The Fertile Goth Neighbor & The Pool Boy

I've been cleaning Victoria Prescott's pool since I was sixteen.

Five years of chlorine, pH balances, and keeping my head down while I work toward a master's in computational neuroscience. I live with my parents. I drive a Honda Civic. I've never had a girlfriend, and my most meaningful relationship is with a Python script that keeps crashing.

Then Victoria's new wife moved in.

Judith is twenty-eight, pale as marble, and she sits poolside in vintage bikinis under a black umbrella like something from a photograph that was never meant to be developed. The neighbors think she's a bitch. I think she's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. She has nails like weapons and porcelain fangs she wears for the content she creates in the studio upstairs, and when she smiles with them in, something in my nervous system rewires itself permanently.

She has twenty-two thousand subscribers. She has rules. She has a wife who doesn't care what she does on her own time. And she has plans for the pool boy that go well beyond payment for services rendered.

I should know better. I'm supposed to be the smart one.

But Judith doesn't ask twice, and I've never been good at saying no to a woman who already knows what I'll say before I open my mouth.