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The sliding door opens behind me. I feel Clint before I see him.
He steps onto the patio still fully dressed, which feels pointed enough to count as punctuation. T-shirt. Shorts. Bare feet. A wooden spoon in one hand.
“Dinner’s not ready,” he says.
“I’m in no rush.”
“Good. Because rushed pasta would be criminal.”
He stops a few feet away from me. His eyes move over my shoulders, my back, the place where my legs disappear into the water.
I grip the pool edge.
“This reminds me of Renny,” I say before I can decide if saying his name is wrong.
Clint goes still. “Yeah?”
I nod. “He liked naked places.”
A beat.
“Like… sex places?”
“No. Well, those places are what you make of them, but we didn’t do that sort of thing.” I lift one foot through the water. “I mean… I didn’t let us do that sort of thing. Renny probably would have jumped at a threeway.”
Clint snorts.
I look out at the water.
“He was good at nudity. Being in his body was easy for him. It never was for me.”
Clint is quiet before saying, “So you watched.”
The words land, but not like accusation this time. Just acknowledging the pattern.
I nod and lean back on my hands. “I guess I’ve always been more comfortable watching others be free than being that way myself.”
He shifts the spoon from one hand to the other.
“Guess we have that in common.”
I look back at him.
“What do you mean? You don’t hide yourself.”
Clint looks at the pool instead of me.
“Not my body, but I do hide,” he says to the water. “From myself mostly. I’ve hidden my whole life.”
The spoon taps once against his thigh.
“Camming was a secret,” he says. “Becca didn’t know everything. I mean, yeah, she knew what I did, but maybe not fully why. But it wasn’t… I don’t know. It wasn’t the same as what you did.”
“I know.”
I don’t defend myself, and that seems to frustrate him more than an argument. He turns away, pacing two steps across the patio, then back again. The spoon flashes in the late light.
“I hate that I get parts of it,” he says. “Why you had to hide to get close to me.”
