Deep End by Ali Hazelwood
- Alisha Eadle
- 1 hour ago
- 13 min read
Deep End
by Ali Hazelwood
Published by Berkley
Scarlett Vandermeer is swimming upstream.
A Junior at Stanford and a student-athlete who specializes in platform diving, Scarlett prefers to keep her head down, concentrating on getting into med school and on recovering from the injury that almost ended her career. She has no time for relationships—at least, that’s what she tells herself.
Swim captain, world champion, all-around aquatics golden boy, Lukas Blomqvist thrives on discipline. It’s how he wins gold medals and breaks records: complete focus, with every stroke. On the surface, Lukas and Scarlett have nothing in common. Until a well-guarded secret slips out, and everything changes.
So they start an arrangement. And as the pressure leading to the Olympics heats up, so does their relationship. It was supposed to be just a temporary, mutually satisfying fling. But when staying away from Lukas becomes impossible, Scarlett realizes that her heart might be treading into dangerous water...
Genre
Triggers
Consensual and Negotiated explorations of kink - in particular, of power exchange, Sports injuries, Anxiety over past injury
Deep End has been sitting on my shelf for a bit now, and not only am I trying to read some of my physical TBR, but, it's Ali Hazelwood.
Why has it taken me so long?
I really, really enjoyed Deep End. It's a little different from Ali's past work, but it still has a healthy amount of science in it that is Ali Hazelwood's staple. It's just not the predominant setting of the book.
No, this time around, it's a pool. Talented swimmers and divers. Olympic medalists. It's not an interest of mine, but it was actually interesting to read about.
The other thing that made Deep End stand out from Ali's past work - BDSM. Now, before you let that turn you away, because, I know there are romance readers who don't enjoy the genre, Deep End is probably the tamest book I've read when it comes to BDSM. Ali wrote it in a way that there is never a MOMENT where it feels weird or out of place. It's always consensual. Always. It's definitely more of a dominant-submissive type romance, without the sadism and masochism.
I promise.
I adored the romance in this book. These two, quiet characters, who just so happen to be into athletics, and both have plans to become doctors, just instantly meshed. The unorthodox way they each learn of each others sexual preferences was a rather simple way to get them through the awkwardness of finding out on their own, and jumpstarted their friendship - and eventual relationship.
I found it a lot of fun - and yes, romantic. But not so disgustingly romantic that I hated it.
Yes, I'm that girl.
I fucking hate Hallmark movies because it's just too cringe.
Another reason I loved Deep End, was the ... tie in to a past book she wrote. I don't want to spoil it if you haven't read it, but let's just say that one of Ali Hazelwood's most beloved couples makes a couple of appearances in Deep End, and yes, it's perfect. I was mentally kicking my feet and squealing.
Have I ever read an Ali Hazelwood book I didn't love? I don't think I have, which is pretty impressive. I mean, I love Jennifer L Armentrout, and Sarah J Maas, but there are certainly books both have written I don't love. So far, Ali Hazelwood has been fun to read, and I can't wait to read her newest release this month.
Where do these people get their bottomless reservoirs of confidence? From a pot at the end of a rainbow?
Scarlett: "Nothing works with my schedule. I should have booked some help sooner."
Like back in the womb.
Scarlett: "But I think I'll be fine."
I got a two out of ten for the first assignment, and a three for the second. Yay for upward trends.
Not only was I proud of how incredibly badass Barb was, but I wanted nothing more than to be a non-mediocre physician who'd take people seriously.
And now, here I am. Daydreaming of liver failure to escape the MCAT.
Scarlett: "How the love of my life?"
Barb: "Currently occupied with her prescheduled junk licking."
Scarlett: "Important business."
Barb: "Hang on, I think she wants to talk to you."
Pipsqueak, the husky-pug mix who was once up on Facebook Marketplace because of "a bad temperament" (falsehoods, slander) and "an unbreakable scooting habit" (yet to be broken), howls her love for me and tries to lick my face over Barb's phone.
Coach Sima: "Ain't no party like a Coach Sima party."
Tragically True. Because a Coach Sima party is compulsory.
Lukas: "Want to get it out of the way?
he asks.
Rich. That's what I'd call his voice. Rumbly, maybe.
Scarlett: "Get what out of the way?"
Lukas: "The elephant in the room."
I swallow. Is he referring to ...?
Lukas: "The one with the ball gag in his mouth."
Laughter pops out of me.
Scarlett: "Wow. Ball gags?"
He shrugs.
Lukas: "Not really my thing, actually."
I stop myself from saying, Not mine, either, because - it's not like he cares. Still, the knot of tension between us loosens.
Scarlett: "Maybe the elephant's just ... blindfolded?"
He nods slowly.
Lukas: "And tied up."
Scarlett: "And doing as it's told."
He looks like he might find that more appealing.
Lukas: "What a good elephant."
Victoria: "It's six fifteen a.m.. Let's keep unconscionable displays of happiness at a minimum."
Pen: "Oh, come on. It's such a good day."
Victoria: "You mispronounced heinous."
Pen: "But we have synchro practice."
Pen sneaks up to Victoria, pressing a surprise kiss to her cheek.
Pen: "I know you like it."
Victoria: "What I like is being on the couch feeling my atoms rot as I succumb to entropy."
I power walk to his office. Every door in biology is wide open - except the one of Dr. Adam J. (Jackass?) Carlsen, which is just ajar enough to not be considered closed. Clearly a department policy loophole.
Scarlett: "Dr. Carlsen?"
He types away, giving no sign of having heard me.
Scarlett: "There was no grade. On the paper."
His eyes settle on me again, and he looks genuinely confused.
Scarlett: "Will I receive one?"
Adam: "Ms. Vandermeer, you planned a graduate-level study and extensively described its pitfalls and possible solutions, showing a command of the topic that eighty percent of my fellow faculty members will never achieve. Most of your peers copy-pasted their projects from Wikipedia and neglected to removed the hyperlinks. If your topic weren't much more in line with my colleague's research, and if my colleague wasn't incredibly ... persuasive, I would be recruiting you into my lab."
Scarlett: "Oh."
Wow. Just ... wow.
Adam: "Believe me when I say that the grade is ..."
I sense despair in him. I bet he'd love to slug off the mortal coil of scoring rubrics.
Adam: "Irrelevant."
Scarlett: "If you don't care either way, I'd like an A plus."
His mouth twitches.
Adam: "I will let Otis know."
Lukas: "Unless it bother you. Would you like me to pretend I don't know about your perversions?"
Scarlett: "You're just as much as a perv as I am."
Lukas: "Oh, no."
My eyebrow lifts.
Lukas: "Way more. I guarantee it."
Essay: "'I desire to follow the footsteps of my heroes, such as Hippocrates of Kos ... which is how I realized that my favorite bacterium was Bordetella parapertussis ... and as I looked at Queen Amidala dying on the screen, I decided that I would become a doctor to help people like her survive to see their Force sensitive twins thrive ...'"
Maryam: "Who are you?"
I grab a throw pillow and hand it to her.
Scarlett: "Will you please hold this against my respiratory airways for the next sixty to ninety seconds?"
Maryam: "Seriously, what is this word soup? Did you kidnap a middle school dropout and force him to write this at gunpoint? Is it AI generated? What was the prompt? 'What if crotch smell was an essay?'"
Scarlett: Please tell me that someone else drew a convolutional neural network on your hand in the past two days?
Immediate reply.
Lukas: Are you calling me a computational slut?
Scarlett: Do you really want to be reminded of my computational superiority that often?
Lukas: I do. I have a think for women who are smarter than me.
Pen: "Are you sick?"
Scarlett: Nope. Just took the MCAT."
Lukas: Free?
It's Lukas. My pulse trips, but quickly stradies. I tilt my head and type:
Scarlett: In Sweden, when you text, do they charge you by the word?
Lukas: There's an emoji surcharge, but I'll make an exception for you:
Lukas: *middle finger emoji*
Scarlett: "Is Kyle as enthusiastic a, um, cleaner as you are?"
Hasan: "He's as terrified of Lukas and susceptible to his authority as I am, yes."
Lukas: "Let him pay. He still owes me six thousand kronor from when he broke my Xbox in a fit of rage."
Jan: "That was, like, eight years ago."
Lukas: "Good point."
Lukas pulls back a chair, and waits patiently until I lower myself into it.
Lukas: "I'll calculate the accrued interests while you buy us coffee."
Scarlett: "Did you consider that I might be the type to hold a grudge? Or self-respecting enough to pick up the phone on the fifteenth day and say, 'Fuck off'?"
He nods, like I'm being nothing but reasonable. The quiet, impersonal civility of this conversation is ... devasting, actually.
Lukas: "I think part of me hoped you would."
Scarlett: "Why?"
It takes him a while to answer. When he does, he's not looking at me.
Lukas: "Because sometimes I can't breathe when you're around."
Lukas: "She's my sister."
I almost choke on my spit.
Trevor: "What?"
Trevor blinks at me.
Trevor: "For real?"
I must be a terrible person. Because I nod.
Trevor: "But isn't your last name ..."
Scarlett: "Half sister."
I improvise.
Lukas nods.
Lukas: "Different dad."
Trevor: "Seriously? I had no idea. Is it pretty well known, or ...?"
I shrug.
Scarlett: "It's not a secret."
Trevor: "Right. You guys must be pretty close in age."
Scarlett: "Yeah."
I inspect my nails.
Scarlett: "Not to slut shame, but our mom got around."
Lukas tries to hide a smile. Fails. Hangs his head.
Trevor: "Oh, wow."
Trevor sounds impressed.
Trevor: "My mom's kind of a slut, too. Had an affair with one of her colleagues out of revenge for my dad fucking her cousin. So petty."
Lukas and I freeze. Exchange a bewildered look.
Lukas: "Thank you for sharing this ... powerful autobiographical story."
Lukas: "Too much?"
I nod, a little desperately.
He halts, pulling out a bit. Instant panic spreads through my stomach. I didn't say stop. I didn't ask him to stop. We agreed that we wouldn't -
Lukas: "That's too bad,"
he says, his voice at once mean and fond like he contains every multitude I'll ever need.
Lukas: "Since you'll take what I fucking give you."
Maryam: "A male underwear model is here to see you,"
she yells.
I made the managerial decision to ignore her.
A minute later, my door opens.
Maryam: "Dude. Do I need to uncork your earwax?"
I lift my head.
Scarlett: "What do you want?"
Maryam: "There's a guy here to see you."
I blink at her.
Scarlett: "Who?"
Maryam: "Tall. Wearing Stanford Athletics gear. Looks like he'd be a good source of protein."
Scarlett: "Do you want to have sex?"
His smile is quiet.
Scarlett: "With you. Yes. But that's my default setting, so don't read too much into it."
Lukas: "It'll be okay, baby. No matter what happens, you will still be you. No matter what happens, you will be okay."
Scarlett: "But what do I do in the meantime?"
Lukas: "In the meantime ... just cry it out."
He sighs deeply, and the swell of his chest, the gravel of his voice, his hands stroking my hair, are as comforting as any perfectly executed dive.
Lukas: "I'm here, okay?"
Scarlett: "I thought you were dead."
I shake the water out of my face.
Scarlett: "Could already hear the Swedish king bitching over the phone."
Lukas: "Did we not go over Sweden's government structure?"
Scarlett: "Can't recall."
I unsheathe my best Swedish impression.
Scarlett: "I understand our national treasure died on your watch, ja? We have lost our golden porpoise, and it is all your fault, ja?"
Lukas: "Whatever just happened with that accent is a violation of NCAA bylaws and the Geneva convention."
Scarlett: "Take me away, Officer."
Lukas: "You were born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on August thirty-first. And yes, I did grow up in Stockholm, but my mom was from Skellefteå."
I try to shape my tongue around the name. Instantly give up.
Scarlett: "That sounds like ..."
Lukas: "Say, 'A piece of IKEA furniture not even the Swedish king would be able to assemble,' and I will throw you back into the pool."
Lukas: "I fuck you -"
He pushes deeper.
Lukas: "Because -"
Deeper.
Lukas: "It's all I want to do -"
Deeper.
Lukas: "From the moment I wake up."
He hits a spot, and ... I hope he's halfway inside, I really do, because I'm already coming, clutching around the too-big, hard width of him, flutters I cannot help. It's so intense and shuddering and good, I'm lost to everything but my pleasure, and I almost don't hear the rest of what Lukas whispers in my ear.
Lukas: "I fuck you because you're the most perfect thing I've ever felt, Scarlett."
Scarlett: I owe lots of it to you. And the very illegal thing you did.
Lukas: Letting you into the pool?
Scarlett: I was trying to be secretive, in case one of us murders someone and our texts get subpoenaed.
Lukas: In that scenario, nighttime pool usage is the least of our problems.
I give her the finger and step outside. It's windy and foggy, and the prospect of practice in preparation for the next away meet, in less than eight goddamn days, turns my will to live into a raisin.
Scarlett: "The part about Gibbs sampling here?"
I tap at my paper on his desk, perhaps a little too forcefully.
Scarlett: "You docked off two points and told me to double-check my rate of convergence. Which I did, and I was correct, so -"
On the margin, Dr. Carlsen scribbles, Otis. Triple check your double-checking requests.
Scarlett: "Thank you,"
I say, satisfied.
He sighs and sits back in his chair.
Adam: 'You're welcome. Unfortunately,"
he adds dryly,
Adam: "your grade is already the highest A I've ever given in this class."
Scarlett: "It's a matter of principle,"
I explain primly.
Scarlett: "I'm sure you understand."
He seems pained.
Adam: "I do, and it's making me reconsider several things about myself."
Pen: "It appears that your presence will not be required, after all."
He lifts an eyebrow, puzzled but not displeased.
Lukas: "Okay?"
Scarlett: "Basically, I'm the new and improved version of you,"
I tell him with my most self-satisfied smile, which makes his own lips quirk.
Lukas: "And here I was, thinking you were a troll."
Scarlett: "I was going to say, maybe we could visit Amsterdam together? But you're best friends with the entire Swedish delegation, and the king will be there -"
Lukas: "Like I said, Sweden's a democracy -"
Scarlett: "You flamed-pants liar."
I lean forward, elbows on the table.
Scarlett: "I checked Wikipedia. You do have a king."
Lukas: "I don't know why it's such a turn-on that you're so much smarter than me, but every time we have a project meeting I have to go home and jerk off until my dick is raw."
Scarlett: "How can you be bad at shaving?"
Lukas: "I'm okay doing my face. But the erst ... there's so much fucking hair, Scarlett."
Scarlett: "Aww. Poor, innocent, seven-feet tall baby."
Lukas: "I'm not seven-"
Scarlett: "Hyperbole. Get in the shower, Bigfoot."
Lukas: "I like you like this."
Scarlett: "When I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds?"
Lukas: "Yup. Fighty."
Scarlett: "But Mei said that -"
Coach: "Why do I feel like a cheated husband?"
I try to keep a straight face.
Scarlett: "Because Mrs. Sima has taken up with the landscaper?"
Coach: "Because my diver came home smelling like another coach!"
Scarlett: "That's not true."
Coach: "Mei is your favorite. You stan her."
I wince.
Scarlett: "Did your son teach you that word?"
I point at the spot in the stands when Dr. Smith leans her head on Dr. Carlsen's shoulder. His hand is wrapped around her waist, and he seems less than enthused to be here. Then again, it might be an improvement from the quiet wrath that's his default state.
Scarlett: "She mentioned a husband. Is she ... openly cheating on him?"
Lukas: "Olive?"
I nod, flabbergasted. But Lukas's mind doesn't seem half to be half as boggled as mine. In fact, he's fighting a smile.
Lukas: "Scarlett, I think Dr. Carlsen is the husband."
I stare, uncomprehending.
Scarlett: "No."
Lukas: "Yeah."
Scarlett: "No."
He bites the inside of his cheek.
Lukas: "Honestly, I see it."
Scarlett: "No."
Lukas: "They complement each other. And they do have several publications together."
Scarlett: "No."
He laughs.
Lukas: "Are you okay, sweetheart?"
Scarlett: "I'll never be okay again."
Lukas: "I love you. I'm in love with you. And you're in love with me. We can say it."
Scarlett: "Lukas."
Lukas: "I have been in love with you for so long. And I won't stop. I know it."
Lukas: "From the very start, you had all the power. From the very start, I was in the palm of your hand."
Scarlett: "First question: Would it be okay if I took a break from my internship?"
Barb: "Um ... sure? You've already done way more than you were suppose to, so I can't see Makayla complaining about it. Plus, you are a nepo baby."
Scarlett: "I prefer 'legacy artist.' Second question: Can I borrow some money?"
Barb: "Borrow? You mean, you'd later return it?"
Scarlett: "Probably not."
Barb: "Hmm, I want to say yes, but I feel like the wise thing would be to first ask: How much money?"
Scarlett: "I'm not sure. Enough to flu to Sweden."
The noise she makes is so triumphant, I have to move the phone away from my ear.
Barb: "Scarlett, baby, finally. Mi bank account es su bank account. Within reason."
Pen: "I acted like Luk was a sandwich, stolen by a seagull, and -"
Scarlett: "Are you saying that I'm the seagull?"
Pen: "I think so, yeah."
Jan: "You said you wanted a grand gesture. What's your plan?"
Scarlett: "Oh. Well. I guess I thought that flying over an ocean and a good chunk of land where toilets are holes in the ground and water is served without ice would kind of be ... it?"
Jan is unimpressed.
Jan: "But what will you do once you see Lukas?"
Scarlett: "Oh."
Had I considered that far? No. Yes. I know that I'll tell him that I -
Jan: "Did you bring flowers?"
Scarlett: "I ... don't think it's legal? Fragile exosystems and such."
Jan: "Then are you proposing to him?"
Scarlett: "What? I'm twenty-one."
Jan shrugs.
Jan: "When you know, you know. Did you learn a complicated TikTok dance?"
Scarlett: "Would he even enjoy that?"
Jan: "Who wouldn't?"
Scarlett: "I cleared didn't think this through."
Scarlett: "This is so messy."
Lukas: "Falling in love?"
I nod.
Scarlett: "And I did it so ..."
Deeply, desperately, fast. It's just pure violence.
Lukas: "We've been dating for nearly a year in everything but name. We work together, in every possible way. Except the chaos you live in, but I can probably train that out of you. Punishments. Positive reinforcement."
He pushes my hair back.
Lukas: "You respond well to that kind of stuff."