Jack propped one eye open, and wondered if a person could simultaneously have a brain aneurism while dying of thirst at the same time. He was looking at at something greenish blue, in a familiar pattern. He tried to lift his head, but it felt like someone was trying to twist it off at his neck, so he carefully lowered it and just looked around with his one open eye.

After a few minutes, the greenish blue came into better focus, and he realized it was the candle that sat on his coffee table. Kelsey had brought it over a few days before and lit it, to help with the chlorine smell that seemed to pervade everything. Its scent was something called Ocean Breezes or something, Jack recalled.

So that would mean he was lying on his sofa.

Alone?

He put a cautious hand out and felt nothing warm, nothing but sofa. So far so good. He again attempted to lift his head, this time ignoring the monstrous, pounding pain, and managed to sit up. It was morning, it appeared. The sun was shining in at the correct window, anyway. And the apartment was quiet, so maybe his company had left.

He gained his feet and managed to remain that way, swaying slightly. He was wearing only the briefs he'd put on before the party, and he wondered where his slacks were. He vaguely remembered pulling his shirt off as he entered his room last night, and the girls exclaiming over his muscles, and one of them saying something about her mother.

Oh no.

He walked carefully toward his open bedroom door, needing to look, but afraid to.

His bed was a complete wreck, but an empty wreck, for which he was moderately grateful. His locked phone was still where he'd left it, for which he was more grateful.

He suddenly realized he had to piss like a racehorse, and when he went to the bathroom, he found the classic morning after cliché of countless movies: one of the girls had left him a note on the mirror in lipstick.

"You were sleeping so cute that we didn't want to wake you up. Thanks for everything!"

It was signed with a J and an A in a little heart.

Jack used the bathroom, and wandered out to the kitchen to make himself some tea and find something for his headache.

Half an hour and a shower later, he felt marginally better. He sat on his sofa, sipping tea and rifling through his memories of the previous night. More and more was coming back, and he felt fairly certain that nothing had happened in his bedroom. He remembered the two girls making out with each other, and trying to draw him in, but he also remembered putting a stop to it pretty quickly, excusing himself and throwing himself down on the sofa.

Good.

In the cold light of day, he could coldly assess his behavior and wonder at his idiocy. Why had he gotten drunk? To get back at Kelsey? And had he actually gotten back at her? As far as he could see, all he'd done was make a fool of himself, and give himself a screaming hangover. If this was what drinking got a person, he didn't need it, no way.

He took another sip of tea.

And what about Kelsey? What was going on between them? Were they over? Had they ever begun? Had he misjudged everything? He'd just assumed that they were a couple, whatever that meant in this day and age. Maybe to her, sleeping with someone, even if it was his first time, was just something friendly and nice, like sharing a towel.

Maybe it wasn't that important to her.

Maybe he needed to talk to Zach. He'd never been in this position before, and he had no idea what to do. He had a feeing, though, that even Zach, or Toby or Jeff, for that matter, wouldn't have the savoir-faire to deal with a situation like this.

His phone buzzed with a text.

He'd read through the texts from Kelsey, and listened to the voicemails. They'd gotten more and more desperate in tone, just asking him to please, please text or call her, then stopped, abruptly, around two thirty in the morning.

It was from Kelsey.

"It's ten after. Are you coming?"

Oh my god. Was she expecting to have practice, today? Jack got up and peeked through his window, where he could see a flash of turquoise blue, the color of Kelsey's racerback bathing suit, through the bushes.

Apparently so.

Jack got his jammers on, grabbed his equipment, quickly applied sunscreen and ran out the door.

Kelsey looked tense and pallid, but otherwise fine. Jack was utterly at a loss. Was he supposed to bring up what had happened? Act like everything was fine? Be all jovial and friendly? He decided to take his cues from her, and behave like she did.

Tense and serious it was, then.

"Good morning," he said, keeping his voice neutral. "I hope you slept well?"

She nodded, biting her lips together. "I'm fine. You?"

Jack nodded. "I'm good, I'm good. So, what are we working on today?"

"Uh, we were working on dolphin kick, and adding arms so I could do butterfly," Kelsey said. Jack could tell she must have done a few laps to warm up already, because water was running out from under her cap, streaming slowly down her neck.

He had the urge to lean out and kiss her, right where the sun was glinting on the rivulet as it slid down her throat.

He yanked his eyes back to her face. "Right, right," he said, nodding.

She nodded back, and he couldn't help but notice how beautiful her neck was, how slender and vulnerable it looked with all her hair tucked up in the cute cap with the butterflies all over it. Her skin was now the color of warm caramel all over, not the cool cream it had been when they'd started training. She took the sun very well, Jack thought to himself.

"Jack? Are we going to start?" Kelsey blinked at him.

"Huh? Yeah. Okay, you're going to need fins for this. They really help you to feel the motion of the dolphin kick, to force you to point your toes and notice the movement, okay?" Jack motioned to her equipment back.

She nodded and boosted herself to the deck, so Jack was suddenly face to face with her knees, which he happened to think were so, so cute. One of them had a small scar, which she'd gotten falling out of an apple tree on grandparents' farm back in Iowa. There'd been this one, beautiful apple, she told Jack, much higher than the others, the reddest, shiniest, perfectly round, and she wanted it, even though her brother told her it was too high. So she'd gone out by herself that evening and climbed the tree, and fallen as the sun went down. Her screams had brought her family flying from the house, and they'd carried her, bloodied and weeping, into the house, clutching the apple.

Jack found himself wanting to kiss the scar.

Kelsey pulled on socks, then the fins, then hopped back in the water, holding on to the side to help her balance with the weird feeling of the fins. She'd used them before, but not too often.

"Okay, so watch me first, how I keep my ankles together, and flex my feet at the same angle, see?" Jack pushed off from the wall and swam back and forth in front of her as slowly as he could. "In butterfly, both sides of your body have to look symmetrical, or you get disqualified, and your feet have to stay together. That's what judges look for. You can't have an alternating kick, it has to be one big splash, then one smaller. Kick KICK, kick KICK, kick KICK, you get it? The first kick is like a real kick, the second is like a flick that carries down from your hips, you see?" He demonstrated some more.

"Like what me and my friends used to call the Little Mermaid kick," Kelsey said with a small smile.

"Yeah, okay, I guess, so, like a dolphin or a mermaid," Jack agreed. They smiled at each other for a moment before their smiles faded and they looked away.

"You ready to try?" Jack asked.

Kelsey nodded gamely.

"Okay, here we go," Jack said, nodding.

Kelsey pushed off from the wall with her kick board, and kicked from her hips, trying to undulate her hips the way Jack had. He put his hands on her, holding her steady, and tried not to think about how wonderful it was to put his hands on her, and how cute her bottom looked, rising and falling in the water in her turquoise suit.

After a half hour or so, her feet started to chafe, even with the socks, so she sat on the deck and took the fins off, and tried the kicking without them.

"Oh, this is so much harder," she exclaimed. "I don't like dolphins kicking without fins, Jack, at all!"

Jack laughed. "Yeah, the fins make your feet much longer, give you a lot more leverage, don't they?"

Kelsey nodded. "Oh god, my abs are going to be so sore tomorrow. No wonder you're so ripped."

Jack just nodded. "Swimming's the best exercise in the world, definitely."

Kelsey swam into the wall and turned to face him.

"Jack."

"Mm?"

"I want--I want to talk to you, please." And the fragile, happy mood they'd established evaporated. "About last night."

Jack took a deep breath and turned, but she put a hand on his arm, saying, "No, please don't leave again, please."

He looked at her hand on his tanned arm in the water and finally looked up at her, eyebrows raised.

"I want to say I'm sorry," she said, tracing patterns on the surface of the water with her fingertips. "I mean--I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"Fine, apology accepted," Jack said briefly. "And I'm sorry too, for walking away from you, and not giving you a chance to say what you wanted to say. I'm sorry for getting shitfaced drunk at a public event with you, and risking damage to your career." He plucked her hand from the surface of the water and held it between his own. "I'm sorry for not answering your texts and causing you concern, too, okay? I should've let you know where I was, and that I was okay. And I shouldn't have gotten drunk and messed around with those girls just to get back at you. I'm sorry for that as well." He nodded before releasing her hand.

Kelsey swallowed and looked sick. "Did you? I mean, what happened? With those girls? Amber and Jessica?"

"You know them?" Jack was surprised.

Kelsey shrugged. "I know who they are." She hugged her arms under her breasts, at the elbows, and Jack could see goosebumps on them, and on her shoulders, in spite of the bright sun. "I know they spent the night here, Jack. I saw them leave this morning." She swallowed and looked down.

"Oh." Jack looked around, running his hand through his hair.

"Look, I know I don't have the right to ask," Kelsey said, her words tumbling out. "I know I did a shitty thing, okay? It's just, this is all new to me, you know?"

Jack looked at her in surprise.

"What? Why the look? I've only been around these people for so long, it just really slipped my mind how normal, decent people live." Kelsey shook her head, smiling viciously. "I'm a commodity, Jack, don't you know that? I'm literally a piece of ass to most people, something to buy and sell and trade." She shrugged. "So it's easy to start seeing yourself that way, you know? To tell yourself that it doesn't really matter if you party a little with these people, do a little blow with those people? Who does it hurt, really? Let the fat old man see you in your underwear, who's going to know? Let your costar feel you up, if it makes the shoot easier..." she wiped away a tear and shivered.

"I can't live like that," Jack said. "I can't have one check list for you, and one for me. Whether we have a quick turn in the sheets that lasts a week, or a relationship that lasts a decade, or an epic romance that lasts a century, I can only live by one set of rules."

He boosted her up on the edge of the pool so she could sit out of water, with just her legs hanging in, hoping the sun would warm her up a little and she'd stop shivering. He rubbed her shoulders and peered at her face. "I can't run back and forth between your world and mine. There's only one world, and that's where I live. This isn't about us, okay? This is about me."

Kelsey nodded, looking at him, standing in the waist deep water.

"Oh Jack," she said. "Please don't say we're finished. I don't know if we're going to last a week, or a decade, or a century, but please don't say I finished us, okay?

"Because I love you, Jack." She put a hand on either side of his face and lifted it so she could kiss him, deeply and long, over and over, her body shaking with relief when she felt him part his lips for her, accepting her tongue into his mouth, giving his to her in return.

She slipped into the water with him, wrapping her legs around his waist, anchoring herself to his body as she felt his arms come around her back and pull her cap off her head. Then his fingers were in her hair, moving along her scalp, threading through the strands, pulling, moving her head as he claimed her with his mouth, all over, kissing her hard, pressing her against the side of the pool.

"I love you too, Kelsey, I do, I love you so much," she heard him murmur.

Then she was peeling his jammers down, she blindly set them down on the deck behind her, and he was thick and hard and hot between her legs, probing, pressing on her through her suit.

He was on her neck, kissing and nipping at the sensitive skin, and she felt him make a sound of frustration, just before he reached down between her legs and pulled the fabric to the side. He pressed on her, one hard thrust, and he was all the way inside her, so she was full of him, and the weightlessness she was experiencing from floating in the pool made it feel like she was flying.

"Oh god, Jack," she moaned as she leaned her head back into the brick of the deck. He pulled the shoulder straps of her suit down so he could see her body, the white part the sun didn't touch, and he put his hot mouth on her skin, on her cold, wet breasts, with the nipples that were so hard and so sensitive at the same time that it almost hurt to feel his teeth on them.

"Harder, please, harder--" she whispered, though she wasn't sure he could hear her. And the friction he was exerting while pressing her into the side of the pool, on the fabric of her suit, the angle, just everything, made her come, something she wasn't expecting. She squeezed her legs around Jack's middle so tightly that it made him gasp, and she dug her nails into his back, as the veins in her neck stood out and she arched her body into him. It was so sexy that watching her, feeling her tightening on him, her nails in his flesh, hearing her call his name, made Jack come too, and he pulsed into her, spasms that she could feel, hot bursts shooting into her body over and over.

When they were both finished, they kissed again, softer, gentler, with smiles.

"I meant it, I want you to know," Jack said seriously. "I didn't just say it because you said it, or because we were screwing or whatever, okay?"

"Me too," Kelsey replied, smiling.

"And now I need to eat, okay?"

"Okay," she answered, laughing, and they got all sorted out, and took off back to the Valley, to their old IHOP, for pancakes and eggs, to celebrate.