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“And where the hell did you learn to do this?”
Del laughs, incredulously watching Wayne pick the lock on the window. The wind is blowing cold in the night around them, her hair with it, but she doesn’t shiver. Wayne looks back at her with a quiet grin and shrugs, in the way he does when he’s trying not to act like he’s showing off.
“Picked it up in juvie.”
Without further address, he slides the window open and looks inside. The pool building is built mostly underground, and the way it's structured means there’s more than a bit of a drop. The window’s also not particularly big, so Wayne doesn’t know how much control he’ll have of how he lands.
Well, there’s no better way to find out.
That’s kind of the only thought he has before jumping through the window and inside. If he had another it’d probably be to tell Del not to worry about helping him if he breaks a bone or something, but he’s not sure that message would’ve been of any use anyways.
Thankfully, he doesn’t break anything on the way down, but he stumbles a little after landing and has to pick himself off the ground all the while his girlfriend is gaping a few feet above.
“What the fuck, Wayne.”
Wayne just steadies himself on the floor beneath the window. He’s not sure if that was a question or not.
“You ready?” He asks, grinning up at her.
Del looks at him like he’s crazy, but she can’t stop herself from laughing as she responds.
“No! No, I’m not ready, Jesus.” Her words are a stage whisper. Cautious even though it’s only them in the building.
“I’ll catch you,” Wayne says, holding his arms out like it’s obvious. Del rolls her eyes.
“Cool, then we’ll both break something,” she dismisses.
Wayne huffs and looks around for something else to break her fall. Del takes a better look at the floor. She’s a good way up but it’s not too high.
She instructs Wayne to grab a few of the floating mats and lay them flat on the ground below the window to which he quickly complies. She turns around and tries to lower herself steadily as far as she can before letting go. Which shortened the fall by a good while, but Del is unsurprised to find herself caught in his arms anyway.
She turns around and snorts as he nods and cautiously moves away afterward, looking anywhere but her as if nothing happened. He gets a kiss on the cheek for his troubles, which manages only to make him more awkward about everything.
This was a really stupid idea.
Initially, Del did figure there was a chance making some wistful off-hand comment about missing pool hopping with her mother in Wayne’s company would end up with them breaking into the Brockton Aquatic Centre around midnight. She honestly just thought she’d do better at resisting whatever invitation of legal misdemeanor he'd produce, but in the end it didn’t really take much convincing.
The pools after hours are… eerie. The room is lit by the fluorescent lamps in the water that probably give the place a heck of an atmosphere when it isn’t closed and empty. Now, with the contrast of the low-lit dingy off-white walls cluttered with pool tubes and water damaged posters, it just makes the place seem like a great venue for being stabbed or drowned.
Wayne takes a seat at the edge of the pool, staring into the body of water like it’s his first time being near one. The small blue light of the pool makes his face look a little softer than it had just a moment ago. Somehow Del doesn’t think he brought her out here to stab or drown her, so she takes a seat next to him.
She waits for him to say something. And moment after moment, that moment doesn’t come, so she has to be the one to break the atmosphere.
“What are we doing here?” She asks, as quiet as can be with her voice reverberating from wall to wall.
Wayne shrugs.
“You said you missed going swimming.”
Del rolls her eyes. It’s to keep herself from smiling more than anything. She really can’t keep encouraging this. For a moment she just sits there, biting the inside of her cheek, trying to decide where her head is at with this. Then, she stands, sliding off the jacket he gave her on the way over and handing it back to him. Wayne seems a little confused.
“You really could’ve said something earlier,” she says, pulling off her hoodie. “They invented bathing suits for a reason, y’know?”
Del’s hands come to the button of her jeans and Wayne seems to understand what she means, if the way his gaze snaps to the tiles on the floor is anything to go off of.
“Right-” he clears his throat. “Sorry.”
Del snorts, leaving her jeans in a pile with the hoodie and her shoes. She never really got the big cultural stigma about underwear that differentiated it from bikinis or speedos. She lifts her shirt over her head and she’s basically in an impractical bikini. Wayne doesn’t look up from his tile. Fuck, it’s cold in here.
Del sits back down at the edge of the pool, slowly easing a foot into the water. Freezing as expected.
“You swimming in that?” Del gestures to, well, Wayne. His hands are stuffed into the pockets of his hoodie, and his vans are still tightly laced. Wayne shakes his head.
“I don’t swim.” He shrugs, risking a glance, just at her face.
“Don’t or won’t?” Del tugs at his hoodie, moving a little closer when he laughs and tries to swat her away. “C’mon, you didn’t bring me all the way out here just to play lifeguard, did you?”
“Can’t,” he wrangles himself out of her grasp, an amused smile on his face.
“Yeah? Why the hell not?”
Del gets close enough to make him uncomfortable, just to see him a little flustered. Wayne flicks another glance her way and reddens.
“Can’t swim. Don’t know how.”
Del doesn’t even think. She jumps in the water, coming to stand, shivering, in front of him. He barks a surprised laugh and once she’s through the shock in the temperature, she grabs him by the wrists.
“Take your clothes off and get in here.”
Wayne’s face cycles through about 30 emotions in the next 3 seconds.
“Um. What?”
Del lets him go and kicks off from the wall. She feels herself getting louder.
“I’ll teach you.”
It seems to take another second to register, but Wayne gives a smile as he stands from the tile, almost shy. Stupidly, it makes Del feel a little warmer in the cold water.
---
Sometimes, Wayne thinks his girlfriend is trying to kill him. It’s alarmingly unclear whether or not he minds.
The water is freezing, which makes every brush of her hands on his skin as she tries to maneuver him into a more teachable position feel like it burns. It’s kind of nice.
It's a foreign feeling, swimming, but he thinks he takes to it alright. Del seems to think so, at least, and that's reassuring. Most of it is just getting used to the feeling of being underwater. Everything else is more or less self explanatory, by a basic standard.
“Just- relax, keep your shoulders down and…”
She's trying to get him to float on his back, which doesn't seem like it should be humanly possible, but she insists, so he goes along. He brings his legs in front of him, steadied by her hand on his back. He's trying really hard to think about the mural on the roof and not the feeling of her hands running over his spine.
He's not very good at floating it seems, when she takes her hand away and gravity pulls him back underwater almost immediately. She helps him resurface.
“Okay, nevermind, we gave that a go,” Del says with a laugh, making her way over to the nearest wall.
She jumps up and sits at the edge of the pool. He comes to float between her legs without thinking about it.
“Sorry,” Wayne says, and Del makes a face.
“Don't be sorry, you idiot. This was fun.” She reaches out, and her hands brush his wet hair back. Wayne smiles bashfully.
“How'd you manage being seventeen not knowing how to swim, anyways?” She asks.
Wayne shrugs.
“No one taught me. I think Dad didn’t think he needed to. He tried sending me to boy scouts when I was little. I think he thought they'd teach me.”
Del makes an amused huff.
“So what happened to boy scouts?”
“Never went. Uniform scratched my arms weird so I tried to burn it in the backyard.”
Del's laughter, sharp and bright, fills the room.
“Jesus. How old were you?”
“Like… seven, I think.”
“Jesus,” she laughs again. They’re quiet for a moment as she scans around the room like she’s looking for something in the walls. She probably should’ve raised this question sooner. “How do we get out?”
Wayne manages to push himself up and out of the pool, with only minimal effort. He mirrors Del's position, crossing his legs on the tile.
“Uh…” Wayne follows her gaze and similarly scans the room. “We can probably put some, uh… stuff… up. Under a window.”
Del hums in agreement, not because she’s happy with that answer, she’s just happy with putting that matter aside till later. She looks at Wayne, who’s turning every which way trying to concoct an escape, and she just huffs a laugh and taps him on the shoulder, shaking her head in an effortless don’t worry about it he wouldn’t be able to read from anyone else.
Maybe he's tired, maybe it's late, but he's not shying away from looking at her anymore. Maybe it's because she's looking back.
“How’d you learn? Swimming and that,” he says, blinking.
Del tilts her head in consideration.
“My Ma taught me. We were too broke for actual lessons, dad said, but she’d take me up to the river, over by Sloughton. Cause it’s not like we had this whole public pool get-up back when she was, y’know, but… yeah. She just thought it was… important, or whatever. That I learn. She loved swimming.”
Part-way through, Del catches him looking at her and looks away, cheeks twinging pink, like she’s embarrassed to be talking for so long. Wayne doesn’t look away. She clears her throat, continuing, trying to be casual about it.
“She said… uh… She said sometimes she felt like something was crushing her. Maybe not anything in particular, just… living. Feeling. It was a lot. But in the water everything was just… Well, it was just easier. She felt lighter, I think.”
Wayne's gaze flicks back to the tile as he takes that in. Del's been talking about her ma much more often recently, which he thinks is good. He likes hearing about this kind of stuff, always has. Not just from her, but she's been a little… withdrawn lately. Not necessarily from him, but still. It means a lot that she trusts him with this kind of thing.
“Do you… feel like that too?” He asks before he can stop himself. He's not sure that he really wanted to.
Del doesn't need to think about her answer, but there's a long beat of silence between them anyway that Wayne doesn't dare disturb. Silence is always easier than words for her, and Wayne thinks he understands that.
“Yeah,” she says, like she's letting out a long breath. “It used to be pretty bad, but…”
She wants to tell him. About the months after her mom died, about the months after he was arrested. She wants to tell him how it felt trusting someone to carry the weight of just being around her so often only to feel it fall right back on her shoulders. But she doesn't know if she'll be able to forgive herself for that kind of vulnerability. She looks at him, still gazing at the tile like he's trying not to startle her, and she feels like she could tell him everything.
Instead, she says: “I'm glad we did this.”
Wayne's eyes snap back up to hers, and he smiles comfortably. There's a flicker of mischief in his eye, and that's all the warning she gets before he gets up and jumps back in the pool. She doesn't have time to recover from being splashed in the face before he's pulling her by the arms.
“Wayne, what the fuck-”
Her words dissolve into laughter as she hits the water once again. Once he lets go of her arms, her first move is to splash the shit out of him.
“Asshole!” She says, as if they both didn't know damn well he wasn't pulling hard enough to do that without her volition.
Wayne just laughs, and splashes her back.
After a while of floating around, play-fighting like toddlers in the water, resolved by a breath-holding competition Wayne didn't have a chance of winning to begin with, they come to rest, each half-sitting on a raised platform within the water. Del has no idea what the practical purpose of it is. Maybe just so the lifeguards can tell kids off for diving from it.
Wayne's fidgeting with his hands, avoiding looking at her. She thinks she knows what he's about to ask her, so she speaks first.
“I'm getting better.” She takes a breath before continuing. God, she hates talking about her feelings. “It comes and goes now, it's not as bad, but… I'm feeling better, so. Thank you.”
Wayne shrugs, because he feels weird about how happy that makes him.
“It's nothing.”
Del rolls her eyes at that, but he continues.
“I think Orlando's got a friend who has a pool. I could ask him-”
Del cuts him off with a laugh, because of course he's planning pool dates now. Of course that's what he takes from this. He's kind of smiling at the noise, his brows furrowed in confusion. She just looks at him for a moment, and without thinking, brushes a hand through his wet hair.
“It ain't the water that's helping.”
She drops her hand, fingers brushing over his. If she were a stronger person, she might've been able to linger in the moment for longer than that. But the amount of time it takes for Wayne to register what she means is the same amount of time it takes her to get uncomfortable with the openness of the moment, so before he responds, she pushes off of the platform, floating a short ways away.
“Wanna see me do a handstand?” She says, suddenly giggly.
Wayne isn't easily redirected, but he just rolls his eyes and follows her in.
---
“What about that one?”
“... Not sure. I think a dirt bike thing again.”
Del's eyes widen of their own accord, her hand pressing properly against the side of his chest.
“You got that in a dirt bike accident?”
Thoroughly splashed out, Del and Wayne have moved back to dry land. Without towels, they're waiting to dry off the old-fashioned way. So to pass time they've gradually moved from regular chit-chat to doing what every other teenage couple probably does in their underwear. Comparing scars.
Wayne needs to take a long minute to think about it, staring at the line by his ribs. Not particularly long or wide, but especially deep.
“Oh. I got it from surgery. Broken rib.”
The most interesting thing about this process for Del is how consistently nonchalant Wayne is about the stories she's hearing.
“And how’d you manage to break a rib?”
“Dirt bike thing.”
She nods, not sure what else she was expecting.
“Right.”
Wayne takes her hand in his, examining a mark on her arm. Short, but thick. Faded, but a noticeable divot. He brushes a thumb gently over it and looks up at Del like he's asking if he's imagining it. She follows his movements and snorts.
“Oh my god, I can't believe I still have that.” She's visibly entertained by the memory. “So, when my brothers were about nine or ten, my dad got them a bow and some arrows. And not like a toy kit or something for kids, like an actual recurve bow for them to share.”
Wayne blinks, a look of concerned disbelief already on his face, because there's only one way this story can go.
“And they got pretty good. One of his buddies from work came over sometimes and taught them, and he was an asshole but he could shoot. So they were pretty full of themselves by the time everything happened.”
Del pulls her arm out of Wayne's grasp, inspecting the mark herself.
“And so I was about five. Barely. And one day my ma went inside while we were all playing in the yard and they decided they wanted me to hold up an apple from the neighbor’s tree, so they could shoot it into the fence, like in the movies.”
Wayne's eyebrows furrow, his features already pulled tight in concern, which just makes her laugh.
“So yeah. Thank God they didn't ask me to balance it on my head or I wouldn't be here today.” She laughs, and Wayne has to let out a huff of amusement at the absurdity. “Ma came out when she heard they were shooting, but it was too late. It's kind of a miracle it grazed me the way it did, but. Y'know. I probably would've preferred not being shot in the first place. They lost the bow and had to clean the bathroom for two months, which is probably how long it took ma to talk to dad after it happened.”
“Jesus Christ,” Wayne mutters, brushing over the mark again.
Del notes that they're both probably dry enough to think about leaving, but she's not in a hurry. She takes in Wayne, hair wet and messy as ever, fingers calloused and long and warm on her arm.
“We should probably get going soon,” she says because she has to.
Wayne makes a noise in response, his hand trailing down to end up in hers.
“Hey…” she starts when she notices a small, light line diagonal on his forearm. “How long have you had this?”
He slowly withdraws his arm from her reach, getting up with a stretch, his body tense with awkward movement.
“Uh… not sure.”
Del narrows her eyes, standing in turn. They've been open about wanting to avoid the relatively heavier stories, at least for tonight, so she's not sure why he'd lie, given his distaste for it.
“How'd you get it?”
She presses on, grabbing her clothes from the floor and starting to dress. Meanwhile, Wayne wanders around the space, looking for stuff to assist their escape.
“Uh. A fight, probably.”
She's not completely dry, so she decides to leave jeans for last, because they're going to be a hassle.
“What, like a knife fight?” Her voice is incredulous as she pulls her hoodie over her head, followed by her socks on her feet.
Wayne stops and sighs. He's gotten a little better, but as it stands, he still can't lie. Especially not to her.
“It was-”
His farce is saved by the sound of the front door opening, and footsteps echoing from the lobby.
The matter is dropped as the two scramble to assemble everything they came in with. There's not really anywhere to hide out here, and Del's instincts are telling her to make a run for the changing rooms, so they end up in the girl's changing room.
They move quickly to a stall, which turns out to be one of the showers. Wayne fumbles to get into a state of dress while Del's attention is taken by a window above them. She can't reach it, but it looks big enough to fit someone of her stature. She's not sure about Wayne, though.
She taps him on the shoulder as he's shimmying his pants back on. She points to the window. She has the courtesy to put her jeans back on before asking him to lift her a little higher, no matter how much of a struggle it is. Then, the struggle is giving him nonverbal instructions to get her high enough to see if it opens, so she kind of just shoves him down so she can get on his shoulders. And then he gets it.
The window doesn't have any stop mechanism in place. It opens all the way, and it's definitely big enough for her to get through. She doesn't bother with the charades this time.
“You think you could make it through here?”
Wayne looks up and thinks. He shakes his head.
“Shit.”
Del finds her way back down, shoving her shoes on. Wayne pulls his own hoodie on, then shoves his jacket through the window. Del gives him a confused look.
“I'll find another way,” he explains, kneeling as if to give her a boost. She shakes her head vigilantly, but he doesn't budge, and she thinks she hears the door to the main pool open.
“Fuck,” she whispers, quickly bending down to give him a peck on the lips. “I hate you. If you get arrested again I’m gonna kill you.”
Wayne just responds with a kiss to her cheek.
“I know.”
And with that, she takes the boost.
She lands hard on the outside of the aquatic center, and supposes all she can do is wait. She sits under a nearby tree for cover, and waits.
After only about a minute, her mind is racing. He's still technically out of juvie on probation. She doesn't know what she'll do if he has to go back in. She knows it'll be her fault if he does, and she-
And after only two minutes, Wayne taps her on the shoulder, offering his hand to help her up. Her breath catches in fright that wears off easily as she registers the same slight line across his forearm she'd been inspecting earlier.
“I got it trying to fish my dad's keys out of the garbage disposal,” he offers, following her gaze.
She grins up at him, letting him pull her to her feet, and following the momentum into his chest.
“Of course you did,” she snickers into his chest, wrapping an arm around his shoulders.
They untangle a moment after that, and for once, Wayne gets a word in before Del can change the subject.
“I don't think it was the water helping your ma either.”
He looks straight at her when he says it, and Del doesn't know how he does it. There's an air of uncertainty in his gaze. He doesn't know if he was allowed to say that.
Del just blinks for a moment. She had never really thought about that. She had spent a lot of time in those first few months without her mom thinking about those last days she had with her. That last time they went pool-hopping. She'd blamed herself a lot, for not noticing, not knowing what was going on with her.
She hadn't actually thought of it like that.
She doesn't know how to respond to that. She figures she probably should, that she's done enough emotional sidestepping for one night, but it doesn't make it any easier.
In the end, she grabs for Wayne's hand and tugs.
“C’mon. Let's get lost.”
Because they can always talk about it later. For once, she knows they've got time.