The lobster ice cream tastes awful.
Like cookie dough ice cream, but with fishy parts instead of Oreos. It reminds me of football field–frosted cakes. Exactly the kind of dessert debauchery that inspires trust issues between humans and food.
The stuffed quahog wasn’t anything to write home about either. This is more than a simple culinary disappointment. It’s a thumb-in-nose moment for our entire relationship. Dom and I are supposed to get each other. No soulmate of mine can ever accept a travesty such as lobster ice cream as a legitimate dessert. I’m still trying to get over Nickelback.
Listen to yourself, Ever. Does this sound like a sane person to you?
So I focus on the good parts. There is magic. As we walk back to the inn from Main Street, holding hands, I notice that the air is extra crisp. That the ocean twinkles in the dark like tiny black diamonds. That the man nuzzling my neck looks like a Disney prince. And I’m not talking Kristoff or Prince Ferdinand. Dom is Prince Eric or Prince Naveen hot.
I remind myself that Dom is giving me an introduction to his childhood, to his family, to the DNA of his soul. Of course he loves seafood and questionable ice cream flavors and Nickelback. Each of these things has a nostalgic weight attached to it. I try to think what it would feel like if Dom told me he hated the Painted Ladies of San Francisco, or Oasis, or Apple Jacks. I would wrestle him to the floor until he took it back.
And it’s not like everything about our dinner date sucked. There was a live band, and Dom convinced me to dance on the table, which was the most liberating thing I’d done since I pierced my septum. At one point, his brother called him, and Dom answered the phone and put him on speaker and said, “Seph, tell this girl how crazy I am about her!” The man on the other line chuckled sardonically and refused to cooperate, but it did draw a few claps and whistles from other people in the restaurant. Including one: “Marry him now, girl, or I will!”
On our way back to the inn, Dom tugs me suddenly, and we cross the road to the beach. I stumble, trying to catch up.
“What are we doing?” I ask.
“Skinny-dipping,” he says. “This is the most secluded spot in all of Cape Cod, and I’ll be damned if we don’t make a new memory here.”
My heart picks up speed. The setting and the scent remind me of Joe. My emotions feel soggy, heavy. But I go along with Dom’s plan. Just because this love feels different doesn’t necessarily mean it is less than what I had with Joe, right?
We strip down to our underwear and run into the ocean holding hands. I shriek, braving the ice-cold water of the Cape in November. I don’t slow down, even when Dom dives right into the deep end, taking me with him.
My head breaks the surface of the water first. Dom follows closely.
“Oh my God. It’s freezing!” I wail. I don’t usually wail. But I imagine that Dom goes for girls who do. Delicate girls, who are more sugar than spice.
Since when are we adhering to what guys want us to be? I hear Pippa in my head. Or maybe it’s Mom. Either way, they aren’t happy about the wail.
“Poor baby Lynne,” Dom tuts, his body latching against mine. We swim close to the shore. I learned my lesson the hard way the last time I went into a large body of water in the middle of the night. Dom curls his strong fingers around my ass. I instinctively lace my legs around his torso. Our teeth chatter when we kiss. My nipples are puckered against his hard chest. He’s seen me naked before, but this feels different. More.
I no longer feel the achy, unexplained longing to be Virginia Woolf. To fill my pockets with stones before getting in the water. And that’s a huge win.
“Confession time.” He captures my lower lip between his teeth. The contrast between the cold water on our lips and our hot mouths gives me shivers.
“Hit me with it.”
“When I first opened the door for you all those weeks ago, you were so cool, so funny, so pretty, I was, in fact, ready to propose.”
“But . . . why?” I can’t shake the feeling I am not what he usually goes for. It’s not that I think little of myself. It’s just that on first glance, we don’t fit.
“Because you’re gorgeous.” He kisses my chin, my neck, the tip of my nose. “And inspiring. And sweet. And caring. That day in my apartment, I didn’t want you to leave. I kept thinking it was a good thing you couldn’t read my mind, because then you would think I was a creeper. Then when we met again, the night I lost my patient . . . sweet Anna . . . it felt like God had sent me a sign. I just knew. Knew our hearts were made out of the same material. Cracked in the same places. That they beat to the same rhythm.”