Love on the Backhand

The padel court at the resort was glass-walled and unforgiving, reflecting everything back at us — my exhausted posture, Elena's fierce determination, the twelve years of marriage compressed into a single afternoon match.

"You're not even trying," she said, smashing the ball against the backwall. It bounced wickedly, skidding past my racket.

"I haven't played sports since college, El. This was your idea."

"Everything was my idea," she muttered, serving again. The ball hit the net.

I thought about baseball, actually — the summer of 2003, when I played third base with something like conviction, when my body moved without hesitation, when I believed effort mattered. Elena had come to every game that season, sitting in the bleachers with her college roommates, wearing my jersey. We'd been dating six months. She'd bring spinach and feta wraps to the dugout afterward, cold from her cooler but perfect anyway. I'd proposed the night of the championship game. We lost, but she said yes, and that had felt like winning.

That version of us felt like a different species entirely.

"Are you even listening to me?" she asked now.

"I'm sorry, what?"

Elena dropped her racket. It clattered against the synthetic surface, echoing in our glass enclosure. "I asked if you remembered what today is."

I hesitated a fraction too long. Her face collapsed.

"Twelve years," she said quietly. "We've been married twelve years. I thought this trip would be — I don't know, something. Instead you're miserable, I'm miserable, we're just going through motions in a nicer setting."

"Elena, I'm not — "

"You are. You're somewhere else. You're always somewhere else."

She walked to the bench, shoulders curved inward. I followed, the pulse in my throat thick and uncomfortable.

"I'm here," I said. "I'm trying."

"Trying isn't presence, David."

We sat in silence, watching the couple on the adjacent court laugh as they played, effortless and affectionate. Their ball occasionally hit the glass between us.

"I could make us dinner," I said finally. "Actually cook, not room service. That place in the village market had fresh spinach. I could do that thing with the pine nuts, the one you liked."

Elena turned to me. The fluorescent lights caught the silver at her temples. She was more beautiful now than at twenty-two, complicated and weathered and real. I had stopped looking closely enough to notice.

"That sounds good," she said, but didn't smile.

"And," I continued carefully, "we could skip padel tomorrow. Maybe walk along the beach instead. Like we used to."

Something softened in her expression. A crack in the glass wall between us, barely perceptible but there.

"That," she said, "would be something."

We gathered our things, shoulder to shoulder without touching. The ball still sat on the court where she'd left it, a small blue sphere suspended in the space between what we'd been and what we might yet become.