Poolside Tease After Dark

I shouldn’t be writing this down. Diaries are for confessions you mean to keep, and yet my hand keeps moving, the pen scratching harder whenever I picture the moonlight on the water and the dark rectangle of Everett’s guest-house window. I’m twenty-eight. He’s thirty-two. We are not children. Still, the heat this summer has turned every thought filthy.

It started the way these things always do with us—too much wine at Aunt Rosa’s long marble table, too many glances that lasted half a second longer than politeness allows. Everett had driven up from the city for the long weekend, unpacking into the pool house the way he has every July since his mother married my uncle. Step-cousins. The word is supposed to make the wanting cleaner. It doesn’t. It only makes the wanting quieter, denser, like humidity you can’t fan away.

After midnight the house finally slept. Aunt Rosa’s soft snoring drifted down the hall. I slipped out barefoot in nothing but the thin silk robe I keep for exactly these nights, the one that clings when the air is this thick. The flagstones still held the day’s heat; each step felt like walking across skin. Cicadas screamed in the oleanders. The pool glowed that impossible turquoise, lit from below, a private stage no one was supposed to see.

I knew he was awake. Everett never sleeps early when he’s here. I’ve caught the blue flicker of his laptop through the guest-house blinds at two in the morning more times than I can count. And I’ve felt his eyes. We both know it. Last summer I sunbathed in the smallest bikini I own and watched his jaw tighten every time I arched to oil my stomach. He never spoke of it. Neither did I. The silence became its own language.