Moving In With The Enemy

Chapter 5 ~ "Just Walk"

My first closing shift at work.

I've literally never had a shift this late at work before, and when it's over I can just go to bed. I can sleep. 

I've really been enjoying the extra sleep, even if it's in an unfamiliar place, in a new bed. It's so nice. It's been three days that I've been moved into my new apartment, it still doesn't feel like it's mine yet. That urge to ask permission before using the kitchen or to be in the living room creeps in all the time and I have to remind myself that this is my place now too.

I've been extremely tidy, worried about them hating me for making a mess. So I always clean everything up after I'm done, I don't leave anything out in the bathroom when I get ready in the mornings and I sweep the whole apartment regularly. 

It seems like they like me well enough, but I can't really tell. We haven't hung out much since my first night, hell, I've hardly seen Walker since that night. He's always in his room with the door closed or out somewhere.

"Hey Annie?" I hear and I look up from my place in the pool office. I was on break right now, my supervisor Oliver was standing in the doorway.

"Yeah?"

"Can you cover for about five minutes, I've really got to piss." He begs and I laugh, standing from the chair.

I pull my whistle back on my arm and he passes me the tube as I grab my water. Lifeguarding is really not the glamorous job people think it is, it's not siting around in cute swimsuits and flirting. It's a lot of reminding people to walk, dealing with confused old people, occasionally bandaging cuts and sweating to death because of the humidity inside the pool.

The pool, as far as pools went, was relatively nice. It was a lane pool, no separate shallow pool, no waterslides or crazy things for kids to play with. Just a simple 56 meter pool, it has two bulkheads so we can change the pool and split it up for competitions. It's also insanely wide too so it's the proper width to use it for training. 

It's almost 9:45 at night and we close the pool at ten, there's only a couple of swimmers in the pool, finishing up a lane and leisure swim. We do some family stuff on the weekends and swim lessons in the evenings and on the weekends too, but right now it was just middle-aged people or ex-swim team competitors getting some exercise. 

The first pool I worked at was way worse than this one, it was very much designed as a family pool versus the Coleman competition pool. It was so much more dangerous because parents wouldn't watch their children, you'd have kids having breath holding contests, splashing each other and doing dangerous things. Not to mention the facility wasn't as nice and neither were the staff.

It wasn't really any harder to work here than at my old pool, so I transferred here. They needed the guards and once I got hired, I stayed.

We usually give the swimmers a warning at the ten minute mark and that was coming up soon. Then I had to actually close the pool which I wasn't familiar with at all. That's what Oliver was here for, to show me.

My lifeguard outfits were never attractive. I wore a pair of gym shorts, my pinnie with my sports bra on underneath. Sometimes I wore a swimsuit to work, sometimes I couldn't be bothered. Part of our work policy was once a week, you were supposed to swim five-hundred meters so on those days, I usually wore it.

9:50 p.m

I roll my whistle down my arm and blow it twice quickly. The swimmers all poke their heads up and I sigh.

"Pool's closing in ten!" I call and they all nod or shoot me a thumbs up, finishing their laps.

It was also our policy that we weren't allowed to guard completely alone, that meant that if there was only one guard on the deck, then another had to be close-by in the event of an emergency. Our aquatics coordinator Micheala was still here though in her separate office finishing the pool schedules.