Teaching a Loner to Swim
— Han Sia’s point of view
If I sit in the toddler pool, I can see children running around everywhere, clutching their parents’ hands as they play.
Some of them are so busy darting this way and that after letting go of their parents’ hands that they make their guardians fret and worry, while in other families the parents seem even more excited than the kids, splashing them and teasing them for fun.
It’s an old memory now, hazy and half-lost, but when I was little, I used to play with my parents like that too.
It wasn’t in a swimming pool, though. It was on the green lawn in front of our house, with my mother’s hand in mine...
...
...
What did I do then?
I can’t really remember anymore.
Well, from the look of it, I probably did exactly what those children are doing now—wandering around, looking at everything, and getting happy over nothing at all.
I don’t remember what I wore that day, what my mother wore, or even very much of what was said and done.
Watching these families at the toddler pool, I find that even the version of me in my memory seems to be wearing a swimsuit too.
Since there wasn’t much left in my memory to begin with, my brain seems to have patched it together using the scene right in front of me as material.
With that sloppy stitching done, the image in my memory and the one before my eyes now almost overlap.
I can’t quite tell whether the children I’m seeing are the ones playing in the pool, or whether I’m looking at myself running around on the lawn in front of my house.
And if I place the image of my mother from my memory there too,
somehow, the scene of me and my mother happily playing in the toddler pool is complete.
There, in that place, was a longing that could never be repaid, no matter how much I grieved or how desperately I reached for it.
But the more I watched mothers and daughters playing in the pool, the more that emptiness in my heart only grew.
I think even the counselor warned me about situations like this.
And yet my gaze, turned toward the past, refused to fall away so easily.
Opportunities to think of my mother in a state that wasn’t drenched in blood were pretty rare.
Even if what I was remembering was only a fake stitched together from scraps of other memories,
I didn’t have many memories left at all.
...Still, if I were to recall this time again someday,
I felt like I’d end up mistaking it for a day when my mother and I had gone to the pool together, and that made me feel a little sad.
...
Then, all at once, my view was filled with skin.
And... this familiar shape was...?
The chest was still soft around the edges rather than sharply cut, but it was clear he’d been training steadily, with a young set of pectorals and six abs that stood out every time he breathed.
And, as if he tended to put more force into the right side when doing upper-body work, even the asymmetry of his body had developed so that the upper-right abdominal tile was just a little more pronounced than the others.
There was no mistaking it. This was Jung Ian’s body.
I didn’t know what kind of intent he had, but he came so close to me with his bare skin exposed like that...
He was nothing but a clueless puppy who didn’t know how frightening the world could be.
If he knew what I had been thinking when he was asleep so peacefully on the sunbed earlier, with my fingers secretly tracing his abs, he would never have dared do something like this again.
Now my head was completely seized by the impulse to bite his abs and leave my teeth marks there.
Haah... damn it... should I have done it while he was asleep after all?
It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission, after all. If I had just gone ahead and done it, my bite marks would be on him by now.
But while I was inwardly thinking such wicked things, just for that brief moment, Jung Ian wrapped both arms around my thighs and back and lifted me up in one motion.
“I’ll go teach you how to swim!”
“...Huh?! Eh??”
His rough arm muscles brushed against my bare skin on my thighs and back.
Along my side, his smooth abs rose and fell with his breathing, their heat laid bare against me.
And in front of me, his pectorals bulged as he lifted the weight of a human of roughly forty kilograms...!
On top of that, there was something strangely sad in Jung Ian’s eyes as he looked down at me with such indifference, and that fragile impression—as if a single well-aimed jab could exploit the opening in his heart and make him easy to twist around in my hands—kept fanning the flames of my impulses.
-Haa... haa... huff...!
I was breathing too hard. I was afraid he’d catch what I was thinking, so I had to clamp both hands over my mouth and force my breathing to settle.
My diaphragm trying to gulp in air according to instinct, and my palms fighting to hold it back.
Was this what they called love that felt like your chest was about to burst?
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
I wanted to make Han Sia feel a little better, since she looked so down, so I carried her in a princess hold from the toddler pool to the main pool.
Her face reddened in my arms. Was she embarrassed?
Or... was she making those muffled hiccuping sounds with both hands over her mouth actually laughing?
I wasn’t sure, but whatever it was, the sadness and gloom had clearly vanished from her face.
Yeah, moving her somewhere else had definitely been the right call.
To teach Han Sia how to swim, I set her down at the edge of the main pool first.
From what she’d just said, it sounded like she still hadn’t learned how to float, so the first thing I needed to teach her was how to keep herself afloat without touching the bottom of the pool.
But before I could even open my mouth, Han Sia asked a question first.
“Ian. But can you really teach me how to swim? Actually, when you were asleep earlier, Somi told me you’re really awful at swimming, and that you learned from her today.”
That hurt. Getting hit with facts before I’d even started was rough. Couldn’t she go a little easier on me?
“...Yeah, Somi’s definitely better than me at swimming, but I can still teach you how to float and maybe the backstroke.”
“Hmm... really? If I mess up while learning and panic because I swallow water, can you still stay calm and teach me?”
“Of course. The water here only comes up to my shoulders or chest, so pulling you out won’t be difficult.”
“...Even if I accidentally scratch, pinch, or bite you? Even if I get so scared of sinking that I hang on tight enough to leave marks on your body and refuse to let go?”
Damn it. What was with the biting part?
I felt something off in the way Han Sia phrased that.
Still, I nodded for now.
In a pool shallow enough for her feet to touch, the kind of incident she was talking about probably wouldn’t happen easily, and even if it somehow did, she was pretty light. I could probably manage.
...And if I somehow couldn’t, I trusted the lifeguard watching us to deal with it.
...
The very first thing I did was get Han Sia’s feet to touch the bottom of the pool.
Holding onto the edge with both hands, she slowly lowered herself until her legs reached the floor.
And once the soles of her feet finally touched the bottom,
the water rose to just below Han Sia’s mouth and lapped there, sometimes even climbing to her nose and making her wrinkle her face.
“Puhhuu... khek...! This is deeper than I thought. Instead of standing on the bottom, can’t I just cling to you?”
That was odd. Considering the depth was 1.4 meters, I’d expected Han Sia to be able to keep her head above water just fine.
Maybe the pool had been filled a little more than I’d realized, or maybe Han Sia was a little shorter than I’d thought.
So I had no choice but to offer her my shoulders, and Han Sia grabbed both of them with her hands and ended up floating in place.
“Next... after taking a breath, let’s try lying facedown on the water and lifting your body up. You can do it while holding onto my shoulders like this, or you can hold my hands instead.”
“Hmm... my feet aren’t touching the bottom anymore, at least, but what exactly do I get out of lying face-down on the water?”
“First, it lets you get enough buoyancy that you won’t need to rely on my shoulders. You learned this in science class too, right? Objects that are exposed to the surface of water get more buoyant force than ones that are fully submerged.”
Han Sia understood what I said perfectly.
As expected of the top student in the school, she was easy to teach.
“And if you practice holding that prone position, it helps you get a feel for keeping your balance while you’re floating. For now, let’s aim for getting you used to the posture while holding onto my shoulders, all right?”
After that, Han Sia practiced the face-down floating position on the water several times.
Once, she lost her balance and started flailing, and at that moment she gripped my shoulder so hard that it left a slight red mark.
Still, she adapted to floating quickly,
and by now, in the face-down position, she could stay afloat without holding my shoulders at all.
“All right. Next is the long-awaited practice of floating while lying on your back. Honestly, if you can do just this much, you won’t have any problem enjoying yourself in the main pool, and since the stroke that develops from this is the backstroke... if you can master this much, I’d say you’ve already achieved about eighty percent of today’s goal.”
“Hmm... just hearing it makes it sound simple. Are there any cautions or tips?”
“The biggest difference between lying on your back and lying face-down is whether you can breathe or not. But if you breathe out, your body loses buoyancy and sinks like a deflated balloon, so it’s important to keep holding your breath for as long as you can.”
Han Sia bravely tried the back-floating position, but she failed to keep her balance and started floundering.
I immediately went over and helped her sit upright,
and as a result, both of my arms ended up marked with scratches from her nails.
...
I wondered if, by the time she could actually do the backstroke, my whole body would be covered in nail marks.