The Pool

Kavya started swimming at midnight because the building pool was empty then — no children, no neighbours making small talk, no performance of leisure. Just the water and the quiet and the particular freedom of being alone. She'd been doing it for two months when she showed up one Tuesday and found Arjun already in the pool. He was the man from 8B. She knew him by the approximate facts of adjacency: he worked late hours, he had a good laugh, he'd helped her carry a sofa up the stairs once and refused tea after. She knew he was objectively attractive in a way she'd registered and filed away. "Sorry," he said, treading water. "I didn't know anyone else came at this hour." "Neither did I." She could have gone back up. She didn't. She slid into the water at the opposite end and began her laps, and they swam in a companionable silence that turned, over the next few weeks, into conversation — the easy, unguarded kind that happens in the dark, with the pool lights turning everything aquamarine. She noticed things. The length of him in the water. The way he looked at her when he thought she wasn't watching. The way she looked at him when he thought the same. One night in August, very hot, she finished her laps and pulled herself up onto the pool's edge to cool down. Arjun surfaced beside her and rested his arms on the concrete, looking up at her. "Kavya," he said. "Mm." "Can I ask you something?" "Depends." "What are you doing after this?" She looked at him for a long moment in the pool light — the water on his shoulders, his dark eyes, the particular careful attention in his face. "Nothing," she said. He climbed out and they walked to the elevator dripping, neither of them suggesting they go to separate floors. In his apartment — a mirror of hers across the hallway — he handed her a towel and she stood in his kitchen and thought: I have been building to this for two months without admitting it. He crossed the kitchen and kissed her, one hand coming up to the back of her neck, still cool from the water. She tasted chlorine and something sweeter and pressed herself against him. They moved toward the bedroom slowly, undressing the rest of the way — her swimsuit, his trunks, skin against skin in the warm air. He was unhurried and thorough. She lay back on his sheets and let him learn her, gasping when his mouth found the soft skin of her inner thigh, threading her fingers through his hair when he moved higher. She came the first time like that, quietly, with her back arching off the mattress. He came up and over her with a look of intent that made her pull him down by the neck. Afterwards, the building was quiet around them. Somewhere below, the pool filtered quietly in the dark. "I live twelve metres away," Kavya said. "I know," Arjun said. "This seems like it changes things." "Good things," he said, and she decided he was right.