Page 63 of Ideal Life

They traipsed across the sand, Talia clutching his coat and their precious bag of bad tacos close, before he steered her toward a crevice in the side of the cliff. She cocked her head, confused. It didn’t look like much from the beach, just a narrow opening barely big enough for an adult to wedge into sideways.

“Do you trust me?” Sam asked.

“No,” Talia said.

Sam smirked and led the way in anyhow.

A couple of meters in, the crevice turned right and opened into a small cave. Fissures led straight up to the top of the cliff, letting in streams of soft evening light. In the distance, they could still hear the sounds of the waves as they rolled onto the shore, but otherwise, it was secluded and perfectly quiet.

“Wow…” Talia spun around. It was fifteen degrees warmer in here, sheltered from the cold but still with a nice breeze that blew through and kept the air fresh. It was comfortable enough for her to shed Sam’s coat. “Have you been keeping this place from me all these years?”

“I found out about it from Kayla the other day.”

“Ahhh, Kayla.” Talia was facing away from Sam, but he could hear the teasing in her voice.

“It’s not like that,” he said.

“She didn’t seem to think so at the Chloe Quinn event last weekend.”

“Yeah, well, we actually talked after you left. I thought that if we were going to keep seeing each other, then maybe we should be more serious, like you suggested. But Kayla wasn’t interested. She said she just wanted to have fun, didn’t want to be tied down.”

Talia turned to him now. “I’m sorry, Sam.”

He shook his head. “I wasn’t in love with her or anything. I mean, I thought that maybe if we were in a relationship, I could see where it led… Really, it’s not a big deal. We’re friends now, and when I told her that you and I had a tradition of coming to Pacifica once a week, she told me about this secret cave.”

“Well, tell Kayla thank you for saving me from the cold the next time you see her.”

They set up a picnic area, and Talia went through her routine of unwrapping her soft taco, crumbling and evenly distributing tortilla chips over it, then drizzling the entire operation with nacho cheese. She asked about his parents, and he told them about how happy they were to be visiting, and how they were living it up at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, eating lobster rolls with a beachfront view and ending their evenings by making s’mores in their personal firepit on their hotel room patio.

Then she asked if there were any new Kenneth stories (because there was always something going on with him that made Sam’s life more, well, lively), and he told her about some drama that had happened when Kenneth had opened a box of Stephen King’s next novel—highly anticipated books were clearly marked by publishers with a neon sticker on the box that warned NOT FOR SALE UNTIL whatever the official release day was—and Kenneth had completely ignored the warning sticker and set the books out anyway. (Another reason new releases were supposed to be Sam’s job.)

When a tourist noticed the book out before it was supposed to be available, she had immediately posted about it online. Sam had received an angry call from the publisher soon after and had to run down onto the showroom floor and pack away all the books himself.

“What did Kenneth say when you confronted him?” Talia asked.

“He said, ‘Oh, oops, I didn’t see the sticker on the box—sorry.’ Then he went out back and smoked a joint.”

Talia laughed. “Sometimes, I wonder if we’d all be better off if we were Kenneth. We’d be a lot less stressed, anyway.”

Sam laughed, too. “Yeah, but if you had the same attitude as Kenneth, you wouldn’t be able to change the world. And then you wouldn’t be happy.”

She got quiet then, and Sam didn’t push it. He just let her methodically clean up their taco wrappers—folding them all into neat, compact squares, then stacking them inside the paper bag and folding that until it took the minimum amount of space possible—before she decided to speak again.

“The watch makes me tired,” she said.

To anyone else, it would’ve seemed like a non sequitur. But Sam knew they’d been building toward this the whole time. Talia volunteered her emotions on her own schedule. He’d just made sure to give her the space and lack of pressure to do it.

“I didn’t know the watch could do that,” he said. “Are you using it a lot?”

“Um.” She looked at it on her wrist. It was the one piece of technology she hadn’t left in the glove compartment, but maybe it didn’t really count as technology. Sam wasn’t sure what it was, and given that she’d had it now for a couple of weeks and they still didn’t know where it had come from or how it worked, they would probably never know.

“I don’t use it too much.” Talia didn’t elaborate after that.

Sam didn’t say anything, either. He’d already cautioned her not to overdo it that day when she rewound her meetings on the Omni campus and ended up attending them three times.

She was a grown woman and didn’t need him micromanaging her. Besides, between the two of them, Talia was the one running a successful startup. He was the one who’d bought a bookshop that couldn’t turn a profit.

Speaking of which…