Page 1 of Teach Me To Sin

If Victorand I had mothers, they would have taught us never to get drunk on the edge of a swimming pool.

I set the second empty bottle of vodka next to the first on the gray-tiled pool deck, then clumsily try to open a third. Victor’s floating naked in the pool with his arms propped on the wall. I stay a foot or two away from the water, barefoot but fully dressed.

Even retired Olympic swimmers can drown in a freak accident. Hell, we almost drowned together once, in the middle of the Gulf of Naples. But today’s not a day for accidents. Today we’re gods.

I pass Victor the bottle, drops of alcohol scattering on the floor because I can’t hold it steady. He chugs, then starts coughing and pushes it toward me. “I think the lining of my throat is gone.”

Giggling, I slide down onto my back and stare up at the ceiling high above us, dotted with skylights that still have tarps over them while the construction crew repairs the roof. Towering wooden beams support the well-worn brick walls, a million cozy hues of brown, orange, and red, while immense rafters arch forty feet above our heads. For better or worse, it’s all ours now.

“The fuck are we doing?” I slur gently, closing my eyes. We’re two young, fucked up ex-swimmers who got our fathers sent to jail—his for tax fraud and corruption, mine for far, far worse. We have no purpose, no place in this new world, and we’ve just bought a run-down building with a pool we can’t afford. I don’t even know what a “community center” is supposed to do, let alone how to start one. “No one’s ever gonna sign up for this shit-ass idea.”

Victor ducks his blond head under the water, then pops up and stretches out a dripping arm to slap my foot. “Sit up.”

“I can’t.”

“Sit up, you lightweight bitch.”

The entire room twirls like a merry-go-round as I struggle upright. I make a mental note to puke outside, not in the pool.

“Which way is jail?” Victor struggles to enunciate, flopping his pointer finger in every direction.

“I think…” I pause to down more vodka. “I think there’s more than one jail, dude.”

Pushing himself up, he swipes at me, misses, then manages to grab my chin in wet fingers and pull our foreheads together. “Which. Way. Is. Jail?” The sentence takes a long time to finish because we keep cracking up between words.

“That way.” I thrust my arm in a random direction. “Jail is that way.”

Victor flips the bird with both hands, extending his arms like he’s cheering after the best race of his life.

“Fuck you all,” he yells, loud enough for his voice to echo off the water and through the cathedral of empty space. “We don’t need you. You’re nothing. We have our own fucking pool now.”

This isn’t over; it never will be for us. We lived too long in the dark to crawl out unscathed. The world is too twisted, the nights too deep and the mornings slow to come.

But I put up my middle fingers too, because today we’re gods

Alek

“Have you ever fucked a redhead?Maybe I should try going ginger.” Hairbrushes and eyeshadow compacts clatter into the bathroom sink as my girlfriend upends her toiletry bag, looking for her mascara.

“Your hair is pretty, babe,” I croak, too exhausted to move from where I’m sprawled naked across the bed. My soft, messy dick is flopped against my thigh, like it just keeled over and died. I should clean up, get dressed, dosomething. Instead, I drape my arm over my eyes, letting the pressure massage away my throbbing headache.

“If I gave you head first, do you think you’d have a little more, um,oomph? Oh, or maybe a cock ring would help?” Her forced enthusiasm echoes around the luxurious storm-gray walls of the resort bathroom. “Or…I know all the guys in the Viagra commercials are horny grandpas, but I’m sure it works for any age.” The worst part is that no matter how many times we have this conversation, she never sounds frustrated–just concerned, like a therapist trying to figure out which mommy issue made you an alcoholic.

“Shit.” Groaning, I roll over and stifle my face in the mattress until I start to feel lightheaded. Maya and I used to blame our disastrous sex life on the fact that I work from six in the morning until eleven at night, seven days a week. Unfortunately, a ten-day vacation in the clear air and bright summer sun of a resort in central Washington has made the problem worse instead of better. I had to eat her out earlier after an hour of trying to fuck because a stunning, naked woman grinding on me and talking dirty couldn’t get me hard enough.

Rolling onto my side, I stare out the window toward a hazy wall of mountains guarded by endless miles of trees. “I’ll make another appointment when we get back.” Half of me wants her to snap, throw a few things, and walk out on me. The other half will take any pill and try any dick torture device she can think of, because the one thing I fear most is being alone.

My phone buzzes under my chest, and I dig through the sheets to unearth it. Maya pats my ass warningly on her way to grab a sundress from her suitcase. “This time you only lasted ten hours without taking a work message, and we were sleeping for eight of them. How many dinners do you owe me now?”

“Seven,” I mumble, squinting at the text. “But this definitely isn’t work.”

Did you manage to keep it up this time?

Victor Lang, the co-owner of my swimming nonprofit, seems to have a sixth sense about when I’m fucking. He follows his text with a whole storyline of emojis–eggplant, water droplet, wilting flower, crying face. I send him a middle finger, then switch over to message our head teacher, Tate.

Me: Victor’s bored enough to send me emojis, which means someone needs to go in and make sure the place is still standing.

Tate, the dickhole, just responds with a saluting face and an emergency siren. I throw my phone across the bed and bury my head in my pillow. My headache is rapidly becoming a migraine.

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