Cable Lines and Palm Readings

The gray in her hair had arrived like uninvited guests at a dinner party—first just one or two, then suddenly the whole table was crowded. Elena found herself at the office holiday party, nursing lukewarm chardonnay, watching the younger women toss their hair like they had forever to waste it.

"You're going to meet someone tall, dark, and dangerous," the palm reader said, tracing the life line on Elena's sweating palm. "But you already knew that. You've already met him."

Elena pulled her hand back. The office party was in full swing somewhere above them, in the coworking space's event room. Down here, in what passed for a lounge area, a cable snaked across the floor like a dead thing, connecting the payment terminal to the wall.

Marcus found her there. "Hiding?"

"Observing," she corrected, though she'd been doing both since the incident with the fox.

Three weeks ago, driving home from that disastrous conference in San Jose, she'd hit something. A fox—razor-thin, magnificent in its dying moments—had frozen in her headlights. She'd cried in the rain while Marcus held her umbrella, and that was when everything had shifted between them. Not into anything simple. Into this terrible awareness that had settled like humidity in the small spaces between them.

"We're still friends," he said now, like it was a question.

"Friends," she agreed. "The word people use when they can't say what they actually mean."

The cable on the floor connected to a terminal that charged $12 for palm readings. Some things you paid for. Some things you couldn't afford.

"You know what the reader told me?" Elena asked.

Marcus waited. His palm rested on the table near hers, not touching, but close enough that she could feel the heat radiating off his skin. The unspoken thing between them had become its own kind of infrastructure—like the cables running beneath the city, carrying things people needed but never wanted to think about.

"She said I already met you."

Marcus looked at her then. Really looked. "And what did you say to that?"

"Nothing," Elena said. "Some things don't need saying. They just need—" She gestured vaguely between them. "—whatever comes next."

The fox had died in the road. Her hair was turning gray. Marcus was married to someone else. But here they were, two cables crossed in the dark, carrying current they couldn't turn off.