The Night Swim

Robbie had rented the cabin off some listing site without ever seeing it in person, which was the kind of gamble he usually lost, but when the gravel drive spat them out in front of a squat stone building with a dock running down to the lake, he figured he'd finally won one. The place looked old but solid, smoke curling from a chimney somebody had lit before they arrived, and the water behind it sat flat and grey in the late afternoon light, so still it looked poured.

"That's decent," Rhys said from the passenger seat of the van, leaning forward to take it in through the windshield. "You said hunting cabin, I was picturing something with a dead stag on the wall and a smell you can't describe."

"Give it a minute, it might still have that." Robbie cut the engine and sat there a second, hands on the wheel. Rhys was thirty-three now and he hadn't changed much since the apartment building days, still had that easy smile like he'd never once had to think about anything harder than what to have for tea. Robbie had missed that smile more than he'd meant to, which was inconvenient, because the whole point of this weekend had a plan attached to it, and the plan did not include catching feelings.

He got out and hauled the bags from the back while Rhys went and tried the door, found it unlocked, and called back that the keys were sitting right on the kitchen counter like the owner had said, which made Robbie feel doubly stupid for bringing the spare set he'd posted to himself. Inside it was warm and a bit cluttered, a sofa with a tartan throw, a stove already ticking away, two bedrooms and a bathroom with a shower that groaned when Rhys tested it, the way old pipes always did.

"Beds are decent anyway," Rhys called from the back, and Robbie stood in the middle of the main room holding both bags and felt something twist low in his stomach. One of them had a black holdall zipped inside it that Rhys did not know about, and would not know about until the right moment, if everything went the way Robbie had sketched it out in his head on the drive up. Two years since Jess had laughed at him, really laughed, sitting on the edge of the bed in their old flat holding a slip of black lace she'd found at the bottom of his kitbag, and he could still hear the exact note of it, that bright mean sound, and every stupid idea he'd had since had grown out of it somehow.

"Whose round is it, mine or yours?" Rhys came back through with two bottles of light lager he'd found in the fridge, holding one out. "Owner left these, which means technically we're drinking on the job."

"Yours, and I'm drinking on your job then." Robbie took the bottle and they clinked them without ceremony and sat down, Rhys on the sofa and Robbie in the worn armchair by the window, and outside the light was going gold over the water, gulls working the shoreline the way they did before dark.

* * *

By the second round they'd covered the usual ground, work and rent and the state of the village shop they'd passed on the way in, and then Rhys got onto the years properly, elbows on his knees, bottle loose in his hand. "Five years we were on the same landing before you moved out, and I never once got your forwarding address right, you know that. I sent your deposit letter to the wrong flat and some bloke called Alan opened it."

"That tracks, Alan kept getting everything." Robbie grinned and tipped the bottle back. He'd moved out three years ago this autumn, taken a place forty minutes across the city because the rent was better and the building had no mice, and he'd let the friendship drift the way people do, not meaning to, just letting it get thin. Sitting here now with the stove ticking and Rhys filling the room the way he always had, Robbie thought the drift had been his own fault more than anyone's, and he pushed that thought down where it wouldn't cause trouble.

"You seeing anyone these days?" Rhys asked, casual, the way he asked things.

"No. You?"

"Nah, nobody serious. Few dates, nothing stuck." He rolled the bottle between his palms and looked out the window at the water going dark. "Funny thing, though. Last lass I was seeing, we got to talking one night about, I don't know, preferences, and she asked me something I'd never been asked."

"Go on then."

"She asked if I'd ever been with someone who liked to dress up. Lingerie, that side of it. And I said no, never have, and she looked sort of surprised and said she thought everybody had by our age." Rhys shrugged and took a drink. "It stuck with me more than it should have, maybe. Like a gap in my education."

Robbie's hand had gone still around his bottle. He was thirty-four years old and a plumber by trade and he could strip a boiler down in the dark, and none of that helped him at all in that moment, sitting there while his old neighbor talked about lingerie like it was a country he'd never visited. "Some people get funny about it," he said, and heard how careful his own voice came out.

"Funny how? The men or the women?"

"Either. Both." He set the bottle down on the windowsill so he'd have something else to do with his hands. "People decide what a thing means before they ask what it is, half the time."

"Aye, that's people." Rhys said it easily, no weight on it, and went back to looking at the lake, and Robbie sat there feeling the holdall in the bag like it was warm to the touch.

* * *

It was full dark by the time they'd eaten, some sausages and a pan of beans, and they stood out on the dock with a mug of tea each, the lager long since called a day, shoulders not quite touching, looking up at more stars than the city had ever let either of them see. The cold came off the water and the cabin light behind them threw their shadows long across the boards.

"Right, I've an idea," Robbie said, and his voice came out lower than he'd planned. "You fancy a swim?"

Rhys turned to look at him. "In the lake?"

"Not the lake, the pool. In the village. The old baths, they shut for the season three weeks ago, the woman in the shop told me. Fenced off but the fence has a gap in it, I had a look when we drove through."

Rhys laughed, that bright easy laugh, and Robbie felt it land somewhere under his ribs. "You're serious. Sneaking into the village pool, in October, in the dark."

"There's a boiler, they keep it warm for the school club on Thursdays, so it might still hold heat from today." He was talking faster now, the way he did when an idea had hold of him. "Swimming under the stars, Rhys. When are we ever doing that again?"

"When do we ever do anything twice." Rhys drained his mug and set it on the dock post. "Aye, go on then, I'm in. I should tell you I've got a pair of trunks in my bag that haven't seen water since I was twenty-nine, so if they fall apart mid-lane you're explaining that to the village constable."

"Trunks are for people with something to prove. Water's water." Robbie said it without thinking and then heard exactly what he'd said, and Rhys gave him a look, one eyebrow up, but he was smiling, and he said nothing about it, just turned toward the cabin to get his bag.

Robbie stayed on the dock a moment longer, looking at the gap in the fence he'd scouted out on the drive through, the one he'd had in mind before they'd even parked. The plan was going exactly the way he'd wanted it to, and that was the problem, because standing here in the cold with the stars out he couldn't remember anymore which parts of tonight had been the plan and which parts had just been tonight.

The gap in the fence was exactly where Robbie remembered it, at the back corner where a rotted post had leaned out and taken a panel with it, and they went through one after the other, Rhys holding the loose edge back for him like a gentleman holding a door. The pool sat there dark and flat, the surface holding a smear of reflected stars, and the air around it was warmer than the night had any right to make it, a damp steamy warmth that meant the boiler was still ticking over. "It's actually warm," Rhys said, crouched at the edge with his hand in the water, sounding like a wee boy on holiday. "Told you. Thursdays, school club, they never bother turning it off the rest of the week."

They'd driven over in the van with the windows down and the heater rattling, and Rhys had talked the whole way about nothing, about a client with a disputed boundary and a sheep that kept escaping onto it, and Robbie had listened and laughed and felt the plan sitting in his chest like a stone he kept forgetting to pick up.

Rhys peeled his shirt off over his head and stood there in the pooled light from the moon, thirty-three years old and broader across the shoulders than Robbie remembered, a bit of a belly starting that he'd clearly stopped caring about, and he stepped out of his jeans and his ancient trunks