Dead Pool Monday

Sarah found him at the edge of the hotel pool at 2 AM, fully dressed in his funeral suit, staring at the water like it might offer answers she couldn't.

"You're running away again," Mark said, not turning around. He always knew.

"Just needed air." She slid onto the chaise beside him. Their affair had started three months ago at the Christmas party, fueled by open bars and closed marriages. Now it was just something they did between conference calls and quarterly projections. "Death pool update?"

"Johnson from Accounting. Massive coronary during the all-hands meeting." Mark laughed, that hollow sound she'd come to recognize as the noise a man makes when he's sold his soul for corner office promises and a mortgage he can't afford. "We're all zombies, you know that, right?"

The water lapped against the pool's edge, rhythmic and indifferent. Sarah thought about her daughter's eighth birthday party tomorrow, the balloon bouquet waiting in her closet, the husband who'd stopped asking why she smelled like someone else's cologne.

"We could leave," she said, though they both wouldn't.

"I'm up for partner." Mark flicked his cigarette into the pool, watching it hiss and die. "You're up for director. We've got mortgages and car payments and expectations chewing us alive from the inside out. We're already dead, Sarah. We just haven't had the decency to lie down yet."

She thought about the death pool — how everyone in the office secretly bet on who'd snap first, who'd have the nervous breakdown, who'd sleep with whom. Her money had been on herself for months now.

"What if I just went under?" she pointed at the water. "Just slipped beneath the surface and stayed there."

Mark looked at her then, really looked, his zombie eyes flickering with something that might have been love if either of them were still capable of it. "You'd miss your daughter's birthday."

"I know." She stood up, smoothing her skirt. "That's why I won't do it."

"That's why we never do anything." He crushed his cigarette pack. "See you Monday."

"Monday," she agreed, already running back to her room, her life, the exquisite misery of being exactly what everyone expected her to be.