest insult made her throat close completely with surprise, because she was dangling in midair like a misbehaving kitten, the water making her clothes twice as heavy on her flailing body.
There was another flash of light, stunning her for a second time. She was suspended by her armpits, the tips of her toes just barely touching the ground, breathing with difficulty. She couldn’t get her legs under her. Her lungs were seizing up.
“Oh my God, Boyd,” Tom said, sounding both horrified and deeply annoyed. “Get the fuck off my wife.”