lifeguard lessons

You stay like that in the window, your hands doing the job her sports bras used to do, and the memory arrives without being invited.

“You used to hate these,”
you say into her hair.

Sandra snorts, still watching the cat.
“I was Seventeen, oppinions change yknow ”

“They just… showed up. Out of proportion with the rest of me. I looked like someone had stuck them on as a joke. That’s why I quit the swim club. I was good, remember?”

“Coach wanted you at tournaments every other weekend.”

“And I just wanted to swim. For fun. but my times got worse the bigger they got”
She covers your hands with hers for a second.
“I missed the water more than I admitted.”

“I was never fond of swimming,”
you say.
“Only diving.”

“You mean disappearing,”
she corrects.
“You’d go under and stay there like you had gills. I thought you’d drowned once. Nearly two minutes. I was on the side counting and then I stopped counting and I started planning how to tell your mum.”

You blink.

“You never said that.”

“You came up grinning like an idiot. I wanted to punch you.”
She leans back into your chest.
“That’s why I took the lifeguard lessons.”

“I thought you were collecting badges. Like Pokémon.”

Sandra turns her head enough to give you a look.

“I did collect the badges. That was real. But this one was because of you. Because you thought two minutes under the surface was a personality trait and I couldn’t stand the idea of being the person on the pool edge who didn’t know what to do. Every time you dove I held my breath with you. It was stupid. You were fine. I still was scared”

“Sorry ... I didn’t know, if you would hav...”

“You weren’t supposed to. You would have stopped diving to make me feel better and then I would have felt worse.”
She smiles, small.
“So I got the badges and I got to yell at kids for running and I got to know I could pull you out if you ever actually tried to live down there.”

“wait a second...” you start already smiling
“You hoped you could give me CPR didn't you?”

Her wordless reaction tells you everything you need to know, her head turned away, ears tinting in that familiar red.
And her heel currently striking your shin on repeat.

You kiss her shoulder, still holding the weight she used to hate.

“For the record,”
you murmur,
“I’m sad these ruined a beloved hobby for you, and even though you always looked pretty in your swimwear, long before they showed up. I’m glad these exist now, even if seventeen-you wanted them gone.”

“Seventeen-me was an idiot.”

“Seventeen-you was doing her best.”

You both admit defeat to the cat.

Clothes go on—decency, grudging, the minimum required to look like people who have not spent two weeks treating the house as a nesting site.
Then you start putting the place back together for the parents who will walk through the door tomorrow and expect their kitchen not to smell like broth, sex, and guilt.

The fridge is a small catastrophe. You throw out what died due to neglet. Sandra wipes shelves. Jeff the Land Shark finally gets a fitting place in her room, on the real shelf you talked about in the moving-in dream, instead of the shoe rack. You haul the spare futon upstairs together and unroll it beside her bed so it can look, if anyone checks, like you slept on the floor the way you always used to. A cover story with bedding. Just to be sure.

The work is slow because neither of you wants it. Every cleaned surface is a little death of the holiday. Every closed cupboard is the world coming back.

You walk past her while she is vacuuming the hall, on your way to start the bathroom, and she shouts your name in fake anger.
“John”

You stop.

She is bent over the vacuum, in ordinary shorts, that prime, succulent, perfect ass aimed at the corridor like a toll booth.

“You just walked past that,”
she says, giving her ass a slight twerk, switching the vacuum off so the accusation lands clean.
“No squeeze. No slap. No kiss. Who do you think you are.”

The bridge troll, you think. You did not pay.

You pay her double in every available option.

A squeeze first, both hands, appreciative and slow. A slap second, sharp enough to make her jump and laugh. A kiss third, dropped on the warm place you just marked, then you straighten and kiss her mouth too so the troll cannot claim you were stingy.

She makes the sound that usually means the hallway floor is about to see action again.

You stop it.

Hands on her waist, forehead to hers, both of you breathing in the smell of vacuum dust and leftover holiday.

“Clear ship first,” you say.

She groans, then nods, because she knows. The futon is a lie that only works if the rest of the house is not a crime scene. The bathroom still has evidence. The table is better than it was and not good enough. Her parents do not need to come home to a tally of creampies and a wet vacuum that has seen things.

“Clear ship first,”
she repeats, pointing a finger at your chest.
“Then you owe me interest on the toll.”