Chapter Text
Every morning, Beatrice has a routine. She wakes in the pre-dawn light and goes down to the ocean pool by her apartment, where the concrete walls are hewn into the eroded tidepools, and she does twenty laps. Sometimes there are fish, in the pool. Sometimes she scares them away. She likes when she doesn't; when they stay, flitting and silver-specked beneath her, and she gets to watch them. On those days, slicing her arms with each stroke doesn't feel violent. She needs to be violent, sometimes, but not here. Not with them. She's buoyant, in the salt water.
After her swim, she goes back to her apartment and showers. Some days, she would like to watch the sun rise properly, cresting and shifting over the waves. Mary tells her she should. But then she would be late. So she she lets the sun rise behind the shorefront buildings, casting shadows on the tarmac, as she walks to her apartment, showers the salt from her skin, changes into her clothes, and goes to work.
One night, a serious storm system moves in. She leaves the hospital where she works late—skeletal hands of lightning beat at the dark sky as she takes the train home. When she rises to rain still hammering on the windows, she knows before she checks that the tide will be high, the sea too churned. While she still puts on her swimmers, she grabs an umbrella and heads in the opposite direction of the beach.
Beatrice prefers ocean pools, but Beatrice is practical: she has a backup indoor pool that she visits when her beach routine is untenable, like when the surf is rough, the pool gets crowded by once-in-a-whilers, or a juvenile crested hornshark slips in and can't figure out how to slip out.
She checks in at the front desk and leaves her bag in the locker room. The main room of the pool, echoey and muggy and tiled, fills Beatrice's nose with chlorine. There are less usuals than she expects to see; most must have seen the sheets of rain and decided to roll over for another forty minutes of sleep.
She steps into the pool. She starts her laps.
About halfway through, she's aware of a presence in the lane next to her. Small body; good technique; swimming slowly, with a snorkel. She has on a bright red one-piece that catches Beatrice's eye. Beatrice doesn't need to take a break—shouldn't take a break—she has twelve more laps to get through and then she has to get out and return home and shower and go to the hospital and change into her scrubs and do her rounds and—
Beatrices pauses, at the end of her lane. She watches the young woman in the red swimmers.
The palms of her hands lift, gently cupping the air before they glide back into the water. Her pointed toes kick at the water, sending up droplets. When she gets to the end of the lane, instead of flip turning like Beatrice does, she stops. She lifts up her goggled mask, letting out the drips that broke the seal, and lets the mouthpiece of the snorkel fall inelegantly from her mouth. Her hair, slick and dark, tucks behind her ears.
She notices Beatrice watching. She looks behind her, checking for someone behind her. When she sees nobody, her mouth tips up on one side, into a grin. She waves. She has goggle marks around her mouth and the bridge of her nose, framing bright eyes.
Hesitantly, Beatrice waves back.
The young woman's smile widens.
Something hot and thick burns through her body, catching her unawares. She sinks into the cool water again. Contain yourself, she hears, in a familiar voice that's not her own.
Twelve more laps to go. She starts swimming; eleven more laps to go. Ten. Nine.
The girl in the lane beside her, the girl in the bright red, swims backstroke now. Beatrice stares at the bottom of the pool, absent her fish, and sees the snorkel, cast onto the lip of the pool deck.
Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four.
The girl gets out. Beatrice misses her. She feels an unexplainable frustration building inside. She hates the repetition of the stroke, the steady beat that's usually comforting. She slices her hand through the water. It's banal. It's violent.
She doesn't want to finish. She doesn't want to responsibly walk back to her apartment and do her rounds. She wants to poke her head above the water and see where the girl went, to see if the snorkel is all plastic angles against the NO RUNNING sign on the deck.
To see if she smiles at Beatrice again.
Beatrice-
Beatrice-
Beatrice stops. She doesn't pause; she stops. She stops and she pokes her head out of the pool and she looks around.
Next to the lap pool is the open swim pool, which usually stays closed until the family hours open later in the morning. The girl has clearly sweet-talked her way into something, because the attendants pay her no mind even though she has trespassed well into the off-limits space.
The girl sits on the edge of the diving board. Her legs dangle off. She swings her legs, slightly, and has a small smile at the slight bounce that reverberates up and down the board. Her eyes are closed.
Beatrice stays with the water up to her neck, watching her. She doesn't know if she could get out, could feel the gravity of it all pressing down on her, could feel her you're out of the pool now you need to towel off now you need to walk home routines kick in at the abandonment of her in the pool stage of her day, and fight herself well enough to stay.
The girl stands up on the diving board. She lets the board bounce. Once, twice. She catches Beatrice watching her and she beams. Then she winks; then she jumps, not dives, and falls, full pencil, arms pointed above her, into the deep end. There's barely a splash as her head follows her feet into the water.
It's incredibly silly. Beatrice is immediately endeared.
The girl paddles over to the wall. She climbs halfway up the in-cut ladder, hand gripped to the metal bar, then looks at Beatrice. "Hey," she says.
Beatrice can't contain herself. "Hello."
"Okay, be honest. How many points?"
Beatrice frowns.
"Like, I had basically no splash! That's gotta count for something."
"Oh," Beatrice says. She pauses. "Eight," she decides.
"Eight!" The girl grins. "Eight for eigh-va. You're tough to impress. One sec, one sec."
She climbs out of the pool. On her back, Beatrice sees the silvery-white lines of scar tissue, roiling across her tanned skin.
"I'm not, like, super supposed to do this," the girl—Ava, presumably—says, with a touch of sheepishness, as though Beatrice asked, but Beatrice also hasn't moved, hasn't resumed her laps, hasn't left. Ava walks out onto the edge of the diving board again. It's a low diving board, meant for young kids, but Beatrice still has to tip her chin to see her. Light from the skylight reflects on the water, rippling back up across her face. "It's fun, though. You ready?"
To watch? Beatrice has watched, and repented for watching, her whole life. For something else? Water drips from Ava's ankles, to the board. Beatrice has no idea what she'll be agreeing to, if she says yes. She swallows. "Out of ten?" she asks.
"That's the classic."
"Alright," Beatrice agrees. Her words feel round, heavy, next to Ava's slant. "I'll prepare myself."
Ava laughs. It's a joke, and not just by Beatrice's dry tone; Beatrice has prepared herself for everything possible since she was fourteen years old, maybe even before that, but suddenly she doesn't think she can possibly prepare herself for this.
Ava leaps from the diving board. Her knees come up. They tuck to her chest, clasped with her spread hands. Her grin spreads so wide, her nose scrunching, and she closes her eyes in mid-air, whooping. The sound echoes off the tiles, reverberates through Beatrice's chest. Beatrice stares at her; at her freedom, at her joy. She dangles in the air above the pool.
Beatrice has a moment of imagining so visceral, so subconscious, that she feels it sear through her untranslatable.
Ava smashes to the water. Concentric ripples grow, smack noisily against the sides. In the bullseye of her impact, she surfaces, the back of her head to Beatrice. She scrubs water out of her eyes. Then she casts around, spinning on her treading legs to find Beatrice.
"So?"
Beatrice blinks. Right. Out of ten. She swallows. "Nine."
"Nine? Jeez, what's a girl gotta do?"
"Only God is perfect." Beatrice says it deadpan, with the calibrated weight of seventeen years of Catholic education. "To regard anyone else as such would be to do a disservice to His name."
Ava's eyes widen fractionally. Her limbs still. She starts to sink.
The corner of Beatrice's mouth crooks.
"Oh, that was- I was raised by nuns, you can't get a girl like that!"
"You thought your cannonball was divine, then?"
"Uh, yeah!" Ava kicks herself over to the wall. She loops her arm around the ladder handle and points at herself with the other. "Made in God's image to fuck shit up."
Beatrice looks down, amused.
"So, I haven't seen you here before." Ava gets out, walks between the pools. She plops down beside Beatrice, her legs hanging into the water of the lane she'd been in before.
Beatrice's eyes are at the height of her thighs, where they press into the lip of the pool. Her toenails are painted, sloppily, ten different colors. She can't keep looking there, so she flicks her eyes up to Ava's face. "I swim at the beach," she says, clearing her throat. "In the ocean pool."
"Mm. No diving board at the ocean pool."
"No, there isn't."
"So...wanna give it a try here?"
Beatrice hesitates. She looks to the attendants through the window. She looks at the board, stilled again. She opens her mouth.
"No diving," Ava clarifies. "Huge risk of spinal injury, if you don't know what you're doing. But just…jumping, you know?"
Beatrice does know what she's doing; Beatrice has dived from ten foot platforms and off the back of boats in full scuba gear. She doesn't say so.
Ava gives her hopeful, uncertain eyes.
Beatrice should go to work. Beatrice is late for work. Beatrice needs to contain herself, be practical, get her feet back on the ground-
Beatrice nods, smiling slightly. "I'll do my best," she says.
"Fuck yeah," Ava says, surprise and delight washing together. She has freckles on her shoulders, and a tiny scar on her left cheek.
She offers Beatrice a hand, and Beatrice takes it, warm and wet and small. She presses her other palm to the ledge of the pool and pushes her body up onto the deck. She looks into Ava's brown eyes before she lets go.
The warm air chills against Beatrice's skin as she walks over to the diving board. She steps onto the rough, treaded rungs. She feels the board bend under her weight as she walks out. Looking down at the other pool, she finds Ava watching her.
She smiles at her, small. Ava grins.
Tomorrow, Beatrice thinks, she'd like to stay at the beach to watch the sunrise. She wants to show this girl the sunrise.
She jumps.