The Pool Guy Came Tuesdays, and by July It Wasn't the Pool novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Hold Still

Nico's POV

I knew the temperature of that deck better than anyone alive.

By eleven on a July Tuesday the pavers around the lounger ran 140 degrees.

I had measured it with the infrared gun I kept in the truck.

I measured it every week.

It was a habit, like checking the chlorine.

Joelle was standing on it barefoot at five to eleven on July 14, and she hadn't noticed.

"Joelle," I said, "the pavers."

"What about them?"

"They'll burn you."

She looked down at her bare feet and then at me, and her mouth went crooked.

"Then you'd better keep me off them," she said.

She was in a white bikini with her hair in the claw clip and a gold chain at her throat.

The sun was on every freckle on her shoulders.

I had dreamed about those shoulders for fourteen weeks.

I couldn't tell her that.

I couldn't tell her a lot of things, and one of them sat in my head and wouldn't move.

I pushed it down.

I had the net in my hand, and I put it on the deck.

"Fuck me," she said.

I stood there.

The sentence went through me.

"Now?" I said.

"Now. Here. Not careful. Not slow. I've been wet since you came through the gate, and I've been careful for eleven months, and I'm done."

She pulled the clip out of her hair.

It fell around her shoulders in a red-brown rope, and she tossed the clip onto the cushion.

"Say you won't be careful," she said. "Pool guy."

"I won't," I said, and my voice was gone.

I took my polo off and dropped it on the deck.

She took off the bikini top.

I had seen her breasts before, in the rain, in the lamplight, on a towel.

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