Swimsuit at an Okanagan Lake House, Late Summer

The lake made a sound at the dock's edge — not a wave, just water finding the wood again and again, patient, the same small slap it had been making all weekend. Claire had stopped hearing it by Saturday. Now, lying on her back in water that came only to her hips when she stood, she heard it again.

The sun was doing something particular in the late afternoon, the kind of gold that made the hills on the far shore look painted. She'd read about golden hour without ever really seeing it. This was it. She understood now that she had missed a lot of things by not paying attention.

She was thirty-four. The thought arrived without weight, which surprised her. Thirty-four and floating in a lake in the Okanagan on the last weekend of summer, the rented house empty behind her, no one on either shore that she could see. The swimsuit — a black one-piece she'd owned for three years and barely worn — was soft from washing, soft from the week of water, and it pressed against her everywhere the lake pressed. She could feel the specific warmth of the fabric across her stomach, different from the lake's warmth, her own heat held there.

She hadn't meant to let her hand drift. That was the true thing, the one she would turn over later. She had been floating with both arms out, palms up, watching the sky go from blue to something almost amber at the edges, and then her right arm had come in from the cold and her hand had come to rest low on her stomach, just above the swimsuit's waistband. She left it there. The contrast between her palm — warm — and the wet fabric was specific and small and impossible to ignore.

A breath went out of her that was longer than the one before it. She didn't plan it.

She had always understood the mechanics. She was not uninformed. But there was a difference, she was learning now, between knowing a thing and being in the water on a Thursday afternoon with no reason to stop yourself from finding out what everyone had always meant. Her knees were together. They had been together. The lake moved through the small gap between them, which was its own kind of thing to notice.

Her hand was still. She was in the moment before the hand moved — aware of it, aware of the fabric below her palm, aware of her own pulse in a place she didn't usually track her pulse. The elastic at her inner right thigh pressed a faint line into the skin. She could feel that line. She focused on it the way you focus on something you have only just realized was always there.

The lake kept finding the dock. The same sound, patient, unhurried.

She let her knees part — just slightly, just enough that the water moved differently between them — and held very still, waiting to see what she would do next.