“Kal Rubenstein’s finest cold brewskies, babe,” he says. “Get on in, it will be fun.”
We drive over a bridge to a fishing village and stop at a tackle shop by the pier. Seth runs in and emerges with a big bucket of bait fish. I carry the bucket and he hauls our gear out to the pier. There’s a pelican chilling on one of the posts, and some wizened old fishermen casting lines.
“Notice how no one else appears to be on a date here?” I ask.
“Too bad their boyfriends aren’t as creative as me.”
“Are you my boyfriend?” I ask softly. I don’t know why this word feels so freighted, since we’ve spent the past few hours reliving our youthful romance, kissing, and discussing trips we can take together while we feel out being a couple.
But it does.
“I want to be,” he says.
I feel a slow grin overtake my face. “I think I want that too.”
He reaches out and draws me to his chest.
I burrow there.
I feel eyes on us, and look over Seth’s shoulder at a pair of burly, tanned men openly ogling us as they wait for bites on their lines.
“They’re staring at us like we’re the catch,” I whisper.
“Yeah. We better get down to business,” Seth says, drawing away. Apparently public displays of affection on a pier where people routinely gut fish are a bit too sappy even for him.
Snapper are biting, and we catch a few small ones we throw back. And then Seth gets a giant tug on his line and has to really fight to bring it in—so much that the fishermen guys crowd around us to give him advice.
“Step back and brace your shoulders,” says an old man with a tobacco-stained beard.
“Don’t tug so hard, you’ll snap the line,” commands a younger guy with a deep sunburn.
Seth struggles for what feels like forty-five minutes until the creature breaks above the water. We all cry out encouragement as he reels in… a very small, very mad, hammerhead shark.
“You caught a fuckingshark?”I squeal, taking one million pictures with my phone.
I don’t fuck with sharks, as stated, but I’m still impressed that my dudecaught one with a fishing pole.
Seth shoots me a smug grin, holding the writhing, furious creature up for a portrait. The fishermen help him remove the hook from the shark to throw it back, though not before a few of them pose for pictures with it too. We give away the rest of our bait and walk back to the car.
We drive five minutes to an outdoor oyster bar so old that my grandparents took my mom here when she was growing up. Seth orders two dozen oysters on the half shell, which come with a bucket of saltine crackers and cocktail sauce so full of horseradish it nearly burns my face off.
The sun has moved behind the clouds and a big gust of wind blows over the stack of napkins in front of us. All of a sudden, I smell petrichor.
“Uh-oh,” Seth says. He peers out at the horizon, where you can already see rain pounding the ocean in the distance.
“It’s going to pour,” I say.
We ask for our check, but every other person at the bar has the same idea. By the time we pay there’s a crack of thunder, and then the sky erupts.
“Should we make a run for it?” Seth asks.
I grab his hand. “Come on.”
We sprint out from under the cover of the bar to his car, getting utterly soaked in the process. Water is dripping down my arms, my hair, my nose. His shirt is clinging to his chest. We dive in and slam the doors behind us.
Seth reaches in the backseat for some towels and hands me one.
“You’ve thought of everything.”
