Electrical Storm in July

The lightning flashed so bright it turned the bedroom bone-white, illuminating everything I didn't want to see: the pile of unpacked boxes in the corner, Marcus's phone vibrating on the nightstand, the bottle of vitamin D supplements on his dresser—prescribed after his diagnosis, swallowed daily like a tiny prayer I wasn't sure he believed in anymore.

"You're watching me sleep," he said, eyes still closed. Thunder cracked directly overhead.

"I'm watching the storm."

"Same difference."

We hadn't spoken since dinner, since I'd asked if he'd thought about what came next and he'd turned up the cable TV volume until some baseball announcer's voice filled the silence between us. Baseball—something we'd never watched together, something his father loved, something that belonged to a version of himself I was beginning to realize I'd never fully known.

"You think about your dad when you watch it," I said. "Don't you?"

Marcus rolled onto his back, eyes finding mine in the darkness. Another flash of lightning, closer this time. The smell of ozone through the open window.

"He died at forty-two," Marcus said. "I'm thirty-eight. The math doesn't require a medical degree."

"You're not your father."

"Aren't I? Same genes. Same baseball games. Same—" He gestured vaguely at his nightstand. "Same pills. Same body that decides to eat itself alive for no goddamn reason."

The autoimmune disease had come out of nowhere, aggressive and uninterested in his carefully mapped future. We were supposed to be trying for a baby this year. Instead, we were tracking flare-ups and avoiding the word 'mortality' like it was contagious.

I reached for his hand across the sheets. His fingers were cold. The thunder shook the windowframe.

"We could still," he said softly. "Adopt. If you want."

"I want you," I said. "Whatever that looks like."

"Even if it looks like this? Lightning strikes and baseball games and pills every morning?"

"Especially then."

On TV, the baseball game cut to commercial. Some cable company ad about staying connected through every storm, every blackout, every disaster that could strike a household. Marcus laughed—a real laugh, the first I'd heard in days.

"They make it sound so easy," he said. "Like connection is just a matter of paying your bill on time."

"Maybe it is," I said, moving closer until our shoulders touched. "Maybe we just haven't been paying the right bills."

The lightning flashed again, but for once, I didn't look away from his face. We lay there as the storm passed over us, as the baseball game ended, as the night deepened around the bed where we'd made and unmade so many futures together.

"Tomorrow," Marcus said, "I'll take the vitamins with breakfast. And we can talk about adoption paperwork. If you're serious."

"I've never been more serious about anything."

"Good." His thumb traced circles on my palm. "Then tomorrow."

But tonight, for now, there was just the rain falling on the roof and the weight of his hand in mine, steady and certain as the tides. Tomorrow would bring its own lightning. Tonight was just the waiting space between storms, where we still knew how to touch each other in the dark.