Electric Current

The pool sat still and black, a mirror for the storm-charged sky above. Elena sat on the edge, legs dangling in the water, while Marcus stood three feet away—the exact distance they'd been maintaining for six months.

"You going to tell me what's wrong, or just let me guess?" Marcus's voice was tight. Controlled.

Elena pressed her palm flat against the concrete, feeling the vibration before she heard it. Thunder rolled across the valley. Lightning forked the sky, illuminating the deep lines etched around his eyes. When had he aged so much?

"Remember when we put this pool in?" she asked quietly. "You said it would bring us together. Something about floating, weightless."

"That was three years ago, El. Before."

Before the layoffs. Before the miscarriage. Before the silence grew so thick between them that it felt like something alive, something they fed with every unanswered question.

She pulled her legs from the water, droplets trailing like the tears she wouldn't cry. Not here. Not again. "I'm not coming back inside tonight."

Marcus stepped closer. The space between them felt electric, charged with everything unsaid. "Don't do this. Not now."

"When, then?" She stood, water dripping from her calf onto his shoe. He didn't move. "When there's nothing left to salvage? When we've picked each other clean?"

Lightning struck somewhere nearby. The pool surface fractured into white scars.

"I still love you," he said, and the worst part was that she believed him. Love wasn't their problem. Love was easy. Love was the cheap furniture they kept rearranging, hoping the room would somehow look different.

"Love's not enough," she said. "It hasn't been enough for a long time."

She walked past him, toward the guest house they'd never converted. Rain began to fall, warm and relentless, blurring the line between the pool water falling from her skin and the water falling from the sky. Marcus didn't follow. Some distances, once crossed, couldn't be uncrossed. Even if you spent the rest of your life trying.