Saratoga Woods 02 The Edge of the Water (12 page)

J
enn wasn’t used to naked women. She didn’t like showing off her body, since she
had
no body to speak of, and she always felt weird when other girls stripped after soccer games, casually walking nude to the showers. So when Annie Taylor pulled off her clothes in the locker room of South Whidbey Fitness Center, Jenn felt a little awkward. She felt even more so when Annie stood there fully naked and chatted for a minute, not the least self-conscious about putting her nipples and pubes on full display. It was five in the morning, so at least Jenn was the only other person in the locker room. But still, she wasn’t sure where to look. She knew where she
wanted
to look—everyone made comparisons when they had the chance, right?— but that felt odd when it came to Annie.

Annie was talking about the scuba lessons. Not to worry, she said, Jenn would pick up diving quickly. And what she didn’t get straight off the bat, Annie would help her with in additional sessions. She finally got around to dressing herself in a bathing suit, which prompted Jenn to ask if Annie was going to be part of the lesson, too. It turned out, though, that Annie intended to use their time at the fitness center to swim laps. This made sense, although Jenn had to wonder how well Annie would be able to swim laps in a butt floss bikini.

Chad’s jaw dropped at the sight of Annie when they walked from the locker room to the indoor pool. He snapped it back into place fast enough, though. He said, “Uh . . . okay . . . great,” when Annie told him she herself would exercise during Jenn’s scuba lesson. Then, while she walked to the far side of the pool, Chad never moved his eyes off her butt cheeks.

“Too old for you, bro,” was what Jenn said to Chad since Annie herself had already mentioned the fact. But if Annie was too old for Chad, it was pretty clear that her butt cheeks weren’t.

Chad said, “Good thing I like ’em older, Aquagirl.”

“My name is Jenn.”

“You’re Aquagirl to me.”

Annie lowered herself into the water. Once she began to swim, Chad managed to tear his eyes off her. Jenn said sourly, “For God’s sake, she’s thirty-three years old. She’s got someone in Florida. What’re
you
, nineteen?”

He glanced at her. “And what are
you
? Jealous?”

“As if,” she said. “Are we having a lesson or not? ’Cause believe me, I could be home in bed if all you’re going to do is drool after her. Not, by the way, that you stand a chance.”

“But you do?” he asked.

“What’s
that
s’posed to mean?”

He shook his head and seemed to shake off whatever was on his mind as well. He said, “Forget it. Let’s get down to work. Into the water. Give me six laps.”

“Huh? What is this? Boot camp or something?”

“Just do it,” he said.

“I’m here to learn to
dive
.”

“And if you drop your gear, you sure as hell need to be able to swim distance. So give me six laps any way you can. Dog paddle, breast stroke, crawl, whatever.”

Jenn cooperated although to her it sounded like something between a waste of time and a drill sergeant’s punishment. Still, she did the first two laps and she had no trouble. By the third lap, though, she knew that cigarette smoking was well on its way to doing her in. She barely finished at all. She ended up clinging to the edge of the pool panting like a Texas dog in the summer sun. Chad then told her to float on her back for ten minutes. “And no using your arms and legs,” he instructed.

“I just frigging showed you that I can swim. Why the hell do I need to float?”

“Just
do
it, Aquagirl. D’you always argue?”

“My name is
Jenn
,” she repeated.

And he said again, “You’re Aquagirl to me. Now get out there and float.”

Jenn muttered a few choice words that she hoped he heard, but she did as he asked. It was tougher than it sounded, floating without using her arms or her legs, but once she got the idea, she managed it. Then Chad told her to join him at a table he’d set up. There he began to recite what seemed like a billion facts. These had to do with air pressure, oxygen, buoyancy, blah, blah, blah. What
ever
. Jenn listened and nodded and tried to take it all in, but she was distracted by Chad’s distraction.

He kept looking at Annie, who moved sleekly through the water like some obscure goddess of the sea. When she finally lifted herself from the pool, Chad even stumbled over a few of his words as she padded over to see how they were doing.

Jenn glanced her way. Great nipple shot, she thought sourly as Annie grabbed up a towel and used it on her hair. The rest of her body she left wet and dripping, with her nipples poking out against her bathing suit top like greetings that someone was meant to acknowledge.

“How’s it going?” Annie asked, directing her smile at Jenn.

“We’re just talking about air pressure,” Chad replied.

“What’re you learning?” again to Jenn.

“I’m explaining why it’s important that she clear her ears.”

“Know how to do that?” Annie asked Jenn. “Pinch your nose closed and blow. Like this.”

Her demonstration wasn’t done on herself but rather on Jenn. She pressed her nostrils closed and said that Jenn’s head would feel like a balloon about to explode if she couldn’t clear her ears underwater. Chad, she ignored entirely. To Jenn she said, “You’re going to be great. No worries, Jenn.”

Then she sat at the edge of the pool, her legs in the water to watch the rest of the lesson. She rested her arms on her thighs. She showed a lot of cleavage.

Somehow poor Chad got himself focused in spite of the cleavage and in spite of Annie’s ignoring his general wonderfulness. He told Jenn that their next project was getting used to having the equipment on while in the water, and he helped her into hers and then donned his own. They were going to sit on the bottom in the shallow end, he said. They were just going to see what it was like to breathe through the regulator, okay?

Underwater, Jenn found life wasn’t half bad. She sat Indian style, facing Chad, and they breathed in unison. Chad nodded at her and closed his eyes. She did the same and discovered that she actually didn’t mind the strange new sensations. She began drifting in her thoughts. She considered what she might be able to do if she got good at diving. She was thinking of how she could make some money, just as Annie said, when suddenly her masked was ripped from her face.

She shot to the surface. She lost her regulator and took in a mouthful of pool water. She coughed and sputtered and when she could talk, she yelled, “What the hell! You pulled off my mask!”

Having surfaced next to her, Chad nodded placidly. “Yep.”

“What the hell’d you do that for?”

“To see what you’d do. What you did was panic.”

“What d’you
expect
, Bozo? How’d you like it if I did it to you?”

“Calm down,” he said. “You panic, you drown. You panic, you shoot to the top like you just did. You panic, you don’t decompress. In three feet of water? No problem. In fifty? You get the bends.”

“That wasn’t fair.”

“Stuff happens underwater, Aqua—”

“My name is Jenn!” she shrieked.

• • •

IT TOOK FOUR
tries before Chad was satisfied that Jenn could lose her face mask underwater without panicking and that she could also lose her regulator, get it back into her mouth, and remember to blow
out
to clear it instead of desperately inhaling and getting a mouthful of water. They went on from that to learning how to enter the water with fins on. The entire lesson lasted more than three hours. By the end of it, Jenn was exhausted.

Annie had long since showered and returned to the pool. She said to Chad, “How’d she do?”

“Aside from her tendency to panic, which’ll probably kill her, she did okay,” he said.

Annie followed Jenn back to the locker room. She said, “Have a shower. It’ll make you feel better. You did fine, by the way, no matter what he said. For your first lesson? You did great.” She stood there, arms crossed. Jenn waited for her to take herself back to the pool or out to the car or whatever, but Annie leaned against one of the lockers as if waiting for Jenn to strip. Jenn knew it was nothing, just a we’re-all-girls-here sort of thing. Still she wanted to say “D’you mind?” at the same time as she also didn’t want to say “D’you mind?” Well, they were friends, weren’t they? She decided they were. She peeled off her bathing suit. “Nice bod,” Annie said.

“If you like boards,” Jenn retorted.

“Don’t put yourself down.” Annie gave her a playful slap on the butt as Jenn passed by, on her way to the shower. Then she left her alone, saying she would help Chad load gear into his pickup outside.

That was what she was just finishing doing when Jenn rejoined her. Daylight had finally arrived, always late in the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, and at one side of the parking lot, a dented white van with a Bondo-repaired door was idling, sending out a plume of white exhaust. There was someone leaning into the driver’s window, Jenn saw. Crap, it was that scumbag Dylan Cooper.

He was someone she wanted to avoid on the general principle of his being so disgusting, but the white van was not far from Annie’s car, and Annie was waving a good-bye to Chad and coming her way with a cheerful callout of, “Let’s get a latte and a pastry, Beauty.”

Dylan looked around from whatever he was doing at the van. He caught sight of Jenn, got a glimpse of Annie, said something to the van’s driver, and slouched Jenn’s way. He said, “This the place you lesbos hook up?”

She said, “What’re you doing here? Scoring or selling? Never mind. I already know.”

“She’s hot, lesbo.” He cocked his thumb at Annie. “Wouldn’t’ve thought she’d want to do it with you.” He waggled his tongue suggestively at her. “Good for you?” he asked, and she wanted to slug him.

“You’re so pathetic,” she told him. “You’re like a freaking piano that only plays one key.”

“Har har. Saying you aren’t one? Maybe I should ask her.” He gave a shout to Annie, “Hey! What was it like? Is she a moaner?”

“Drop
dead
,” Jenn snarled at him and she swung around to face Annie.

But Annie had already gotten into her Honda and fired it up. Thankfully, she hadn’t heard a word.

• • •

“JUST A BUTTHEAD
from school,” was how Jenn explained Dylan Cooper to Annie when she asked about him. “I know his brother. End of story.”

“What was he shouting? Was he talking to me? Because—”

“We should stop at Bayview Corner,” Jenn announced firmly. “They’ve got coffee there, and we c’n get a bagel or a muffin or something. And Eddie Beddoe works across the street. Have you talked to him about the trailer rent yet?”

Annie looked as if she was about to say something more about Dylan Cooper, but instead she shrugged and after a moment said, “Good idea about Eddie. Coffee first, though.”

After they’d had their coffee and bagels, they walked across Marsh Road where Eddie Beddoe had long ago converted one of the defunct island gas stations into a car mechanics shop. The place was a pit of grime, and Eddie Beddoe was the last person on earth that Jenn would trust an engine to, but he made a decent living at the place and they found him adjusting the idle on a Toyota Land Cruiser.

He looked up from the engine when Jenn said his name. He said, “Jenn McDaniels. How’s that dad of yours? Any new brews? I got some rent due at the start of the month and you tell him I don’t want it paid to me in beer.”

“Here’s who’s paying that rent,” Jenn announced. “This’s Annie Taylor and you’re overcharging her.”

Eddie adjusted his baseball cap as if he needed to do this to get a better look at Annie. He said, “Far ’s I know, rent’s whatever the market will bear.”

“Yeah? Well, a look at the
Record
’s going to show you what the market is. Annie’s looked and she’s here to tell you—”

“She don’t speak?” Eddie asked. “Now that’s awful strange, Jenn, ’cause I recall talking to her least one time by phone. That’d be right when we agreed on the rent. What’re you doing around here anyway on a Saturday morning?”

“Just having a diving lesson, Mr. Beddoe,” Annie said. “I’ve looked at rents on the island and I know you’re cheating me.”

“Diving lesson? Who’s taking a diving lesson? Why’s anyone taking a diving lesson?”

Like it’s any of your business? was what Jenn wanted to say. But she stopped herself because he’d ceased his working on the Land Cruiser engine and he was wiping his hands on a rag with a lot of industry. His brow was furrowed.

Annie was the one to respond. She said, “Jenn’s taking lessons, Mr. Beddoe. She’ll be diving with me.”

“What sort of diving?”

“Marine studies, okay?”

“On what?”

“Look,” Jenn cut in, “we’re here about the rent. You’re trying to get us onto another topic and don’t think we don’t see that because we do.”

Annie put a hand on her arm to stop her. “There was an oil spill,” she said. “A long time ago. I’m making a case for—”

“A lawsuit?” Eddie scoffed. “That’ll be the day.”

“—genetic mutations in sea life. It’s for my dissertation. And frankly, Mr. Beddoe, it would help me a lot if you and I could renegotiate the rent before it comes due.”