The Bear at the Bottom of the Pool

The Holiday Inn pool at 2 AM has a particular quality — the water takes on this stillness, like glass you could walk across if you believed enough. I'm doing laps, back and forth, trying to exhaust myself enough to sleep.

My phone buzzes on the deck chair. Sarah again. My ex-best friend, the one who chose him. The bear. That's what I call him now, not to his face, but in my head — lumbering, territorial, completely incapable of understanding why his presence in what used to be my safe space feels like violence.

I dive under. The water muffles everything. Down here, I can pretend I'm anywhere. A forest stream. A mountain lake. Someplace wild, where betrayal doesn't exist and the only things that want to hurt you make noise first.

When I surface, gasping, there's a cat sitting on one of the deck chairs. Orange tabby, watching me with those assessing eyes that cats have. It probably belongs to some guest who left their door open. I swim over, tread water near the edge.

"You too?" I ask it. "Can't sleep either?"

The cat yawns, showing sharp teeth, and begins to clean its paw. Uncertain. Unimpressed. I like it.

I pull myself out of the water, dripping onto the concrete. My phone lights up again. Sarah: *Please talk to me. It's not what you think.*

She would say that. People who haven't been betrayed always say it's not what it looks like, as if perception changes reality. As if my memory of her face when I walked in — that split second of guilt before the mask slipped — isn't burned into my retina.

The cat approaches, sniffing my wet ankle, then decides I'm acceptable and rubs against my leg. I sit on the edge of the pool, legs trailing in the cool water, stroking its coarse fur. This, at least, is honest affection. Transactional, but honest.

Tomorrow I'll check out of this hotel. Drive back to the apartment she still has a key to. Call a locksmith. Start the long work of excavating her from my life, month by month, memory by memory.

But tonight, in this blue-lit artificial oasis with a stranger's cat and the endless pool and the third-floor view of a freeway I don't recognize, I can float. I can pretend the water holds me up. I can pretend I'm not afraid of what comes next.

The cat curls up on my towel. I slip back into the pool, let the water close over my head, and for a moment, I'm nowhere at all.