Tropical Decay

The pool at the Veranda Resort was empty at 2 AM, which was exactly why Elena found herself there, swimming laps in the darkness. The water was warm, like bathwater left too long, and it felt like amniotic fluid — a return to something primal and undone. She'd left David in their room, asleep, his breathing already that familiar rhythmic drone that had become the soundtrack of her fifteen-year marriage.

She touched the wall at the shallow end and surfaced, gasping. Her hair, once thick and caramel-colored, was now thinning at the temples. The chemotherapy had ended six months ago, but the body kept its own accounting. The doctors called it premature menopause; she called it evidence.

"You're still here."

Elena froze. Marco stood at the pool's edge, backlit by the resort's ambient lighting. He was the junior VP from the Chicago office, thirty-two to her forty-seven, with that dangerous combination of ambition and something else she hadn't named yet.

"Couldn't sleep," she said, treading water. The motion felt obscene suddenly.

He sat on the edge, rolled his pants up, dipped his feet in. "Me neither." His profile was sharp against the night sky. "My wife thinks I'm at the gym."

The word hung between them. Wife. As if David, asleep upstairs, wasn't her husband in every way that mattered except this.

"I brought you something." Marco reached into his pocket and produced a papaya, small and imperfect, stolen from the breakfast buffet. "They're actually ripe here. Not like in Chicago." He split it with his thumbs. The flesh was the color of bruised sunset.

Elena swam to the edge, accepted the half he offered. The juice ran down her chin, sticky and sweet. It tasted like forbidden things, like the summer she was seventeen and her mother's boyfriend let her drive his Mustang. Like the way Marco had looked at her during yesterday's keynote, as if he saw through the tailored blazer to the woman underneath — the one who'd survived cancer, who'd stopped believing in forever, who understood that some hungers couldn't be named.

"David doesn't know," she said, and it wasn't a question.

Marco's fingers brushed her wrist as he took the seed from her hand. "Some things aren't for husbands to know."

The papaya left stains on her fingers that would last for days. Later, in the elevator, she'd realize she tasted like tropical rot, like something that had waited too long to be consumed. David would sleep through everything. And tomorrow they'd fly home, and she'd pretend this weekend had never happened. But the papaya stains would remain, invisible under her wedding ring, a reminder of the woman she'd been for exactly three hours in a darkened pool.