The Corpse Who Caught

Marcus stood at home plate, the **baseball** bat feeling foreign in his hands like a relic from a life he'd lived centuries ago rather than mere decades. The corporate retreat had been HR's idea—forced team building for people who secretly wanted to watch each other fail. Behind him, someone from Accounting shouted encouragement he didn't feel.

He hadn't played since college, before the divorce, before the antidepressants, before he'd learned to move through each day like a man observing his own funeral. He felt like a **zombie**, really—animated by habit and caffeine, hollowed out by years of compromise. His ex-wife had told him once that watching him choose a restaurant was like watching someone drown in shallow water. She hadn't been wrong.

The pitch came. Marcus swung, connected. The ball sailed toward the pool where the VP of Marketing was hosting an unauthorized **swimming** break, her sensible skirt draped over a lounge chair. She surfaced as the ball splashed down beside her, sleek and predatory in the water.

"Marcus!" she called, and there was something in her voice that made his chest tighten. "Finally showing some life."

He waded in, fully clothed. The water shocked him cold. She was right there, close enough that he could see the small scar at her hairline, the calculation in her eyes that everyone said made her ruthless but he found strangely reassuring. People who wanted things—really wanted them—were the only ones who didn't bore him anymore.

"You know what they say about us," she murmured, not moving away. "The ones who stay."

"The walking dead?"

She laughed, and it wasn't a nice laugh. "The ones who forgot how to want anything real." She touched his wrist underwater, her thumb finding his pulse. "I'd rather be hungry than dead inside, Marcus."

The baseball floated between them. Behind them, his coworkers cheered his hit, unaware that something else was being decided in the water. Marcus realized suddenly that he hadn't wanted anything in years, not really. He'd been waiting.

He reached for the ball. He reached for her hand at the same time, and for the first time in forever, his pulse jumped against her fingers.