(and i feel all right)

He spread the aloe over her skin in small careful sweeps. He kept waiting for her to flinch away from his touch and when she didn’t, he wasn’t sure if that meant he was doing it right or if she was just being patient with him. Both were possible. Both were equally hard to sit with.

“That’s good, feels better,” she said, before he’d done anything wrong. Like she could tell he was working it out.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, it’s cooling it already.”

He’d looked it up on his phone, earlier, when he’d caught the colour of her shoulders as she’d made her way inside. He’d known she’d need help with this. He wasn’t going to say so, but he’d Googled quickly before she’d asked - rubbed in versus let it sit, cool compress first or not, and none of the things he’d read agreed with each other. Putting aloe on after the sun wasn’t something the Tillman’s had ever bothered with. He’d gone back and forth on whether to stay back and let someone else help her, but before he could decide one way or the other she’d cornered him in the hallway, the others still out back at the grill, and now he was here, with her, his big dumb hands on her smooth skin.

That was new. The going back and forth on things relating to her. He’d had friends before, obviously, but most of them required nothing from him except showing up (usually with a six pack), and she… she expected him to pay attention. To think and be sure of things. He didn’t mind that the way he thought he would.

His thumbs found a knot in her left shoulder, just below the strap of her swimsuit, and without thinking he pressed into it.

“Ooh,” she hissed, but she didn’t move away.

“Too hard?”

“No.” She paused, turning just enough to catch his eye over her shoulder. “No, that’s… keep going.”

He kept going, working his thumbs into the knot until it softened, adding more aloe to the sunburn and soothing it in. She tipped her head forward a little. He watched the back of her neck, the small hairs there, and looked away.

There was a particular square of skin between her shoulder blades she’d pointed to earlier. Mostly there, I couldn’t get it. He’d nodded like it was a normal thing to be told. He moved to it now, spread the aloe slow, and he could feel the heat of the burn under his fingers, the way the skin was tight with it, and he thought, distantly, that she should have covered up sooner. But he’d liked seeing her in her swimsuit. He didn’t want that to end. So he’d said nothing, and now she was burned.

“You’re better at this than I expected,” she said.

“What’d you expect?”

“I don’t know. You always seem like a guy who doesn’t do things gently.”

He didn’t answer right away. His hands kept moving, the same careful circles.

“I can,” he said finally. “When it matters.”

She went quiet. The bathroom was small and warm and the only sound was the buzz of the bulb above the mirror. He could see the edge of her face if he looked up, not much, just the line of her jaw, the way she was looking down at her hands in her lap.

He didn’t know what they were, really. He’d been trying not to think about it directly, the way you don’t look straight at something bright. They were friends. That was true and also not quite the whole truth and he was pretty sure she knew it too, which was maybe why she’d asked him instead of someone else. Or maybe he was wrong about that. He was wrong about things sometimes.

“Can you do the sides too?” she asked. Her voice was a little quieter than before.

“I will,” he said. “I’m getting there.”

He wasn’t rushing. For once in his life, he was not rushing.

He smoothed the aloe into her sides, slow as the rest of it, then capped the bottle, placing it on the counter beside her.

She turned around.

He hadn’t quite prepared for that - for her facing him in the small space, close enough that he could see the dusting of freckles across her nose and the pink across her cheekbones that had nothing to do with the sun. She looked at him for a second, something working itself out behind her eyes, and then she leaned up and kissed him on the cheek.

Except she caught the corner of his mouth, just barely. Warm and soft and over before he could decide what to do with his hands.

She pulled back without a word. Reached past him for the blouse she’d draped over the towel rail and shrugged it on, leaving it hanging open, and then she was moving around him and the door was opening and he could hear the others out back, the grill, someone laughing at something.

The door didn’t quite close behind her.