I drained the rest of my wine. “My father could spend twenty years in prison and my mother might live the rest of her life on the run. All because I didn’t watch the books closely enough. I should’ve caught this when it started. It was right there in front of me.”
“You cannot shoulder that blame,” she said, closing my hand between both of hers. “I won’t let you. You’re here now and you’re doing everything you can to make it work. It’s actually really amazing that you still find the time to come over to Naked and harass me every day.”
“It’s all a matter of prioritizing,” I said.
“Do you miss it?” she asked. “Living on the other side of the world?”
Yes. No. Sometimes. Ask me when I’m not touching you.“There’s a lot to love about Singapore. Between Zurich, London, and Singapore, those would be my top three. And I do miss the consistency and predictability of my life there. I spent zero minutes a day trying to understand the mind of a seventeen-year-old and it was glorious.”
“Do you hate it?” she asked, her eyes soft and sparkling like she already knew the answer. “Being here again? Shucking oysters and chasing teenagers?”
Yes. No. Sometimes. Ask me when I’m not touching you.
Before I could respond, she added, “Or is it that you’re so focused on solving all the problems that you don’t stop to ask yourself what you feel, other than the byproduct feelings of exhaustion and frustration?”
Our meals arrived then, buying me a minute to think through a question that felt like she’d trailed her fingers over every shelf and corner in my mind to come up with the one thing that was both devastatingly true and impossible to put into words. But she did. She found the words. Packed them into one neat, clean sentence. Delivered them like they were as easy and simple as drinking wine from an olive jar on a summer night.
Then, because she was a sadist and an assassin and possibly the most perfect woman in the world for me, she asked, “Have you ever stopped to ask yourself how you feel?”
I stroked my hand over her calf. I didn’t need both hands to eat. Not when her skin was the only thing anchoring me to the earth at this moment. “I know how I feel right now,” I said.
“And how’s that?”
“Content,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how that word had pushed to the front of my mind.
Another thing I realized was that Sunny made me honest. Not that I’d beendishonest, though I’d never put as much time and energy into saying exactly what I meant as I did when I was with her. The words mattered tonight the same way they’d mattered last week when we stepped into her bedroom and all those weeks ago when I’d almost kissed her in the café. When I’d been a fool and said it was a mistake. These words between us existed on the iridescent surface of a bubble and they had to be the truest, rightest ones.
“Content is good.” She smiled at me. “What would you do if you just happened to be back here in Friendship but didn’t have all these crazy legal problems to worry about? What would you do if you were content every day?”
“Is harassing you all day not an option?”
“Let’s pretend you find time to do other things,” she said, snorting out a laugh.
“I don’t know,” I said, watching as she sampled the ravioli. She seemed to like it so I could breathe again. “Maybe build a shellfish hatchery.”
“Build a what now?”
“Oysters are hatched from seeds, essentially, but the conditions necessary for that are precise. It requires careful feeding of the seeds and manipulation of water temperatures, and a ton of observation. We already do this to some degree because the ecosystem of the cove can be unpredictable and weather patterns only add to that.”
“Building a hatchery would mean more oysters for you?”
“Yes, but more than that, there’s also an opportunity to research the impact of climate change on aquaculture in real time. Would we be able to expand our distribution network beyond trucking out four or five hundred dozen oysters to local restaurants and markets each day? Yes, definitely, but if we want to continue farming oysters for another seventy years, we need to know how the ecosystem is evolving before the species is wiped out.”
“Then why don’t you do that?”
“Because it’s a project that would take years to even get off the ground and I do have to worry about crazy legal problems and teenagers. Aside from all that, I like my job. I’m good at it and I want to keep doing it. I don’t have the bandwidth for a shellfish hatchery. Not right now.”
“But someday?”
I chuckled. “Yeah. Someday. When things calm down.”
“Have things ever calmed down for you?”
I reached for the wine bottle and poured a small amount into my glass. I didn’t want it, but I needed something to do. “There have been times,” I said.
With a nod that said she knew I was full of shit, Sunny said, “Are you aware that not everyone else can keep so many balls in the air and make it look easy?”
“I take my balls very seriously,” I replied. “But don’t forget the part where I also harass impressionable young women.”
