The Pool Where We Drowned

The cable went out at 11:47 PM, taking with it the last distraction from the silence of my apartment. I stood in the living room, remote in hand, feeling like the zombie I'd been pretending not to be since David left three months ago.

Outside, rain hammered against the windows. I grabbed my phone, thinking I'd just scroll through something, anything, until sleep came. Instead, I found myself at the sliding glass door, watching the fox that appeared in the backyard every Thursday night. A routine I'd developed without meaning to.

'The pool's still open,' I whispered to myself.

The apartment complex pool was technically closed after dark, but I'd been going there for weeks. No one checked. No one cared.

I grabbed my towel and barefooted it through the rain. The water was black and still, reflecting the security light that cast everything in an orange glow. I slipped in, clothes be damned. The cold wrapped around me like forgiveness I couldn't give myself.

'You again.'

I jumped, thrashing water everywhere. Marcus from accounting sat at the edge, legs in the pool, tie undone. We'd exchanged exactly twelve words in two years of working together.

'Cable's out,' he said, by way of explanation.

'Water's colder than usual.'

'Monthly maintenance. Something about the heater.' He shifted, and I realized he was crying. Not messy crying, just tears that cut tracks through the exhaustion on his face. 'My wife left. For my brother.' The words came out flat, like reading a quarterly report.

I swam closer. 'My husband left. For his assistant.'

Marcus laughed, bitter and short. 'We're pathetic.'

'We're human.'

The fox appeared at the pool fence, watching us through the chain-link. Neither of us moved. Water lapped against the pool edges. In that moment, stripped of our corporate armor, we were just two people who'd forgotten how to be seen.

'Start tomorrow,' Marcus said finally. 'Not the cable, not the job. Us.' He reached for my hand in the water. 'Start here.'

And somewhere beneath the exhaustion and the rain and the life we'd forgotten how to live, something began to soften.