Someone was next to her in the water, probably Etcetera to judge from the amount of displaced water. He panted as he struggled with his body’s instinct to flee the remorseless heat. She listened to his breath deepen, heard the sighs as he unwound. There was a sympathy between their bodies as the ripples carried the signals of relaxation between them.
You can’t stay in that kind of heat forever, no matter how much you’d like to. She stayed right to the last instant, then stood up quickly, cool air tingling everywhere it kissed her. She gasped. The heat cooked away all self-consciousness. She could stand naked and gasping on the pool’s steaming edge without even the awareness of not being self-conscious. She walked in measured steps, smooth flagstones sensual against her feet’s half-boiled soles, to the edge of the coldest pool. She dipped a nearby pail into it, then used the pail to wet her small towel, squeezing it on her skin, starting on the top of her head and nearly choking as the icy water sluiced down her shaven scalp and behind her ears and into her eyes, nose and mouth.
She dipped the towel, scrubbed her skin, clenching her jaw to keep from gasping. She forced herself to scour her skin with the water, dipping the towel again and again, lashing herself with the cold until the pail was empty. She contemplated another pailful – sometimes she did two or three – but couldn’t bear the thought.
She stepped into the coldest pool, up to her ankles, and made herself descend the steps, keeping her hand light on the grab-rail despite the death-grip she wanted. One more step and she was in the water to her knees, another step and she was up to her thighs, and the water lapped at the bottom of her butt and her vulva. The thought of taking one more step was impossible, no sane person would plunge their tenderest places into icy hell. She knew from experience that if she didn’t go for it, she’d lose her nerve. She brought her weight forward until she had no choice but to plunge chest-first into the water, head dipping under for a moment that made her ears go instantly numb and the skin on her eyeballs and forehead feel like it was being pulled to her hairline.
She refused, by iron will, to allow herself to gasp. She made herself stay in that punishing water for one long breath, and then walked out in measured steps. The air, chilly before, now felt hot. She took her small towel back to the hottest pool and filled a fresh bucket and started the process in reverse. The water was blister-raising, scorching, scalding, but she made herself wash down with it before sinking back into the hottest pool.
Five minutes before, she’d thought every muscle had released its reservoirs of tension. This time, as the hot water boiled her, the feeling was transcendent. She closed her eyes and there was nothing behind them, no flickering worries, nothing but animal joy.
The sensation ended with a shocked cry from the coldest pool. She turned placidly, saw Etcetera in the cold water, face a rictus, nostrils flared so wide they looked horsey, and he snorted down them with steam-train intensity. To his credit, he stayed for a five-count and came back to the hottest pool with a measured pace. She smiled lazily as he washed himself with his small towel. He stepped into the hottest pool and their eyes met.
She held his gaze as he let the heat and his muscles and nerves do their dance.
“Oh, wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Wow.”
She waited for him on the next cold plunge, and they locked eyes as they stepped into the cold, a playful dare. Neither of them made a sound, not even when the water touched his scrotum, though he gave the smallest jolt. They waded in up to their necks, and, without saying a word, dipped their heads, surfaced. Neither wanted to be the first to get out. They stared, then glared, until he muttered “you’re crazy” between gritted teeth and started for the stairs. She followed. He had a cute butt, she noticed, in the most abstract way.
She had to admit that it wasn’t all that abstract.
Back into the hot, giggling as they silently dared each other to sluice the scalding water over themselves, to step into the bubbling heat, quickly sink in. The third immersion in the heat took her to places she had forgot, driving out all conscious thought, turning her into a thermotropic organism that reacted to the convection currents through a process below her brain stem.
Once again, her body told her she couldn’t stay in this heat much longer. It was a return to awareness from that blissful no-place, eyes opening to cracks, then fully, head lifting out of the water. He joined her a moment later, just long enough that he might have been proving some macho point about his ability to withstand pain. She banished the thought. If it was true he was only hurting himself. His business, not hers. If it wasn’t true, she was being needlessly mean.
They stood beside the pool beside each other, stress wrung out of their flesh, faces falling into unconscious bliss.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Now we go for the normal pools.” She pointed to the onsen’s other pools where a dozen bathers sat, chatting quietly or contemplating their eyelid-backs. His friends sat in a warm, bubbly bath with an awkward distance between them.
They ambled over, and as always happened in the baths, Limpopo found the stimulus had dissolved any sense of nudity. Even their eyes on her body didn’t awaken any feeling of nakedness. It was the psychological equivalent of the ringing in your ears after a long-humming refrigerator compressor shut down. The baseline hum of worry about her appearance, where she was hairy, what the hair looked like, where she had fat, where her bones protruded, where her skin was striated with stretch marks and where it was curdled with burn-scars, all ceased to matter.
She slid into the water beside the noobs. Seen from this side of hot/cold treatment, they were gnarled by years in default reality. Being in the death-cult of money and status marked you. They bore the marks. She hoped to erase her own someday.
“Can we join you?”
“You already have,” the sarcastic one said, good natured. He was between her and Etcetera – who’d followed her into the water – and Etcetera gave him a brotherly elbow in the ribs. They were at ease side by side, like brothers but not, pink arm by brown arm, hairless chest next to Etcetera’s thick mat.
“Herr Von Puddleducks,” she said, “what say you to our humble baths?”
“Decadent,” he sniffed. “Sure to be a breeding ground for something entirely unsavory.”
“Don’t listen,” the girl said. “It’s amazing.”
Etcetera said, “You’ve got to try that hot/cold thing. It’s consciousness-alteringly good.”