I. The Roof

The heat wave had been going for nine days, and by midnight the apartment felt like the inside of a mouth. Elena Reyes lay on top of her sheets with every window open and a fan pushing the same warm air from one side of the room to the other. She gave up at 11:40. She pulled her black one-piece on over bare skin, put a towel around her shoulders, and took the elevator to the roof.

She had lived in the building for five weeks. She’d seen the pool on the day she signed the lease and not since. Her job, drafting hospital wings for a firm that billed in six-minute increments, had eaten every evening she had. There was also the matter of her ex, who had moved out in the spring and left the whole city feeling like a place she wasn’t allowed in. Elena was twenty-three, and she had told herself she was resting.

The door at the top of the stairs stuck, then gave. The night outside was thick and warm and smelled of chlorine and hot tar. The city glowed orange along the edges of the sky, and above it a handful of stars showed through the haze. The pool lights were still on, a long rectangle of unreal blue, and someone was already in it.

She was swimming laps. Elena stopped at the edge of the deck with her towel balled in her fist and watched. The woman had a swimmer’s stroke, long and unhurried, with a rhythm that never broke. At each wall she tucked, flipped, and came off the tiles in a smooth glide. When she finally stopped, she hung at the far end with her forearms on the gutter, chest heaving. She pushed her hair back with both hands, and Elena saw auburn, darkened to the color of wet copper.

She should leave. She was thinking it clearly when the woman turned her head and looked straight at her.

“You can come in,” the woman called. Her voice carried easily over the water. It was low, a little amused, and not at all startled. “I don’t bite. Not before the second date.”

Elena laughed before she could stop herself. It came out of her like something that had been stuck in her chest for months.

II. Water

The water was the temperature of skin. Elena lowered herself in from the shallow steps and felt the day come off her in layers, the office and the commute and the long quiet evenings. She pushed off the wall and swam a slow, careful length. When she surfaced, the woman was treading water an arm’s length away.

“Maya,” she said. “Eighth floor. I come up here most nights, and I haven’t seen you before.”

“Elena.” She cleared her throat, suddenly self-conscious. “Fourth floor. I moved in last month.” She said it between breaths, with her eyes on the water. “I work a lot.”

“Doing what?”

“Architecture. Well. Drafting. I’m the one who draws the stairwells nobody ever thanks.”

“That explains the shoulders.” Maya tilted her head. In the blue light Elena could see her properly: a strong, handsome face with a broken-in look, a scatter of freckles across the nose, and a mouth that seemed to be holding a joke it hadn’t decided to tell. Maya was twenty-five, she’d say later. She had swum all through college, coached at a masters club now, and still got in the water every night because she didn’t know how to stop. Her black racing suit stretched over broad shoulders and a full chest, and over hips and thighs that made Elena’s eyes do something she didn’t want to examine. “You’ve been carrying them up around your ears since you got in.”

“Desk work.”

“It adds up.” Maya drifted nearer. “I could fix that. I’m good at it. Shoulders are basically my whole personality.”

Elena knew exactly what was happening, and her face went hot. She wasn’t naive. She knew a line when she heard one, and she knew what it meant when a woman offered to put her hands on you at midnight and said it with her eyes on your mouth. What she didn’t know was what to do with her own hands, or her face, or the loud, sudden pounding of her heart. She was terrified of getting it wrong. She was more terrified of saying no.

She had known she liked women since she was nineteen. There had been one girl in college, a long fumbling autumn that ended when the girl moved across the country, and then two boyfriends who were kind and fine and a little like looking at a painting through glass. The second had been the last. She had never once said the word out loud in this building. She had never said it to anyone at the firm.

She turned around in the water, put her back to Maya, and let her shoulders drop.

“O-okay,” she said, so quietly it barely carried over the water.

Maya’s hands were warm even in the warm water. They settled on either side of Elena’s neck and stayed there a moment without moving, as if taking a reading. Then her thumbs found the knots at the base of Elena’s skull and pressed in, slow and firm, in small circles.

Elena let out a sound she’d never meant to make, and clapped her lips shut, mortified.

“Don’t hide it,” Maya murmured, smiling. “There she is.”

The thumbs moved down along her spine and out across the tops of her shoulders, working the muscle until it melted. Elena’s head hung forward. The water lapped at her collarbones. She was aware of everything at once: the heat of the hands, the faint tick of the pool filter, the bare inches of water between her back and Maya’s front. Each time Maya shifted, Elena felt the brush of a body there, and then not.

The hands went lower. They slid over her shoulder blades and reached the edge of her swimsuit at the back, where the straps crossed. They paused there, fingertips resting against the wet fabric.

“I can go lower,” Maya said, very quietly, close to her ear. “If you want. Say no and I’ll stop, and we’ll just swim.”

Elena’s heart was going hard enough to ripple the surface. She thought about the girl in college. She thought about the glass between herself and every man she’d ever slept with. She thought, I am twenty-three years old and I am so tired of waiting for permission.

“Please,” she whispered, and her voice cracked on it. “I just ... I don’t want to be awkward. I don’t really know how to do this.”

“You’re doing it right now.” Maya’s lips brushed her shoulder. “Just let me.”

III. The Wall

They drifted to the shallow end without either of them deciding to. Maya’s hands came around to Elena’s hips and turned her, and then Elena’s back met the cool tile of the pool wall and Maya stepped in close, and there was nowhere for either of them to look but at each other.

“This okay?” Maya asked.

“Yes.”

“Tell me if it stops being.”

“It’s okay.” Elena’s voice was barely a whisper. Her hands hung at her sides, uncertain where they were allowed to go. “I just ... I might be bad at this. It’s been a while, and I don’t really know...”

“Hey.” Maya’s thumb brushed her cheekbone. “There’s no bad. Do you want me to kiss you?”

Elena nodded, her face burning. “Please.”

Maya did. The first touch was almost careful, her lips barely resting on Elena’s, a question asked in the softest way she knew. Elena answered it. She opened her mouth and slid her hands up Maya’s wet ribs, and felt Maya’s breath leave her in a shaky rush. After that the kiss stopped being careful. It was slow and deep and wet, and the water moved between them as their tongues slid against each other. Elena tasted chlorine and salt and something sweeter underneath, and she thought, dizzily, that nobody had ever kissed her like she was being eaten.

Their bodies pressed together all the way down. Maya’s full breasts crushed against Elena’s smaller ones, and through two layers of wet lycra Elena could feel the hard points of both their nipples. Maya’s thigh slid between her legs. Elena gasped into her mouth and ground down against it without meaning to.

“God, you’re responsive,” Maya breathed against her lips. “You have no idea. You taste even better than I thought you would.”

“You thought about this?”

“Since the day you moved in. I saw you carrying boxes through the lobby.” Maya bit at her lower lip. “I almost offered to help, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands to myself.”

Elena pulled her closer, so hungry she could barely think. Her hands crept up Maya’s back, then lower, hesitant, until Maya’s low, approving groan gave her courage and she gripped the round curve of her ass through the swimsuit. Maya groaned, low in her throat, and rolled her hips forward in answer.

“I want to touch you,” Maya said. “Properly. Right here.”

“Anyone could come up.”

“Nobody comes up. The pool closed at ten, and I’m the only one who ever uses the key fob after hours.” Maya’s mouth found the hollow under her ear. “But if you want to stop, we stop.”

“I don’t want to stop.”

Maya’s hand slid down Elena’s hip and found the edge of the swimsuit where it cut high across her thigh. She hooked two fingers under the fabric and dragged it to the side. The warm water rushed in against Elena’s bare pussy, so strange and intimate that she gasped. Then Maya’s fingertips found her clit, already swollen and aching, and began to circle it.

“Oh, fuck,” Elena said.

“You’re so wet.” Maya’s lips brushed her ear. “I can feel it even through the water. You’re slick as hell. Do you know how bad you want this?”

“Yes. God, yes.”

She wrapped a leg around Maya’s waist, then the other, and the water took most of her weight. Maya held her against the wall with one forearm braced under her ass. Her fingers kept up their slow, maddening circles on Elena’s clit, and then she slid two of them inside. They went in easily, past the first tight resistance, and curled up toward her belly.

Elena’s head dropped back against the tile. A sound came out of her that would have embarrassed her anywhere else.

“Look at me,” Maya said. “Elena. Open your eyes.”

She did. Maya’s face was inches away, flushed, her lips swollen, her eyes dark and steady and completely focused. Elena had never in her life been looked at like that. It wasn’t hunger exactly. It was attention. Maya was watching every flicker across her face, reading each breath, learning her. She fucked her fingers into her in a patient rhythm that grew faster and harder as Elena’s hips began to meet it, and her thumb ground down on Elena’s clit with exactly the right pressure.

“Don’t stop,” Elena whispered. Her voice shook. “Please, Maya. Right there. Right there.”

“Listen to how wet you are.” Maya drove her fingers in deeper, and the slick sound of it carried even through the water. “Hear that? That’s your pussy begging for me. You were this wet before I even touched you, weren’t you? Standing up here in the dark, watching me swim, getting your little black suit soaked.”