“Breathe,” he says calmly as he adds oil and the chopped garlic to the small pot.
“And why are you cooking dinner like that’s a normal thing to do? You just march in here after barely speaking to me and act all blasé and cool? You don’t even really remember much about when we met, do you? That day? It was a big day for me, and it was probably nothing to you, which I get. Why would it be?”
“You didn’t breathe.” He catches a tomato that almost rolled off the counter and then expertly begins dicing it.
I inhale and exhale dramatically. “Happy?”
Sam adds the tomato, sending a burst of steam into the air, and the smell immediately fills the room. For a few minutes, he just cooks as though I’m not there, as though I have not just blurted out monstrously huge and weird shit. But I can see that he is thinking. Then, he puts down the knife and faces me while I swim in confusion across from him.
He runs his hands through his hair a few times. “I’ve been an asshole. I’m sorry.” Now, he’s the one who takes a big breath, but he maintains eye contact while he blows me away with his words. “You up and ditched an entire life in Chicago, which is a big goddamn deal. I don’t know what you left behind, but it was some pile of shit, I’m guessing.” He looks away and busies himself with rummaging through a drawer.
I watch him take mussels and clams from a netted bag, and he washes them under the tap.
“I’m glad you’re doing something for yourself. Healing.” He pauses. “We should all be as smart as you are. As strong. You’re pretty tough, you know that?”
In the few moments it takes Sam to say these words, he undoes so many knots of unhappiness that have been twisting inside me for years.
I also realize that this is a boy who knows deep pain.
We stand side by side in the kitchen for the next half an hour, our arms occasionally brushing while we cook, with no further discussion. Sam teaches me that mussels and clams are done when their shells are fully open, and we throw out a few that stay closed. I laugh when he takes the live lobsters out of a bag and strokes one with a finger, causing it to go limp.
“See? You can put them to sleep. You know, before you really put them to sleep.” He winks and drops one into the pot that has a few inches of boiling water. “You do the next one,” he insists.
I scream and whine as I hold the lobster as far away from my body as possible. Then, with half-shut eyes, I fling it into the pot. Sam claps the lid down.
Since I don’t have a proper dining room table—or maybe as an excuse to stay close to him in the cramped kitchen—I suggest we just eat in here. I hop onto the counter while Sam pours the clams and mussels from the steaming pot into a large bowl. He rips off a piece of bread and dunks it into the aromatic broth. Then, he cups his hand under the dripping bread as he lifts it to my mouth.
“Good, right? This isn’t that farm-raised shit. This is the real thing, straight from the ocean.”
I groan and nod. I get that same salty depth that I got from the clam chowder I had at the inn. That reminds me that I’ve been avoiding stopping in to see Sam’s mom, Felicia. I didn’t know how to explain that Sam had not been particularly friendly. Well, until now.
“Is it really good, or are you just saying that?” he asks.
“It’s delicious. For real.” It is. I can taste and smell as I never have. It’s as though my body is coming alive in all new ways.
“Intense, huh? Now, try this.” He scrapes a clam loose and hands me the shell. “It’s okay if you don’t like it. Some people are weirded out by the texture.”
I shake my head as I swallow. “No, it’s so good.”
Next, I greedily devour three more clams as if I haven’t eaten in years. I can’t get enough of the briny taste. The mussels are just as good—a smokier taste but wonderful. We pull out the meat and toss our empty shells across the room, making baskets into the trash bin.
“You’ll be into oysters on the half shell soon enough, I bet,” he says happily.
While we eat, I ask Sam about working at his parents’ inn, and he tells me he loves when he gets to demolish a bathroom and redo it and when he replaced the roof last fall.
“Nothing better than walking on top of a three-story building.”
“Yeah, if you have a death wish.”
He holds back a smile, which I find confusing. “I don’t have a death wish. Trust me.”
“Okay.” I study him for a moment. “You didn’t go to college then?”
He makes a clamshell arc perfectly, and it lands in the center of the trash. “I did. I was at Colby for a few years.”
“You dropped out?”
“Yeah. What about you? Did you go to college?”
