Miss Lilly does not speak to me anymore. I only ever see Keol at mealtimes and rarely I bump into Ava. When I do, she’s always smoking, her cat trailing behind her, and she grins at me as we pass, but neither of us say anything. My bottom lip begins to bleed from how much I bite it, and Nua and I keep trading books.

One day I don’t feel like reading, and spend the day following Bayan around instead. He lets me, not saying anything, and I spend time with him in the kitchen as he plans meals, and then follow him into the downstairs living room where he dusts. How did he get here, working for Miss Lilly? I don’t even know how old he is. I wonder if he’s ever been married.

There’s a fence that goes all the way around the house, and when you look towards the ocean you can see it stretching along on either side of what must be Miss Lilly’s own part of the beach. The water even hits it on high tide. I follow it one day from inside the house, going from room to room on the first floor, and manage to trace it from one end to the other, all the way from the beach behind the pool and the fountain in the backyard and back to the beach on the other side.

I find myself in the downstairs living room, which has a sliding glass door that leads to the porch, and I look out of it. Ava and her other two husbands are by the pool, outside. It’s a hot day. Ava’s lounging on a long chair with her legs curled up under her, surprisingly cigarette-less. Nua sits with his feet in the pool, and Keol’s standing on the edge of it as if he’s about to jump in.

“Go on outside,” says Miss Lilly suddenly from behind me, and I jump. I wasn’t expecting her to be there. Bayan is gone, suddenly, I didn’t see him slip out. She touches my shoulder, then runs her hand down my arm. “Join your wife, have a little fun.”

I’m uncomfortable around her and in the past few weeks I’ve learned that I trust Ava more than her mother so I obey, and go down to the pool to join them. She looks over at me as I approach, and gestures to the chair next to her. Nua smiles at me; Keol ignores.

“Do a flip,” calls Ava, and Keol grins at her, then jumps into the pool, tumbling head over heels. “You should’ve seen the first time he tried that,” she says to me. “His back was bright red for days.”

I laugh despite myself, and Keol pops back up, his usually messy unkempt hair flattened by the weight of the water. “Come in.”

Ava sighs but smiles, and then slides her ring off her finger and holds it out to me. “Hold these.”

She dumps it into the palm of my hand, and then I realize that she had been holding another one, too - a shiny plain golden band, one that looks exactly like mine. I squint at Nua’s finger as Ava goes towards the edge; he still has one on, so this one must be Keol’s.

She’s still wearing her thin white dress, but jumps up once anyway and then does a perfect dive right over Keol’s head into the water. She slips underneath almost without a splash, and then pops back up next to him. “Nua!”

“No,” he says, laughing, and when Keol swims closer to him he kicks water at his face. Keol sputters but can’t hold back a grin.

Ava floats on her back, her eyes squeezed shut against the sun, and Nua nudges Keol with his foot, then kicks it towards her. Keol grins, then takes a deep breath and swims under the water, then pushes off the floor of the pool, holding his arms braced above him.

He manages to get her square on the back and underneath her legs, and she opens her eyes, shrieking, as she goes almost flying into the air. Keol pushes a little, throwing her to the side, and she lands with a splash in the water near the deep end. When she comes up, wiping her hair out of her face, she takes a breath and then shoots off like a rocket under the water towards him, sending him in a dead swimming sprint towards the ladder.

Keol scrambles out of the pool, leaving her treading in the deep end. He’s breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling, glistening with water droplets. He’s not wearing his ring nor a shirt, I can see it and the rope-belt lying on a chair next to the one that Ava was sitting on when we got here. She grins up at him now, then goes back into her back float, closing her eyes.

Keol goes to sit down next to Nua on the other side of the pool, and I study them for a second. Keol looks strange with his hair not rumpled and sticking up, in fact it looks like Nua’s always is. He lets it grow and grow, and it falls over his face in pale strands lighter than Ava’s. Her hair spreads out around her in the water as she floats, and Keol watches her. He’s strong, I don’t know how. He’s catching his breath now, and when he leans back on his hands, his dark eyes following her around the pool, the sunlight glistens over his skin.

“Can you swim?” he asks suddenly, looking at me, and Ava lifts her head up too, waiting for my answer. I shake my head, and Nua grins. “You should learn.”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Ava turns onto her belly and swims towards the edge of the pool, and then pulls herself halfway out of it with her arms. Keol looks over his shoulder, then stands and grabs something out of the grass for her. It’s a long float that she can lie on, and he tosses it into the water for her. She clambers up into it, and just then Bayan comes out of the poolhouse with glasses in his hands. I have no idea when he came out here. He’s like a ghost. He hands them to Keol, who reaches one arm out to Ava. She takes her drink, then relaxes on the float, closing her eyes against the sun.

“You know that just makes it easier for me to knock you over,” says Keol, taking a sip of his drink, then passing it to Nua.

“You’re not even in the pool,” says Ava lazily, and Keol stands. Nua does as well, downing the rest of the drink, and goes into the poolhouse with his glass. I watch Keol climb up soundlessly to the diving board, and then bounce once.

Ava opens her eyes, and then sits straight up in the pool.

Keol jumps up into the air, flips himself around again, and does a graceless dive into the pool, his legs smacking against the water and splashing it all over Ava. She shrieks again, holding her hands up in front of her, then uses her hands to push herself towards the wall so she can place her glass down. Keol’s underwater, following her like a shark when Nua jumps into the pool as well.

Ava groans, getting hit with another wave of water, and Nua pops up, grinning. His hair is flattened against his head, and he treads for a moment as Keol comes up for air. “Nice.”

Ava kicks water at his face, then rolls off her float and sinks to the bottom of the pool before pushing off and wiping hair out of her eyes. “God.”

Nua had changed, I see, into a bathing suit when he was in the poolhouse. I wonder if I could change, too. I don’t really want to. Nua and Keol can both tread, they’re in the deep end right now with their wife, and I don’t even know how to do that. Even Bayan sits at the edge of the pool, with his feet in the water, until Miss Lilly yells out the door for him.

Ava’s floating on her back again, but rolls her eyes when she hears her mother, and straightens herself up. “No, Bayan, stay.”

He smiles slightly, but pulls his toes out of the water and says, “Miss Ava.”

She wrinkles her nose at him. He goes back towards the house. Keol says, “Your mom’s a bitch.”

“I know,” says Ava with a sigh, leaning back again and spreading her arms out so she looks like a star in the pool. I lean my head back as well, resting it against the back of the chair, and stare at the sky. I wonder why they’ve got a pool when they have a perfectly nice beach on the other side of the house.

Not long afterwards, Bayan calls us in for lunch. I’m not really that hungry, and when we’re done I go back up to my room to avoid Miss Lilly. I forgot I didn’t have a book. Nua has a couple stacked up next to his bed, and I flip through them, and then Keol comes in, running his fingers through his messy hair. “You like books too?”

“I suppose,” I answer. “Not much else to do. Have you read any of these?”

“I don’t read,” he answers, and I sit on my bed. “Ever?”

“No,” answers Keol shortly. “Why do you even care?”

I look up at him. “I was just gonna ask for suggestions, but if you don’t have any.”

“Nope. I don’t have time to read.”

“Right,” I say under my breath. Keol glares at me, and I raise my eyebrows. “What?”

He looks at the books in my hand, and then shakes his head and turns away. I furrow my eyebrows. “Can you read, Keol?”

He opens his mouth to protest, but nothing comes out, and I see his fists clenching at his sides. I take a deep breath and press my lips together, then say, “Keol-”

“You shut up,” he says, breathing out hard through his nose. “I bet you thought you were gonna be free your whole life, you would never be married, I bet your stupid parents taught you how to read because they thought you’d actually make something with your life. I never had that, I never had a reason to live except to get married to some woman. All I was told was going to happen. If I didn’t die first.”

I don’t say anything. Keol can’t read.

“So why should I’ve ever learned?” he asks, his voice low. He smiles a little, but it’s not in his eyes. “I’m not gonna do anything with it anyway. You’re not better than me.”

He pushes through the door to his room, letting it slam behind him. I thought he was gonna slam me, so it’s a welcome bang.

“Huh,” says Ava from the bathroom. I jump and then turn to her. She’s leaning against the doorframe, a smoking cigarette between her lips. The smell of smoke has seeped into pretty much everything she touches so I didn’t even notice her presence. “That’s surprising.”

“You didn’t know he can’t read?” I ask in slight surprise.

“We don’t actually talk much,” she says around the smoke, and then takes it out of her mouth to cough before promptly putting it back. “I think you’ve found a sore spot with him.”

She takes another drag of the cigarette, then says, “You can?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Was he right? Parents?”

She wants to know who taught me. Her way of getting a little bit of insight to my life, insight that I’m never going to give. I’ll never tell her that my parents taught us both, but it was always Abigala who loved the words on every newspaper we ever got, who made me practice with her under the covers at night, who made me read her own words when she started writing them. Ava’s never going to get her hands on Abigala. “Something like that.”

“Hm,” says Ava, but doesn’t press. She looks at me a second as if she knows I’m lying and then goes back through the bathroom into her own room.

I leave the room so that Keol isn’t trapped in there and go to the library. I don’t even know what I would do if I couldn’t read. Ava’s probably smarter than all three of her husbands combined. Abigala is smart, too, she taught herself and me to read. Keol never had anything like that. The person he’s probably felt closest to in his entire life is Ava.

He must really trust his wife, then. But she tied him to her bed. But he didn’t seem particularly disturbed by that. He doesn’t seem particularly disturbed by anything she does.

That night, Keol doesn’t look at me all through dinner, and Ava follows him up to our bedroom afterwards, catching the door to his tiny room before he can slam it in her face. She joins him inside, closing the door behind her, and I can hear her voice through the wall, but I can’t make out what she’s saying. Nua shrugs at me and just sits on his bed. They stay in there together all night, and I have no nightmares at all.