The Last Set

The padel court echoed with the sharp thwack of racquet against ball, a rhythm we'd perfected over seven years of Saturday mornings. Marcus's back glistened with sweat as he sprinted for the return, his movements precise and practiced—the same way he'd practiced his confession last night.

"Your serve," he said, avoiding my eyes.

I served into the net. Again.

We'd come here because neither of us knew how to say goodbye in our apartment. Every surface there held a memory: the couch where we'd watched three entire seasons of that terrible show, the wall where we'd measured each other's height during our fifth month of dating (I'd won by an inch), the bed where everything had slowly unraveled like a sweater caught on a nail.

After the match—we didn't finish the set—we ended up at that bistro on 4th Street. Marcus ordered the spinach salad because he knew I liked it, even though he hated the stuff. He pushed the crispy prosciutto topping to my side of the table without thinking.

"You still remember," I said.

"Some things you don't forget." He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "You've got spinach in your teeth."

I wiped it away with my napkin, feeling seventeen again, awkward and seen and somehow safe. Outside, lightning fractured the sky, illuminating our little corner booth in sudden harsh brightness. I watched him watch the storm, and in that flash, I understood something that had been eluding me for months.

The problem wasn't that we'd stopped loving each other. It was that we'd stopped surprising each other.

"Check, please," Marcus said to the waitress.

"Wait." I reached across the table, my hand covering his. "What if we didn't go home?"

He looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time in what felt like years. "What do you mean?"

"What if we drove until we hit something we'd never seen before? What if we ordered things we swore we'd never eat? What if—" I laughed, realizing how ridiculous it sounded—"what if we tried padel left-handed tomorrow?"

Marcus's thumb traced circles on my palm. The lightning flashed again, closer this time, and somewhere between the thunder and the rain beginning to streak the windows, he smiled. It was small, tentative, but it reached his eyes.

"I hate left-handed," he said.

"Exactly."