Riddles in the Sand

The message came at sunset, her name lighting up my **iphone** like a warning I'd been waiting three months to receive. 'Can we talk?' Two words that undid everything I'd carefully built since she walked away from me on this same beach, leaving footprints that the tide had already erased.

I found her sitting beneath the **palm** tree where we'd first kissed—its fronds rustling like old paper, bent by storms we'd weathered together. She looked smaller somehow, her shoulders curved inward as if protecting something fragile. This was **friend**, lover, stranger—she was all of these things now, categories that no longer fit cleanly.

She wasn't eating. Just holding a halved **orange**, its juice dripping through her fingers like forgotten promises. The citrus scent hit me—sour, sweet, overwhelming—and suddenly it was three years ago and we were twenty-four and everything felt possible.

'The riddles,' she said, not looking up. 'Remember how you called me **sphinx**? Because I never gave straight answers.' She finally met my eyes, hers wet with something that might have been regret. 'I'm done with riddles. I'm done being mysterious.'

Her **palm** found mine across the table, sticky with orange juice, trembling. 'I love you. I have always loved you. I was just—' She broke off, and I watched her throat work around the words.

'Terrified,' I finished. 'I know. I was too.'

Her **iphone** buzzed between us—her sister, probably, wondering where she was. She ignored it. The sky burned **orange**, that fleeting moment before darkness when the world holds its breath. I thought about all the time we'd lost to pride, to fear, to the cowardice that hides behind pride.

'**Friend**,' I said softly, testing the shape of it. 'That's not enough anymore.' I squeezed her hand, letting the juice and the fear and the years between us slick together. 'But it's a place to start.'

Behind us, the **palm** trees whispered against the wind, and the **sphinx** finally lowered her paws and spoke her name.