Hands-On - part 1 (Patreon)

Part 2 is available here.

A second ago I was telling Connor to quit forcing it, that the girl at the diving board could smell the try on him from across the pool. A second ago. Then the bottom drops out of everything, a long greasy slide like a cable letting go, no pain in it, just a wrongness that goes all the way down, and when it stops the world has reset an inch lower and a stranger's weight away. There was a Modelo in my hand and both feet flat on the concrete and the body I'd worn for forty-six years. Now the bottle's gone, there's a sweating cocktail glass in fingers slimmer than mine, and the concrete's the same concrete except I'm lower to it, looking up at Connor where I stood eye to eye with him a breath ago.

Everything's closer to the surface. The sun on my shoulders isn't just warm, it goes somewhere, a flush spreading down my chest and settling low. A breeze comes off the pool and crosses my stomach and my whole front tightens, two points on my chest drawing up hard against triangles of fabric that are barely there, two strings and a guess. I'm in a string bikini. I can feel exactly how much of me it doesn't cover, the damp heat where my thighs meet, open air over everything else, and when I shift my weight the whole front of me moves with it, soft and heavy, a sway I'm not driving.

Connor's already turned to me. Running the open I built for him, the lean, the beat of eye contact and the look away, and it takes me too long to understand he's running it on me. He doesn't know me. He's looking at a woman in a bikini he's never seen, and the woman is me, and I watch his pupils do the thing I taught a hundred guys to wait for.

I'm being looked at. Not just him. There's a guy at the grill who's quit turning the burgers, two more by the cooler, and the weight of all of it lands on my skin like a temperature, every one of them running the same slow inventory down and back up that I used to coach. By the deep end a woman in a black one-piece looks me over once, flat, and goes back to her friend, and somehow hers is worse, that cool quick measuring, like I've been priced and shelved.

And the looking does something I can't get out ahead of. Down low, where there's a fold and a give now instead of what I had this morning, there's a slow heavy pulse, the lips of it gone tender and swollen, a wet building between them that the thin bikini does nothing to keep from me even if it keeps it from them. The more eyes land on me the heavier it gets. Being looked at is what's doing it. That's the part that turns my stomach, that a guy at a grill running his eyes down my chest is enough to make me slick, that this body reads attention as a reason to get ready for something.

His fingers land above my hip. Bare skin. The touch goes in wrong, straight up and through, a hot line off five fingertips lighting every nerve from his hand to my spine, and the glass leaves my hand and bursts on the deck. Ice and cold up the back of a calf gone smooth, and even that fires too bright.

Both hands come up. One shoves his chest. The other's clamped over my own without my say and there's weight in it, soft and full, spilling past my palm, the nipple dragging under the string as I grip and a wire snapping tight down through my belly to that same swollen ache that pulls in on nothing. The ache is what I can't think past. And I sense her Opal neural implant picking now to help. A calm settles over me from the inside like a hand laid on the back of my neck, a pull to drop my shoulders and slow my breath, the same steadying my implant worked into me on a thousand approaches, except it's reading this body's terror as cold feet before a set and trying to walk me down off it, and I'd dig it out through the bone if I could reach it. I hear the sound I make, high and frightened, a stranger's pitch out of a throat gone narrow.

Connor doesn't move. Reads my hand on his chest as the soft no, the test, hold your frame. I taught him to wait through exactly this. His hand stays at my waist, five separate points of heat, my skin answering each one whether I want it to or not.

The Modelo's gone. My phone was in my shorts and there are no shorts. Wallet, keys, the truck in the parking lot, the whole body I woke up in this morning, gone, up and walking around somewhere with somebody else behind my face. I'm standing barefoot in two strings on a pool deck with a hand full of my own breast and no way to prove to a single soul out here that I'm anybody.

He looks down again, slower, to where my hand still cups myself, and back up. He likes it. I taught him to look exactly that long.