I don't have a key to Lou's house but when I push down the front door handle with my elbow, it's unlocked. Riley waves as she drives off once I'm inside and I toe off my new running shoes by the door. It's almost two. I don't hear anything coming from the living room so Lou must be done with lessons for the day.

"Hello?" I call as I head through to the kitchen. "It's only me," I add, in case she thinks she's being burgled.

"Charlotte. There you are."

"Here I am."

Lou's sitting in the window seat, a thick book in her hands. She lets it fall shut without marking her page when she stands. She gives me a weary look and runs her hand through her hair. By the strands caught in her rings, it looks like she's been doing that for a while. "I need your number."

"Huh?" I turn my ear towards her, having only half heard what she said.

"I need your number," she says again, "so that when you leave me a note saying you're going for a quick run and then you still haven't come back more than three hours later, I can text you to make sure you're okay instead of stressing out over a hypothetical catastrophe."

I'm about to make a joke, to tease her for her worry, until I remember James. The catastrophe is not entirely hypothetical when her husband would still be alive if he hadn't hiked the same route I just ran. My face falls; I can pinpoint the moment my flush turns to pallor.

"Shit, Lou, I'm sorry. I didn't think. I bumped into Riley at the overlook and she took me shopping." I hold up my bags as evidence and let them drop to the floor. I spot the moment Lou's body deflates, when the stress leaks out of her shoulders. It's the same moment I realize I am not answerable only to myself, not while I'm staying with her. She passes me her phone, the new contact page already open; she has put my name as Charlotte. I don't change it when I add my number beneath but I do add a couple of emojis. A sparkle and a rainbow.

When I give it back to her, she smiles. My own phone buzzes in my pocket with a text from a new number. I save her to my contacts as Lou and I add the nail polish emoji to her name, an homage to her hands.

"How was your run?"

"Good. Sweaty. Hard."

"Buy anything nice?" She nods at my bags.

"I spent a lot," I admit. "I found a bunch of great running gear in the thrift stores, and Riley made me get new shoes from her boyfriend, so I'm a whole new woman. Just don't come too close." I pluck at the hem of my tank top, pull it away from my body. "I'm so hot and I bet I stink."

"Well, you know where the shower is."

"I have a better idea."

"Mmm?"

She follows me outside. I cross the garden to the dock, where I strip out of my top and pants and run into the lake in my underwear. It's been years since I cannonballed into the water, way too long since I felt that cold slap of the lake and the sting as the water goes up my nose. When I surface, Lou's standing on the edge of the dock, mid-laugh as I adjust my bra.

"I take it you didn't buy a bathing suit?"

"Oh! I did, actually. It's in one of the bags on the kitchen floor. Could you grab it for me?" I give her my best puppy dog eyes; she chuckles and disappears.

There's no-one around. I slip out of my bra and underwear and drape them over the ladder. When Lou returns with my new bikini — a cute tropical print, the cups only the slightest bit too big — she tilts her head at me and says, "Are you naked right now?"

"Only momentarily." The water is up to my shoulders and I don't think it's clear enough that she can see anything, although I do reach a bit too far to grab the bikini off her and tug it on underwater. I doggy paddle for a moment, still rendered breathless by the cold, but I slowly acclimatize and before long, I'm floating on my back, loose strings of my bathing suit floating around me. Lou is still watching me. I grin up at her. "Take a picture. It'll last longer."

She goes beet red but her smile doesn't drop.

"This is heaven," I say. "You should get in."

"I'm good right here, thank you. Can I get you anything?"

"You know what this situation calls for?" I spin in a slow circle in the water, squinting at the bright sky. "A pool floatie, a Cosmopolitan, and a good book. Something ... sexy. Sexy and summery."

Lou laughs and rolls her eyes. "You're a liability, Charlotte." She turns around and bends over my discarded top and pants. I splash around in panic, a poor attempt to stop her when I'm down here and she's all the way up there.

"Don't touch those!" I yell out, choking on a mouthful of lake water. "Seriously, Lou, I sweated so fucking much, those clothes might need to be burned. Do not touch them."

"I'm only putting them in the laundry basket." She picks up my clothes and holds them at arm's length. "You know, where dirty clothes belong."

"Oh my god, now you're contaminated. Quick, drop the clothes and get in the lake."

"If anyone here is contaminated," she says drily, bunching the tank top and pants into a ball, "it's you. God knows what's in that lake."

"Whatever you do, don't sniff that."

Her laugh is a bright surprise. "Charlotte. I can assure you, I have no intention of sniffing your running gear. Where's the rest?"

"You're not having my underwear," I say as sternly as I can.

She laughs as she leaves. I paddle around, relishing the cold as my internal body temperature slowly drops to a normal level and nostalgia overwhelms me. I'm so close to the patch of lake I spent my life in, Uncle Harry's dock only fifty feet from here. With lazy strokes I swim around the waterlogged tree that separates Lou's dock from her neighbor's and I find the place where Ashley, Connor and I carved our initials into the wood, on the underside so Uncle Harry wouldn't see. Mom caught us doing it but she laughed and promised not to tell. I run my thumb over the jagged letters — Connor used a sharp stone to make the etching — and I swim back before Lou can worry that I've drowned.

I hear her pottering around for several minutes but I don't see her until something eclipses the sun. A giant inflatable dinghy is hovering over me; I squeak when it smacks onto the surface of the lake right next to me.

"What is that?!" I cry out.

"I don't have a pool floatie," Lou says, "but I do have that. If you want to lie on something in the water. I also have this"—she shows me a book—"and these." She puts down the book and holds up two cocktail glasses filled with something bright red. "I had to look up how to make a cosmopolitan. By some miracle I had all the ingredients."

"Oh my god," I say when I realize what she's done. Everything I asked her for. "You didn't have to do that."

"I wanted to. I like a challenge." She has a towel, too, which she holds out over the edge of the dock and says, "For the boat."

I pull the inflatable boat over to the ladder by its long rope, tying it to the mooring post like we used to do when we were kids, so we could play on the water without floating off into the middle of the lake. I dry myself off a bit before I lay the towel down in the bottom and from halfway up the ladder, I drop into the boat.

"This is perfect. You're amazing," I say, reaching up for the cocktail Lou is holding out to me. I take a sip. Incredible.

The book is in her hand, she waggles it at me. "I don't recall if this is set in summer, but it's the sexiest book I could find at short notice." She throws it to me and I'm impressed with how I catch it in one hand. I have to suppress a shiver of delight when I read the blurb: it's a sapphic romance between a woman in her early twenties and the mom of a college student. Holy shit. I can't tell if this is some sort of signal, if she's letting me know that she's interested, or if it's just a good book.

"You've read it?" I ask, trying to keep the rasp out of my voice.

"Loved it," Lou says. Does she hold my gaze longer than usual? I can't tell. I am, after all, a starer. She hoists her skirt up to her knees and sits on the edge of the dock, dangling her bare feet over the edge so her toes graze the water.

Glass in one hand, she leans back on the other with her eyes closed as she sips her Cosmopolitan. It's the first time I've seen her legs, I realize; she is always in long skirts that flow to her ankles but now the material is bunched underneath her like a cushion and I can see that she has the legs of a goddess. Her calves are smooth and shapely and I want to rub oil into them. Want to feel her flesh, to trace the path from her knee to her ankle to the arch of her feet. She has pretty feet. I don't say that easily. In general, I hate feet, but hers are beautiful. Almost as elegant as her hands, her toenails painted fuschia pink. Even her smallest toes have proper nails. I want to hold her by the ankle. To tug her into the boat with me and feel her weight on top of me.

Only when she takes out a book of her own do I feel comfortable enough to crack open the one she has given me. It isn't long before I'm blushing — the book starts with a bang. Sex in the first ten pages. I am hooked.

My eyes don't leave the page for an hour, at which point I'm wrenched from the story by a tube of sunscreen being thrown at me.

"You're burning," Lou says. There are telltale streaks of white on her face and arms where she hasn't massaged it in properly.

"Good afternoon to you too."

"Sorry. I don't want you to burn," she says. "Don't forget your stomach."

I look down. My pasty stomach, which almost never sees the light of day, is turning pink. Whoops. I slather myself in sunscreen from head to toe, between my breasts and under the straps of my bikini top and down to the low waistband of my bottoms. When I hand the tube back, I give her the glass too.

"That was delicious, thank you."

"It was, wasn't it? Fancy another?"

"Sure."

She disappears, comes back after five minutes in a sun hat with a tray holding a pitcher of Cosmopolitan, two full glasses, and some snacks. A bowl of trail mix and a bag of salted peanuts, some pistachios too.

"Are you staying in there all afternoon?" she asks as she stretches down with the trail mix so I can grab a handful.

I sit up and pat the empty space. The boat is easily big enough for two; we could sit opposite each other or lie side by side. "There's plenty of space in here. You could join me, if you want. It'll make it easier to share."

She considers it for a moment. I can see the cogs turning in her mind. Right when I'm sure she's going to tell me to join her on the dock, she says, "Okay. As long as you don't get me wet."

I hold up my hands and wink. "No promises."

God I love to see her flushed.

The boat wobbles as she gets in, one hand on the ladder and one fisted in her skirt. What I wouldn't do to be that yard of cotton.

The dock isn't so high that we can't reach it from here. Once Lou is settled in the boat, her thigh pressed to my calf, her foot tucked against my waist, she expertly eases the tray off the dock and onto her lap.

"This is the height of class," I say, tapping my second Cosmo against hers. "Here's to day drinking on the lake."

"Cheers to that."

Lou opens her book so I do too, immediately sucked back into the world of sex and romance that I long to be a part of. I forgot how nice this could be: reading with someone, each of us doing our own thing, lost in different books, but doing it together. As the afternoon wears on, the cloud cover grows and it's a relief when the sun hides itself away, taking with it its strongest rays. Our boat gently rocks when someone speeds by; we occasionally bump against the dock, but it's nice. Soothing. Like a lullaby.

A very effective one, seeing as Lou's book has dropped onto her stomach, her wrists limp and her eyes closed. Her head is at an awkward angle, propped up against the inflated rim of the boat so her chin is almost touching her chest, and she's gently snoring. Her hat has tipped forward to shade her face from what's left of the sun. Every now and then her foot twitches, tickling my waist. It's fucking adorable. I smile to myself and go back to my book, one hand trailing in the water, and I check my page. One hundred and two. I wonder how much I can read before she wakes up.

*

One hundred and thirteen pages. Which amounts to approximately one hundred and thirteen minutes, given my average reading speed of sixty pages an hour. That's how long it takes for Lou to jerk awake with a gasp, knocking her hat into the water.

"Hey there, sleepyhead." I rest my book over my stomach and watch as she gathers her surroundings. There's a crease down her right cheek where it has been pressed against the side of the boat, a dent between her eyebrows as she recalls the afternoon.

"How long was I out?"

"Couple hours, give or take."

"Jesus."

"I reckon it was the Cosmos."

She rubs her head, runs her fingers over the imprint in her cheek, looks around at the sky and the clouds and the sun. "What time is it?"

"Haven't a clue," I say. "I never learned how to read the shadows, but I reckon ... five? Ish?"

"Shit. Sorry. Was I snoring?"

"Very cute snoring."

"Ha. I don't think such a thing exists." She struggles to sit up without letting water in or falling out.

"Trust me, it does." I hold her gaze for a moment. My hand is on the book she gave me; her gaze slips down to it briefly and I wish I could read her thoughts but she keeps her emotions close to her chest. I have no idea what she's feeling, except disoriented.

"Ugh. It's going to be a long night. I never normally nap."

"Do you normally drink cocktails on the lake at three p.m.?"

A short, dry laugh. "Good point." She uses the rope to pull us close enough to the dock for her to get out, pointedly staring at my now dry underwear as she climbs the ladder. When she makes it to her phone, she gasps and says, "Christ, it's six o'clock already."

"Does it matter?" When she isn't looking, I try to artfully rearrange my position to make my legs look longer and my breasts bigger (impossible), propping myself up on one elbow and shading my eyes. In my head I look like a model in a Vogue shoot. In reality, I probably look like a kid stuck in a blow-up rowboat.

Lou considers the question as she lies flat on the wooden planks to rescue her hat before it disappears. "I suppose not."

"Sometimes it's nice to have a quiet afternoon."

"Mmm. What do you want for dinner?"

I give her my sweetest grin. "Surprise me."

"Takeout it is."

*

can you figure out what book charlie's reading? it's one of my favorites!