Free Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw

it.”
    “Ian might have a lousy watch.”
    “Might. Never can tell,” Marty says.
    Jesse laughs, both because she’s nervous about being down here in the middle of the night, and because here they are, at the Olympics, and Marty’s trying to pull the cheapest sort of club pool psych-out.
    “Fastest,” she whispers now, tapping her own heart. Then, tapping Jesse’s, she says, “Second fastest. Everyone else eats our wake.”
    Jesse stands listening to her pulse pounding in her temples, and to the dogs, for the light years until Marty says, “Seems to call for something, doesn’t it?” Even though the words are spoken low, they seem to Jesse—wholly unversed in the mechanics of seduction—to ring off the tiles. Even though it is the lightest imaginable touch, Jesse feels the whorls of Marty’s fingerprints burning into the soft skin at her throat.
    And that’s it. She can’t push it any further, although there surely was a further. As hard as she can stare at the insides of her eyelids, she can’t bring the colors back.
     
    Neal is easy to wake up, even in the middle of the night, even when he’s on his back with his mouth open, looking like a fighter on the canvas, out for the count. She touches him and his eyes pop open.
    “The baby!” he says, startled, but alert, ready to go.
    “No, it’s just me. I’m all riled up.”
    He rolls over and props himself on an elbow and touches the scar at her jaw. She wonders how he can even find it in just the moonlight.
    “It’s the air conditioning,” he says. “It throws the ions in the atmosphere out of kilter. I read it somewhere. If the heat keeps up, we should really just go down and sleep in the cave.”
    “No. It’s my past.”
    “Your checkered past?”
    “My aquatic past. I took Alice Avery out to the quarry today. She remembers me from back when. Something about that nerves me up. Gets me to thinking old thoughts.”
    “But all that’s over, dead and done, a million miles behind you.”
    She rolls away from him, looking for comfort in what used to be their old spooning position, only now she’s too big for him to get his arm around her. She rolls back in frustration and props herself up on bunched pillows. “I worry I was my best self then, my best version of me. And I can never get back to her.”
    He sits up, too, and looks down at her. “Sweetheart, I’ve known you the whole time between then and now. I’m practically an authority on you. Ted Koppel will have me up on the screen when he does a ‘Nightline’ on you. And I’ll tell him that you were great when I met you, a wonderful girl and all, but really just at the start of you. I knew I was taking a big chance.”
    This is the kind of place where she usually gives him a fake punch in the stomach, but she doesn’t have the heart now.
    He goes on anyway. “All you really were then was great-looking and incredibly fast in water. All the really good parts have been filled in since then. You just can’t see it because you’re sitting on the inside. Lucky you’ve got me with twenty-twenty to set you straight.”
    Jesse grabs onto his beard and starts to cry softly, silently, just tears sliding out the corners of her eyes. She has never told him about the aquamarine, or even much about Marty. Jesse has been with Neal more than twenty years chesting these trumps. And yet she let almost all of it come tumbling out to Alice Avery today. In the same off-balance way, she has not really ever let herself experience passion with Neal, who has thrown his whole lot in with hers. Has instead squandered it, on two near strangers.
     
    Jesse and Wayne are sitting across from each other in a semicircular black vinyl booth in the cocktail lounge of the Holiday Inn by the interstate. They come here because there’s no one else but them and tourists and passing-through salesmen. It’s two in the afternoon. She’s having a Coke, Wayne’s having coffee—he drinks it all day long, mostly from