Electric Water

The rooftop pool shimmered like liquid mercury under the hotel lights, and Maya sank deeper into the hot tub, letting the jets hammer at her lower back. Across from her, David swam laps with methodical precision—breaststroke, turn, breaststroke—his head bobbing up and down like a metronome marking time they'd both run out of.

'You're avoiding the conversation,' Maya said when he finally pulled himself up to sit on the edge, water streaming down his chest.

David toweled his hair, not meeting her eyes. 'There's nothing to avoid.'

'The biopsy results came back yesterday.' She kept her voice flat, practiced. 'I wanted you to know before—'

'Before what?' He snapped, and something fractured between them. 'Before you die? Before you need someone to hold your hand?' He laughed darkly. 'We haven't been real friends in fifteen years, Maya. We're people who used to know each other, who meet once a year at this conference and pretend.'

The first lightning bolt cracked across the sky—brilliant, violent, illuminating the sudden wetness on David's face. Thunder followed like God slamming a door.

'I didn't ask for this,' Maya whispered. 'The cancer. Or you. But you're the only person who remembers who I was before the divorce, before the pills, before I became this.' She gestured at herself helplessly.

David slid back into the pool, cutting through the water toward her. The storm had begun in earnest now, rain plastering his hair to his skull, the pool surface choppy with wind.

'I remember,' he said, reaching for her hand underwater. His fingers were pruned from the hours of swimming. 'I remember the girl who burned through life like she was made of flame. I remember why I fell in love with her.'

'Married people don't say that,' she said, even as she squeezed his hand back.

'People who are about to lose the only person who ever truly knew them do.' He pulled her toward him through the electric water. 'Stay. Just—stay. Let me pretend I can fix this for one night.'

Lightning struck the hotel's lightning rod with terrifying proximity, and in the flash, Maya saw everything she'd spent decades refusing to see: the way David looked at her across conference tables, the weddings he'd attended alone, the friendship he'd maintained like a garden he hoped might bloom again someday.

'You were never just my friend,' she realized aloud.

'No,' he said, holding her tighter as the storm broke around them. 'I was yours.'