Electric Dead

The wedding reception was in full swing when I found her by the pool, cigarette glowing like a dying star in the darkness. I hadn't seen Sarah since our own wedding fell apart three years ago—since I'd become the kind of man who goes through motions like a zombie, heart still beating but nothing worth pumping inside it.

She was standing in the shallow end, water lapping at her calves, ruinously elegant in that black dress that caught every flicker of light from the reception tents. The pool lights were off, but the sky was doing something violent—distant lightning painting the clouds in bruised purples, like God's own тревога.

"You look like hell, David," she said, not turning around.

"I've been working at that firm. The one you said would eat me alive."

"I was right. You're a ghost."

I waded in. The water was shockingly cold, or maybe that was just her proximity. Sarah turned then, and I saw it—the same exhaustion I saw in the mirror every morning. We were both dead inside, just different bodies.

"I miss you," I said. Pathetic. True.

She laughed, and it wasn't kind. "You miss who I made you feel like. You don't miss me at all."

Lightning cracked closer, illuminating her face—harder now, older, eyes that had seen too much of the same nothing. The water between us felt charged, electric with everything unsaid.

"I cancelled the meetings," I said suddenly. "Next week. I don't know why."

She stepped closer. The water rose to her thighs. "You're lying."

"I'm not."

Sarah studied my face in the next flash of lightning, looking for the lie, looking for the man she'd loved before the promotions and the equity and the slow death of everything that mattered. I held still, pulse hammering.

"Prove it," she whispered. "Be here. Actually here. Not that zombie you've become."

The storm broke then—rain sheeting down, lightning forking across the sky like cracked bone, the two of us standing in water up to our waists, fully clothed, ruined and wonderful and terrifyingly alive for the first time in years. I reached for her hand. She didn't pull away.