Adrian gave a coughing laugh. “Wait, how old do you think I am, exactly?”
Caroline’s teeth showed between her pink lips. She looked delighted with his question. “Contemporary with Bach, maybe?”
Before he could come up with a sufficiently powerful response to her brattiness, the server came over with their dinner.
The restaurant did a nice presentation: his fish was garnished with vegetables and roe formed to suggest exotic flowers. Microgreens and orchids dotted Caroline’s sushi rolls.
Adrian made the requisite noise of pleasure and nodded at the server. Caroline’s eyes were wide as she stared at her dinner.
“Please enjoy,” said the server.
Caroline knew about sushi. People in books and television shows ordered sushi. She’d seen sushi restaurants before, tucked into strip malls or spilling out of shopping mall food courts. They just didn’t have any sushi restaurants in Templeton, and the only fish her family ate was of the stick or Filet-O varieties. So she knew what sushi was, but she’d never eaten any before.
Adrian took the lime-green paste off his tray with his chopsticks (another hurdle—she’d only handled those a couple of times, and she wasn’t good with them), movedthe paste to a small dish, and poured soy sauce over it. Slowly copying him gave her something to do while she convinced herself that she was going to eat all this fish and like it.
“Looks good,” Caroline said, based on nothing more than hope.
Adrian dipped a translucent pink diamond of food—raw fish, it had to be, because Caroline couldn’t identify it as anything else—in his soy sauce, then popped it into his mouth with evident enjoyment.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “I’ve been eating nothing but the leftovers my roommate brings home for almost a month. This is a perfect change of pace.”
“Is he a chef?” Caroline asked.
“A waiter.” He waved off that line of inquiry, refocusing on Caroline as she tentatively tapped her chopsticks together. “What did you think of the Bach concerto?”
Caroline didn’t particularly want to answer that. She busied herself mixing her green paste and her soy sauce. The white part of the sushi rolls was rice, no problem with that. The dark green was seaweed, probably, and that was just ocean lettuce. That left everything else on her tray to be positively identified before she put it in her mouth.
“They all seemed very talented at their instruments.” She tried to be rigorously fair. “It was a very complicated piece of music, but I don’t think they made any mistakes.”
One of the rolls had orange-pink meat in the center. She thought it was probably salmon, because she’d been at awards banquets where salmon was served. People seemed to like it. So she took a deep breath, tried to turn off the voice in her head that was highly skeptical of eating meat without cooking it properly first, and picked up the roll with her chopsticks.
“But didyouenjoy it?” Adrian asked, not misled by her faint praise. His expression was too interested in the answer.
Caroline tried to dunk the roll in the soy sauce, the way she’d seen him do, but she fumbled her chopsticks, dropping the sushi into the soy sauce, where it fell apart.
“Here,” Adrian said, closing his hands over hers and trying to arrange them appropriately around the chopsticks. His fingers were warmer than hers and had a couple of calluses that brushed against the ones that were starting to peel off her own fingers from lack of tennis practice.
Caroline blushed and pulled away, setting the chopsticks aside.
“Maybe next time,” she deflected. She grabbed her fork, using it to pry the various components out of the soy sauce and onto a side plate. She got a few drops on the table, and her hand shook when she took the napkin out of her lap to blot them up.
She swallowed hard and admitted the truth before trying to eat again. “I didn’t understand the point of it. There’s no lyrics. There’s no story. And I couldn’t figure out whether it was supposed to be happy or sad or... if it even was supposed to be anything? What was it supposed to mean?”
Adrian ate a few more slices of fish while he thought about that, and the seriousness with which he was taking her thoughts made her nervous. She supposed she could have read up on it before they went to the concert, but she’d had a midterm that day. She probably sounded really ignorant. And Adrian was treating her opinion like theBoston Globereview.
“That’s fair,” Adrian said, handsome face creased withinternal deliberation. “About Bach. It’s music for music’s sake, not to tell a story.”
She grabbed another roll at random, forwent the soy sauce that had caused disaster before, and stuffed the roll in her mouth. Her mind was still fighting hard against the idea of raw fish, so she barely chewed before swallowing it, getting only the sweetness of the rice and the saltiness of the seaweed.
There. It was done. Fish was in her.
There were nearly two dozen more pieces to go. So many different colors and textures, from God-only-knew-what creatures. Caroline quailed at the thought. She’d been raised to clean her plate, especially at restaurants. She opened her mouth to take a breath, then picked up a second piece. Adrian was no longer watching her eat, at least, while he tried to convince himself that her opinion on Bach was a reasonable one.
“You didn’t study any instruments?” he asked.
“No. You did?”
“Seven years of piano lessons.”
