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Phoebe loves pushing off the side of the pool with her feet and shooting like a dart towards the opposite side. Her eyes are closed tight and she doesn’t move her arms, and when she pop up to breathe it looks like she’s only made it about a third of the length, but she lazily makes her way back to the wall to do it again.
She isn’t a swimmer. Fear of the deep sea and generally being more of an indoor girl saw to that. Her most utilized move is the all-essential Don’t Drown™. But that somehow makes her love this all the more— the holiday quiet, the lull between legs of their world tour, the sound of the Australian jungle around them but other than that only the sound of Phoebe kicking and splashing.
Martyn and Corn are making a snacks run in town. Dani is on a lounge chair soaking in the summer sun.
“No Twitter!” Phoebe shouts at her before diving back under the water. When she comes back up for air, Dani has set her phone on the ground. Phoebe can see its little back void on the concrete, but she can also see Dani’s hair drying from the swim she’d taken earlier in frizzy curls around her face and from this distance it’s hard to tell but she might have gotten a little sunburnt despite the diligent application of sunscreen they both made before venturing outside. She’s on her stomach, facing the pool and propped up on her elbows.
“Are you scolding me on holiday?” Dan asks.
“Only when you break the rules,” Phoebe says. She dives under the water and paddles towards the wall closest to Dani, popping up just before crashing into it by pure luck.
“I wasn’t even on Twitter,” Dani says with a smile that Phoebe recognizes after nearly a decade. A smile that means mischief.
Phoebe tries to match it. “What were you doing then, sending me nudes?”
“You’d love that, wouldn’t you, Lester. Nudes from twenty feet away,” Dani says while rolling her eyes. The mischief happens when along with rolling her eyes, she also raises a hand and undoes the simple knot at the back of her neck holding up her bikini top.
The strings drop to the lounge chair. Dani brings her arm back down to lean on.
Her chest is still pressed against the fucking canvas of the seat beneath her and this lazy simulation striptease is a cruel joke that Phoebe doesn’t deserve—
“Horrible girlfriend!” she screeches, splashing as much water as she can in one swoop of her arm towards Dani.
The chair is too far away and it doesn’t actually get near her, but Dani still lunges towards her phone like it’s in danger. “I hate you,” Dani says through laughter, moving her phone to a safe place and reaching up to cover her now-exposed chest as though it’s not a sight Phoebe has seen countless times.
Phoebe is still hurling splashes her way when Dani stands and runs into the line of fire and jumps into the water beside her.
She only realizes the danger and starts swimming away too late. Dani has an arm around her waist and is clinging to her like a koala. Which thankfully isn’t a problem only because the two of them are taller than any human bendy straws have a right to be and Phoebe can stand before they sink.
Until she feels a kick knock out her knees and both tumble into the water. There’s something in the splashing and giggling and gasping for air that delights Phoebe— she and Dani went down together.
Somewhere in all the tussle, the other string of Dani’s bikini top has come undone from around her ribs. Phoebe only realizes when she crawls to the shallow end of the pool and finds it tangled around her own arm. Dani is pushing her sopping curls off of her face when she notices and screeches and Phoebe pushes off the wall again to try to get away.
This is always so good. Pushing and running and laughing.
Playing.
Dani has always been somebody that she can play with, even after years of being afraid to be too loud or to get sweaty or to be anything other than a quiet accommodating smile sitting passive. They rolled around in the snow their first winter together and they splashed around in a pool like this in Italy so very long ago. Phoebe’s back aches when she crawls into bed most days now because of three decades with terrible posture, but if she tickles Dani when they’re both feeling goofy enough she knows a play fight they don’t bother to pick a winner for will ensue, and it’s really fucking nice. She never takes it for granted. But she also doesn’t always think the thorough thoughts of I appreciate this so much. I love it. I love her because thoughts so rarely are in complete sentences like that.
Dani does get her top back eventually. And she does cover up her tan lines before getting back out of the water again. Phoebe joins her this time, sitting on a lounge chair and letting the warm southern sun dry her skin.
She sees Dani on her phone again and is ready to scold when Dani beats her to it. “I’m not on Twitter!”
“No Instagram either,” Phoebe says.
“Oh,” Dani snorts. “Well…”
Dani holds her phone out for Phoebe, showing a selfie posted to instastories a few minutes ago. It must’ve been taken earlier because Dani’s hair is actually dry; she’s on the lounge chair and squinting both from the sun but also for the sake of a pose. The color of her cheeks matches the color of flowers behind her— red rust and sunkissed.
Some cheeky text on the photo says getting that d vitamin and Phoebe is well familiar with the mental gymnastics that led to Dani typing that. She had to crack a joke to justify posting something that otherwise exists only to say “hey, I look hot!” And because they didn’t actually come out in June like they thought they would do, the caption is both bragging about being on holiday… and implying she’s getting hot Aussie dude attention while they’re here. It doesn’t bother Phoebe other than the twist in her gut that makes her wish Dani didn’t have to make all those little rationales. She wants Dani to be able to post something without weighing the risks and rewards, whether the nice comments she’ll get will be worth the slurs she’ll also get. She wants Dani to be able to feel hot and say she’s hot and feel alright leaving it at that.
She’s wanted that for both of them for a long time.
The chime of someday sits in her head.
Until then, this works. Until then they’ll keep playing around the world and doing the mental gymnastics and crawling into bed together at the end of the day with their aches and pains.
“Your second best pool shot, babe,” Phoebe teases, handing the phone back over and posing with her hand against her forehead like the photo she had teased Dani about months ago in the ninth pinof. She starts to say, Just caught me resting my hand when Dani stands and wrings her long hair out along Phoebe’s back, which is warm from the sun and now cool from the water, and Phoebe squeaks out laughter. She pulls Dani by the hair in a tug that would be ungentle if Dani didn’t move right away with it, bringing her close enough for a giggly kiss.