The Stranger by Kerri Sackville

A few weeks ago I took off my clothes in front of a handsome stranger. I’d like to report that it was in an expensive hotel suite for the purposes of a steamy extra-marital dalliance, but in fact it was in a steamy indoor swimming pool for the purposes of expensive children’s swimming lessons.

It was the first swimming lesson after winter, and so the first time I had donned a swimsuit since the previous summer. I’d forgotten about the lesson until the morning itself, and by then it was too late to prepare (using ‘prepare’ in the sense of ‘engage in hair removal activities’). I threw on a swimsuit and grabbed a towel and prayed that there would be no-one at the lesson whom I wished to impress.

I was out of luck. Oh, how out of luck I was.

I stood by the side of the pool in my old tracksuit pants and slipped them off. And then, up he surfaced, The World’s Most Handsome Dad, from the depths of the pool, dripping wet and in direct eye line with my ungroomed bikini area.

“Hey, how are you?” he drawled, in a thick New York accent. Oh my lord. Did I mention I love New York accents?

I slid into the water next to him. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Kerri.” He looked just like a movie star. I was transfixed.

“I’m Aaron,” he told me. He indicated the cute little girl sitting on the side of the pool. “And this is my daughter, Peaceful Princess Flower Petal. I think our kids are doing lessons together.”

Of course, Handsome Dad’s name isn’t really Aaron, and his daughter isn’t really Peaceful Princess Flower Petal. However, his name is very close to Aaron, and his daughter does have one of those spiritual, invoking-the-spirit-of-the-universe type names that is bound to get her mocked in school unless her father is a movie star. Which made me utterly convinced that he was, in fact, a movie star.

I spent the whole lesson racking my brains, trying to determine which movies he had been in. After the lesson (which went very poorly, as I kept forgetting Boo was there in my fixation on Handsome Dad), I went home and Googled ‘Aaron daughter Peaceful Princess Flower Petal’ for about an hour. Nothing.

The next lesson, I managed to convince my husband to take Boo to swimming lessons, partly because I still hadn’t had time to do my bikini line, and partly because I wanted him to do some research. “There’s a nice father there,” I told him. “Aaron. I think he’s an actor. Can you find out what he’s been in?”

When my husband came home, he looked excited. I knew it. Aaron was a movie star!

“Well?” I asked.

“Boo did really well today!” he said.

“Well great,” I said, “but did you talk to Aaron?”

“Oh right. Yeah, he works for a bank,” said my husband.

A bank? The World’s Most Handsome Dad worked for a bank?

The following week, he suddenly didn’t look so handsome anymore.

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