The Fruit of Betrayal

Marcus sat alone in the breakroom, spooning cubed papaya into his mouth. The tropical sweetness felt obscene against the fluorescent lights and gray carpet. At 43, he'd become what he swore he never would: a zombie. Not the movie kind, but the corporate variety—shuffling between meetings, speaking in acronyms, forgetting what it felt like to want something real.

The door clicked open. Elena.

"They know," she said, leaning against the counter. Her blouse was misbuttoned. Marcus felt that familiar ache in his chest, the one he'd been suppressing for eight months.

"About us?"

"About the accounts. Someone's been a spy, Marcus. And now we're both going down."

He should have been afraid. Instead, he felt something like relief. The affair with Elena—twice divorced, predatory as a fox in everything except love—had been less about passion and more about feeling anything at all. Now the sham would collapse.

"Was it you?" he asked.

Elena laughed, but her eyes stayed dead. "Does it matter? We were always eating each other alive here. Just slower."

Marcus looked at his papaya, suddenly nauseous. Tomorrow there would be lawyers, questions, his wife's face when she learned everything. But in this fluorescent purgatory, watching the woman who'd helped him destroy his marriage, he understood something terrible: he'd do it again. Not for the sex. For the moment of being awake.

"You really are a fox, aren't you?" he said quietly.

"And you," she touched his shoulder, "are just another zombie who forgot he was dead years ago."

The papaya turned to ash in his mouth. Outside, the world continued. Inside, something finally broke.