Page 56 of Deep End

“Yup. He called me early this morning. Said,You got your drunken wish, Penelope, and guess how I replied?”

“‘I told you so,’ seventy-three times?”

“Precisely.”

I let a cautious smile stretch my lips. “Are you really okay with the idea of your ex having sex withyour synchro partner?”

“Put like that, it does sound weird.” She giggles. “Can I be honest with you? Like fully, one hundred percent, ‘please don’t judge me’ honest?”

I nod. A new weight threatening to expand in my stomach, but Pen’s smile is serene.

“I was the one who initiated our breakup, and I’ve been worrying about him. It’s hard for him to date freely, but I hate the idea of him pining alone while I’m out there having fun. He’s a great guy. When no one else wanted anything to do with me, and I thought that my diving career was over, he stood by me. He’s loyal. Kind. He’s still my best friend. But I have to admit that he’s not exactly . . . passionate. It can be hard, for someone as cold as he is. But it sounds like you’re mostly interested in him for the sex, and the stuff you guys like”—her voice lowers—“it’s hard to romanticize being flogged, right?”

I blink. Did she just—

“I love that you two are gonna get to be all horny and pervy together. Congrats, my friend.”

Honestly, she’s right. I really like Lukas, and I definitely don’t perceive him as cold, but I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to catch feelings for him. Not beyond lust, anyway.

”Anyway,” she says, “while we’re on the matter of horny and pervy . . . as you know, I, too, have taken a lover.”

I wince. “Terriblephrasing.”

“Right? Since Luk is my best friend, you’re the only person I can tell about my sexual skylarking.”

I savor it, the quiet pleasure of someone wanting to confide in me. “And how’s that going?”

She lies back in the grass, and I follow. We stare at the sky for a minute, silent, until she rolls over on her elbows. The glare of the sun beats against my eyes, and I lift my hand like a visor.

“When Lukas and I first started having sex, we were young and had no idea what we were doing. There was a learning curve, you know? But with Theo—”

“Theo the Hot Teacher!”

“Yup. Theo the Hot Teacher.” She grins. “It just kind of fell into place. I really like that he’s a little more . . .” She sighs. “I really like him. Luk is sooverwhelmingsometimes. Even when he’s actively tryingnotto be. Sometimes he’ll just be sitting there doing readings for class and still manage to suck up all the air in the room, and I—I kind of get lost in it. I forget about myself. I forget to be my own planet and just start orbiting around him. And I think it feels right to him, to be this monolith offorbiddingenergy, but Theo is so much softer, and . . .” She bites her lower lip. “He calls me honey.”

“Oh. Is that a good thing?”

She shrugs, a little embarrassed. “It’s trite, I know, but Luk never calls me anything butPenelope.” She works in a slight Swedish accent. “He’s just not naturally affectionate. Theo the Hot Teacher is. And, I slept, as in, actuallyslept, at his place.”

“You didn’t sleep at Lukas’s?”

“Not really. Not if we could help it. We’re both fussy sleepers. With Theo it was nice, though.”

I nod. I’m happy for her. I’m happy that she got what she wanted. We stare at each other for a while, her elbow brushing my shoulder,the quiet of a Saturday afternoon on campus balmy against our skins. Laughter in the distance, birds, the rustling of trees.

And then something occurs to me.

I sit up. Almost choke on my saliva. “Your name is PenelopeDianaRoss?”

CHAPTER 25

IT’S A NICE SATURDAY—BECAUSE I HAVE NO PLANS.

After lunch with Pen, I go home, shower until I fool my skin and hair into believing that I wasn’t spawned inside a puddle of chlorine, and then catch up with laundry and assignments. Herr Karl-Heinz, may both sides of his pillow always be cold and his favorite fanfiction update every night, shed some light on German’s obscure sentence structure. I walked out of his office last week feeling . . . in deep shit, but less alone.

Look at me. Acknowledging my deficiencies. Accepting help.

It’s difficult even for native speakers, he told me.You’re a STEM major, right? Try to see the rules as basic laws of biology. Sometimes you just have to accept them. And I can help you.

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