The Pool Where We Drowned

The water mirrored everything wrong with us—the cat's indifference from the patio, my abandoned hat floating like a dead thing, and your iphone glowing with messages you wouldn't show me. We were at Marcus's workplace celebration, the kind where people pretend to be friends because they're trapped together forty hours a week.

I'd bought the hat specially, a fedora that made me feel like someone who had his life together. Now it bobbed near the pool's edge, abandoned after you dared me to swim fully clothed at midnight. That was your special talent—making poor decisions feel like liberation.

"Someone's texting you," I said, watching the screen pulse on the patio table.

"Work."

"At 2 AM."

You didn't answer. The cat—Marcus's wife's Siamese, some pretentious name like Cézanne—jumped onto the table and walked across your iphone, pressing buttons with bureaucratic precision.

"That's an omen," I said.

"It's a cat, Maya. Not a mystic." But you grabbed the phone anyway, screen lighting your face in harsh blue as you read whatever message made your shoulders tighten. I knew that posture. I'd seen it three times before: when your mother called, when your ex-boyfriend resurfaced, and now, whatever fresh disaster had arrived to claim you.

"I should go," you said.

"You just got here."

"Yeah."

The pool lights clicked off automatically. In the darkness, I could hear the water lapping against the tiles, that patient sound of something waiting to swallow you whole. I'd wanted tonight to be different—no defenses, no carefully constructed distance. Just us, possibly the last honest thing between us.

"Your hat," you said, already walking toward the gate.

"Keep it."

You paused. "What?"

"The hat. Consider it collateral for next time. If there is one."

You laughed—really laughed—and for a second, the old you surfaced, the one who climbed onto rooftops to watch storms approach. Then you were gone, and the cat settled on the table where your phone had been, yellow eyes regarding me with something uncomfortably close to pity.

I fished the hat from the pool, water dripping like the worst kind of joke, and sat alone in the darkness, wondering which of us was drowning—the one who left, or the one who stayed.