The Storm We Chose

Elena traced the lifeline on Marcus's palm, the way she had a thousand times before. The skin was familiar, soft with age, but the eyes beneath it were hollow — that thousand-yard stare of the corporate zombie he'd become sometime between the promotion and the divorce papers.

"You're going to live a long, miserable life," she said, dropping his hand.

Marcus laughed, a dry sound. "That's what the last palm reader said. Before I met you."

They sat on the balcony of the Cancún resort that had seemed like a good idea three months ago, when the apartment felt too empty and their respective therapists had suggested they try something new. Now, watching the storm roll in over the Caribbean, Elena wondered if they were both just swimming through different oceans, never quite touching.

The waiter brought fresh papaya, bright as a wound against the gray sky. Marcus didn't touch it. He was watching something behind her, and when Elena turned, she saw him — a young man in the pool, slicing through the water with the desperate grace of someone trying to outrun something on land.

"He reminds me of me," Marcus said softly. "Before."

Lightning struck somewhere beyond the horizon, a white fissure in the sky that made everything painfully bright for a second. In that flash, Elena saw something in Marcus's face she hadn't seen in years — not the zombie she'd been sleeping beside, but something fractured and human underneath.

"I never asked you," she said, "what you were running from when you met me."

He didn't answer. The first drops of rain began to fall, hot and heavy against the tiles. Down below, the young man in the pool kept swimming, strokes growing more desperate as the storm broke over the water.

Marcus stood up, his chair scraping against the stone. "I'm not running anymore," he said, and stepped out into the rain.

Elena watched him go, the papaya forgotten on the table between them. Some storms you break apart in. Some storms you weather together. And some — she realized, as she took a bite of the fruit, sweet and strange on her tongue — some storms you simply let break you, and hope something new grows from the pieces.