The Bull at the Edge of the Pool

Mara stood at the edge of the infinity pool, her expensive blonde hair plastered to her skull like wet silk. Below, the lights of Phoenix sprawled like gold dust scattered across black velvet. She'd come here for the corporate retreat—her first since Keith left—expecting team-building exercises and lukewarm chardonnay. Instead, she'd spent three days avoiding her iPhone and its barrage of unread messages from the office.

"You look like you're plotting something," came a voice from behind her.

She turned. It was Miller from Legal, loosening his tie in the desert heat. He held an orange, its bright skin fluorescent against the twilight.

"Just thinking about bulls," she said, surprising herself.

He laughed, surprised. "The animal or the market?"

"Neither. The way they charge at things because that's all they know how to do." She thought of Keith—how he'd left without a fight, without even an argument. Just packed his things and walked out while she was at work. Not like a bull at all. Like someone who'd already conceded.

Miller peeled the orange. The scent hit her—citrus and childhood summers, before marriages and mortgages and corporate ladders. "I saw you swimming earlier," he said. "You looked peaceful."

She had been. Weightless. For twenty minutes, suspended in that turquoise water, she hadn't been a soon-to-be-divorced thirty-eight-year-old director of operations with a 401(k) and too many unanswered emails. She'd just been body and breath and motion.

"My husband left," she heard herself say. The words felt foreign, as if someone else had spoken them. "Three weeks ago."

Miller's hand stilled. The orange segment in his fingers gleamed like a small sun. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be." She stepped closer to the pool's edge. The water lapped at the concrete, rhythmic and hypnotic. "I think I'm going to start swimming again."

He didn't ask what she meant. He just stood there in the cooling desert air, holding out the other half of his orange like an offering, like some small bright thing she could hold onto if she wanted to.

She took it. The citrus juice stung her fingers. Behind them, the bull market ticked onward on screens inside, but out here, under the emerging stars, everything was possible. She bit into the orange. It was tart and sweet and real. She'd check her phone tomorrow. Tonight, she would swim.