By Your Side: "By Your Side"

            He wasn’t trying to get sprayed with the soapy water. But he wanted so dearly to be close to her. The tub was too small for a couple anyways; another body in the porcelain would cause too much splash and commotion for her parents to hear.

            June was getting tanner the more she soaked. Perhaps it was coming on even before he’d arrived in that afternoon. She’d probably been lying out for days under the scorching blaze of the bulb in the blue sky, nothing standing between them. Everything else was beneath her— beneath everyone’s—feet, everything that was only sand and chalky reddening dirt.

            She’d come into the room he’d checked out to bathe in, the small orange-painted one at the end of the hall. It was her way of showing gratitude for visiting.

            “It’s a charming place, I guess,” Kirk said to her, sitting reversed on the desk chair he dragged into the small bathroom and rested against its steel back.

            “The charm goes away after 22 years here,” she replied, in the middle of shaving. “Actually, it’s not a bad place, but I guess it just depends on the mood I’m in.” He was marveling the sharpness of those blades, but more the slenderness of her legs stretched into the air, the neon-red painted on her toes, like cherries, curling under towards her heels. It didn’t seem to bug her that he was watching something so intimate.

            “So this solves one thing,” she went on, smiling up at him and lightly shaking bubbles away from her brunette locks coming out of her loose bun.

            “And that is?” he answered. He removed his t-shirt stained with his sweat. He’d have to find a tub of his own soon, to meet this lovely gal’s standards. She surely couldn’t long for a man who’d driven 400 miles against the heat and dust to watch her shave those long browning legs of hers.

            “You’ve shown me yours, you gotta see mine.” She giggled and buried herself behind the edge of the tub, like she’d never said something so naughty before. “It’s behind the office up the stairs, between the linens closet and my parents’ room. Has a water bed, too.”

            He couldn’t help but smile.