Wet
I was really just thirsty when I met him. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d learn any kind of lesson from it.
“I’ve come to get some water,” I drunkenly said to the manager. A shadow walked through the unlit courtyard.
“Hello there,” a blue-blonde shadow said to me. The shadow’s name was Net.
He wore a heavy black backpack over his bare shoulders in the open air guest house where I’d been staying for the New Year. I looked at Net as he was assigned a bungalow perpendicular to mine. I looked at Net’s shoulders. I looked at his blonde hair and blue eyes. I half-grinned. Sihanoukville sure was beautiful during the winter.
Net had just arrived in the beach town. He was traveling with his sister and her fiancee, but they hadn’t arrived yet. I don’t remember now how we ended up in the ocean together. I just remember talking to him and then being in the ocean. We swung our arms back and forth in the night water, hoping the clouds would conceal the moon long enough for us to see the phosphorescents. I remember him saying, “I feel so gay because I can’t stop playing with the sparkles!” His Dutch accent combined with the lisp hiding behind his straight row of white teeth made him sound like a child. It was New Year’s Eve eve.
“It’s al-gee,” Net said. He was studying to become a microbiologist. I noted his lack of enthusiasm and questioned his skill in the scientific arena. “It’s really… boring. Looking at slides of people’s spit under a magnifying glass to see what antibiotics will make their diseases disappear...”
I had met another scientist on my trip who was from England and an atheist. We swam in the ocean together on the other end of the beach, but his anti-religion kept our adventures swim-related. Some people who live with the complete absence of faith aren’t very sexy, but his love for the iron-clad life of science was still attractive enough for a little lip service.
Besides the atheist, there were more. There was the Italian with the lube that had a dragon on the outside of the bottle. There was the Ghanian-bred, German-raised, Australian-living soccer coach who wanted to spend time with my family. There was the polite Norwegian who wouldn’t have sex with me on account of the gonorrhea he picked up in Thailand. They all accompanied my late night swimming escapades. I’d emerge from the ocean with pruney fingers, feeling like I needed to take a bath.
But this swim felt different. The water was warmer and the sky darker. Despite the calm of the almost-early-morning ocean, salt water lapped into the creases of my pursed lips as we swam around one another. The smell of stale whiskey wafted over the current and met my nose as Net swam by, making sure to get close enough for my attention but not close enough to touch. He dove underwater. I began to panic, imagining he would grab my ankles like kids used to do in the pool at my apartment complex.
Looking into the clear water hoping to see Net before he could grab me made me feel like a child. But in the blackness, unclothed lust-hungry and cloud-illuminated skin also made me feel more innocent than I should have.
The steps between an initial glance late at night and a last glance in the sober morning sun are always difficult for me. I weighed my odds for successfully making a smooth move while drunk, naked, and treading water. I watched Net’s blonde hair pop up out of the liquid stillness. His long arms were above his head and flew up over the edge of a wooden fishing boat floating nearby.
The boats nested themselves a mere thirty feet from shore at night, dotting the water’s edge like hollow black rocks. They illuminate to passersby the outline of the coast with green and red blinking lights and sway their six-foot high bows in the shallow waves. In the faint light of the boat, Net pulled his legs over the side and lifted himself over the edge of the bow. He threw a rope into the water.
“Come up here. I’ll pull you in!”
My nakedness met me like an oncoming wave from the rocking boat as I suspended myself just above the water below. Before I had the chance to false-justify my sudden uptightness about scaling the side of a fishing boat at night while naked, Net was off the bow. He crashed into the water just inches from me; he slid back up through the water as a cloud of glowing phosphorescents surrounded his path. Neon green sparks flew off the tips of his fingers like slivers of gold dust. The water parted and he put his hands around my hips, his white-blondeness and broad shoulders emerged from the glossy water and floated parallel to mine.
His mouth tasted like salt and I had to fight the desire to bite the edges of his bottom lip against the rocking of the waves. He pulled me closer and I dug the tips of my fingers into his shoulders and back. We could’ve floated all the way to Rabbit Island that way. We would’ve washed up on shore together, our bodies connected by newly-formed coral, skins glimmering like freshly caught fish.
But nevermind the ocean. Even in eight-foot water I was caught, only released by his grasp as we floated closer to shore.
It began to rain. At first, drops patted the stillness of the water, the phosphorescents flashing from the pressure of the water from the dripping sky. Again Net dove underwater, this time swimming up quietly behind me, sliding his hands around my waist as the weight of the water pushed him against me. The waves slid in the spaces between us. He bit my neck and with a surge of adrenaline I turned to his arms, begging to be drowned. The rain was cold and hit both of us like an electric current. We were connected by nothing more than waves, and the phosphorescence glowed brighter with our movement.
Even in the water I could feel him getting hard. I wondered if we’d have babies that looked like dolphins or were born with seaweed skin as I wrapped by legs around his waist. I was Venus emerging from that big old shell. Net carried me to shore, happily enmeshed in his limbs. There, under a tree in the grit of the sand and rain I gave in. He had me. He pressed into me with the rhythm of the waves. I bit my lip to draw a tiny pearl of blood. I didn’t want to wake the birds nesting in the trees with our voices.
Hours later we laid naked in my bungalow beneath a single red lightbulb gently illuminating thin walls. Dashes of light like braille speckled the walls as the sun rose into daylight. On the mat our bodies huddled and I dared him to speak to me in Dutch. “Happy last day of the year,” I whispered to him. His smile emerged from behind pink fleshy lips and he giggled like a child. “You too.”
But soon, all of our whiskey-induced conversation faded as the day grew lighter. He had run out of different english words to teach me, like “gumboots” and alternative words for “hiking.” He said his real dream was to be in the Special Forces, hunting and climbing, “surrounded by nature.” In a moment of supposed vulnerability, he whispered that he could never imagine killing a man. I didn’t know what to say. My feet were tangled in the tattered mosquito net hanging from the ceiling. Unwrapping them, I stood and walked across the fake linoleum patterned floor, hovering in the doorway to smoke a cigarette. I no longer felt like disturbing the entire group of travelers in the hostel room downstairs with our whispering.
Net followed me, ignoring my telepathic waves for him to go. We stood on the tiny front porch shoulder to shoulder, sharing smoke, trapped between the impending day, the enclosed patio, and my wet swimsuit hanging from the ceiling support. The smoke slipped out from our lips and traveled across the elongated courtyard where we had met. It dissipated between the giant green palms and towels drying on clothes lines along the concrete walkways.
“I should be going soon,” Net said as he looked across the balcony over to his own room.
“It’s not like you have that long of a journey,” I replied. He looked at me, still naked on the porch. I wrapped a closely-hanging towel around my chest.
“You wouldn’t want to flash anyone who’s awake now!” He looked again around the empty courtyard. “Americans can be so uptight.” He thought it was funny. I just laughed for finally seeing him in the daylight. I spent the next afternoon loathing in self-hate for getting tangled in such a stranger.
I recovered from my hangover by drinking a little more. I started writing about the ocean water that night with Net, seaweed wet, sand-coated sex in the complete darkness. Slowly I fell into the sticky sleep of the afternoon and I dreamt of water. I dreamt about the calmness, the disconnection from my own naked body in that warm womb, the desire to hold onto something—someone—so as not to float away under the clouds.
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