Page 43 of So This Isn't Love
"Yep." I step closer, mostly because I can't resist closing the distance. "What do you say, Darcy?"
The smile gets away from her entirely. "Seven," she says.
I nod. "I'll pick you up at your place."
"All right, Finn."
"Great," I say, grinning like I just touched down on terra firma after my first skydive.
She's still smiling, still looking up at me with those soft hazel eyes and a look in them that says she's been thinking about me at least half as much as she's been on my mind. Then she pivots and walks to her car, and I stand there watching her go, savoring every shift of her hips as she crosses the lot.
Promptly at seven I roll up to the curb in my car, then position myself at the bottom of her stairs beside the bookshop. She comes down before I have a chance to meet her at her door. When she appears at the top of the stairs I take back everything Isaid about the sweet floral dress from earlier being the headline of my day.
This one is the color of the bay an hour before sunset, and it wraps and ties at her waist, its hem ending at a point on her thigh that I am going to be thinking about during dinner, through dinner, and for the rest of my natural life. Her hair is still down. She's done something to her eyes that makes them look even bigger and deeper, and her mouth is dark pink and glossy.
"It has pockets," she says, flouncing her skirt and doing a small turn on the last step.
"I'll be honest with you, Darcy. I did not notice the pockets." I open the car door for her, and when she brushes past me her light perfume hits my senses, something warm and vanilla-scented. She not only looks incredible, but smells temptingly edible too. As she gets situated in the passenger seat, I give real, executive consideration to skipping dinner altogether. I don't. Barely.
The restaurant is in a weathered cedar shakes building on stilts at the end of a gravel lane, a deck over the water, white paper on the tables, gulls running surveillance from the railing. The sun is low and throwing gold across the bay, and the hostess puts us at the corner table I reserved, where the water is on two sides, and when the wine list comes I don't open it.
"The Bardot Vista white," I tell the kid. "The one your manager hides."
It comes, and it's Dad's old east block, and I pour for Darcy myself because some things you don't delegate. She tastes it and closes her eyes for a second, and I watch her throat move when she swallows.
"Okay," she says. "That's unfair. You grew up drinking this?"
"I grew up sneaking it. Drinking it out in the open came later." When the server comes around again I place our appetizerorder. "A dozen oysters. The locals." I look at her. "Do you like them?"
She nods.
"Good. You're about to learn a trade."
She laughs. "I know how to eat an oyster, Finn."
"Eating's the easy part." The tray arrives with the shucking knife and the towel, because this place lets you work for them, which is half the reason I picked it, and I hold up the knife and give her the voice, the one I use on stages. "Ladies and gentlemen, the blade. Respect it. The hinge is here, the wrist does the work, and the man or woman who muscles it loses the liquor and the dignity both."
"Was that the safety briefing?"
"That was the whole certification course. You're licensed. Go."
She goes. Darcy Gable, who can spell anything ever printed, sets her jaw at a bivalve like it insulted her mother, works the knife into the hinge with surgical care, and then muscles it. The shell skips out of the towel, skids the length of the table, and goes off the edge of the deck. A gull drops from the railing and takes full credit.
The silence that follows is majestic.
"This is humiliating," she says. "I have a master's degree."
"The oyster doesn't know that." I move my chair around the corner of the table before I've finished deciding to. "Here."
I put my arms around her from the side, my hands over her hands, the towel and the shell and the knife bundled in our four hands together, and her hair is against my jaw and her shoulder is against my chest, and this was a tactical error, because now I can feel her breathing.
"Hinge," I say, quieter, no stage in it at all. "Wrist. There."
The shell gives. The top lifts clean, liquor intact, and she makes a small triumphant sound I'm going to be hearing at oddhours for the rest of the week. She turns her face, inadvertently placing her mouth three inches from mine, and neither of us does anything about it, which is somehow more indecent than doing something about it. I go back to my side of the table. It takes actual effort.
She's a natural after that, which annoys me and doesn't surprise me. She shucks four in a row and eats them like she's getting away with something. On the fifth, the brine gets the best of her, one bright line escaping the corner of her mouth, and her tongue comes out and catches it, unhurried, and my sentence dies in the middle of the word "trellis."
Because I'm imagining that tongue on my cock. There's no dressing that up. It's seared into my brain now. I'm hard enough to pound nails at a family restaurant with paper tablecloths and a gull audience, and I can't summon one single regret even if I had a search party.
