Deep End(6)

“He’s settling. Just like I’m settling. If we stay together, we’ll get married, have a house in the suburbs and two point five bilingual kids I cannot understand, and will always wonder what we missed out on. I won’t know what being young and free feels like, and he’ll be bitter because he had to give up all that kinky shit, like spanking people and tying them up and ordering them what to do.”

I freeze. I should really not be here, but I can’t leave, because my feet weigh a million pounds, and every drop of blood in my body is flowing up to hang out on my cheeks.

“I get it.” Victoria is exasperated. “But you need to decide—”

A hard pounding at the door. We all jolt. “Hey? Is anyone in there?”

Victoria shouts, “Yeah, just a sec!”

“I left my gear bag in there, so if you guys could move your orgy to the showers . . .”

Victoria rolls her eyes but opens the door. We march past Gear Girl—Victoria, with a defiant expression; Pen, wiping residual tears; me, stubbornly refusing to make eye contact. The conversation may have resumed, but the twins are coming our way. “Where were you guys?” Bella asks. I panic, but Victoria makes up something about a missing shammy on the fly, because for her lying doesn’t require two to three business days of careful preparation, and we all go warm up, like a big happy family.

I’m still flushed. Aware of my pulse. Cogs turn in my skull. All I can think of is: Pen has always been so lovely to me.

After my third surgery, when Barb couldn’t take more than a week off without collapsing the field of medicine, Pen popped by to check on me every day. To make sure your evil roommate isn’t making belts out of your skin, she’d say with a wink, but she’s just a naturally caring person. And there was the time she sat down with me after my first dual meet, to remind me that a few splashy entries didn’t make me a bad diver, that sometimes we’re just too much in our heads, that she’d been there, too—that chaotic, overthinking feeling that makes the platform feel like a tightrope and turns your body into an unreliable narrator. That moment when your focus dissolves into panic, and the dive is irreparably fucked before it even begins.

It had meant so much to me, back in the fall of freshman year. Everything was new and raw and too big, but Penelope Ross, world and Pan Am medalist, NCAA champion, held my hand and told me that she felt like I did.

I think about it during Pilates, and dryland training, and while climbing up the infinite steps of the diving tower. I think about it as I stretch every muscle I possess, with special care for my tender, stupid shoulder, the one that all my doctors insist is healed, but in my nightmares shatters like a champagne flute at least twice a week.

By the time practice is over, I’ve made up my mind. And while the rest of the team chatters away in the locker room, I walk to her side, take a deep breath, and ask, “Could we go get coffee after this? Just you and I.”





CHAPTER 4


ITHOUGHT IT MIGHT BE HARD TO SAY OUT LOUD, MOSTLY BECAUSE I never have, not to anyone who wasn’t . . . intimately involved in the matter. But the words flow out of me, as smooth as a perfect dive. No hiccups, no stutters, just a knife-sharp slice through rippling water. I picture a panel of seven smiling judges, raising several perfect-ten boards in unison.

Full points, Ms. Vandermeer. This disclosure of your sexual history was unimpeachably executed. Now hit the showers.

Not gonna lie, I’m feeling pretty proud. Unfortunately, Pen isn’t impressed. “You are into that?” She blinks and glances around the Coupa Café. Classes started this week, and campus is too crowded. Backpack straps wrapped around tanned shoulders, stickered water bottles, a new cohort of freshmen that comes in two versions: invincible and terrified. I started out the former, but my slide to the latter was swift.

Pen sets her elbows on the small wooden table, satisfied with our level of privacy. “You’re into what Luk’s into.”

“Well, I can’t be sure about that.”

“But you said . . . ?”

“There are many, many facets to kink and BDSM. ”

“Right.”

“I’ve never talked with Lukas before this morning. I have no idea what he likes.”

“Should I tell you? He—”

“I—no, that’s not . . .” I clear my throat. Starting to have some regrets here. “That’s beyond the, um, scope of this conversation.”

“Ah.”

“You shouldn’t feel like you have to explain what you guys . . . but I was there”—unwillingly—“when you and Victoria were discussing the matter, and she seemed to be lending a slightly less than, um, sympathetic ear—”

“Hall of Fame–worthy understatement. Please, continue.”

“I just wanted to offer myself as a resource, as someone who has experience in . . . this.”

“And ‘this’ would be . . . ?”

“An established relationship in which only one party is interested in kink. Figuring out something you can both enjoy and can affirmatively consent to. If that’s what you want, of course,” I add with a small smile.

She leans back in her chair to study me, and I know what she’s seeing: damp dark hair, guarded dark eyes, unexpectedly dark sexual history. I’ve never navel-gazed too much about what turns me on—she could slap me on a microscope slide and label me Sexual Deviant, and I wouldn’t bat an eye. Still, it’s nice to see more curiosity than judgment in the tilt of her head.