He asked if I was seeing anyone

He asked me in the lot behind the pool with his keys already out.

"You seeing anybody right now?"

That's it. It was the second week of August and it's the middle of September.

His truck was two spaces down from mine, a gray Tacoma with a tailgate you have to lift up before it'll latch. My hair was still wet. It was a hundred and three and the asphalt had that give it gets in the afternoon.

When Muñoz asks you that, he's asking so he can tell you about some girl he met on Fourth. Renner didn't go for his door. He had the keys in his hand and he wasn't using them for anything.

Six seconds. I timed it on my phone later, thumb on the stopwatch, sitting on my bed trying to hold still that long. Six is probably too many. It wasn't two.

I said nah. I said something about there being too much going on right now, which is what anybody says. He said cool. He got in the truck. I got in my car and the wheel was too hot to hold so I drove with my hands down at the bottom of it, and I went home and rinsed my suit in the kitchen sink, and that was August.

There's five of us in a house off Fourth. The swamp cooler stops being a cooler the second the humidity comes up, so most of August it just blew wet air on us and everybody's sheets felt damp all month. Renner's got the room by the kitchen. Mine's the back one on the alley, with the window that doesn't lock.

We sign again in March. Five names on it.

I'm up at 4:50. In the water by 5:40, lift after, then class, then back in at two, then food, then I'm done by nine. That's the day. I don't really know anybody outside of it. The guys I live with are the guys I swim with, and my phone is the group thread and my mom.

Twelve two hundreds on 2:20 and it's the same wall and the same line on the bottom, and your head just goes wherever it wants. I'll be on the sixth one and I'm not in the pool, I'm standing on that asphalt again.

Some nights I've got him looking at the gravel first and then up at me. Then I'll get one where he's looking right at me and I'm the one who looked down. I can't get it to hold still. I've run it so many times I don't trust any version of it now.

I parked in his spot the next week. Not on purpose, or, I don't know. It was open. I sat in the car with the AC going and looked at where he'd been standing and I couldn't tell you what I thought was going to happen.

And nothing's happened since. He's exactly the same. He rode with me to Eegee's on the twelfth because it was his turn to buy and we split a large and he talked about his shoulder the whole way. At the intrasquad he was on the wall yelling when I came in, and then he had his hand on the back of my neck in the water, which is what everybody does.

Last week Muñoz started in on him about a girl from the volleyball house and Renner just kept taping his fingers. He didn't say yes. He didn't say it wasn't true either. Then he looked up and I was still watching. Maybe a second. He went back to the tape.

I thought about that one for two days.

Sunday night we were both in the kitchen at eleven because neither of us can sleep the night before a hard week. He's eating cereal standing up over the sink. I had it right there. I had the whole thing lined up in my mouth, I was going to go hey, back in August, when you asked me that. That's all. Eight words and then he says whatever he says and it's done either way. What I actually said was that somebody needs to snake the shower drain because it's backing up again. He said he'd do it Saturday. He did, too.

There was a guy here two years ago that the house went quiet on. I don't even know what it was over. He finished the season and then he was somewhere else.

All I had to do was go what about you. Guys say it back without thinking about it. I didn't.

He's had a month to say something else.

So it's a hundred and three and we're in the lot and he's got the keys in his hand. He asks. I hear myself answer. He says cool and gets in the truck, and then he sits there a second before he starts it, and I don't know if that's real or if I put it in later. That's the newest part. It only showed up about a week ago. I don't remember him sitting there in August.

We got maybe forty minutes of rain last Thursday, probably the last of it for the year, hard enough that the wash on Speedway had water moving in it and everything smelled like creosote after. He came in the back door soaked and stood on the mat and said my car window was down. It was. He'd gone out in it and put it up for me. Then he went and took a shower.

The hot water in that house is a joke with five of us, so we rinse the chlorine off with the hose in the backyard before we come in.

I was out there Tuesday with my flip-flops in the dirt when his truck pulled up front. I heard the tailgate.