Electricity in the Water

The pool at the Hotel Bel-Air was unnaturally still for 10 PM. Elena sat at the edge, her legs submerged to the calves, nursing a gin and tonic that had gone watery twenty minutes ago. She'd come out here to escape the company retreat's open bar—too many colleagues pretending to be friends, too many forced laughs.

She ran her fingers through her hair, still styled from the evening's gala. At forty-two, she'd stopped caring whether the gray at her temples showed. David certainly hadn't noticed. He was too busy laughing at something his new vice president had said, his hand familiar on her lower back.

The fronds of a towering palm rustled in the wind that preceded the storm. Elena watched them sway, thinking how perfectly they encapsulated her marriage—graceful from a distance, but up close? The dried brown fronds hidden beneath the green ones, the ones you had to reach up to touch.

Then she saw them.

David and what's-her-name from Marketing emerged from the shadows of the garden path, walking toward the pool house. His hand was on her arm now—lingering, intimate. The woman laughed and tilted her head toward his.

Lightning split the sky, white and merciless, illuminating them for one crystalline second. David's expression was tender. Tender in a way he hadn't looked at Elena in years. The woman's hand covered his on her arm.

Elena didn't scream. Didn't splash into the water to ruin their moment. Instead, she stood up, water dripping from her legs, and walked toward the exit with the careful, measured steps of someone who has just realized they've been running in the wrong direction for a very long time.

Behind her, the first raindrops began to fall, sizzling against the heated pool surface like the aftermath of something that could no longer be contained. She thought about palm readers and predictions, about how everyone warns you that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, and how they're wrong.

Some lives are built entirely around the places they've been struck before. Tomorrow, she would file the papers. Tonight, she would finish her watered-down drink in the room they'd booked separately, and sleep, finally, alone.