He pulls his hand away. “There you go.”
My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else when I mumble, “Thanks.”
We’re three beers in, which for me is sitting in the warm, pleasant place between relaxed and saying things I’ll regret later. Griffin, who is bigger and has more mass to metabolize these things, is probably where I was after one. We’re a good tipsy.
“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” I say.
He considers it. “I learned to read music before I learned to read words.”
I put my drink down. “What?”
“My great-aunt played piano. She taught me note names before I started school.” He shrugs. “I have no memory of her face. I remember the piano and the way she’d put my fingers on the keys.”
My mouth falls open.
“I’m not musical,” he says quickly. “I can’t actually play anything. I just remember the notes. That’s all.”
“Griffin, I had no idea.”
“It’s a weird fact.”
My mouth curves. “It’s not a weird fact. It’s a beautiful fact.”
He picks up his beer. “Your turn.”
“I wanted to be a marine biologist until I was twelve.”
“What changed?”
“I watched a documentary about the deep ocean. The deep,deepocean. The part with no light. I realized that the ocean is, in fact, terrifying at its core, and I’d been operating under a false sense of its benevolence this whole time.”
“So you gave up marine biology because the ocean is scary?”
“The deep ocean specifically. The surface ocean is fine. The surface ocean is a friend.”
“Hence the beach.”
“Hence the beach,” I agree as we clink our bottles together.
He’s smiling, which means I’m looking at his mouth and telling myself I’m not.
The band slips into another song. A few people near the back have started moving.
“Do you dance?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “No.”
“I’ve seen you dance.” I click my fingers, trying to remember. “My parents’ anniversary thing. When I was seventeen. You danced with my mother.”
Something warm moves across his face. “That was a waltz. Betty made me learn. She said a man who can’t waltz is only half a man. It was an anxiety of hers that I never fully got to the bottom of.”
“She was ahead of her time. That’s a very progressive stance.”
“She’d be offended that you called it progressive.”
I rest my chin on my hand. “What else did she make you learn?”
“How to cook four things properly. How to iron a shirt, which I still do badly. How to write a handwritten letter, which is apparently a dying art.” He ticks them off. “How to sit through a meal without checking my phone, how to apologize without caveats, and how to leave a room better than you found it.”
