← Back
Ana’s day off began on the back of a battered green scooter with me clinging to her waist and my sunhat in my teeth.
We rode forty minutes down a road cut through jungle so thick it felt like driving through green wool. She parked by a hand-painted sign, led me along a path of crumbling limestone, and stopped at a hole in the ground the size of a swimming pool, a hundred feet of turquoise water, roots hanging down through the daylight like curtains. Nobody else. Birdsong. Dripping.
“A cenote,” she said. “Where I go when I need to remember I’m small.”
She pulled off her T-shirt and shorts and dived in wearing a black bikini. I stood on the edge in my sundress with my heart thudding, watching her surface and flick her braid back, laughing up at me.
“Come in, Sophie. Nobody here but fish.”
I took my dress off. Cold water closed round me and I yelped, and she swam over, grinning, and caught my hands to steady me. Her legs brushed mine as we trod water. I could smell her sunscreen and the green mineral scent of the cave.
We talked for an hour with our arms resting on a ledge. She’d grown up in Oaxaca, taught in Barcelona and Goa, loved the sea. I told her about the ten years, and about the last eleven months of nothing. She went quiet.
“You haven’t let yourself be touched in a long time,” she said softly.
I looked at her wet mouth and my stomach turned over.