Riddles by the Pool

The water in the infinity pool merged with the Pacific, a perfect illusion she couldn't afford to believe in. Not at this conference. Not after what happened in the breakroom with Marcus and the prototype.

She sat on the deck chair, nursing her third drink, watching palm fronds silhouette against the sunset. Her phone buzzed — him, again. The messages were like riddles from the sphinx: fragments of explanations that made less sense the more she parsed them. "It's complicated," he'd written. "You don't understand the politics."

He was right about that last part.

A stray cat — the hotel's resident mouser, a scrappy calico — wound through the lounge chairs, eyeing her abandoned shrimp cocktail. She tossed it a piece, and the cat devoured it with ruthless efficiency. She envied that clarity sometimes. Want. Take. Eat. No corporate strategy sessions about optimal shrimp allocation protocols.

"You're blocking my light."

She jumped. Marcus stood there, cocktail in hand, looking nauseatingly put-together in his linen shirt. He sat without waiting for permission, close enough that their thighs almost touched. The cat hissed and vanished.

"We need to talk about the prototype," he said.

"We need to talk about a lot of things."

He set his drink on the tile between them. The condensation pooled, mirroring the ocean beyond. "I'm sorry about Thursday. I was stressed. The investors—"

"—the investors, yes. Always the investors." She turned to face him. "You stole my work, Marcus. That's not stress. That's theft."

The silence stretched, heavy and suffocating. Then his face crumbled. Just for a second — genuine remorse, or maybe excellent acting. Hard to tell anymore.

"I know," he said quietly. "I was going to tell you. I was going to—"

The cat returned, jumping onto the table between them, knocking over both drinks. Glass shattered. Liquid everywhere. They sprang apart, the moment broken.

"Well," Marcus said, staring at the mess. "That's one way to solve it."

She looked at the shattered glass, the cat preening nearby, oblivious. Sometimes things broke clean. Sometimes you had to break them yourself.

"No," she said, standing up. "That's not solving anything."

She walked toward the hotel, leaving him beside the pool, leaving the riddles unsolved. Some sphinxes you didn't need to answer. Some doors you just walked through.