She could have been a kid there.
Here everything was very adult. He slid her hands over him, so slowly she could make out almost every bump and groove. She felt the scar she had seen him get when Brian Wannamaker snapped one of his ribs through his skin; the oddly feminine-feeling curve of his waist; the braid of his abdominal muscles that always looked so brutal from across a field or a gym. They bulged, in her memory. They did vicious, violent things. But in the quiet darkness, everything was different He was different. He could have been anyone standing there. Just some faceless hunk, gently persuading her to explore and uncover all the things she would never really get to again. She would never touch him like this in the daylight. And no other man like this was ever going to want her to. This was it, and for one delirious moment it made her eager. She came close to squeezing when he passed her fingers over his chest, and actually did when he got to his biceps.
In fact, by the time he got to his shoulders he wasn’t helping her at all. His hands left hers but she kept going, uncovering each new part like an archaeologist unearthing the bones of an undiscovered dinosaur. She marveled over the slabs of his shoulder blades and the hollow at the base of his back—so deep she felt sure she could have slid right down into it.
And his hips. Lord his hips.
He had those arrows of muscle, she knew he did. Yet it was shocking to feel them beneath her searching fingers. They formed such a deep ridge that— “Letty, goddamn it!”
She snapped away the second she heard her name.
Though it was not the name that dragged her back to the reality of what she’d just done. It was his tone, sharp and frantic. It was that goddamn it on the end, almost cut off but not quite. They were the things that made it clear: she had almost gotten to the waistband of his shorts. Her hands had roamed below his navel, below his abs, below any point of friendly decency.
They might have even gone lower if he hadn’t shouted.
And she suspected he knew it. He wasn’t laughing, or saying anything else. There was just more of that thick silence—only now it seemed more like a nightmare than a secure little safety net. Even the darkness was no longer her friend, because darkness meant she couldn’t read his expression. Was he furious? Was this outrage? It seemed like it, but she had no way of knowing for sure.
She couldn’t ask him. She could barely explain. All she managed was an abrupt it was just an accident.
But he didn’t respond. He kept his silence, until she suggested they get out of the pool.
And then he said the worst possible thing she could imagine.
“We…what? Why do we…are you…I think that…things.”
She had broken him, apparently.
Broken him with her wandering hands.
“I…I don’t know what any of that means.”
“It means that I have…thinkings.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Totally. Fine.”
“There were a lot of periods in that last sentence.”
“You have a lot of periods,” he said, like a little kid saying I’m rubber and you’re glue. Only then he seemed to realize it hadn’t come out right, and tried to correct himself. He tried to correct himself really, really badly. “In your sentences, I mean. Not in the other way, because obviously you have a lot of those. And that is a good thing, a normal thing, I wasn’t suggesting that was weird that you have periods.” He took a big breath—big enough that she could hear it. Big enough that she knew what it meant, before he verbally shook his head at himself. “Man, I am just saying a ton of words right now.”
“I know. I hear all of them.”
“That getting-out idea was probably the way to go.”
“Yeah, that seems best, I think.”
“Right, right, right. So lead the way,” he said.
And that was when she realized what her suggestion meant.
She was still in her underwear. Her soaking-wet underwear, which he would now be able to see in full Technicolor from head to foot. There would be no hiding under a veil of water once they climbed out. No darkness to cover her once he flicked on the lights. And he was going to flick them on, too. It was the first thing he mentioned once they’d fumbled their way out of the pool.
“Stay there,” he said. “I’ll go get them turned on.”
Then she had to just wait for her doom, in the dark.
Of course she thought about simply leaving. It would mean putting her wet clothes on, but she could manage that. And there were excuses she could make to him later. I needed the bathroom seemed plausible, as did I felt unwell. But by the time she’d come up with a plan he had returned, the light from the locker rooms now bright behind him. So bright, in fact, that she could see almost all of him.