He thought back to how he’d finally decided to try to touch her. A few weeks ago she worked late and he was the lifeguard that was closing up for the night. Everything was done, but he was supposed to stay until the last man was done in the locker room, and tonight it was the 70-year old Larry who always took forever in the shower.

As Ben waited in the reception area, sitting in one of the three chairs at the front counter, Jules was doing the final paperwork for the front desk. Ben always felt a little uncomfortable around Jules, because she was his boss, but also because they’d been working together for over a year and she was always uptight. She never had a down moment where she just joked with everyone, and the lifeguards usually did plenty of joking; he thought it would be easy for her to chime in. She usually just ignored the lifeguards’ joking unless they happened to say something derogatory or degrading. In that case, she would just look up from whatever she was working on, or suddenly appear from the other room and say, “That’s enough, guys. Talk like that outside of work, but not here. I’m happy to give out official warnings if it continues.” Then she would look them in the eye until she got a nod or a “Yes, ma’am,” from each offender. Ben had always thought her personality didn’t fit her look. She acted like she was his mom’s age, not just a couple years his senior. In Ben’s experience, most attractive women in their early twenty’s were easy going and flirty, but Jules was serious and considered herself to be above the banality of joking around.

Ben remembered that night, as they sat at the front counter. Ben stole a glance at Jules, who had her head turned away from him. In her tank-top and shorts, he could see her trim arms, her long narrow torso, her firm legs, and her long blonde hair cascading down her back loosely tied in a ponytail. He tried to guess how tall she was. He guessed maybe five foot eight inches, which would put her just a few inches shorter than him. He tried to imagine what type of person she was when she wasn’t at work, when she wasn’t in charge. He wondered what she acted like when she let loose, and he wondered if that ever happened.

Ben decided to pull his phone out of his pocket to start playing a game when Jules sighed, turned to him, and said in a surprisingly exasperated voice, “This isn’t the worst job in the world, right?” He was surprised that she asked him the question as if he were her friend, not in her usual commanding tone. He felt like she was reaching for some comfort from him, like she desperately needed to be told that everything was alright.

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