Tethered

The hotel pool shimmered like liquid mercury at midnight, the only light coming from the underwater fixtures and my iPhone, face-down on the concrete where I'd abandoned it three hours ago.

I shouldn't be here. I should be upstairs in room 412, on a conference call with Tokyo, explaining why the Q3 projections had shifted. But the charging cable lay coiled on the nightstand back in my room like a sleeping snake, and I'd left it there deliberately.

"You come here often?"

I hadn't heard her approach. A woman in her forties, maybe older, drying her hair with a towel that smelled of chlorine and expensive hotel shampoo. Her eyes held that specific exhausted sharpness I recognized from every mirror I'd looked in for the past decade.

"Just tonight," I said. "I'm in town for the merger."

"The merger." She laughed, but it wasn't happy. "I flew in from Chicago for the same thing. Different side of the deal."

The water rippled around us as she slipped in beside me. Her dress — silk, probably worth more than my first car — was folded on a chair. My own suit jacket lay somewhere nearby, shed like a skin I couldn't wait to molt.

"Your iPhone," she said. "It's been buzzing for twenty minutes."

"I know."

"Aren't you going to check it?"

"No."

"Why not?"

I looked at the dark screen, its face glowing briefly with another notification. "Because I'm tired of being a cable that connects everyone else to what they need while I fray at both ends."

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she slid closer through the water. Her hand found mine underwater, fingers interlacing. "Me too."

We stayed there until dawn, two professionals on opposite sides of a deal that would make shareholders richer and lives poorer, tethered together by the kind of connection that doesn't require a charging cable at all. My iPhone battery died by 4 AM. I didn't notice until the sun began to rise over the pool, turning the water back into something that reflected only the light of a new day.