Storm Warning at the Corporate Retreat

The vitamin supplements rattled in Maya's pocket as she stood by the hotel pool, watching her colleagues get drunk on company time. Three tablets, twice daily — the doctor's orders after her last panic attack left her hyperventilating in the office elevator. Now here she was, surrounded by the same people who made the job feel like drowning, except literally this time.

Thunder cracked across the sky. Someone squealed and splashed toward the shallow end. Maya checked her phone: another email from him. The message was innocuous enough — "Got your presentation notes, great work" — but she read it three times, analyzing each comma for subtext.

"Maya! Get in here!" Daniel called from the water. His hair was plastered to his forehead, dark and dripping, and she remembered too late why she'd avoided this weekend retreat. Six months after their drunken conference hookup, and he still looked at her like he was waiting for something.

Lightning struck somewhere nearby. The pool's surface shivered.

"Storm's coming in," she said, grateful for an excuse to leave. "I should—"

"One drink," Daniel said, climbing out of the pool. Water cascaded down his chest. "You never relax."

"I'm fine." The vitamins burned in her pocket, a reminder she wasn't.

The sky opened up. Rain hit the pool in concentric circles, blurring the line between water and air. They ran for the awning together, and when his hand brushed hers, Maya felt that old electric ache — the one she'd been medicating away, the one that had nothing to do with vitamins or panic attacks or work.

"You know," he said, breathless, "we never talked about Chicago."

"No," she said. "We didn't."

"Want to now?"

She looked at him really looked — rain in his eyelashes, uncertainty in his posture, the weight of everything unsaid between them. The panic rose, familiar and suffocating. But then she thought about the storm, how some things you can't control, only survive.

"Yes," Maya said. "But first, let me take these vitamins."