28. Sam
Sam
Sam’s parents were sightseeing in San Francisco today, so it worked out that Talia wanted to hang out. But when she walked into Lighthouse Books, he blinked twice and had to make an effort to keep his face neutral.
She was a sickly shade of pale and the bags under her eyes were more pronounced than usual, and it wasn’t just because of the fluorescent lights overhead.
Kenneth, though, wasn’t trained in subtlety. “Damn, Talia,” he said from behind the register. “You burning the candle on both ends? You look like shit, no offense.”
She paused in the middle of the floor, before she plastered on her CEO smile and said, “Don’t be a dick, Kenneth. This is what a powerful woman looks like, and you’re just intimidated.”
Kenneth hooted and slapped his knee. “Touché, Talia. Touché.”
On the way to Taco Bell, Sam watched Talia as she drove. This close, he could see how her collarbones stuck out too sharply beneath her skin. Her normally shiny hair was dull, and she slouched in her seat, her shoulders slumped forward.
He’d suspected something was wrong this week when she didn’t respond to his daily texts.
But he also knew not to push her, that Talia would clam up more if you asked directly about how she was feeling.
Sure, you could get away with a “How are you?” But if you tried to make her open up deeper when she didn’t want to, she’d just clamp shut even tighter.
Sam had to draw her out on her own terms.
When they arrived at the Taco Bell in Pacifica, Talia left all her devices in the glove compartment, honoring Sunday Lunch rules even though it wasn’t Sunday.
Then they went inside, and she ordered the same thing as always—a beef soft taco, a side of chips and nacho cheese, and cinnamon twists. Sam, on the other hand, studied the menu for a good minute.
Talia tapped her finger on her watch, pretending to be impatient even though he knew she was actually curious about what he would order. And because helping her relax was step one in getting Talia to share what was really going on, he erred on the side of ridiculous.
“Today’s theme is ‘supreme superlative’—I will only eat items that have the word ‘supreme’ in them.”
Talia snickered.
The Taco Bell cashier was a lot less impressed by a thirty-five-year-old acting like he was eighteen.
But Sam didn’t care whether the cashier was amused, only if Talia was.
Back when they were in college, he used to make up themes all the time for their Taco Bell runs.
It had been years, though, since he’d done it, and now Sam was committing to it.
He ordered a Crunchwrap Supreme, a Double Decker Taco Supreme, and a Chalupa Supreme.
“For here or to go?” the cashier asked, bored and monotone.
“For—” Talia began.
“To go,” Sam said. “Let’s go to the beach to eat.”
The chilly wind whipped Talia’s hair everywhere as they walked along the cliffside beach. It had been a little warmer earlier in the day, but now the temperature had already begun to dip, even though sunset was still a couple of hours away.
“Samuel Jason Chang, this was a terrible idea,” she said, although there was an undercurrent of laughter in her tone.
“Just wait and see.”
Sam took off his coat and wrapped it around her. Hearing her soft sigh as she sank into the warm shearling was more than worth it to him to brave the cold.
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…
“Hey, I signed up for an open poker tournament in San Jose this weekend. It’s called Summer Million, and first prize is… Guess.”
Talia grinned. “A million dollars? Sam! I’m so excited for you!”
He waved it off. “There are over two thousand other players. I still have to play well.”
“I’m sure you will.”
Sam thought she glanced at her watch.
But no, he must’ve been mistaken. She’d promised she wouldn’t use it on him.
Talia drove them back to the lighthouse. As she pulled into the parking lot, she asked Sam to hand her her phone from the glove compartment.
They said their goodbyes, and he was halfway out the door when she started checking her messages.
Talia gasped. “What?”
Sam slid back into the car. “What happened? Are you okay?”
She gaped at her phone. Then she passed it to him so he could read the message.
Erin: Oh my gosh, I just saw on YouTube that Libby and Jacob are pregnant! Congrats on becoming an aunt soon!!
“Libby didn’t tell you?” Sam asked. The sisters weren’t as close as they used to be, ever since Libby got married and started jet-setting around the world, but they still loved each other fiercely, and he knew Talia would be very hurt that she hadn’t found out before the entire internet.
Talia sank into the driver’s seat. “I think she tried to. But I was too busy.”
The Ideal Life app dinged as a suggestion popped up on her phone. Sam was still holding it.
Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth: I am detecting increased activity in your bilateral limbic and paralimbic structures, which may signal transient sadness.
I see you have also just read the message from Erin Berg about your sister.
Assuming a correlation between the two, perhaps your feelings are related to Libby, with whom you had a truncated conversation last week and have not reconnected with since.
To alleviate your distress, may I suggest that you reach out to her, as I suggested you do with Sam?
His heart sank.
It hadn’t even been Talia herself who’d wanted to see him. It had been an AI bumblebee that had reminded her that he was her friend.
Disappointment was too weak a word to describe how he felt.
Sadness? Dismay?
But it didn’t really matter if he could define it, because the knot in his chest was tight enough that it was hard to speak.
Sam shook his head as he put the phone down on her console. “Call your sister, Tal,” he said quietly. “I’ll… see you later.”
Then he got out of her car and walked away, not sure whether this friendship only went in one direction anymore.