Page 48 of Pucking Good Girl

“I’m counting on it.”

Macklin’s eyes are still on me. This time he smiles, offering me a subtle nod. He looks proud of me, and I’m proud of myself for finally telling Tucker how I feel about his overprotective bullshit.

“Now,” I sigh, looking at all the fish on the table. “We need to gut these unfortunate creatures.”

Just the thought of handling the fish and eviscerating it makes me feel queasy.

“Hey pretty gi—Talia,” Becks swallows back the term of endearment before it’s totally out. “If you don’t want to touch the fish, the guys and I can handle it. You have herbs too, right? You can chop those while we work.”

I’m so grateful for the offer that I could kiss him. And I promise myself to do it later.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive,” he nods. “Right, guys?”

Macklin and Vaughn agree, and they each take one of the paring knives I borrowed both from the Zeta house and from my parents’ kitchens.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I call out when Tucker mutters his goodbyes. “If you can threaten violence over your teammates, use that repressed anger and gut some fish.”

“Do I have to?” He whines. “This isn’t even my group project.”

Maybe I should let him off the hook, but the petty part of me prevails. “You steamrolled your way into our project when you took over buying the fish. So now you can help us.”

The next hour passes quickly as the guys gut and break down the fish, and I chop the thyme and oregano I’ve chosen to use as part of the seasoning. Those herbs were available to the ancient Romans, together with some that are no longer in existence.

I also grind some sea salt crystals to put with our fish guts and the anchovies that are going in whole since they’re too small to be broken down.

Once everything has been prepped, it’s time to put together our garum. I put the fish guts in a solution of salt and water and add the chopped up herbs. I then pour the mixture through a cut of muslin cloth, placing that inside a sieve suspended over a terracotta bowl.

“Ok,” I place that on a counter in the middle of our little greenhouse. “Now we wait. We have about one week to let this ferment. The sun will be directly on it for several hours a day. The liquid that will ooze out will collect at the bottom of the pot. Then we squeeze the cloth to make sure we get every drop. The fluid that we’ll obtain will be the premium part of our product, the liquamen. But we can also present the stuff inside the cloth, which should have been reduced into a paste. The ancient Romans loved that too. They called it allec. If the liquamen is something like our modern Thai fish sauce, the allec can be compared to anchovy paste.”

None of the guys look excited about it, and I don’t blame them.

“Do we really have to eat it?” Tucker asks.

“You heard the professor. We’ll have an ancient Roman style banquet on presentation day.”

If gutting all that fish wasn’t a pleasant task, cleaning up is even less fun. But it’s the least we can do after the Agricultural Department allowed us to use their facilities.

Thankfully, we all pitch in, but even then, the smell of fish still lingers in the air.

“It stinks in here.” Tucker complains.

“It’ll only get worse as our garum ferments. While I was researching, I learned that thousands of years later, when archaeologists dug out some sites that used to host garum factories, the smell was still there. Especially when they found pottery that was used to contain garum.”

Becks ties up one full trash bag. “Hopefully here it won’t be so bad since we’re not going to make garum ever again.”

“Yeah. Can you imagine stinking up the entire campus?”

“It would be in the interest of historical accuracy, though,” Macklin chuckles. “They can’t be mad, right?”

Despite the disgusting smell of our concoction, working with the guys was fun. We laughed and joked and worked in harmony. A far cry from when Gen was a member of our group project.

“Hey baby,” Macklin whispers. “The guys and I have practice. I know you don’t have any classes this evening and you don’t have to work. I was thinking, why don’t you come to our practice and then we could hang out.”

“How do you know that I don’t have any classes?”

He rubs the back of his neck. I’ve never seen Macklin Shayba blush before. Spoiler alert, he looks adorable.