The Orange Hour

The storm broke at 4 AM — lightning fracturing the sky like God's own camera flash, illuminating the empty pillow beside me. I'd been awake since David's text came through at midnight: *Can't make it. Work thing. Sorry.* Three years of this weather pattern and I still checked my phone like an addict.

I peeled an orange in the dark, the citrus scent sharp against the stale air of disappointment. My fingers stuck with juice, I walked to the window. Below, the pool water churned in the wind, and I remembered the night we met — swimming drunk at his sister's wedding, his wet hair plastered to his forehead, saying my name like it was the only word he knew in English. We'd bobbed in the shallow end, his hand on my waist, and I'd felt it: that electric charge, better than lightning, better than anything I'd known at thirty-five.

Now I'm thirty-eight, and the charge has faded to a dull hum. David loves me in the way people love comfortable shoes — reliable, nothing special. He says he'll call and doesn't. He says he'll come and gets detained. The lightning flashed again, and I watched my reflection in the glass: my hair, once red as that sunset we watched from his fire escape, now darkened to auburn by too many nights waiting up.

I bit into the orange — bitter, sweet, complicated. The juice ran down my chin. Somewhere downstairs, the pool water slapped against the tiles, relentless as a heartbeat. I could go down there, strip off this nightgown, and swim until my arms burned. Instead I texted back: *It's okay.* Then I added: *Actually, it's not.*

The phone stayed dark. The lightning flickered like a dying bulb. Outside, the storm was breaking up, leaving behind that washed-out orange light that comes before dawn. I finished the orange, wiped my sticky hands on the sheets, and lay down facing the window. Tomorrow I'd call my sister. Tomorrow I'd find a new apartment. Tomorrow I'd stop swimming in circles. But for now, I just watched the light change, and waited.