Page 49 of Back to 1984: The Birthday I Went Back

“Lorrie?”

“I’m fine.”

He didn’t believe me, but he didn’t push. Instead he looked at the pool. “Do people actually wait thirty minutes to swim after eating?”

“Maybe little kids?”

Paul moved his feet through the water, making ripples that spread toward the lights. “I haven’t been swimming all summer.”

“I know you own a swimsuit.”

He looked toward the house, then back at me. “Would your mother object?”

“To swimming?”

“To me swimming.”

“Maybe in the lake since it’s getting dark, but in the pool? Probably not.” I smiled. “In your pants, definitely.”

“I have gym shorts in the car.”

I stared at him. “You do?”

“I went to the club before work.”

“That’s very productive.” I smiled. “Get them. I need to see this.”

He returned from the Saab a minute later with navy gym shorts and a T-shirt from some charity run his mother had probably organized, then disappeared into the pool house to change. When he came out, I really looked at him.

He was leaner than Dean, less broad through the shoulders, with long runner’s legs and a fading tan line at his wrist where his watch usually sat. He looked younger. That sounds ridiculous, since he was twenty-five, but Paul often carried himself as if he were practicing to be forty. In gym shorts, with his hair mussed and his shirt faded from too many washings, he looked like someone who might once have cannonballed into a lake before anyone told him not to splash everyone.

“Well?” he said.

“I’m reevaluating several assumptions.”

“I’m not sure I like that.”

I slid into the water first, and swam backward while he stood at the edge.