Deep End

I’M FAWN-LEGGED AS WE WALK DOWN THE MAIN QUAD, WOBBLIER than after a week with the flu. The fresh air does little to clear out the haze, or to ease the throbbing between my legs.

I lift my chin, trying to look like I’m not still processing the ins and outs of what just happened, like it wasn’t a bit of a religious, existence-defining experience.

Scenes, that’s what people call what we did. Pockets of time in which power is exchanged. They have a beginning and an end. They can be broken with safe words. They can be structured and formalized as much as their participants like—in my case, not too much, at least for now. Words like dom and sub feel a little cumbersome. Unwieldy. I wrote on my list that at this stage I’d rather explore than constrain, and Lukas seemed . . . eager. For now, we’re just two kinky people, checking in with each other and figuring it out.

I wonder if something like this birthed the expression fuck around and find out.

I take deep breaths, squinting at the glare of the late-afternoon sun, until a pair of sunglasses is pushed up the bridge of my nose. Lukas looks formidable against the suddenly dark sky, but his eyes are very much bare.

“You—”

“That way,” he instructs, tapping my nape and taking a right turn.

My lips are tender and pouty. Earlier, in the elevator, he traced them with his thumb over and over, the soft hint of a pleased smile obvious in the creases at the corners of his eyes. He took my hand and held it—out of the lab, the hallway, the building, until I wiggled free.

It’s disarming, how a five-minute walk through campus results in several eyeballs slipping in his direction. But Stanford is the alma mater of dozens of Olympians, many of whom end up medaling, and Lukas is by no means unique. Basically a public figure, Pen said, and maybe she wasn’t wrong.

“Do you mind?” I ask him. I am slowly winding down. Not quite steady yet.

“Mind what?”

“Just, you know, the people. The attention.”

He gives me an empty look. “What attention, and what people?”

A laugh bubbles out of me, and I picture bringing this up with Pen. He doesn’t realize! I told you—constantly unfazed!

“You still doing okay?” he checks in, and I nod.

I feel used, deliciously so. But not like one might use a thing, only to discard it. I feel precious, something able to bring pleasure, a product of enthusiasm and instructions well carried out. And that, really, is the crux of it. When I’m following commands, my shoulders are bare of any weight. I’m sure there are many reasons people like what I like, but for me—this is it. The quiet. The grind, stopped. Knowing that for a brief moment, someone else has me. No decisions, no responsibilities.

When that’s over, though, reality seeps back in. Classes. Practice. Projects.

“I’ve been working on the pooling layers for the neural network,” I tell Lukas.

“You said max pooling, right?”

“Zach did.”

“Ah. What do you think?”

I pause. Chew my lower lip. “Zach is a grad student. I’m just an undergrad.”

“Uh-huh. And you can still disagree with him.”

“The average value would be better.” I glance up at him, sideways. “What do you think?”

“I think you’re better than me, or Zach, at this.”

I don’t strictly need Lukas to tell me that I’m good at something, especially when I already know that, but it’s still nice. A quiet warmth. My knees no longer shake, but I’m empty. Electrified. “Love the trust.”

“It’s a hell of a drug.” We exchange a knowing look. “I’m going to write a script to prepare the training dataset for the model.”

“Can you?”

His eyebrow quirks. “Are you doubting my coding ability?”

“No, no. I’d rather do it, though.”

“Why?”

“Well, I don’t know what coding languages you know, for one.”

“And?”

“I’m concerned that you’ll say, I don’t know, MATLAB.”

He scoffs. “MATLAB.”

“Your indignation is a relief.” I catch the twitch of his lips as he nudges me into a left turn. We’re slowly heading toward the outskirts of campus—maybe another library I don’t know about? “You may write the script.”

“How generous of you. How’s German going, troll?”

I glare at his smug, self-satisfied face. “Okay, first: troll? And, that was low.”

“But warranted. MATLAB.”

“Uh-huh. Next thing you’re gonna ask me about my inward dives.”

“Hmm. Which ones are those?”

I halt in the middle of the sidewalk.

“What?” he asks.

“Did you just . . . do you not know what an inward dive is?”

He shrugs. “I get them mixed up.”

“But . . . Pen.” He stares at me like I should elaborate. “Your ex is a diving prodigy.” More blank stares. “You can tell different dive groups apart, right?”

“Well, I did notice the difference between the short, bouncy board and the tall, stiff board—”

“You mean the platform?”

“Is that what it’s called?”

I cover my mouth with both hands to prevent a clamor of harpies from slipping out of my trachea and attacking him—and then realize he’s messing with me. “I hate you.”

He smiles and reaches out, pushing a strand behind my ear. Then tugs me till I resume walking. “I do get the diving groups confused. I couldn’t pick out an inward dive.”

Unacceptable. “Maybe if you did she wouldn’t . . .” I stop myself mid-mumble, and cast about for a not wound-salting way of ending the sentence.

But Lukas is already grinning. “Have dumped me?”

“I didn’t mean to . . . I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I could memorize every item in the diving book by degree of difficulty, and it would change nothing.”

“Are you sure? It’s a bit of a red-flaggy, deadbeat boyfriend move, not knowing the basics of your girlfriend’s sport. Maybe she feels neglected?”

He chuckles. “Sufficiently supporting each other was the one issue we did not have, Scarlett.” Then continues, more serious. “Pen and I got together when we both needed something—someone outside of our disciplines. Knowing little about each other’s sports was part of the draw.”

I guess it’s not too outlandish. “Josh once said that splashier dives were prettier because they reminded him of fountains, and that judges should score them higher.”

“Josh?”

“My ex.”

We take another turn. Lukas’s arm brushes against mine, his elbow grazing my shoulder. “The one you experimented with?”

“The one and only.” I huff a laugh. “Quite literally ‘the only.’”

“Is he here?”

“You mean at Stanford? Nope, he’s at WashU. St. Louis.”

“Is that where you’re from?”

“Where my stepmom’s from.”

He nods. “Did you break it off because of the distance?”

It’s more questions than Lukas has produced in the entirety of our acquaintance—all in the space of about ten seconds. Maybe he’s sussing out whether I’m a weirdo. “The opposite, actually. He broke up with me.” Lukas’s forehead curls into a scowl. “What’s that face?”

The scowl remains. “Nothing.”

“It wasn’t because—it wasn’t a sex thing,” I reassure him.

Lukas seems baffled. “I never assumed it was.”

I’m not convinced. “If anything, it’s more because of the way I am.”

“The way you are?”

“Just—my personality. Overachiever. Obsessive with wanting things to go my way. Hyper-controlled. Distant, sometimes. Basically, I know I come across as a stone-cold bitch, but—”

He laughs. Lukas straight-up, outright laughs. A rumbling, deep sound that’s louder than anything I’ve heard from him. I’m not sure what to do, except keep walking and stare, perplexed.

“What?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “You’re not cold, Scarlett,” he says. “You’re . . . soft.”

“I’m not soft.”

“You are with me.” His eyes meet mine. A dark, unflinching look that sands layer upon layer off me. “Maybe I make you soft.”

Heat rushes to my cheeks, and I force my gaze away, down to our shoes, his legs that are so much longer than mine, he must be matching our paces, or I’d have run out of breath a while ago. “Josh met someone he liked better.” The truth is not the sucker punch it used to be, back when just hearing his name made me feel alone and unwanted. “But he wasn’t really . . . like us. We weren’t well matched in that sense.”

He stops in front of a white Spanish Colonial house just outside campus. I do the same, trying not to be intimidated by the serious way he’s studying me. “Are you still in love with him?” he asks quietly.

The question takes me by surprise. So does the ease of my reply. “No. I haven’t been pining for him. It’s been a million years, and—”

“A million.”

I roll my eyes. Smile. “One and a half years.” It’s a more helpful answer than the one he gave me when I asked if he still had feelings for Pen. Do you, Lukas?

“And there hasn’t been anyone else?”

I shake my head. “Not because I’m hung up on Josh. It has more to do with being premed and practice schedules. Plus, with my luck, I’d swipe right on someone who stormed the Capitol and hates routine vaccinations. So . . . yeah. Just Josh.” And now you pulsates sweetly between us. I want to squirm against it, this heat in my stomach he left burning, this frustrating but pleasant reminder that Lukas is like me.

I shrug. Chew on my lower lip before finding the courage to ask, “What about you?”

“Me, what?” He gives me an expectant look. A Norse god granting an audience to his subject. It’s more than a slight turn-on, because I’m twisted like that.

“Has there been anyone else aside from Pen?”

He hesitates, then tilts his head, gesturing toward the entrance of the house, and says, “It’s complicated. We can discuss it inside the house.”