Free Love Her Madly by M. Elizabeth Lee

be. I told him about you. Turns out he’s a swimmer, too. Hell, maybe we should go to the pool today.”
    â€œYou told him about me?”
    â€œYeah. You’ll like him, too. I’ve already decided he should be part of our crew.”
    â€œOh, I see. Does he know he’s been recruited to serve with the finest?”
    Cyn smiled. “Not yet. A girl doesn’t want to come on too strong.”
    Only three days later, I met Cyn’s new favorite person.
    I was in the pool, swimming laps. When I was almost in the dead center of the lane, I had this impulse to stop. I wasn’t tired or out of breath, I just felt a strong desire to pop my head out and look around. That was when I saw him.
    He was walking out of the locker room, dark red swim trunks, toned swimmer’s build, sunglasses. He stopped walking and looked at me down in the pool, treading water, staring at him. Then he smiled. His smile literally punctured something in my heart, and I felt this strange sense of relief, like finally , this is happening , though what this was, I had no idea. All I knew was that I was treading water midlane like a weirdo, glowing inwardly from the smile of a stranger. I pretended like I needed to empty my goggles, then I laboriously kicked back into stroke. I was moving for a few seconds before it hit me that I had forgotten to smile back, or maybe I had without realizing it.
    Clearly, he was the awesome guy Cyn had gushed about. She had mentioned the lovely dark bronze cast of his skin, but had not described, or possibly had not yet fully glimpsed, his extraordinary frame. My memory captured him in 3-D Technicolor; wide, graceful shoulders that angled down to a narrow waist, buttressed by chiseled obliques that guided the eye toward his crotch as assuredly as a neon sign. Did I really just scope out his package? Yes. I reached the wall and flipped, the aqueous world spinning wildly around me. Before the world righted itself, I imagined tracing the contours of those obliques with my tongue, and conquering the mystery so thinly masked by those red trunks.
    My rhythm, which I hadn’t fully recovered after the sighting, short-circuited at the thought, and I decided to give up the charade. My mind was clearly no longer focused on my stroke. I swam to the wall and hung on to the floating lane divider, waiting for my breathing to return to normal. I didn’t exactly need a periscope to locate the mystery guy, as he had settled on a bench at the end of my lane. I pulled off my goggles and rubbed my face a few times to iron out any pressure lines.
    â€œHey,” he said.
    â€œHey,” I said.
    â€œHow is it in there?” He smiled that same smile. Beauty.
    I pulled myself up out of the water and sat on the edge of the pool, not quite facing him.
    â€œIt’s great. You going in?”
    â€œThat was my plan.” He paused. “I think we have a friend in common.”
    I smiled. “Oh?”
    â€œI think so. I met a girl who said her roommate was a redheaded mermaid.”
    I laughed out loud. “You’ve met Cyn.”
    â€œYes. So you are Gloria. I’m Raj.”
    I stood up to shake his hand. It felt warm and dry against my cool, wet fingers.
    â€œJust Raj?”
    â€œOh. Rajveer Nicholas Roy III. Just kidding about the third.”
    I sat down on the bench next to him, close but out of dripping distance. “Cyn told me about you, too. She said that she wanted to adopt you into our group.”
    â€œDid she?” He smiled and looked down bashfully.
    In that moment, it occurred to me that he was probably already in love with Cyn. It was an impossibly dismal thought, and sitting next to him in the sunlight, I couldn’t make myself believe it. I rapidly steered the conversation in a different direction.
    â€œSo how come I haven’t seen you on campus before? There’s only, like, twelve of us enrolled here. Don’t you eat, go to class, things like