Deep Water Page 2

  He barely moved, but it got his attention.

  He frowned. “What…?” That finger came out, and my hands went straight to pulling up my bikini bottoms.

  “Why did you do that?” I managed to rasp out as I put my bathing suit back in place with shaking hands.

  He stared at me for a second, before letting a slight sneer come over his face. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  I watched him, open-mouthed, feeling every romantic notion and idea I had about him come crashing down. I shook my head at him, breathing heavily. I wanted to tell him that this wasn’t how it should be. It should be sweet, idealistic, and not connected to sex in any way. But of course, I didn’t.

  Instead, I swam back to shore.

  Chapter Three

  I walked out of the water dripping wet and with the horrible feeling of wanting to cry pounding behind my eyes. I wouldn’t dare, though, not until later when I was alone. Eve and I had made pacts long ago never to become those dramatic girls who got drunk and cried over boys. Up until now, it had never been an issue.

  I found where I had stashed my towel hours earlier and wrapped it securely around myself. I didn’t want my body on show anymore. I didn’t want to be open to attention that made me feel so exposed. I kept my back to the lake, having no desire to see that sneer on Joseph’s face again.

  Would he laugh about me to his friends? Jessica Jamieson, the virgin. She’s hot for me, I’m telling you. Had my finger up that tight little pussy of hers…but she’s frigid as fuck…

  I flushed in the dark of the night at the thought of the horrible things I knew that boys could say. Or maybe he’d just tell everyone that I let him screw me in the lake…

  Away from the crowd, I rubbed my skin dry with the towel and threw on some shorts and a warm sweater. I drew the hood up over my head as some kind of makeshift defense. It made me feel better, anyway. I sat with some of my friends, suddenly feeling coldly sober and out of place. It took an hour before I heard of a sober driver heading back to town. I begged a ride and couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  If my parents were home, then they were fast asleep because the house was silent and dark. I didn’t bother to shower, just changed into my nightgown and pulled the covers over me. My hair was still slightly damp, but I was beyond caring now. I didn’t even cry like I thought I would.

  I rose late in the morning with my head pounding. I opened cupboards searching for pain killers but could find none. Dad raised an eyebrow at me as he walked into the kitchen.

  “You slept late.”

  “Yeah,” I stirred my cereal absentmindedly with a spoon while he made himself a coffee. He sat opposite me and didn’t say anything for a while until he finally cleared his throat.

  “Heard from your mother?”

  I lifted my eyes to meet his and shook my head. She did this from time to time, taking off for a few days to be by herself when we stressed her out too much, or my father denied her something, or we breathed…

  He forced a smile. “I have to go into the office today, and then I’ll probably meet up with some friends for dinner so you’ll be alone unless your Mom decides to make an appearance. That okay?”

  I was dying to ask if it was Anna that he was meeting with, but I didn’t. “Sure,” I told him.

  “Good.” He got up and put his coffee cup in the sink as his phone beeped. Whoever the message was from, it put a smile on his face, and he whistled as he walked out the door. I went back to stirring my cereal, the only message on my phone was from Eve, who complained about her hangover. I didn’t bother to text back. I wasn’t in the mood to read her monolog of the night’s events and the boys who hit on her. Instead, I got in my car and drove around that afternoon, finally ending up at the lake again. It was a dismal day with gray skies and wind making the water choppy.

  I was going for a swim regardless.

  I changed into my swimsuit. This was not a bikini that yelled ‘look at me, look at me!’ but a black one-piece with a racing stripe down that side. This was for serious swimming. Throwing my towel and car keys on a group of rocks, I sprinted into the water that rose up to meet me and dived under. The water was cool and refreshed my poor, abused head. I thought of nothing but breathing and moving as my arms cut through the water. I swam out as far as I could until I tired, and then I just floated on my back and stared up at the awful sky.

  I started the swim back to shore. But there was nothing making me want to go back in a hurry at that moment. Instead I swam to the platform, climbed the ladder and lay down on my back with my legs hanging over the side, and closed my eyes as it rocked with the wind. The only sound was that of the water licking at my feet.

  I don’t know how long I lay there; maybe I drifted off to sleep. But the swift grasp that gripped my ankle and gave it a quick pull sent me bolting upright in fear and even made me let loose a scream.

  “Calm down.”

  Joseph appeared, climbing the ladder. He didn’t wear a bathing suit, just boxers. He collapsed down beside me, lying on his back with his arms cushioning his head like it was a beautiful day for sunbathing. I tried not to look at his chest but couldn’t help it, muscle and scars intertwined amongst smooth skin to create a canvas I still wanted to touch.

  I could feel him watching me, but I didn’t even feel self-conscious.

  “What are those from?” I lifted my hand to indicate toward a set of small scars below his collar bone.

  “Cigarettes.”

  I didn’t gasp in shock or horror because this wasn’t a surprise. “And this?” I reached out and touched this one. It was a long, white scar that went down most of his side. I traced it with my fingers.

  He smiled, kind of. “That’s more innocent. Barbed wire. I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be and got trapped in the stuff.”

  I took my hand away. “That must have hurt.”

  He didn’t answer; instead he sat up. “You can keep touching me. I know you want to.”

  I could have tried to laugh away his comment like it was absurd. Or I could have run by diving quickly into the water. But I did neither; instead I looked at him directly.

  “I think your touching and my touching mean different things.”

  He shrugged. “You’re still pissed because of what I did last night? Okay, I get it. But you would have liked it if you’d given me half a chance.” Then his hand reached out and started to stroke my leg. I shoved it away.

  “I don’t want to have sex with someone I barely know.” I hated how I liked his touch so much.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Who said anything about having sex? I could’ve kept your precious virginity intact and still shown you a really good time.”

  “Omigod.” I felt myself blush. “Who said I was a virgin anyway?” I snapped out.

  He laughed. It was a real laugh this time; one that stretched back far enough to reveal his missing tooth. “Okay, who have you fucked, then?”

  “Jesus.” I hid my face in my hands briefly, before summoning courage to face him again. “You’re just doing this to be mean and to embarrass me. I bet you think this is all some big joke. Well, screw you.”

  I jumped to my feet, and he did too, still laughing. “Hold on–” he began.

  I shoved him at the same time the wind made the platform tilt, and he went over. But his head smacked into the wood before he hit the water with a splash. And he didn’t come back up.

  “Oh, shit. Joseph!”

  I leaped in after him and dived down frantically looking for him. I thrashed around in a panic, but there was no sign. When my lungs finally felt like they would burst, I surfaced, ready to take in another breath and head under again.

  But he sat lazily on the platform, a grin on his face. I stared at him in disbelief.

  “You prick! I thought that I’d killed you.” I splashed water at him.

  He shrugged. “I’m pretty fucking hard to kill,” he said smugly.

  I glared. “Fuck you.” Then I started to swim back to shore.
He caught up with me easily, and I avoided looking at him as he matched my pace. Once on land I marched over to my towel and started to dry myself.

  “Can I borrow your towel? I kind of just jumped in on impulse.” He indicated his soaking boxers. I was about to tell him no, but then I spied the stream of red that leaked from a gash on his forehead.

  “You’re bleeding.” I pointed toward his head. He brought up a hand and wiped the back of it over the blood before bringing it down to examine it.

  “It’ll stop, sooner or later.”

  “Here.” I threw my towel at him. “I’ve got a first aid kit in my car.”

  By the time I got back with the kit, he had the towel wrapped around his waist and his boxers were lying spread out on a rock. The red of his blood was smeared down his face.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked as I pressed a cotton pad against his wound.

  “Nah, head wounds always bleed like a bitch.”

  After his wound was dressed, I stepped back and started packing up my stuff. “Okay, well, I guess I’ll see you later.”

  “See you, Jessica.”

  I walked away from him, slowly, and headed toward my car. Was I disappointed he didn’t call after me or say anything more? Hell yes.

  Chapter Four

  My Mom still wasn’t home by the time I dragged my body through the door. I left my wet bathing suit on the bathroom floor because I knew she would hate that, but it would serve her right for just taking off with no word.

  I steamed vegetables for dinner and sprinkled low-fat cheese over the top of them before sitting down in front of the TV to watch a show about overweight people trying to lose weight. They would always fall off the wagon at some point and go crazy eating pizza and donuts before having an emotional breakdown in which they’d blame their weight issues on their traumatic childhoods.

  This was my Mom’s favorite TV show. She would scoff as she watched a woman wearing sauce-stained sweatpants cry about her parents’ divorce. She would roll her eyes at the man whose father was murdered in front of him as a child. She would drink her vodka mixed with diet coke and shake her head at these people. She herself had to put up with her mother’s boyfriends treating her like a sex slave from the age of nine until she finally escaped at seventeen when she started to win pageants.

  “Look at me, I haven’t let myself turn into a cow like that, and she only had one man screwing her.” Her manicured nail would point at the sad person wearing a tent dress on the TV while the ice clinked in her glass. These things would only come out when she had a bit too much to drink, and Dad and I would avert our eyes in embarrassment, not really knowing where to look.

  Being fat was the ultimate sin in my mother’s book. She worked out every day at the local gym and weighed her food so it met the strict requirements of her diet. Once a year, when I was a child, we had to visit her mother during our vacation. We wouldn’t stay with her of course; we would stay in a hotel in a better part of town. We’d drive out to a depressed part of the city where shops were boarded up and graffiti stained the walls. My grandmother’s apartment smelled like bacon fat and cigarettes. I was forced to kiss the powdery cheek of a woman who, I later realized, couldn’t have been much more than forty-five, but she seemed so much older. She was huge, each breast sagged out sideways in the bright colored dresses she wore, and the skirts always seemed to ride up to reveal dimpled thighs as she sat with her legs spread in a way that my mother said ladies never sat.

  The woman seemed nice, she would offer cookies or cake to me which I would take and sit quietly in the corner to eat, ever conscious of my mother’s frown. This food was forbidden. My mother would always be quiet at first with her brightly colored mouth giving forced little smiles as she feigned happiness. Then, as the visit continued, she would start to make little digs.

  “Really, mother. Couldn’t you clean up a little? You knew we were coming.” Her manicured nails would flick around at the piles of magazines and the dust that littered the bookshelves.

  Her mother would say, “It’s hard, Mandy. My arthritis has been playing up, and I’m alone now, you know…”

  It wasn’t until later that I found out she was alone because my mother had managed to have her last boyfriend prosecuted for the things he did to her as a teenager. I didn’t know this at the time, and once I confessed to my Dad that I felt sorry for the sad, fat old lady. He had looked at me sadly and said, “You shouldn’t.”

  The trauma of her childhood gave my mother a lot of excuses. It meant she didn’t have to work; it meant she was allowed to throw more tantrums than I ever was allowed and disappear for days on end. I didn’t know why those overweight, traumatized people on TV weren’t allowed the same liberty in her book.

  When it was finished, neither of my parents had come home, so I switched off the lights and went to bed. I didn’t bother to stack the dishwasher just in case my mother came home because that would be another thing to piss her off. She hated her pristine kitchen to be filled with clutter; even childhood artwork had never been allowed on the refrigerator.

  The next day was a proper summer’s day complete with sunshine and heat. So of course, we went out to the lake. The water was like glass; the only noise was the jet boats from further around the lake where the wealthy had estates that reached right to the water’s edge. My Dad’s boss owned one, and we had been there for a Christmas party once. The place was amazing. Mom and I had stood on the stone balcony and marveled at the manicured garden that led down to the water.

  Eve was drinking beer again, but I had pilfered my mother’s vodka to mix with diet coke. I had a buzz going on that made it easy to forget about my parents, Joseph, and everything else. Not many people were out because it was a weekday and most people had summer jobs. I was reading a magazine and inspecting celebrities’ boob jobs. I didn’t want breasts so big that they’d be trashy; I just wanted more than the barely B-cup I had been cursed with.

  “You know, big breasts aren’t all they’re cracked up to be,” Eve told me as she lounged beside me. “It can be hard to find bras to fit, you get a sore back…” But even as she spoke, her back was arching like she was in a swimsuit catalog as two boys a little further down were eyeing her up.

  I scowled and sipped my vodka. The boys were friends with Joseph, and they were laughing about something. I hoped it wasn’t me. But it turned out it was Eve they were talking about because they approached us, and I don’t think their eyes moved from her bikini-clad figure the whole time.

  “I’m going for a swim,” I announced. But no one bothered with me so I walked into the water before diving under and heading to the platform. But as soon as I got there, I missed my drink. I wanted to get trashed. I stayed and sunned my skin anyway, enjoying the solitude. I started to make up stories in my head. I pretended I lived in one of the estates off the water and every evening was a party where I would wear diamonds and long dresses. My husband would wear a tux, and we’d have servants and–

  Joseph rocked the platform as he climbed aboard, causing me to open an eye to see who the intruder was. I promptly closed that eye again. Then something wet and hot engulfed my big toe, and I sat up with a gasp, pulling my foot away.

  “You sucked my toe?” I said in disbelief.

  He gave me a smirk. “I told you I could make you feel good and keep your virginity intact.”

  “That didn’t feel good. That just felt disgusting.” I dipped my foot in the water to wash off his saliva.

  And then he smiled a real smile that showed teeth. “That’s because it was your toe.” He leaned in closer, and his voice became quieter. “If you let me suck other parts of you, however…” A single finger reached out to stroke down my thigh, and I watched it wide-eyed. “Just let me show you–”

  I pushed him away in disgust, remembering stories my mother told me of her seduction by her Mom’s boyfriends. “Why does everything have to be about sex with you? Why can’t it be…?” I clamped my mouth shut when I realized that I was about
to start spewing out romantic ideals and fairytales, but he knew anyway.

  He rolled his eyes. “Jesus, you want romance, flowers. I haven’t got time for all that shit. I just want to get my leg over. I’m being straight with you. You want me to tell you that I’ll call you the next day or something? I probably won’t. I’m not like that.” He got to his feet, and I lifted my hand to shield my eyes from the sun as I looked up at him. “You ever want to lose your virginity to someone who knows what they’re doing; I’m your guy. Come find me.”

  Then he dived into the water, and I was left staring after him. I lay back down, bumping my head on the wood. Why couldn’t I just be one of those girls who had sex for the sake of having sex? Why did I need the fucking fairytale? A guy I liked wanted to have sex with me, but I wouldn’t. I was so boring.

  Chapter Five

  Fires were starting on the beach. On the opposite side from where I sat, Katrin was nestled on Joseph’s lap. The stars and stripes of her bikini were pressed hard up against his chest as she kissed him. It was hard not to watch. It wasn’t long before she was getting to her feet and pulling him with her to lead him away to the trees. He caught my eye, just briefly, before he followed.

  I looked away and sipped my drink. That could have been me, up against the tree, bark scratching my bare ass as he pounded hard at me. I shivered in distaste. I’d made the right decision, I wanted romance, flowers…at the very least a bed.

  I lost track of time. I was drunk. In the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Katrin, but it wasn’t until later that Joseph appeared at my side. He must have been as drunk as I was, because he stumbled down beside me, beer sloshing out of the bottle and onto my legs. He was right in my space, his breath hot on my cheek.