Naughtyathome | Poolguy Desirae Spencer Exclusive

In one scene she details a moment—the pool guy leaning over the skimmer, knee dirtied, offering a casual joke about summer storms—that reads like a parable about attention. The neighbors will turn it into an anecdote about something else entirely. Desirae knows that for many, these micro-encounters are the marrow of gossip; for her, they are prompts. She uses them to interrogate what she wants to write about intimacy now: permission, consent, and the ethics of telling other people’s fallibilities as if they were your inspiration.

Desirae Spencer moved back to her childhood town for reasons big and small: to care for her aging father, to escape the grind of big-city anonymity, and—she admits with a conspiratorial smile—to finally fix the sagging wooden deck her brothers never got around to. What she didn’t expect was that the man who showed up on a Monday morning to quote the job would become the pulse of the summer.

There’s craft to solitude, she writes: the way mornings on the porch feel like bookmarked chapters, the rhythm of workflow that allows her to measure days by the length of shadow on the patio stones. The pool guy’s presence doesn’t upend her life so much as make visible the edits she might choose. He reminds her that desire is less a bolt of lightning than a steady current—sometimes warm, sometimes cool, always moving. It’s also political: who gets noticed, who gets commentary, whose labor is romanticized and whose is erased. naughtyathome poolguy desirae spencer exclusive

Desirae’s home is a modest bungalow with mismatched shutters and a garden that’s been coaxed into life the way she disciplines her ambitions—patiently, insistently. She’s worked in communications for years, writing press materials for nonprofits and dreaming of a column where she could say something that sticks. The pool repair was supposed to be a literal fix; instead it became a lens. Watching the pool guy at work, she notices things she’s stopped noticing in herself: the way bodies carry weather, the economy of small talk, the choreography of hands that gossip in gestures as much as words.

The column grows less about the pool guy and more about negotiation—with yourself and with a community that trades in shorthand. Desirae’s essays explore how place shapes appetite: a porch swing that remembers every conversation, a pool whose surface records the sky, a lawn where secrets are both sown and trampled. She writes about the economy of availability—how being seen can feel like a currency that inflates with attention and collapses under scrutiny. In one scene she details a moment—the pool

Small towns are theaters for intimacy and inference. The pool guy becomes an artifact onto which residents project narratives—some tender, some salacious—because people prefer stories they can edit. Desirae resists, not because she’s immune to intrigue, but because she recognizes the hunger for narrative as currency. She begins to write notes—snapshots of color, cadence, and half-finished conversations—until the note-taking becomes a ritual and the stories shift from rumor to crafted scenes.

The work is not a confession so much as an experiment: can a writer render attraction without diminishing the people involved? Desirae’s answer is a careful, sometimes wry, almost always humane yes. The pool is fixed. The deck is straightened. The stories that spring from their summer are left in the hands of a watchful woman who wants to write, above all, about how we live near one another—how our small, ordinary negotiations of desire reveal the architecture of belonging. She uses them to interrogate what she wants

—Desirae Spencer (exclusive)