“I thought you were a monster,” I said.
He swam closer to me. Swirls of water moved across my legs.
“Maybe I am.”
Sam tugged at my swimsuit bottoms, his skin shining wet in the streetlights. Sam was twenty-six but already had a bit of a beer gut. His face was young-looking and cute, a little round, and it made him seem approachable. He grew his beard out sometimes in a scruffy way. I felt drugged by his charm, or I felt drugged by my desire for his attention. It was hard to tell which.
He moved closer and I looked around for Jenny. I wondered if they had slept together at all, or if she sensed that there was something going on between me and Sam. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but it seemed important that Sam pay attention to me, not her, while we were both here and hardly clothed. Jenny was swimming away from us, toward a corner of the pool.
What I did then is what I continued to do for years. I chose sex. I chose validation, attention, over any actual chance at love from friends or even boyfriends. Sam pushed his body against mine. His hands kept tugging at my swimsuit, and he started kissing my neck. I kissed him at first, thinking that we would be shrouded by the darkness of the night, but I hesitated at the thought of Jenny or other coworkers seeing us. He didn’t seem to care.
“Come on,” he said. I put my hand in his and tried to swim over to the edge of the pool, worried about the water affecting the scab of my tattoo.
“We should go shower first,” I said. I picked at the soggy skin on my thumb and it bled a little.
Some of the kids followed us back up to Sam’s apartment to get more beer, Jenny too. They sat around finishing off the beers and watched South Park on TV. Sam looked over at me and I looked him.
I walked into his bathroom, waited for him to follow, and turned on the shower. It was clean, with minimal clutter on the countertops and a spotless shower. I saw a spritz of toothpaste spit on the mirror, but that was the only evidence the bathroom was even used. I felt dirty by comparison. I wondered if this was why I wanted him so badly.
Sam walked in and closed the door behind him. He looked me up and down, my skin cold from the wet fabric, and I peeled off my bathing suit, throwing it onto his floor with a thick flop. Sam got naked, one leg out of his swimming trunks and then the other. He stood there, ready, hands at his sides. I stared at his body for a while, watched his beer gut breathe, moved my eyes down his legs and back up to his broad chest and shoulders. He was different from Matt, who seemed feminine, thin and pale in comparison. I didn’t make eye contact. Eye contact made things too real.
Water dripped from his hair onto his skin. He got in the shower first. When I stepped in, his hand wrapped around the back of my neck and pulled me in.
This time, the sex didn’t hurt. I wasn’t focused on moaning or making noises. Other people were in the apartment. He kissed me hard, and then I turned around. I felt him enter me, and I pushed my hands against the tile. My waterproof mascara ran, and my hair was stringy and tangled, astringent from the chlorine of the pool. I did not look my best but he wanted to have sex with me anyway. I felt close to him in that moment.
I heard later that Jenny became very quiet and her face got red at the sound of our skin slapping together in the shower. I imagined her there, wet bleach-blond hair down to her shoulders, wrapped in a towel on the couch, wringing the plastic grocery bag with her clothes in it.
I felt an unusual sense of pride at my ability to emotionally detach from all this. When I had sex with Sam, I didn’t feel bad about how Jenny felt. In my journal that night, I wrote:
This time, I am not the dumb girl. I am the smart girl. Jenny is the dumb girl because she let or is letting her dumb feelings get the best of her. She told another coworker, and I quote, “I think I’m falling for him.” DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. Getting attached to someone is not good.
I brought a half gallon of vodka to her house, where she lived in her parents’ basement. By the time a third of the bottle was gone, I grabbed her hand and put it to my mouth, sucked on the web of skin between her thumb and pointer finger. It had been three weeks since that night at Sam’s pool.
I stopped in her basement bathroom and caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror. I had recently pierced my septum to match Matt’s. I liked the look, and he often hid his piercing, and it felt nice having this mark of pain on my body I could also hide. My eyeliner was thick
