Electric Flesh

The storm had been raging for three hours when she arrived at his doorstep, hair plastered to her skull like seaweed. She held her iPhone like a weapon, screen cracked from where she'd hurled it across her apartment two nights before.

"You didn't call," he said, not opening the door wider.

"The cable frayed," she lied. "Couldn't charge it."

But they both knew the truth: she hadn't wanted to call. Hadn't wanted to hear his voice explaining why he'd ghosted after three months of Saturday mornings eating papaya in bed, her juice on his sheets, his fingers tracing the constellation of scars on her thigh.

Lightning struck somewhere close. The condo flickered.

"Come in," he said finally.

She stepped inside, dripping water onto his pristine hardwood. Everything was exactly as she remembered — the orchid on the windowsill dying slowly, the books organized by color, the smell of him like sandalwood and something metallic.

"You're still eating that papaya crap?" she asked, gesturing to the fruit bowl on the counter.

"It's good for you."

"Everything that's good for you tastes like disappointment."

He laughed, and she felt it in her chest like a physical blow. That laugh — low, warm, familiar — had been the soundtrack to her undoing.

"Why am I here?" she asked, her phone buzzing in her hand. A notification from work. Another email about the project she'd been ignoring since he'd stopped responding to her texts.

"Because you're drowning," he said softly. "And you think I can save you."

Lightning illuminated his face. She saw it then — the exhaustion, the age lines she hadn't noticed three months ago, the way his eyes kept darting to his phone on the counter. He wasn't a savior. He was just another person trying not to dissolve.

"I'm not drowning," she said, though her clothes were still soaking wet, leaving a puddle on his floor. "I'm just wet."

"There's a difference?"

She looked at her phone again. No new messages. Just the blank screen reflecting her own face back at her, distorted by the cracked glass.

"Yeah," she said. "The difference is, you can dry off."

She turned to leave, and he didn't stop her. Outside, the storm had passed, leaving behind that strange liminal light that comes after rain, when everything looks both exactly the same and completely different. She walked to her car holding her broken phone, not caring if it ever turned on again. Some things, she realized, were better left shattered.