Palm Fronds at Midnight

The corporate retreat in Key West was Marcus's idea of hell. He stood by the pool at midnight, nursing room-temperature whiskey, feeling like a zombie from three months of fourteen-hour days. His palm sweated against the glass—nerves, or the humidity, he couldn't tell anymore.

Then she emerged from the pool like some sleek fox, all sharp angles knowing too much. Elena from accounting. He'd never really looked at her before—just another spreadsheet in the endless columns of his dying department.

"You're not swimming," she said, water dripping from her hair onto the concrete. "You're drowning."

Marcus laughed, bitter. "Metaphorically. Literally, I'm perfectly fine."

"Bullshit." She climbed out, wrapped herself in a towel. "I saw you running toward the office at 2 AM last Tuesday. The security guard told me. You sleep there now, don't you?"

He stared at her. The truth was a lump in his throat.

"My wife left me," he said finally. "Took the kids. I work because the alternative is sitting in an empty house listening to the ghost of what used to be a life."

Elena stepped closer. The air between them crackled with something dangerous—like standing too close to a downed power line.

"You know what my father said when I got divorced?" Her voice dropped lower. "'At least you're still alive.' Trite, but true."

"Is it?" Marcus looked at her really looked. She had laugh lines around her eyes and something wounded in her smile.

"No." Her fingers brushed his palm, electric. "But tonight? Between two wrongs? That's something."

The zombie woke up. The drowning man remembered how to swim.

"Your room or mine?" he asked.

She grinned—fox, indeed—and pulled him toward the stairs. "Bets on whose marriage died first."

And running with her toward the dark balcony doors, Marcus thought: hell of a team-building exercise.