The pool was turquoise, a color that existed nowhere in nature but in the chemical dreams of suburban summers, and I’d been watching her since she moved back from college for the summer—since the day she appeared at my back gate in cut-off shorts and a tank top and asked if she could “borrow some sugar” with a look that said she knew exactly what she was doing.
I’d known her since birth. Since her mother—my best friend, my confidante, the woman who’d held my hand through my husband’s funeral—had brought her home from the hospital wrapped in a yellow blanket. I’d held her at her christening. I’d attended every birthday party, every graduation, every milestone that marked her transition from “Aunt Elena’s little friend” to something else entirely.
Something that had changed three summers ago, when she was eighteen and I’d caught her watching me by the pool. Something that had intensified last summer, when she was twenty and had “accidentally” walked into my bedroom while I was changing. Something that had become inevitable now, at twenty-one, with her college degree finished and her future uncertain and her body in a red bikini that was completely unlike the one-piece she’d worn at sixteen.
“Your mother said you needed swimming lessons,” I called out, setting down the book I’d been pretending to read for an hour. “She didn’t say you needed… other things.”
She turned from the pool’s edge. Water dripped from her skin, catching the afternoon sun in droplets that looked like diamonds. Her dark hair was wet, plastered to her shoulders, and her eyes—her mother’s eyes, but with something added, something hungry—found mine across the turquoise water.
She didn’t speak. Just bit her lip. A gesture that was supposed to look innocent but had stopped being innocent years ago, around the time she’d stopped calling me “Aunt Elena” and started calling me nothing at all, just looking at me with a silence that was louder than any name.
I stood. My one-piece was black, modest, the armor of a fifty-six-year-old widow who was supposed to be beyond desire. I walked over to the pool’s edge. Stopped behind her. Put my hands on her shoulders—warm, wet, trembling slightly under my touch.
“How old are you again, sweetheart?”
She turned her head. Looked at me. Mouthed the words rather than speaking them, her lips forming the shape of numbers that were supposed to matter but didn’t, not anymore, not since the day she’d turned eighteen and I’d realized that the law was the only thing keeping me from this.
I smiled. Rare. Warm. The smile that my husband had loved, the one that had died with him three years ago in a hospital room where I’d held his hand and promised to keep living. The smile that I hadn’t known I still possessed until this girl—this woman, this forbidden thing—had started looking at me like I was worth coming back to life for.
“Old enough to know what you want,” I whispered. My mouth was near her ear, close enough to smell the chlorine and the coconut sunscreen and something else—something that was purely her, purely desire, purely the exact moment when a widow stops being a widow and becomes a woman again. “Old enough for me to give it.”
I pulled her close by the waist. My hands slid down her stomach, over the red bikini bottom, under the elastic. She gasped—a sharp intake of breath that was part surprise, part relief, part the exact sound I’d been imagining in the dark hours of my empty bed.
My f/ingers found her. Insid-e her. Wet and warm and completely ready in a way that made me dizzy, made me forget my age, made me forget every promise I’d made to be appropriate, to be respectable, to be the kind of woman that suburban widows were supposed to be.
The sound was unmistakable—the metal latch, the creak of hinges, the footsteps on the concrete path that led from the driveway to the pool. We both froze. My hand was still insid-e her, my f/ingers still moving, her body still trembling against mine.
Her mother. Sarah. My best friend. Walking through the gate with a pitcher of lemonade and a smile that was completely unaware.
“Elena! I made too much—” She stopped. Looked at us. At her daughter in my arms, at my hand clearly under her bikini, at the way we were pressed together in a way that was definitely not swimming lessons.
I turned my head. Smiled at Sarah with the same smile I’d used at PTA meetings and book clubs and every other suburban performance. My f/ingers kept moving, kept circling, kept making her daughter shake in a way that was completely hidden by our bodies and the angle of the sun.
“Lemonade,” I said. “Perfect timing. Your daughter was just showing me her… stroke technique.”
Sarah laughed. Set the pitcher on the table. Started talking about her garden, her book club, the neighbors’ new fence. And all the while, all the while, my f/ingers were insid-e her daughter, making her come apart against my hand while she smiled and nodded and made sounds that could have been agreement but were actually desperate attempts not to scream.
When Sarah finally left—”Don’t forget the lemons have seeds!”—I turned back to the girl in my arms. She was shaking. Crying. Coming down from the most intense orgasm of her young life.
“Again,” she whispered. “Make me do that again. Make me do that while she’s in the house. Make me—”
I did. All summer. In the pool while Sarah napped upstairs. In my bed while Sarah ran errands. In the backyard while Sarah chatted with neighbors over the fence, her voice carrying across the lawn while her daughter came apart on my fingers in the garden shed.
She’s still twenty-one. I’m still fifty-six. The gap between us is thirty-five years and a lifetime of experience and every reason this shouldn’t work.
But when she calls me “Auntie” in the dark, her voice breaking, her body mine—when she whispers that she’s never wanted anyone the way she wants me—I stop counting years and start counting blessings.
Some neighbors borrow sugar. Mine borrowed my heart. And she never gave it back.
