Everything You Touch

Elena traced the lifeline on Marcos' palm, her finger lingering in the sweat-beaded hollow of his hand. The ceiling fan above them wobbled with an aggressive rattle, threatening to detach itself and join their tangled sheets.

"Your phone's been buzzing," she said, not moving from the crook of his shoulder. "For twenty minutes."

Marcos groaned, reaching for the bedside table where his iPhone sat like a judgmental eye. The screen illuminated his face—blue light carving hollows beneath his eyes that weren't there when they'd met three years ago. "It's Lisa. The merger." His thumb hovered over the accept button, then dropped to the mattress. "She can wait."

Elena laughed softly, bitter as old coffee. "No, she can't. That's the point. She never could." She sat up, letting the sheet pool at her waist, exposing breasts that still carried tan lines from their Cancún trip—lines that hadn't faded, unlike the photographs they'd stopped taking. "Remember when we used to leave our phones in the hotel safe? Remember how we said nothing would matter for a whole week?"

"We were drunk."

"We were happy. There's a difference."

In the kitchen, Elena stood over a pot of wilting spinach. Steam rose in gentle ghosts as she stirred, watching the emerald leaves collapse into themselves, surrendering to heat the way she had to job restructurings, his travel schedule, the incremental erosion of their shared silence into something porous and anxious. The refrigerator's power cable was frayed where Marcos had kicked it during their last argument about money—an argument that had ended with both of them crying on the linoleum floor, holding each other like survivors of a shipwreck they'd engineered themselves.

The spinach sputtered. She turned off the burner.

Marcos appeared in the doorway, phone in hand, tie loosened around a neck that seemed thicker than she remembered. "I have to go to Tokyo. Sunday. They're finalizing the acquisition."

Elena looked at him—at the palm she'd traced earlier, now curled around his phone like a lifeline, and at her own hands, smelling of garlic and surrender. "When do you come back?"

"Two weeks. Maybe three."

She nodded, reaching for a bowl. The spinach was done—cooked down to almost nothing, transformed by heat into something unrecognizable from its crisp, stubborn self. "Dinner's ready," she said. "If you have time."

For a moment, his thumb moved toward the home screen, toward her. Then the phone buzzed again. He turned toward the bedroom to pack, and Elena watched her future walk away from the kitchen counter, calculating the cost of staying versus the price of leaving.