Devoted
Rosy Adams

January sunshine slants through the glass roof, illuminates the steam rising from the pool. It’s busy. The tail-end of school holidays. Teenagers display to each other, and to the fit young lifeguard on his dais. Small children splash and scream, pairs of older women swim up and down, a leisurely breast-stroke, chatting as they go.

          Ginny sits on the side, feet dangling in the water. The air is a warm fug of stale breath and chlorine. She longs for the crisp snap of frost outside.

          This is her New Year’s resolution: lose weight, get fit, tone up those flabby arms and legs. Starting with swimming, so she can hide her hideous body beneath the water, until she shrinks to the point she can bear to be seen at the gym.

          She should be swimming lengths already, but it’s busy. She’ll sit here a while longer, wait for some space.

          She’s the only one who notices the woman walk in and stand on the other side of the pool. Fully dressed. Looks like she just stepped off the cover of Vogue. Clearly not staff. Not in this ageing, council-run leisure centre.

          All she does is stand there, intent, gazing into the water. Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection.

          Narcissa.

          Narcisse, perhaps. She’s stylish like a Parisienne.

          Get a grip, Ginny. You spend way too much time in your head. That’s what her husband says, although he wouldn’t say it to this woman. He tells beautiful ladies whatever he thinks they want to hear. She should know. She used to be one.

          The woman steps out of her heels and slides the tailored fawn jacket from her shoulders. She moves slowly, each movement a meditation, folding the jacket, placing it over the shoes.

          Ginny expects the lifeguard’s whistle to sound any moment, but he’s busy watching the teenagers, especially the girls, newly aware and proud of their burgeoning curves, striking poses and side-eyeing the boys.

          He should be having a laugh with them but his mum made him get this job. Stay out of trouble, save up for uni in October. He hasn’t told her he’s not going back.

          He catches the movement from the corner of his eye. The woman bending down to place the jacket. She straightens, undoes the matching skirt, lets it slither over her hips. The lifeguard feels dizzy. He realises he’s holding his breath, lets it out in a quiet whoop. 

          She unbuttons her blouse and it seems to him it takes hours, each button a slo-mo scene, a porno build-up. His whistle dangles on a cord around

his neck, forgotten.

          She sloughs off shimmery tights, snake-like, revealing perfect hairless skin. Ginny admires the long, smooth length of her legs, not sure if she wants to be her or worship her. Even at her slimmest she didn’t look like that, and it comes to her all of a sudden; it doesn’t matter. Her husband will never see her the way he would this woman. He will always make little jokes about her looks, about her size, about her scatterbrained daydreaming self that will never ever be good enough.

          Down to underwear now. Understated cream lace hugging the perfect globes of her breasts and bottom. Ginny can’t believe no-one has noticed. She spares a glance for the lifeguard, sees him watching. Like her.

          The lifeguard knows he should get up, blow his whistle at least, but he’s immobilised by a sudden hard-on, painfully intense, and he daren’t stand or draw attention to himself. He closes his eyes, concentrates on his breathing, but the after-image in his head is even more erotic than the real thing. He looks at the other side of the pool, at the fat cow squeezed into a black one-piece, sitting on the side. The swimsuit compresses her flesh, pushes it into rolls and curves, and he imagines her naked, a landscape of hills and valleys. His erection tents his swim shorts and he hunches over to keep it hidden, trying to think of something, anything, that might turn him off.

          The woman looks up, straight into Ginny’s eyes. She reaches around and undoes her bra strap. Cream lace falls to the floor with a limp flutter; a bird shot through the wing.          

          It’s just the two of them, as if she’s standing right in front of Ginny, no expanse of water between.

          Ginny can’t look away, doesn’t want to look away, but she can hear the hush rippling outward followed by gasps, whispers, muffled laughter.

          The woman hooks her thumbs into the waist band of her knickers and pushes them down, revealing a tapered line of dark blonde. An arrow. She is a goddess, and Ginny is her devotee.

          She raises her arms, and her breasts pull high, showing the curve of her ribs. Eyes closed, she leaps, arching like a salmon, through the miasma of stale breath and chlorine, into the water.

          The swimmers fall back to the edges of the pool, a collective held breath, waiting for her to surface. When she doesn’t come back up the lifeguard realises he has to act. He dives, strikes downwards, eyes open, scanning, despite the chlorine sting. He can’t see anyone. He surfaces, takes a breath, dives again, and this time he’s sure. She’s not there. He climbs out, thinking she must have swum underwater to the side.

          Ginny is sure the woman never came out of the pool, but she can see clear down to the bottom and there’s nothing there. She stands, walks to the other side, and while everyone is distracted by the lifeguard’s attempted rescue, she picks up the discarded pile of clothes and walks out.

          When she gets home, she goes straight to the bathroom and locks the door. She shakes out each thing, holding it up against the light, then refolding it with care. She can’t resist burying her face in the blouse, inhaling. A hint of vanilla, a tang of fresh sweat under the arms.

          Last, the shoes. Stiletto heels, fine cream leather edged with Swarovski crystals. The bold scarlet soles are slick to touch, and she has a sudden urge to lick them from toe to heel. Disturbed, she puts them on the floor, away from temptation.

          But it couldn’t hurt to try them on. She dares to slide a foot into one. It won’t fit, she’s sure of it, but the shoe is snug as Cinderella’s slipper. She puts on the other, stands with a hand on the wall to steady herself. She never wears shoes like this. She moves across the floor, and the effort of balancing gives her walk a slow sway.

          She takes them off, hides them in the back of her wardrobe. The clothes go in a drawer beneath a pile of shabby t-shirts.  

          That night, she lies awake. Her husband snores, one meaty arm thrown across her. She replays the moment, the bow of the body slicing into the water. She edges away from her husband, and when there’s sufficient space between them she licks two fingers and slides them between her legs. She replays the scene, slowing it down, zooming in on every little detail. She strokes and circles until she sees in her head, the woman looking up, meeting her eyes, and her back arches in a shuddering whole-body climax, lips clamped together to hold in her cries, not wanting to share that moment with anyone, particularly not the man lying by her side.

          Across town, the lifeguard is twitching and mumbling in his sleep. He is dreaming of the woman, of finding her body, weeks later, pale and bloated. No-one else is there and he has to drag her out of the pool on his own. Her flesh feels spongy and her hair tangles around his wrists. He pulls away, but finds himself in his lifeguard’s chair again, the pool full of people, the woman beginning to take off her clothes. Again, the hard ache of erection, again he dives in, and this time the water is warm and all-enveloping, pulsing, amniotic fluid, and there’s a vast clenching within and without.

          He wakes in a tangle of duvet, sweat-damp, rapidly cooling cum all over his belly and thighs.

          When he gets to work, the woman in the black one-piece is sitting on the side, like before. She looks up, catches him staring, then goes back to gazing across the pool. He realises she’s watching the place where she stood.

          She sits on the side for the full forty-five minute session. Normally, he would have thought she was mental, but he’s doing the same thing.

          Sitting.

          Watching.

          Ginny can’t say why she goes back, why she sits and stares at the place. When she looks up, sees the lifeguard staring, she’s sure he feels it too.

          They are the echoes.

          Ginny dawdles in the changing rooms, waits until everyone else has left. The woman’s clothes don’t fit, but she has a dress, one she has never dared to wear before. A heavy, shimmery jersey material, red like the soles of the shoes, with diamanté buttons.

          Each step is a prayer, a conscious movement, gauging balance and grip on the slippy tiles. She sways out of the changing rooms, peeking into the main pool area. The lifeguard is there, standing on the edge, where she stood. The water is a flat blue sheet. Without the daytime ripple and splash, it’s like a photograph. Ginny walks to her place, opposite the lifeguard.

          He looks up.

          She steps out of the shoes, keeping her eyes on his. Undoes her dress, slow, button by button. Lets it slide off her shoulders and puddle on the tiles. Nothing underneath.

          The lifeguard is wondering why he called her a fat cow, even in the privacy of his own thoughts. She is glorious. The pool lights gild the curve of breast, hip, thigh, and the hair between her legs is a dark swirl, unmapped.

          As he watches, she raises her arms and dives into the water. He knows what to do next. He pulls off his clothes, jumps in without a thought. They meet beneath the surface. Lips, hands, skin pressed against skin, breath held until the frantic pumping of their hearts forces them to the surface, water and tears streaming down faces, hair seal-slick.

          This is the beginning.

          The first devotional.