Papaya Season

The papaya sat on the counter, its skin mottled with yellow and green like a bruise that wouldn't heal. Three days since Marco bought it, promising to cut it up for breakfast. Three days since he'd said anything that wasn't about work or the weather or whether we needed more milk.

I stood in the kitchen at 2 AM, unable to sleep, running my fingers through my hair and watching strands accumulate in the brush. More than usual lately. The doctor said stress, or maybe just thirty-seven catching up with me. Marco hadn't noticed. He hadn't noticed much since the promotion.

The papaya's scent drifted up—sweet, cloying, slightly fermented. It was going soft, surrendering.

"You're overthinking again," he'd told me last week when I tried to talk about us, about how we'd become roommates who shared a bed and a mortgage. He was watching a baseball game, shouting at the television like the players could hear him. Some bull about the umpire's call.

That was Marco's word for everything he didn't want to discuss: bullshit, bullcrap, just a bunch of bull. The language of dismissal.

I picked up the papaya. It yielded to my touch, ripe beyond saving. The kitchen knife slid through it easily, exposing the orange flesh and the black seeds inside—hundreds of tiny possibilities that would never become anything.

My hair fell over my face as I bent over the cutting board. I should tie it back. I should do a lot of things.

Marco appeared in the doorway, silhouette against the hallway light. "Couldn't sleep?"

"The papaya was going bad," I said.

He came closer, saw the fruit cut in half, the seeds scooped into a bowl. For a moment, he looked at it like he'd never seen a papaya before, like he was trying to remember why it mattered.

"I was going to do that," he said quietly.

"I know."

"I'm sorry, Elena."

The words hung there, fragile and uncertain. Not bullshit. Not bull. Just the truth, finally.

"It's okay," I said, though it wasn't, not really. But I sliced the papaya into wedges anyway, and we ate them standing at the counter in the dark, and for the first time in months, we didn't say anything at all.