“I believe I’ve told you before, I don’t.”
“I know it’s you.”
“Why would I do such a thing?”
I looked around the large yard, the pool, the lights of the house looming behind us through the trees. “I don’t know, maybe some kind of charity thing.”
“You are not a charity to me, Jack.”
“No? Then what am I?”
She lowered her legs back down into the water and smiled mischievously. “Are you sure you can’t swim?”
“There are at least three instructors at that summer camp I mentioned who would gladly write you a letter that says I have no business setting foot off dry land.”
“That’s too bad.” Her left hand disappeared beneath the water and came back with her bra. She tossed it across the pool, and it landed with a splash a few inches from my face. I watched in awe as she reached back beneath the water, removed her panties, and threw those toward me, too. With a giggle, she dove beneath the surface.
The water was impossibly black.
My gaze remained fixed on the place where Stella had been, on the quieting ripple, the circles spreading and growing until the first of which reached me and pushed past, her bra and panties bobbing in the wake beyond my reach. I couldn’t see anything beneath the surface of the water, and all had gone silent as the seconds grew to a minute.
Stella broke the water a few feet away, between the deep end and where I stood. She tilted her head back into the water, clearing the hair from her face.
I opened my mouth to say something, and she raised a finger to her lips.
I couldn’t help but look at the figures in white standing at the pool house. They hadn’t moved, nor had the ones in the woods. All their eyes were on us, greedy and silent. I thought about the gun Oliver carried under her coat all those years ago and studied the coats of the two near the pool house; it was impossible to tell if they concealed weapons as she had, but my gut told me they did, for reasons I had yet to understand.
Stella drew closer, only inches from me now, somehow that vanilla scent still present and lofting around her. To breathe it was intoxicating, a siren’s song. Images danced in her dark eyes, and I wanted to understand the thoughts behind those eyes, I wanted to hear more of her voice, that smooth, melodic voice, upon the summer night air.
I wanted to touch her.
I wanted to reach across the mere inches of water that separated us and pull her to me, pull her body against mine. The outline of her breasts were barely visible in the dark water, and when I found myself staring, I forced my eyes back to hers.
“I know you find me attractive, Jack. It’s okay to look, I know you want to. I don’t mind. I want you to look,” she said in the softest of whispers.
I reached for her, a tentative hand, hoping she wouldn’t notice how bad I was shaking. As my fingers drew close, though, Stella drifted back, drifted a few inches back into the deeper water where I could not follow.
“That’s just mean,” I said, stepping forward, the waterline now halfway up my chin.
“Why, Pip, I don’t believe you’ve earned the right to a touch. Not yet.”
“How about a kiss? Let me kiss you.” This might have been the boldest request I ever made. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more—anything I ever wanted more. “I have thought about you every day since we were eight years old. From that first moment I ever saw you…you were a part of me—youarea part of me, a part I didn’t even realize was missing until that day, but one I feel whenever I’m not with you. There’s a hole in my heart when you aren’t near me. I don’t want to know that feeling, not anymore. Never again.”
These words poured out before I could stop them, and as soon as I finished, I wished I could take them back. I sounded like the young hormone-driven boy I was. This wasn’t hormones, though. This was something else, something much more, and I wanted her to know that, as awkward as trying to verbalize it might be.
Stella’s eyes remained fixed on me, her lips slightly apart. Oh, how I wanted those lips.
“Say something, please.”
She didn’t. She only watched me.
Beneath the surface of the water, her legs swayed gently back and forth, a simple movement that somehow managed to keep her afloat.
Stella raised her hand from the water, glistening drops falling from her fingertips and down the length of her arm. She reached for my cheek, her fingers outstretched, and I wanted her so desperately to touch me at that point. I ached all over for her touch. She didn’t, though. Her fingers hovered less than an inch from my skin, and when I tilted my head toward those fingers, she moved away, keeping that little distance between us.
A tear formed at the corner of her left eye. It ran the length of her beautiful face and fell into the waters of the pool. “I can’t,” she said in a voice so soft at first I wasn’t sure she spoke at all.
“Why?”
