Dead Man's Float
The corporate retreat had reduced them all to the same glassy-eyed stupor, moving through the resort like a **zombie** horde in tailored suits. David leaned against the pool fence, nursing his third gin and tonic, watching his coworkers float on pale blue rafts. The water rippled with their collective exhaustion.
"You look like you're plotting everyone's demise," a voice said beside him.
He turned to find Sarah from accounting—Sarah with the sharp laugh and the wedding ring that had appeared sometime last spring. "Just contemplating the metaphorical nature of **baseball**," he lied smoothly. "You know, the way we keep swinging at pitches we've already missed."
She laughed, and something in his chest cracked open. "God, we really are the walking dead, aren't we?"
"The polite version."
They ended up in the pool after midnight, fully clothed, the water cool against their skin. She told him about her husband's affair; he told her about the promotion he'd taken that made him hate himself. The confession felt like emerging from underwater at last, lungs burning with something real.
"You know what my father used to say about baseball?" she asked, floating on her back. "It's the only game where you can fail seven times out of ten and still be considered great."
David treaded water beside her. "What's our batting average, then?"
"Currently?" She smiled sadly. "We're on a hell of a losing streak."
Her hand brushed his underwater, tentative as a first kiss. The attraction hummed between them—dangerous and electric and exactly the kind of curveball life threw when you'd stopped expecting anything but fastballs down the middle.
"I'm leaving him," she said softly. "After this conference."
"And I'm quitting," David replied, realizing it was true even as he said it.
The pool lights shimmered on the water's surface, creating patterns that looked like constellations. For the first time in months, David didn't feel like the walking dead. He felt like someone who might finally step up to the plate and swing.