The Weight We Bear

The first time I saw him, he was swimming laps in the apartment complex pool at midnight, cutting through the water with the relentless precision of a man trying to outpace his own thoughts. I watched from my balcony, nursing a glass of wine that had gone warm, wondering what kind of person exercised when most normal humans were sleeping or fucking or lying awake wondering where it all went wrong.

Turns out, Marcus was the kind of person who'd been CFO of a tech startup until three weeks ago, when the board let him go with a severance package and a nondisclosure agreement thick enough to choke a bear. He told me this our first night together, after he'd followed me upstairs like a stray cat who'd finally decided to trust someone. We were naked in my bed, the sheets tangled around our legs like the cable knit sweater I'd discarded hours earlier.

"Bull market ends," he said, tracing the constellation of moles on my shoulder. "Bear market begins. That's the cycle. The trick is knowing which one you're in."

I kissed him because he sounded so serious, because his hands were gentle, because my own corporate job had been eating me alive from the inside out for years. Lightning flashed across the window, illuminating the resignation letter I'd drafted but hadn't yet sent.

Three months later, I find myself sitting on the edge of that same pool at dawn, watching Marcus swim his daily laps. He's taken up day trading now—"riding the bull," he calls it—while I've finally quit my job to write that novel I've been talking about since graduate school. The water is still cold this early. The sky is that particular shade of purple that exists only in the hour before sunrise, when the world feels entirely ours.

Marcus pulls himself from the water, dripping and gorgeous and entirely uncertain about everything except this: the water, the exercise, me standing here waiting with his towel.

"You know," he says, wrapping himself around me, "they say drowning is peaceful."

I laugh against his wet chest. "Only if you stop fighting it."

He kisses me, and for once, neither of us does.