Lightning Season

The baseball game droned on—bottom of the ninth, two outs, and Marcus still hadn't looked at me once. The announcer's voice filled the silence between us, thick with false enthusiasm about a curveball that changed everything. Curveballs had a way of doing that.

"You're going to miss it," I said, not specifying what. The pitch, the moment, us.

"Shh." His eyes stayed fixed on the screen, darting back and forth like he was tracking something that could actually save him.

Barnaby—our ginger tabby, the only living thing in this apartment that still made eye contact with me—jumped onto the coffee table and knocked over Marcus's beer. It foamed across the remote, the coasters, our wedding photos in their cheap frames.

"Goddamn it, Elena, control your cat."

"He's not my cat. He's not anyone's cat. That's kind of the point."

The storm outside chose that moment to throw its own pitch. Lightning flashed through the sliding glass door, turning our living room into a negative image—furniture stark white against walls gone suddenly black. For one frozen second, I saw everything clearly: the dust on the baseboards, the three-day-old dishes stacked by the sink, the way Marcus's shoulders hunched forward like he was waiting for something to hit him.

He'd been waiting for three years.

"Did you see that?" I asked.

"See what?" He still hadn't turned around. The baseball game had gone to commercial.

"The lightning. It was—never mind."

Barnaby curled up on my lap, purring loudly, his warmth seeping through my thin pajama pants. Animals knew things. They could taste the atmospheric pressure dropping, sense the earthquake before it struck, smell the moment a heart decided to give up. I stroked his chin and he tilted into my hand, shameless in his neediness. Unashamed to want.

"Elena."

"What."

"The game's tied."

"Is it?" I watched the rain streak against the glass, each drop writing something I couldn't quite read. "I thought you said baseball was a game of failure."

He finally turned to look at me, his face ghost-pale in the flickering light. Somewhere in the distance, thunder caught up to the flash—low, rumbling, inevitable.

"It is," he said quietly. "But sometimes—sometimes, against all odds, it goes into extra innings."

Barnaby shifted in my sleep, his claws digging slightly into my thigh. A small, sharp reminder: I was still here. I could still feel things.

"Extra innings just means more chances to lose," I said, but something in my chest cracked open. A possibility. Not a promise, never that. But the storm hadn't passed yet, and the cat was still purring, and Marcus was finally, finally looking at me like maybe he understood what he'd been missing.

"Or more chances to win," he said.

The batter hit a foul ball. It shattered a neighbor's window somewhere down the street. We both jumped. Barnaby didn't even open his eyes.

"Baseball," I said, and for the first time in months, I didn't hate the sound of my own voice in this room. "It's the longest way to nowhere."

"We're still watching, though," Marcus said.

"Yeah," I replied, as the next lightning flash turned his face into something almost like home. "We're still watching."