The Quiet Touch

The pool after hours is a strange kind of quiet. I've been in this building five days a week for the better part of thirty years, first as a coach, then running my little notary office out of the room they used to give to the swim boosters, and I never once heard it like this. No whistle. No kids shrieking off the diving board. No smell of chlorine so thick it gets in your teeth. Just the hum of the filtration pumps and the underwater LEDs throwing blue light up at the ceiling so it wobbles around as if the whole room is underwater too, which I suppose it is.

Carson's idea, all of this. I want to put that down right away because it surprised me and I don't want to forget that it surprised me. We've been married twenty-eight years. He proposed in the parking lot of this same pool, actually, back when I was twenty-six and coaching the junior squad, and he was twenty-five and shooting meets for the local paper for pocket money. He's fifty-three now and mostly does estate photography and product shots for a candle company out of Inverness, and his hobby is a darkroom he built in the spare room we never turned into a nursery, because we never needed to.

Lately our evenings have gotten so quiet I could hear the refrigerator think. Dinner, telly, bed. He'd kiss my forehead and I'd think, well, this is fine, this is what it is. So when he came into the kitchen last Tuesday while I was doing the crossword and said, "Niki, I've a notion, and hear me out before you laugh," I was already half laughing.

He laid it out. The pool does private hire on Friday evenings for the swim club, but the club disbanded in March. He'd called the recreation office and asked what it would cost to book the natatorium for two hours after close. Forty pounds, cash, paid up front, no staff on site, just a key code for the side door. He'd already booked it. For Friday.

"The rule is this," he said, standing there in his reading glasses with his hands in his cardigan pockets like a man about to present a budget. "We swim. And we touch each other. But only in the water, and only one lap at a time. One lap of touching, then we stop, and we swim a lap apart. Then we can start again or not."

"In the water," I said. "Not out of it."

"Not out of it. That's the whole rule."

I looked at him for a while. Not because I was shocked, exactly. We're not prudes, we just got slow. But because he'd gone to the trouble of phoning the recreation office, and paying forty pounds, and keeping it to himself for three days, all to arrange a way of touching me that had rules attached. There was something in that that made my throat tight, and I said yes before I could get sentimental about it at the kitchen table.

So. Friday evening. I packed a bag like I was twenty, which I am not, I am fifty-four, and I caught myself checking the mirror twice before we left the house and being annoyed at myself for it. Carson drove us over in the Volvo with the radio off. He was quiet in the way he gets when he's composing a photograph in his head.

We changed in separate locker rooms, which felt silly and also kind of thrilling, like we were meeting as strangers. I put on the black one-piece I bought in June when we went to Aberdeen, and I took my hair down and then put it back up because wet hair down my back would drive me mad. Then I stood in the doorway of the girls' side for a moment listening to the pumps.

He was already at the shallow end when I came out, sitting on the edge with his legs in the water up to the knee. He'd kept some shape over the years, broad through the shoulders from hauling camera bags around, and the grey in his chest hair catches the blue light in a way I found I liked very much.

"There she is," he said.

"Here I am."

He stood up and I saw he'd been nervous waiting, doing that little bounce on his toes he does. "Right. The rule stands. One lap of touching, slow, whatever feels right. Then we stop and swim apart. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

"And we say it out loud when we want to stop or change anything. None of this guessing."

"Agreed," I said again, and I got in at the shallow end steps and the water came up warm around me, warmer than the club ever kept it, he must have asked them to crank the heat, and that was such a Carson detail that I had to kiss him on the cheek before we started, which didn't count against the rules because we hadn't started.

For the first lap, I floated on my back and he touched me.

That's such a small sentence for what it actually was. I tipped back, arms out, and let my legs drift up, and he stood in the water beside me and put his hands on my ankles. Then he walked, slow, down the length of me while I floated, and his hands came up my calves and behind my knees and along my thighs, and the water did something to all of it. Every stroke of his palm dragged a little bow wave of warmth ahead of it. Skin under water is a different country. I felt each finger separately. I felt the callus on his right thumb from the tripod. By my hips I had my eyes shut and my mouth open like a fool, and he cupped my waist with both hands and just held me there, floating, for what must have been half a minute.

"That good?" he asked, quiet, because the room made everything quiet.

"Keep going," I said. "Lap's not done."

He laughed low in his chest and his hands slid up over my ribs, outside the suit, water sheeting off me, and he brushed the sides of my breasts with the edges of his thumbs, once each, and then the wall was coming and I put a hand out to stop.

"End of lap," I said, a bit breathless.

"End of lap." He stepped back and gave me space, and we swam our lap apart like the rule said, him doing a lazy breaststroke ahead of me while I followed and tried to get my head on straight.

Then it was my turn. He floated on his back in the deep half and I took his ankles, and I'll be honest with myself here, which I can be on the page if nowhere else: I felt shy. Twenty-eight years of marriage and I was shy, walking my hands up my own husband's legs in an empty pool. It was because it was deliberate. We'd taken the hurry out of it. Usually a touch happens in passing, on the way to the kettle. This was a touch with nowhere to be.

I went up his calves, over his knees, and along his thighs, and he's ticklish there so he twitched and said "Mind the knees," and I said "I'll mind what I like," and he laughed. I splayed my hands over his hips and felt the old scar from the appendix, the one the surgeon botched in 1998, and I traced it like I hadn't in years, because I hadn't. Then up over his stomach, which rises and falls