Chapter 5: The Baja Shelf

The whole cul-de-sac knew about Tuesday now, so I stopped pretending it was a secret and started planning it.

On June 30 the pool was green, the sky over the McDowell Mountains had gone a dirty yellow.

The air smelled of hot dust and rain that hadn't come yet.

The radio said monsoon by the weekend.

I said nothing about that to Nico.

I handed him a water bottle at 9:40 and told him to leave the net.

"Ma'am?"

"The shallow end. The tanning ledge. Lie down on it."

The Baja shelf was a six-inch ledge at the shallow end.

You were meant to lie on it with a towel and a magazine and get brown.

I had never used it.

Craig had picked it from a catalogue.

Nico looked at it, and at me, and understood, and his ears went red from the top down.

"In my work clothes?" he said.

"Take off the shirt and the shorts. Keep the boxers on if you're shy."

"I'm not shy," he said.

"Your ears are."

He laughed and pulled the polo off over his head.

Then the shorts.

His boxers were gray cotton, soaked at the hem, and they did nothing to hide how much he wanted this.

I looked for a long time.

"Joelle," he said.

"Lie down on your back."

He lay on the ledge with six inches of warm water around him.

It covered his ears and his hair and the sides of his face.

I saw him flinch at the muffled quiet.

He couldn't hear.

I could see his chest going up and down and his eyes on the sky.

I took off my bikini top and my bottoms and dropped them on the deck.

I stepped in, and the water was bath-warm around my ankles.

I stood over him and said, in a normal voice, "Can you hear me?"

He lifted his head, and the water ran off.

"Can I what?"

"Never mind. Head down."

He put it back.

I knelt astride him, facing his feet.

My knees were on the ledge on either side of his ribs, with my back to his face.

From there I looked down the length of his body to the water running off his thighs.

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