Water Marks

The pool at the Cancun resort was impossibly blue, the kind that exists only in brochure photography and the morning after too much tequila. Elena sat at the edge, her feet submerged, watching the water ripple around her ankles. The humidity was already oppressive at ten AM, and she could feel the backs of her legs sticking to the concrete lounge chair.

"You're going to burn if you stay out here."

She didn't turn around. She knew Mark's voice by heart—had known it for twelve years, through college graduations and failed startups and her divorce party where he'd held her hair while she vomited merlot in his bathtub. That was before everything changed, or maybe before she finally admitted it had changed years earlier.

"I put on sunscreen," she said.

He sat beside her, leaving careful distance between their bodies. The scent of his cologne—sandalwood and something expensive—drifted over her. "You never could apply it properly to your back."

"I'm fine."

"Elena."

She looked at him then. His face had new lines around the eyes, evidence of the promotion he'd taken in Chicago, the one that had required him to move away right after that night in her kitchen when they'd both had too much wine and he'd almost kissed her before pulling away. "Why are you here, Mark?"

"Sarah's getting married. Remember?" He gestured toward the palm trees swaying in the breeze beyond the pool deck. "Your invitation must have gotten lost in the mail."

"I threw it away."

"Oh." He picked at a loose thread on his swimsuit. "That explains why she thought you were dead."

"That's dramatic."

"You're speaking to the woman who called me in tears three nights ago, drunk, saying you couldn't come to the wedding because seeing me would be like picking at a scab." His tone was gentle, not mocking.

Elena felt her face heat up, though whether from the sun or shame she couldn't say. "I was drunk."

"I know."

They sat in silence for a moment. The pool filter hummed somewhere nearby, a mechanical heartbeat.

"My mother reads palms," she said suddenly.

"What?"

"At parties. She learned it from her aunt. She says the lines on your hands don't change—that your fate is written before you're even born." Elena held up her right hand, examining the creases in her palm. "She told me once that I have a very short love line, but a very long life line. She said I'd outlive everyone I loved."

Mark took her hand before she could pull away. His palm was warm against hers, callused from rock climbing or something else that wasn't typing emails in Chicago offices. "That's not how it works, Elena."

"How what works?"

"Any of it." His thumb traced the lines on her palm, deliberately, as if reading braille. "Fate. Choices. The way we ruin good friendships by being cowards."

"Mark—"

"The wedding isn't until tomorrow," he said. "I have a room. There's air conditioning. We could talk about the things we didn't say twelve years ago. Or we could pretend we're just friends catching up, like we've been pretending since college. Your call."

Elena looked at the pool—so blue, so artificial, so perfect in its manufactured way. Then she looked at Mark, who had always been the most real thing in her life, even when she'd wished he wasn't.

"Show me your hand," she said.