The Trip The Way I Wish It
Had Gone, Part Five
Published early on our
Previews
page on Sunday,
August 16, 2026.
Official publication date for the main page of our
site: Thursday,
August 20, 2026..
This story was submitted by Jack
aka lkngjst@yahoo.com
To read the 1st part of this
story, go to "The
Trip The Way I Wish It Had Gone, Part One".
To read Jack's 1st story, go to "Love Affair With A Shoe".
"The Trip the Way I Wish It Had Gone"
Series. Fantasy framed as "what I wish had
happened."
---
## Part Five
We skipped the afternoon sessions. The road map review would survive
without us, and if it didn't, that was a problem for a version of me who
cared a lot less than the one walking out to the pool.
She'd texted me mid-morning — a photo of an unopened box on her bed,
caption: *behave.* I had not behaved. I'd thought about that box through
two hours of meetings I couldn't have summarized at gunpoint — and about
the night before, which I was still half-sure I'd dreamed.
In LA there'd been a third wheel and a lot of careful pretending, the
two of us orbiting each other at the edge of a hotel pool while a
coworker droned on about his fantasy football team. I'd come down today
slathered in sunscreen like a man who'd learned his lesson, because LA
had cooked me — one hour by that pool and I peeled for two weeks. I
blamed the medication I'd been on that summer, the kind that turns sun
and a couple of drinks into a chemistry experiment on your skin. Not
making that mistake twice. And not, this time, with a chaperone. This
time I came around the corner and she was already there, stretched out
on a lounger in a swimsuit that was doing the Lord's honest work,
sunglasses pushed up, one knee bent.
And on her bare feet, the barefoot jewelry. A fine gold chain around
each ankle, a single strand running up the top of the foot to loop the
middle toe. No shoe. Just the idea of one. All skin and a thread of gold
in the full California sun, exactly the way I'd described it on the
bench like she'd been taking dictation.
"You wore them down," I said, sitting on the
edge of her lounger.
"You said it was your favorite." She lowered
the sunglasses just enough to look at me over them. "Figure
we're even now. You gave me mine last night. This one's yours."
I meant to say something smooth and instead just looked, in a way I had
to consciously rein in so we didn't get noticed — that's its own
particular torture, a thing you want that badly four feet away, in
public, with a dozen strangers between you and any honesty about it. She
knew. She kept shifting her foot in the light, pointing her toes,
letting the chain catch, watching me lose the fight over the top of a
paperback she wasn't reading.
We got in the pool eventually because I needed the water for entirely
unromantic reasons. She slid in after me, all that easy athletic grace,
and in the deep end where nobody could see below the surface she hooked
one foot around the back of my leg and drew it slow up my calf, the
little gold chain dragging against my skin.
"This is unbelievably unfair," I told her,
keeping my face conference-appropriate for the benefit of the retiree
doing laps two lanes over.
"I know." Her toes pressed, deliberate, just
out of view. "That's the fun part. All these people, and
not one of them knows what I'm doing to you right now. Or what you'd
do to me if they weren't here."
I'm a 92-on-the-test voyeur, a 91 exhibitionist, and I had never had it
laid out quite that cleanly — the secret in plain sight, the entire pool
deck none the wiser. I could have stayed in that water until I pruned.
Later she stretched out on the lounger again and dangled both feet off
the end, and I sat on the deck below her and let myself, in the open,
run one thumb along an arch and the gold over it, slow, like I was just
adjusting the chain. To anyone watching it was nothing. To us it was
everything. Her breath changed. Mine did too.
"Okay," she said finally, sitting up, a little
flushed in a way the sun couldn't take credit for. "I have
to stop, or I'm going to do something that gets us both thrown out
of a Marriott."
"Probably wise."
She leaned down close, the wet ends of her hair brushing my shoulder,
and dropped her voice. "The jewelry was the daytime
surprise. You've been very patient." A kiss just below
my ear. "Come up at nine. The rest of the box is for after
dark. And this time, bring your phone."
She gathered her things and walked off across the deck, barefoot, the
gold catching the light with every step, and I sat there in the sun like
a man who'd just been handed the keys to something he'd spent his whole
life being told to feel bad about wanting.
*To be continued.*
---
_Quick one for you: leave the jewelry on, or take it all off?
Tell me in the comments. And if the pool got to you, tap love — Part Six
goes somewhere._
