Storm Season

The lightning struck just as Maya's iPhone buzzed on the nightstand, illuminating the hotel room in a stark white flash that made everything look like a negative photograph. She reached for the phone instinctively, though she knew better.

"It's him, isn't it?" Elena asked from the other bed, her voice thick with sleep and accusation.

"No." Maya turned the phone face down. "Just a work alert."

But they both knew it was a lie. The lightning flashed again, and Maya saw Elena's palm pressed against her forehead—the same gesture she'd made a thousand times in their three years together. That gesture that said: I'm tired, and I'm tired of this.

They'd come to Costa Rica to repair things, or perhaps to finally dismantle them. That was the ambiguity that hung between them like the humidity that clung to everything, even their skin.

"You bought papaya at the market today," Elena said, her tone strange. "You hate papaya."

"I thought I'd try it again. Maybe I'd changed."

"Did you?"

Maya thought about the fruit she'd eaten earlier, sweet and musky with those strange little seeds that got stuck in her teeth. "No. Still hate it."

The storm outside intensified. Rain lashed against the windows, and the lightning came in rapid succession now, the thunder following so close it felt like the sky was tearing open above them.

"We could still turn back," Elena said quietly.

Maya looked at her phone again. The screen stayed dark. No messages. No missed calls. Just the reflection of her own face, ghost-like in the black glass.

"Some things," Maya said, "don't turn back. They just break."

Outside, a palm tree bent nearly double in the wind, its fronds streaming toward the ground. Inside, Maya reached across the space between the beds, her palm open and waiting. Elena stared at it for a long moment before taking Maya's hand, their fingers intertwining in the darkness between flashes of lightning.

They held on as the storm raged, both knowing this was the last time, and neither able to let go.