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Russell leaned down and kissed me gently. “You make an excellent point.” He pulled his hand away from my hip and touched the hem of my tank top carefully, like it was a precious garment, and not something I’d gotten on clearance at J.Crew Factory. “May I?”
I nodded, my heart beating a million miles an hour. Russell slowly, inch by inch, lifted up my tank top until he pulled it over my head, and the cool Nevada night air was hitting my bare skin and my dark red bralette.
“Oh,” he breathed as he looked at me. He touched the strap carefully, like maybe it was made of glass and might shatter. “Red?”
I nodded. “Red.”
“But… you were wearing white. Wouldn’t it have shown through?”
I couldn’t help but smile at his expression of utter bafflement. “Well, here’s a fun fact for you. When you wear red under white, it doesn’t show through. Something about the way it absorbs light and blends with your skin rather than reflecting it. I don’t know exactly how.” I paused for a second. “I guess I really didn’t have enough facts in there, huh? But it always works.”
“I’ll say,” Russell said, still gazing at me.
I laughed and touched the hem of his black T-shirt. “May I?”
He nodded, and I held his eyes as I started lifting up his shirt. He bent his knees slightly so that I could get it over his head.
“Um,” I said, swallowing hard as I took him in, bathed in the moonlight and the blue lights of the hotel pool. Russell was thin but muscular, with well-defined stomach muscles and really nice arms. I wondered if he played any sports—it certainly looked like it. I regretted that I hadn’t asked him back when he was clothed. “Well.” I tried to get my thoughts in any kind of order, but at the moment, that seemed like an ask of monumental proportions. “I mean,” I said, gesturing to him. “This is just unfair.”
He looked at me, shaking his head. “Imagine how I feel.” I realized I was still holding his shirt, and handed it to him. He handed me mine, and we both started laughing—with giddy delight at the whole absurdity of the situation. He put his shirt back on the lounger near his shoes, and I did the same with my tank top. I reached for the button on my jean shorts, trying to tell myself that this was no big deal. After all, I was pretty sure my underwear covered more than a lot of my bathing suits did. If we’d brought bathing suits with us, this whole thing would have been no big deal. But we didn’t have bathing suits—and the fact that I was about to be in just my underwear in front of a boy I really liked made the whole thing seem really intimate.
I knew I was wearing the same kind of underwear as always—lacy stretchy thongs that I bought in packs of three. I was very glad I’d randomly picked the black pair from my duffel, and that it wasn’t one of the ones with sprouting elastic and a stretched-out band. When I’d gotten dressed in the tent that morning, I had just been grabbing whatever pair was nearest, not thinking in the least that someone else would be seeing it before the day was over.
Offering up a brief thank-you to faulty buses and people who chose to use Android phones, I undid my jean shorts and stepped out of them, dropping them on the lounger with my tank top.
Then I turned and ran for the pool, jumping into the deep end with a splash.
The water was cool, and heavily chlorinated, and felt great. I stayed under for just a moment before pushing off the bottom and surfacing.
I smoothed my hair down—it looked like maybe another light in the hotel was now on, and I turned to Russell to mention it, but then I saw him and promptly forgot all about it.
He was walking into the pool from the shallow end, wearing navy boxer-briefs that showed long legs and even more stomach muscles, including those ones that looked like lines on either side of his torso.…
I ducked under the water for another moment, feeling like I needed to cool myself down. He dove off the last step into the pool and then surfaced a moment later, pushing his hair back. He swam over to me, grinning. “It feels great.”
I smiled back. “I know.” He dove down again, and when he surfaced he was swimming on his back.
“When I was little…,” he said, pushing himself through the water toward the end of the pool. I started doing sidestroke, keeping pace with him. “We spent all our time in my dad’s pool. Like, you’d wake up in the morning and put on your bathing suit and not take it off until night, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said, stopping to tread water. “What do you mean, your dad’s pool?”
“Oh.” Russell shook his head. “Sorry—that’s what we call it since my mom never goes swimming.”
“It’s nice you have a pool at your house. My friends and I do the same thing at the Raven Rock pool—go early in the morning, don’t leave until night. Stake your claim.” I swam over to the shallower end until I could touch the bottom, then walked to the float. I ducked underneath it, surfaced through the hole in the center, and pushed off the pebbled concrete floor and swam back over toward Russell.
He smiled as he nodded down at the float. “Nice.”
“I figured it was here—might as well get some use out of it.”
“We used to play this pool game we’d invented, Brontosaurus. It involved a series of floats, and had all these crazy rules, and just got more complicated every year.”
“What does a dinosaur have to do with swimming?”
He laughed. “Nothing. My older—Connor, my cousin, named it back when he was obsessed with Jurassic Park, and it stuck.” Russell swam closer to me, and I could see there were water droplets on his forehead. His eyelashes, which were long and dark, had turned into damp triangles, and there was water beading on his neck, on his nice shoulders…
“So how do you play?”
“Play what?”
