Robbie began to undress with a controlled rapidity. It would embarrass both of them if she spoke or looked at him while he was undressing, so she stayed as she was.
Robbie’s jeans and shirt landed on the seat of the chair between them. He moved toward the pool steps in his boxer shorts and descended into the water smoothly, making a minimum of sound, until his body disappeared with a slosh, and his head reemerged. Knox could see that Robbie’s eyes remained closed as he rubbed the wet from their sockets, pushed a mess of hair up from his face.
“Feels warmer than last night,” he said softly. “Like the heater is on.”
He didn’t expect a reply. He turned away from Knox and began to stroke away from her toward the deep end, kicking up water with louder splashes now. He would swim a few laps while Knox herself undressed and slid into the shallow end, spending minutes bobbing with the water at her armpits, her head and neck dry, before she talked herself into dropping down, immersing herself in the soundlessness and the uniformity of temperature and the light pressure against all her limbs as they floated up. Knox did this while Robbie crawled up and back. She held in the last of her breath, sprung off the bottom, and corkscrewed though the water once, twice. The material of her bra and underwear grew heavier, threatened to float away from her with their own thrust as she moved. She didn’t swim for too long, just let herself flay like that, then hauled herself back up the pool steps and out of the water. She found her clothes, pulled them on over her wet skin, wrapped Robbie’s jeans around her shoulders. She walked the length of the pool, passing Robbie as he splashed below her. When she got to the diving board, she stepped out to the edge that hung over the water and lowered herself carefully down until she was sitting, curled, her arms around her shins and her knees close to her face, close enough for her to smell chlorine on her skin. She waited for Robbie to finish. She stuck the tip of her tongue out and touched it to one of the water drops on her knee. It tasted like it smelled: of diluted bleach, of leaves decomposing.
Robbie swam halfway back, then made his way over to the side and pushed himself up and out of the water with his forearms in a deft motion, the pool releasing him with a plunging sound. He got to his feet, cupped his hands inside his armpits, and trotted quickly toward where Knox sat on the diving board, his boxers plastered to his legs and drooping low off his hips in a way that made him look skinny and young, that made Knox think of waterslides and birthday parties.
“I have your jeans,” she said to him, once he’d drawn close enough. “Here.” She slid them off her shoulders, wadding them together so she could hand them back.
“No, I’m getting back in,” Robbie said. Even his voice seemed to shiver. Knox could hear the acquired Virginia in it—the glottal swing and expansion that had rubbed off enough during his freshman year to last him through the summer, that he must have used to shout for beers with in overcrowded basements. She suddenly wondered if there was a girl, somewhere, that he had been calling, a girl who was looking forward to him returning to school. She hoped there was. “It feels better in the water,” he said. “God, I should have brought a towel.”
One or the other of them said this every night. Knox breathed a kind of acknowledging laugh, a hum: I know, we don’t know what’s good for us, we don’t even think of towels until it’s too late. She breathed, too, that familiar guilt: she was the older one; she should be the one remembering what it was they needed.
Robbie hopped onto the metal ladder to Knox’s left and lowered himself back into the water, sighing a little. He treaded over to the diving board and reached up, gripped with both hands near Knox’s crossed feet, and held on.
A minute passed. Knox could hear a steady dripping under the board.
“I’ll tell you something if you tell me something,” he said at last, his voice echoing up from the cave of space under the board.
She had been getting ready. This was something they had started doing, after their swims—only