10 Days [Brallon]

Jacuzzi Jets And Toxic Waste Water

"Yknow, you're getting over Ryan quite fast," I said, and tossed Brendon a beach towel over my shoulder.

"Yeah, well Ryan never took me to a pool." He claimed "He said it would probably just drive me insane because places like that are never clean."

That's right, Brendon's a clean freak - so I assume that means he's not going to like this pool at all. The last time it was cleaned was probably in like 1979, maybe even earlier than that if you took into consideration the problematic jacuzzi. Long story short, it was not pretty, and anytime the jets would turn on, spider eggs would replace water for a good 30 seconds. That was learned the hard way, more than once. Sadly. Not by me though - from Tyler and his impressively horrifying forgetfulness.

"If you like it clean then we should just stay in the pool and not the jacuzzi then, yeah?"

Brendon paused, stepping out from behind my bathroom door with swimshort ties dangling between his fingers looped into a half done bow. "What's wrong with the jacuzzi?"

I panicked and said, "oh, just some mold spots growing in it. Nobody's bothered to clean it so it's really gross in there." And dammit I felt horrible lying about something like that to his face.

He shut the bathroom door and softly grabbed my arm, holding the towel I'd thrown close to his bare chest. "So we should just not go near it then?"

Actually, the pool was probably nasty too. I'd been in there once, when I was checking out the place before I bought my stupid house with no air conditioning. I thought it was a good idea to pay the extra money each month to have a pool at my disposal whenever I felt like it, but no. It was shit. The entire sectioned off area for swimming and all the little pellets floating around in it. Literal shit.

Disgusting.

Y'know, maybe they'd cleaned it.

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They did not clean it.

Brendon paused as soon as he shut the creaky metal gate behind us, dropping the towel and shuddering. It was even more gross than I'd remembered. The water was actually green, not even a nice and calming sea green, but resembling more toxic waste. Toxic waste didn't seem too out there because the rest of the place looked like a dump too - some of the lounge chairs had been torn to shreds (we don't even have animals other than screaming insomniac birds around here), a couple sidewalk squares on the area had been completely demolished by untrimmed weeds and insane roots from a dead willow tree that looked like it was from Harry Potter.

Almost instinctively, his toes curled closer to the flip flops straps on his feet, stepping backward closer to me instead of the mounds of filth spotting the cement. His fingers grasped for my shoulders, pulling himself into my grip so he wouldn't have to touch the floor anymore. I felt awful - I'd suggested it and here he was, surrounded by so much dirt it could've replaced all the nuclear waste stirring in that pool.

"So, uh I guess the pool hasn't been cleaned in a while-"

Brendon shivered and climbed on to my back, hugging as tightly as he could around my shoulders. "I-It's fine, yknow? I don't mind, we can go swimming if you want to..." his voice cracked every other word and I felt even worse about even suggesting to go to the pool.

"We really don't have to, I know you don't like-"

"No," he insisted and crawled down to the ground, carefully stepping on each tile until he reached the staircase leading into the water "its fine. I've been meaning to get over this stupid thing anyways."