"Everything makes me uncomfortable. Your presence, your absence, this house, the thought of leaving this house. If I waited until I was comfortable, I'd never do anything." I float on my back, staring up at the sky. "Just swim. Be a person who swims in his own damn pool."
He stands, walks to the edge, and dives in cleanly. I watch him surface at the far end, then start swimming laps, keeping his distance. Shared space, but not crowding me.
We swim in silence for a while. No conversation, no loaded glances, just two people moving through water. It's almost peaceful.
Almost.
Eventually I stop at the deep end, treading water. He's still doing laps on the far side.
"Can I ask you something?" I call out.
He stops, floating near the opposite wall. "Depends on the question."
"Not about us. About you." I pause. "What did you do before? Before the debt collection and the... professional problem-solving."
"You want my background?"
"I want to know if you were always this controlled, or if it's something you learned."
He's quiet for a moment, then swims a bit closer, still keeping distance, but enough that we don't have to shout. "I grew up poor. Not romantically poor, not noble-struggle poor. Actually poor. My mother cleaned houses for families like yours."
"And your father?"
"Absent. By choice." His voice is matter-of-fact. "When I was fifteen, I started working for men who solved problems that couldn't be solved legally. Small things at first. Collecting debts, delivering messages, intimidating people who needed intimidating."
"And you were good at it."
"I was good at not being afraid. And I was good at making other people afraid." He floats on his back, staring at the sky. "By the time I was twenty-five, I was running my own operations. By thirty, I had enough money and connections to go legitimate if I wanted."
"But you didn't want to."
"I didn't know how to want anything else. Control was the only thing that made sense to me. The only thing that felt safe."
I process this, floating in the warm water. "And now?"
"Now I'm learning that control is an illusion. And that the things worth having can't be controlled into existence."
"That sounds like therapy speak."
"It’s the truth."
We swim some more, moving in lazy circles around the pool. The sun is starting to set, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink. It's beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with money or power or careful design.
"This is nice," I say eventually, floating near the center of the pool.
"The swimming?"
"The not talking about important things. The not making decisions or processing trauma or figuring out our future." I drift a bit closer to him, testing my reaction to his proximity. "It feels almost like being normal people."
"Are we not normal people?"
"You're a man who kidnaps women from their weddings. I'm a woman who kills people with office supplies." I meet his eyes across the water. "I don't think we qualify as normal."
"Fair point."
"But this..." I gesture to the pool, the evening light, the simple act of existing in the same space without crisis or conflict. "This feels like what normal people might do."
"Yeah. It does."
