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“You want some of my soup?” Maya asks Elaina, motioning toward her bowl as she slides back into her chair. “You know I won’t be able to finish it all. My eyes are always bigger than my stomach when it comes to chowder.”
“No, thanks,” Elaina says, rising to her feet. “I’ll go grab a little cup of my own. You want one, Hunter?” she asks, her tone light, but distant, as if I’m simply the friend of a friend she’s determined to treat with kindness.
“No, thank you,” I say, matching her polite disinterest, note for note. “I’ll wait for the salad course.”
And I do. Only the salad course comes at the same time as the mussel course and soon our entire table is littered with napkins and the shell bucket is overflowing.
Then the lobster arrives, and everyone digs in. Soon, there isn’t a clean space on the butcher paper.
It’s…repulsive.
“You look like you’re going to be sick,” Elaina whispers as the others make fun of the extra-large bib the waitress has just brought over for the very pregnant Sydney. “Don’t you like shellfish?”
“I do,” I mutter. “But this table is…foul.”
She snorts in amusement. “Well yes, but that’s part of the fun, silly. Try to relax and enjoy. Get your hands dirty for once. You might like it.”
“I’ve gotten my hands dirty before. I shoveled shit on our farm as a kid,” I say, watching her dismantle her lobster with the efficiency of a longshoreman.
My own efforts have been…less successful.
My lobster currently has no legs or claws, but I’ve yet to skewer a single bite of the pink crustacean sprawled across my plate.
“A farm boy, huh?” Her forehead furrows. “That’s one I didn’t see coming. But it clearly wasn’t a farm near the ocean, was it? Do you need help, pumpkin?” She casts a pointed look at my plate. “Thereisa learning curve, and no shame in needing a hand.”
“Thank you, but I’ll manage,” I say, attempting to trap one detached claw in my cracking device, only to send it sailing off the edge of the table.
I glance back to the group at large, grateful to see Elaina is the only one who seems to have noticed my…mishap.
She holds out her hand palm up, curling her fingers. “Give it here before you hurt yourself. Or the lobster. The poor thing’s already dead. At least let it be consumed with dignity.”
I scoot my plate her way, asking as she makes quick work of my former nemesis, “How was the eye exam?”
“Helpful. Annoying. Bossy. But most of all…unexpected.” She finishes with the claws and tail and moves on to the legs, exposing every tiny sliver of meat with just a few deft cracks, like magic. When she’s done, she jabs the tiny lobster fork into the lump of claw meat with an aggressivethwack. “What’s your game, Mendelssohn?”
“No game. Just want the future mother of my child to be able to see, that’s all,” I murmur as I guide my plate back to its original position. “Thank you. This looks delicious.”
“Tastes even better,” she says, skewering a bite from her own plate. “And I’m not your future anything yet, buddy. Don’t you forget it.”
My lips part, but before I can reply, Anthony calls my name from further down the table, “Don’t you think so, Hunter? The hipsters in Brooklyn would lose their minds over a place like this. We should open one in my old neighborhood in Red Hook!”
“There’s a Son’s of Italy hall for sale two blocks from my apartment building,” Maya pipes up, every bit as excited about the idea as her fiancé. “And it has an amazing piece of land in the back. We could do a lobster feed and beer garden!”
“Sounds inspired, if you ask me,” Elaina says, pointing her fork Maya’s way. “Then, you’d have a piece of home right down the street. And the port’s close to your place, right? So, you could get fresh catch delivered pretty easily in the summer?”
“For sure,” Maya says.
The three of them fall into a discussion of how much they’d need to earn to keep the project afloat, just for the fun of it all, and what to do with the space when lobster is out of season, sparing me the need to respond.
For which I am grateful.
Restaurants are notoriously risky investments and not a venture that holds the slightest interest for me. I already have more money than I’ll ever be able to spend, and I enjoy winning too much to set myself up for failure.
I also enjoy watching Elaina dance after dinner way too much for a man who’s supposed to be ignoring the woman in the red dress…
But even shifting my chair to face the wall of filthy nets isn’t enough to keep me from tracking her every movement as she leads one line dance and giggles her way through learning another.
Predictably, every male gaze in the room is trained on her ass, her tits, her smile.