‘I’m glad we’re doing this too,’ Sam says. ‘I can’t resist the fries here. You don’t think mayo is going to be the right thing to go with them, and yet.’
‘I meant you and me.’
‘I know. My failed attempt at humour. I’m not so good with the jokes when I’m nervous.’
Lexi flips her hand over in Sam’s, so that she can hold it. ‘You’re nervous?’
‘Of course,’ he says softly.
‘I know I talk a tough game. But I promise you I’m not scary.’ She could swear she’s told him this before.
‘I’m a little scared of how I feel about you?’
Is it possible to feel punched in the gut but in a pleasant way? It must be, because that’s what Lexi is feeling right now. ‘Oh?’
‘You could really hurt me if you wanted to.’
They’ve barely taken a sip or two of their pre-dinner cocktails. It’s a little early for deep and vulnerable. But Lexi rolls with it nonetheless.
‘Do I seem like I want to?’
‘No. But they never do seem like they do at first.’ He says it lightly, but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that there’s real hurt and feeling behind those words, real lived experience.
Lexi will need a glass or two more before she goes there. Instead, she matches the lightness of his tone. ‘I mean, I obviously wanted to kill you before.’
‘Before?’
‘But now I know how you kiss. I could never do that. It would be a real waste. I’d be depriving womankind of a great asset.’
‘Fair.’
The waiter comes over to take their order, but Lexi has only glanced down at the menu to steady her nerves; she hasn’t actually studied it. She asks for a minute from the server and tries to concentrate on the swimming words. She’s never been here on a date; she’s never looked at the options with those eyes before. Like, for example, she loves mussels, but is there any way to eat them elegantly, without the buttery goodness of the garlic sauce dripping down her chin? No, there is not. And speaking of garlic: in this kind of situation, either you both have it or neither of you does. Unless something goes horribly wrong in the next hour or so, they both know how the dinner is going to end. And if itdoesgo horribly wrong– which is certainly not out of the question– Lexi will have bigger things to worry about than whether she was too overt with her garlic calculations.
‘Speaking of which?’ she says. ‘If we’re going to be, say, kissing...’
‘Garlic?’ he asks. She’s relieved he’s read her mind. ‘I think we can assume there’s garlic in everything here. I wouldn’t worry about it.’
‘And it won’t kill the vampire in you?’
He laughs. ‘No.’
The server is back, and they still haven’t chosen. He only rolls his eyes a little bit when they tell him so, but they should probably get a move on.
‘Want to share some mussels to start with?’
Lexi is stuck. Because she doesn’t want the mess but she loves mussels, and for some reason, it seems important in this moment that Sam know this about her, and that he also knows she won’t let a bit of mess and effort spoil her enjoyment of a good evening.
‘Thought you’d never ask,’ she tells him. ‘They’re messy, but so worth it.’
‘Much like myself,’ he jokes. At least Lexi hopes it’s a joke. She’ll ask him once they’ve decided on their order, because she can’t risk the waiter coming back for a third time without their having an answer for him. You don’t want to irritate the people handling your food, after all.
Lexi and Sam get through the mussels, with no choice but to laugh about their sticky hands and the juice dripping down their chins. If Lexi had wondered whether sharing mussels is similar to sharing popcorn at the cinema– hands accidentally, or maybe not so accidentally, touching, the delicate thrill of it all, she is quickly disabused of that notion. There’s far too much going on for those kinds of shenanigans. And, unlike the cinema, where the darkness lets you retain some mystery, eating mussels in front of someone feels strangely intimate. Once you’ve seen someone dip their hands into garlicky sauce, retrieve a shell and inspect its contents, then use half of that shell to dig out the flesh and then pop it in their mouth, it kind of feels like you know everything about them.
The one saving grace when you’re sharing is that you’re usually too busy with your own mussels, never mind attempting to keep flirtatious conversation going, that there’s not really the brain space to also analyse what the other person is doing with their mussels. So maybe not exactly ideal first date food, but not as bad as it could be, either.
And anyway, this isn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill first date, the kind where all you know of each other is your carefully curated picture, your witty messages helped along by having time to figure out what to say, and a description making you seem far more fun or stable or interesting than you actually are. Lexi and Sam know each other’s jobs– have first-hand experience of them, in fact– have encountered each other at both their snarkiest and their most vulnerable, and (eyes on the prize) also know how each other kisses. The promise of that hangs over this whole dinner. Maybe that’s the real reason their hands don’t touch in the mussel bowl. They don’t need to test chemistry or manufacture it. They know where this is going.
Their handsdotouch in thefriteswhen they arrive with the steak, but not out of any kind of romantic impulse: it’s just the impatience of dipping one of these sticks of goodness into mayonnaise and tasting at its hottest and crispiest.
