He looks genuinely baffled. “How else would you eat an oyster?”
“I don’t know! I thought maybe there was a process of some kind?”
Dante laughs. “She’s adorable. Where’d you find her?”
“She found me,” Bastian says, then seems to catch himself. “Taste the oyster, Eliana.”
I lift the shell to my lips, hesitate, then tip it back. The oyster slides onto my tongue—cold, briny, with a sweetness underneath that surprises me. It tastes like the ocean.
“Oh,” I breathe.
“Good?”
“It’s… ” I search for words. “Complex. Minerally. Sweet but also salty? How is it doing all these things at once?”
Bastian actually smiles—not his usual sharp smirk, but something softer. “You have a good palate. That’s a Kusshi from British Columbia. They’re known for that sweet finish.”
Dante sets out more varieties, each with its own personality. Bastian guides me through them: Kumamotos from Washington (buttery, almost nutty), Blue Points from Connecticut (sharp, crisp, classic), Beausoleil from New Brunswick (clean, light, perfect for newbies likemoi). He knows everything about each one.
“You’re like an oyster encyclopedia,” I tell him after my sixth or seventh. The wine from earlier is making me bolder than I ought to be.
“I spent a lot of time here,” he admits. “When I was starting out, trying to make a name for myself. This place was a kind of sanctuary.”
“From what?”
His jaw tightens. “From a lot of things. Dante never asked questions. Just let me sit here and learn.”
“He was runnin’ from his brother,” Dante supplies helpfully. That earns him a sharp look from Bastian. “What? She’s your project whatchamacallit, ain’t she? That’s basically family.”
“Dante.”
I want to keep prying, but there’s a hint of that storm on Bastian’s face. By now, I know better than to poke when he gets that furrowed brow. So I swallow my questions.
“My brother and I are… different,” he explains cryptically when he sees me looking. “He chose his path. I chose a different one.”
“The oyster path,” Dante says solemnly. “A noble calling.”
The tension breaks, and Bastian laughs. Just like that, the storm goes away. “Exactly. The oyster path.”
We work through more varieties, and somewhere between the Miyagis and the Wellfleets, I forget he’s my boss. It’s just too easy to fall into this slipstream of easy banter, of laughing and swilling beer between dirty jokes and silly arguments.
Another customer comes in and Dante goes shuffling off to tend to them. When he’s gone, I look sidelong at this strange, Alice-in-Wonderland version of Bastian I’m seeing tonight.
“You’re different here,” I inform him. “Away from the office. You’re… lighter.”
The smile fades slightly, and I know I’ve hit something true. “Dante brings it out of me,” he explains. “He knew me before all my… everything. Back when I was just a stubborn kid who thought he could change the world, one plate at a time.”
“And did you?” I ask. “Change the world?”
He’s silent and thoughtful for a moment, rolling an oyster shell between his fingers. “I built something. Whether that constitutes changing the world… Ask me in ninety days when Olympus launches.”
The mention of our timeline creates a small silence. The warm bubble of wine and oysters and unexpected connection pops, leaving us back in reality where I’m dying—well, no, not dying, just going blind, but it feels like dying sometimes—and he’s paying me to pretend everything’s fine.
“Not ninety,” I say.
“Huh?”
I raise my eyes. “It’s past midnight. That means eighty-seven days now,” I say. “Not ninety.”
