Riddles by the Pool

The cat watched us from atop the stone wall—impossibly still, like it knew something we didn't. Sarah bent over the pool table, her dress catching the light from the torches along the hotel terrace. The Great Sphinx loomed beyond the fence, its eroded face half-visible in the Egyptian twilight.

"Your shot," I said, though we'd both stopped caring about the game hours ago.

She missed. The striped ball spun lazily toward the pocket, caught the rim, and stayed there. Defiance.

"Remember that baseball game?" she asked, not looking up. "Senior year. You hit that home run and I spilled Coke all over myself trying to catch it on camera."

"You still have that footage."

"I deleted it last week."

The silence stretched between us, thick and humid. This was it, then. The final night. We'd spent ten years accumulating these moments—shared apartments, shared debts, shared friends—until the weight of them had crushed whatever lightness we'd started with.

The cat yawned, showing teeth, and leaped gracefully into the darkness.

"You're going to do it," she said, straightening up. "Take the job in Dubai."

"We agreed—"

"We agreed that's what you'd say. But we both know you've already decided."

I walked to the hotel pool's edge, where the water reflected both the stars and the ancient monument behind us. The Sphinx had endured for millennia, its riddles still unsolved. Some questions didn't have answers, only the asking itself.

Sarah appeared beside me. "You know what my mother said about us? She said we were like riddles without answers. Beautiful to contemplate, impossible to solve."

"That's profound coming from a woman who thinks 'The Da Vinci Code' is historical fiction."

She laughed, and for a moment, we were twenty again, standing in her parents' kitchen, eating stolen ice cream at midnight while her parents slept down the hall.

"The cat," she said suddenly. "Did you see where it went?"

"No."

"That's the thing about them. They don't need you. They choose you, and they unchoose you, and you never get to ask why."

She kissed me then—softly, carefully, like saying goodbye to something she'd loved but outgrown. When she pulled away, her eyes were bright with unshed tears.

"Go to Dubai," she whispered. "Solve your own riddles."

The Sphinx watched from the darkness as I walked away, leaving behind the pool game, the unfinished game, the woman who'd taught me that some questions were their own answers.