Bottom of the Ninth

Sarah watched the baseball game through the lens of her margarita, the ice melting faster than her patience. The Dodgers were down by three, and somehow that felt appropriate. Beside her, Mark's iphone buzzed against the plastic seat—again. He'd turned it face-down at the bottom of the seventh, a reflex she'd learned meant *her*.

"You going to get that?" she asked, her voice flat.

"It's nothing," he said, but his thumb found the edge of the screen, tracing it like a lover's jawline. He hadn't looked her in the eye since the fourth inning.

She'd been the fox once—clever, quick, always three moves ahead of everyone at the firm. That's what drew Mark to her initially, her sharp angles and sharper tongue. Now she felt like something smaller, something that burrowed underground just to survive. He called her style "abrasive" now. He suggested she soften her edges, learn to compromise.

The scoreboard counted down. A bull of a player stepped up to bat, thick-necked and furious, and swung at nothing but air. The crowd groaned. Sarah felt a kinship with that whiff, that pure waste of momentum, the arrogance of thinking you could connect with something moving that fast.

"Remember when we went swimming in Lake Michigan?" Mark asked suddenly, his eyes softening with manufactured nostalgia. "That night we almost drowned? The water was so cold."

She remembered. She'd swum too far, caught in a riptide of her own ambition, and he'd dragged her back to shore. She'd thought it was romantic then—his desperation to save her, the way he'd held her shivering body against his. Now she wondered if he'd simply been afraid of losing possession. Some men didn't want partners; they wanted acquisitions.

The game didn't matter. The phone didn't matter. She stood up, leaving her half-finished drink, and walked toward the exit without gathering her things.

"Sarah?" Mark called, but he didn't follow. His iphone lit up with a message he still wouldn't show her, and his attention snapped back to the screen like a trained animal.

Outside, the air smelled of popcorn, exhaust, and approaching rain. She breathed it in deep, feeling her lungs expand for what felt like the first time in years. Somewhere beyond the stadium lights, water waited. This time, she'd swim on her own terms, or not at all.