“Is that your way of offering?”
Electricity crackles through the air, the kind that has nothing to do with the bright orange extension cord or the glittering blue pool. We’re creating our own current—his body, mine. It steals all the air, making my breath come faster, my breasts pressing harder against the plastic slats of the lounge chair, but I don’t care about that. All this power between us, all this promise.
The only thing I care about now is seeing it fulfilled.
My axis shifts as he bends down, as his dark hand picks up the sunny yellow plastic bottle. A pop as he opens the top. The faintest sound of cream as he puts some in his hands.
The anticipation crests inside me, frothy and white. I have to close my eyes as he reaches for me. Close my eyes to block out the bright water and the green grass, the neon plastic slats of the chair and the flecks of blue in the patio. All of it so bright, but it’s only a mirage. I know about geography; and this is my desert. This man, so dark and so secret—my oasis.
His hands touch my arms first, a place where it’s already smooth with lotion. He runs his hands lightly along the outsides of my upper arms, his fingertips slick, almost obscene, making goosebumps rise.
He moves inward, over my shoulder blades and down my spine. My back does this little arch that can only be suggestive. He ignores it; his touch not impersonal but instead tender. It’s more intimate than a kiss, when he touches me like I matter to him. Like my pale skin burning really bothers him. Like he gives a shit about protecting me.
It’s just another way to lie.
His hands run over the elastic string of my bikini top, coating it with lotion as if it’s my own skin. I think we’re going to pretend about that. This is as far as it will go. Regret whispers through my chest, a cool ribbon of awareness across the scorching heat of my summer.
“This is in the way,” he says, lifting the string away from my body.
He doesn’t wait for me to respond. With deft fingers he unties the knot. The two ends fall away, over the metal-pole sides of the lounge chair, exposing the sides of my breasts, revealing the narrowest strip of skin at my back. He could have reached that without removing the top; we both know that. I don’t argue. I don’t complain.
My relief is too big to pretend about that.
“I know about the diamonds,” I say instead, both an admission and an accusation.
His hands pause in their circular motion, only half a second, almost imperceptible, and then he begins again. My skin is long-protected now, but he doesn’t stop touching me.
“I know you want to take them.”
“Will you tell?” he asks, about finding him in the front room.
I huff an uneven laugh. “No one would believe me anyway. You know that much. However you get your information, it’s thorough.”
This makes him pause longer. “And the irony is you’d be telling the truth.”
The irony is that I’m always telling the truth. “Your secrets are safe with me.”
He reaches down and pours more lotion on his hands. I shiver when he presses it over my lower back. The base of his hands brush the top of my bikini bottoms on every large circle. “That means more than you know to someone like me.”
“A thief?”
He releases a startled breath. “I guess so. Though you should know you can stop me. Your parents may not believe you, but I don’t think they’d take the chance if they thought I’d been inside.”
“You left footprints every time you came in.”
He pauses, and without even looking back I can see him look down at his work boots. I can see the way they’ve become so much a part of him that he doesn’t even register them. He might be a thief but he’s not a very good one. “Why aren’t they suspicious then?”
“Because we have maids,” I say, suddenly weary. Maids who know better than to ask questions. Maids who would be afraid to even mention a muddy spot on the carpet, in case it came from one of us.
Most of them have been with us for years. And the ones who are new, they hear stories. If the man would do something to his own daughter, what would he do to a maid?
His hands skip over the bare skin of my ass, exposed by the thong strap of the bikini bottom. He moves instead to my thighs, spreading lotion over the backs of them, over the ticklish flesh behind my knees.
“What’s your price?” he asks finally, sounding more resigned than angry.
Is he used to people charging him for safety? Is he used to paying for silence? I wish I could disappoint him, be the one altruistic person he doesn’t expect. But I need something from him.
“A way out.”
This is what finally breaks us apart, what finally pulls him away. He stands up, casting a shadow over me again. “What?”
“A way out of this house,” I explain. “For good. You take me and drop me off fifty miles away. Maybe a hundred. That’s the price you’ll pay for my silence.”
His shock changes the space between us. No longer arousal or wonder. Instead there’s a harsh splash of reality as cold and as sudden as the line of water from the pressure washer’s nozzle. His questions will be next: why do I need to escape? What will happen if I try?
The questions will be bad enough, but the disbelief will be worse. I’m a poor little rich girl, a kitchen full of good food available to me, my closet full of designer clothes. He can see most of my skin right now, healthy and glowing, milky-pale, to confirm I’m not being beaten and starved in a basement every night.
He won’t believe me.
This is how I became a pathological liar, by saying things that can’t possibly be true. Even if they are.
A rock sits in my stomach, a weighted promise of everything to come. It’s not enough that someone else will distrust me; that it would be him, this gardener who makes me feel alive, this man who makes me feel like a woman, is a heavy blow.
There’s a creak as the gate opens leading into the backyard. Someone’s coming.
I sit up quickly, using my hands to catch the bikini top as it threatens to fall away from my breasts.
Niko moves to stand in front of me, guarding me from view, a move so chivalrous it makes my throat ache. He says something so stern, so hard, it takes me a moment to realize it isn’t English. It’s some other language, one I don’t recognize, the words as hard and sharp as crystals.
Peeking around his shoulder I see a stocky man in a dirt-scuffed wifebeater and torn jeans. Even from this far away I can see the dark wrinkles on his weathered face, the familiar dark eyes beneath wild brows. This man is related to Nico. His father? He doesn’t look pleased with whatever Niko’s said. He speaks back rapidly, almost angrily. His crude gesture at me makes me shudder.
Niko widens his stance in front of me, as if to block me better. To protect me better.
In that tense moment my mind races with terrible possibility.
The theft could be happening now, in broad daylight, before I’ve wrangled any kind of promise from Niko. What if I’m not supposed to be out here? I’m a witness, even if I’m totally unreliable. They might drop me into the bottom of that glittering pool rather than risk it.
A harsh sentence, devoid of softness or loyalty. Niko flings the words across the lawn, and finally it’s enough to make the other man leave. Only once we’re alone do I fumble with the strings behind me, tying them without being able to see, trying to make myself decent again.