Dry Dock

*This one came from the idea of putting a lifeguard on dry land and watching the water metaphors dry up. Thanks for reading, hope the goat chase made you snort.*

Kara Winston was twenty-three years old and divorced, which she felt was a record worth mentioning at parties. Nobody at parties ever mentioned it with her. Mostly they just got quiet and changed the subject to somebody's wedding.

The marriage had lasted a year. She met Kyle at a pool supply trade show, and for some reason she still hadn't sorted out she'd married him within three months of knowing him. Then he'd spent eleven of the twelve months treating her like an appliance with a warranty. The divorce went through two weeks before her twenty-third birthday. She cried about it exactly twice and then started looking for jobs as far away from Ohio as the internet would allow.

That was how she ended up answering an ad for a traveling aquatic wellness coach, of all things. She'd been a lifeguard since she was twenty-one, she could swim like a fish, and the pay was per client. The company she signed with was called AquaSerene and she had already decided they were a scam, but they were a scam that paid mileage.

Her rusted sedan made it to eastern Oregon on a Tuesday in late September, barely. The car was a 2004 with a check engine light that had been on so long she'd stopped seeing it. The last forty minutes were gravel. Breton Range sat in a bowl of dry hills, a white clapboard farmhouse, a barn, corrals, and a stock tank that caught the sun like a dropped coin.

A man was working the fence line near the drive. No shirt, jeans, boots, and a cut along his forearm that was bleeding freely down his wrist and dripping into the dirt. He was forty feet from a first aid kit that was almost certainly in the barn.

Kara got out. "You're bleeding."

The man looked at his arm like it had announced itself at a dinner party. "Barbed wire," he said.

"Congratulations on the diagnosis. Do you own a bandage?"

"It stops."

"It is not stopping." She dug in her gym bag, came up with a first aid kit she kept from her lifeguard days, and walked over. He watched her do it without moving to help or to stop her, which she found genuinely annoying. Up close he was built like the fence, weathered, mid-thirties, dark hair going gray early at the temples. Handsome in the way that men who never comment on it are handsome. She hated that she noticed.

"You Carlo Breton?" she asked, pressing gauze on the cut.

"That's me. You're the pool lady."

"Aquatic wellness coach." She wrapped his forearm tight. He didn't flinch. "There. Don't ruin my work."

He looked at the bandage, then at her, and something shifted in his face that she would think about later. "AquaSerene. Right." He said the company name like it tasted bad. "Listen. I'll be straight with you, since you patched me up."

"Please."

"I didn't book this for swimming drills." He crossed his arms, which pulled the bandage and he ignored it. "I booked it because the woman on the phone was real vague about what the service included, and I got the impression it included company. The kind you pay for. I've done that before, once, years back, and I'm not proud of it but I'm not going to stand here and pretend I didn't."

Kara stood there with her first aid kit open in the gravel and did the math in about four seconds. Somewhere out of a riding accident and a bad stretch of months, this man had ordered himself a woman off the internet, and the internet had sent her, gauze and noodle drills and all.

The reasonable thing was to explain the misunderstanding and go home. What she actually felt was something hotter. This was the same species of man as her ex. Big land, big hands, assumes the little lifeguard came with a menu. She'd driven nine hundred miles to be underestimated by a bleeding stranger.

"Okay," she heard herself say, and it surprised her how easily it came out. "Well. Why don't we start with a session and see how it goes."

His eyebrows went up. Whatever he'd expected, it wasn't that. "All right," he said slowly. "Tomorrow morning, then. The stock tank's the only water on the place."

"The stock tank," she repeated.

"That a problem?"

"No," said Kara, who was already planning his downfall. "The stock tank is perfect."

She slept in the guest room of the farmhouse, which he'd aired out for her with actual clean sheets, and that small decency annoyed her too. She lay awake plotting. Here was the plan: play along just enough to let him think he'd gotten what he paid for, let him get comfortable, maybe even let him make the move, and then shut him down so hard and so publicly that he'd remember it every time he looked at that stock tank. Revenge on Carlo Breton, rancher, stand-in for all the Kyles of the world. Then she'd drive home and never think about the gravel road again. That was the plan, and she would want it on record that it was a bad plan.

The next morning he was waiting by the tank in swim trunks and boots, which was an outfit she'd never seen on a man and hoped to never fully forget. The tank was maybe eight feet across, horse-water cold, and the morning air had a bite to it.

"Get in," she said.

He got in up to his knees and stopped, arms crossed again, looking like a man standing in a soup pot. "Now what?"

"Now we do leg swings. Hold the edge." She demonstrated. He copied her, stiff as a fence post. "Looser. You're not being interrogated."

"You said leg swings."

"I did. You're doing them like the legs owe you money."

That got the first crack of a smile out of him, quick and gone. He swung his legs. The water sloshed. A horse at the corral rail watched the whole thing with what Kara chose to read as pity.

For an hour she ran him through actual pool-noodle rehab exercises, the kind the AquaSerene pamphlet promised to ranchers with bad backs and old injuries. She found out about the riding accident without meaning to. He'd come off a young horse in June, cracked two ribs and wrenched his shoulder, and spent the summer unable to do his own fencing, which was why the fence, and the cut, and her.

"Roll the noodle under your shoulder blade," she said. "It's not glamorous. It's what I've got."

He did it. He did everything she told him, exactly, literally, like the exercises were legal instructions. Halfway through he asked if the noodle position was correct, and she realized he genuinely cared whether it was correct. There was no swagger in it at all. He was just a man in a cold tank, trusting her to fix his shoulder, and every time he said "like this?" her revenge plan lost a little altitude.

By the end of the hour his shoulder moved better and his dignity was intact, barely, and she was standing in the sun wondering when the plan had started needing repairs.

"Same time tomorrow?" he asked, hauling himself out and dripping on his own boots.

"Same time tomorrow," she said.

She told herself the plan was still on. She told herself that all the way through making coffee in his kitchen, and mostly believed it.

The goat got loose on Thursday. Rain had come through overnight and turned the gravel yard into glue, and Tank, the weed goat Carlo kept tied by the barn, picked that morning to discover freedom. Kara was crossing the yard with her coffee when Tank bleated past her knees and knocked her flat into the mud.

"Get the gate!" Carlo shouted from the porch. He made it three steps before his boots left him and he went down on one knee in the glue.

"Is that a goat?" Kara yelled from the ground. "Why do you have a goat?"

"Weed control. Tank. Tank, you son of a bitch, come back here."

They chased that goat for twenty minutes. Around the stock tank twice. Through the corral, scattering horses, and into the barn, where Tank stood on a hay bale and bleated at them like they were the problem. Kara slipped in the doorway and Carlo caught her arm, and then he slipped too, and they went down together in the wet straw. The barn smelled like hay and rain. They lay there laughing so hard neither of them could get up.

"He's not even sorry," Kara wheezed. Tank was eating his own rope.