Sweet Romance14 min read
The Bowl of Peeled Shrimp and the Things We Couldn’t Say
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This was my second time at the little seafood place by the harbor.
"Do you want blue crab and shrimp?" Baptiste asked as if he had not been surprised by my being there with August.
"Yes," I answered quietly.
Baptiste smiled but his eyes lingered on me and August in a way that made the air thicken. August had the steadiness of somebody who carried rain in his pockets; he didn’t smile often. Tonight he did not either, not yet. He looked as if he were cataloguing the light through the window.
"Add an extra pair of chopsticks," August told Baptiste.
"Right away," Baptiste replied, and then he moved with that careful rhythm of someone who had fed children before.
We sat in the private room. August stood by the window and smoked before the food came out. He only put the cigarette out when the plates clattered on the low table and took a seat beside me.
"Is someone else coming?" I asked, noticing the extra place settings.
"An old friend," he said after a small pause.
"Then we'll wait," I wanted to say, but he shook his head and reached for the first shrimp.
"Eat," he told me, the way you tell someone to breathe when they forget how.
He put on glove, peeled, and handed the shrimp into my bowl. I watched his hands. He did this like he had rehearsed the smallest tenderness a thousand times; he moved as if each shrimp was a small apology.
"Once," he began, not looking at me, "there was a girl about your age."
My chest fell inward. The name in his mouth could be anything, but his voice made it a bell. I waited.
"Her name was Jayla." He said the name like someone turning a page with trembling fingers. "She and I grew up with Ezra. The three of us were like old ropes tied together."
"I know the name," I said, because I did. Jayla—my memory had held a faint photograph of her smiling at the sea once.
"We were friends, then we tried being lovers. I was young and an idiot. We fought across long distances. I did things I thought would teach her to be smaller, to be easier to live with. I ignored calls, I went out with friends knowing she was crying. I told myself she would always come back and beg."
He stopped and peeled more crab, the motion steady and small.
"Then one night she didn't come back," August said. "Ezra told me she was gone. She'd walked toward the water and never returned."
My voice was barely sound. "What happened?"
"After an argument, she locked herself away for days. Ezra said she left at night and met trouble. He said she returned and closed the door. Then she chose the river." August's hand froze. "Ezra told me he had seen her there."
There was a long silence. Outside the window the sea breathed its slow long sighs.
"Why did you jump into the river?" I asked. The memory of my parents was a raw thing folded in my chest. I had walked away in that story. I had thought he might be a kind stranger who saved me. I had never dared ask the full truth.
"I thought I could save her," he said. "But I couldn't. Instead I sank into something—anger, grief. Your father and mother came when they saw me. They called. Your father tried to pull me back. He tried to hold the moment steady. He went in to help. I swam on. I failed them."
My tea slipped in my hand and shattered on the floor.
"Don't," August said, and yet his fingers pressed mine to keep me from moving. He bent and swept up broken porcelain with careful, patient hands like a man gathering the past.
"I thought—" I started and couldn't finish. "You look after me because of that?"
"Yes," he said. "Because I couldn't do enough for Jayla. Because your parents paid—" He stopped, eyes on the bowl of peeled shrimp. "Because your father and mother paid with their lives because of my choices."
I let the truth fold around us. I had always suspected there were threads of obligation winding us together. I had never expected to be a weight tied to his regret.
"Do you resent me?" I asked, frightened by how small I felt in his hands.
He hesitated, then took my hand. "No. I was a coward for a long time. I stayed distant because I thought that would be penance. But when you were cold and frightened, I couldn't pretend not to see. I kept thinking: I will make small things right. I will keep you safe."
"Then do you—" I couldn't ask the direct question. The mouth wants certainty and the heart wants more than a bargain.
He looked at me in full. "Do I like you? I used to not know if I loved Jayla because I was lonely or in love. I do know this: I cannot imagine moving through these next years without you in them."
I trembled, and in that instant the teacup breaking replayed in slow film. He had come back to the harbor where Jayla had worked to try and make peace with the ghosts.
"You told me once, a long time ago, you wanted to bring me here on my parents' memorial day," I said.
He nodded. "I did. I wanted to pause, to make amends to them. I didn't until tonight because I wasn't ready to say your name in daylight."
"Why now?" I asked.
"Because it's been eight years," he said simply. "Because burying everything doesn't heal anything."
Outside, Baptiste sat on a bench and watched the sea like someone still expecting footsteps. He once had worked for August's family as a gardener; he had seen the way sorrow stacked up like loose stones.
"August," I called softly. "Why did you tell Baptiste tonight?"
"Because it's time," he said. "Because secrets are small and heavy, and we were carrying too many."
He surprised me by admitting, "Baptiste is the reason I'm here in town anymore. He and your parents—he's kept this place going. He is one of the people who kept me from disappearing."
I thought of Baptiste's hands—gnarled, kind—and of the way he had fed me when I was small. I looked at August and saw a man who had built a quiet fortress of gestures.
"Tell me one thing," I whispered. "Have you really let her go?"
He hesitated. Then he cradled my hand and looked at the bowl of peeled shrimp, a small confession turning in his throat. "I think tonight was the last time. Tonight I peeled shrimp for her, though she is not here, and for you. Tonight feels like a place to leave the old things."
He smiled then, faint and honest. "If I haven't let her go, I will. For you."
We left the restaurant hand in hand. Baptiste shook my hand and said, "Come by any night. I know how to make bouillabaisse."
When we stepped into the night, August took the lead. He drove me home. On the way, he teased me like someone trying out a new voice.
"You're impossible," he said. "You leave me no rest."
"I thought you hated me once," I said with a small laugh.
"That was before I realized how stubborn I could be about things I care about," he said, and his thumb brushed mine.
I decided to apply to study abroad. I wanted space to learn who I was separate from the soft insistence of people who loved me. August said he'd support me.
"Do you want me to stay?" he asked one evening as we sat in his apartment with a low lamp and a lot of silence.
"Of course I do," I said.
He looked wounded for a moment. "Then don't go."
"I have to go find myself," I said.
"Then take me with you," he said quietly, and I thought of how small the world would be when two people try to carry each other.
He joked, "I'll burn your passport."
I hit his arm and laughed. "Very mature."
He softened. "I'm scared you'll find another man who is everything I cannot be."
"Like Ezra?" I asked, then wished I hadn't.
His muscles tensed. Ezra was a part of our braided past—sharp and loud, the kind of man who took what he wanted with a smile. Ezra Reyes had dated Jayla once and had never left the raw part of that story behind.
"Ezra is...complicated," August said. "He loved Jayla differently. He hated me, too. He came around when he could use me."
"Does he like me?" I asked because I had felt his presence something like smoke—around but no flame.
"He wanted to," August admitted. "Sometimes he wanted to act like he wanted you to sting me. He thinks winning you was a way to win at me."
I thought of the first time Ezra had greeted me as if he had always been my friend, then slipped away and reappeared like a step in a pattern.
"When I went back to town that time," August said, "Ezra and I had a huge fight. He said I didn't care for Jayla. We hit each other. The next nights are a nightmare I don't like. I drank and I walked toward the river because I wanted to see her. I didn't think—" He swallowed. "Your parents ran after me."
There is a heaviness in owning the fault lines of the past. I thought then of the small ways people make amends: bowls of peeled shrimp, offers to hold hands, a promise to guard.
Months passed—no, days braided into a different kind of time—and I applied to the program overseas. August helped me file papers, packed the documents, stayed up late ensuring I signed the right forms. He was both the man who had hurt and the one who refused to let me hurt alone.
"You really want to go?" he asked in a voice that carried tea and storm clouds.
"I want to be my own person," I said. "I don't want to be only what grief made me."
He held my face one night and said, "I am the one who will learn to live without the last of my mistakes only because you let me. Don't make me the only one punished by that past."
"I won't," I promised. "I'll go. But I'll come back. I'll come back to fight by your side."
"Promise me," he murmured.
"No," I said with sudden stubbornness. "I won't say a promise that is not a real promise. I will show you when I return."
He laughed softly and kissed my forehead. "Then hurry up and leave so I can miss you properly."
There were small, impossible moments: him feeding me when I was tired, me sleeping against his chest while he worked; him chasing imaginary orders of shrimp; me finding him awake at midnight with a bowl of sadness and a phone full of pictures of the sea.
One night at his office, while he was finishing a proposal, I asked, "Why did Ezra disappear that first time when we met? Why did he vanish?"
"He plays games," August said. "He thinks he's the hero of his own story. He watches and acts when it benefits him. When he wanted to wound me, he came close to you."
"Do you think he ever loved me?" I asked.
"No," August said, "he used people as chess pieces. That is different from loving."
Then the engagement party happened.
Ezra Reyes was engaged to Sabine Mathieu—a woman from an influential family. I had insisted on going, more because I needed to close a chapter than because I cared about the glitter on other people's plates. August agreed to take me, though there was a steady, protective line in his posture the whole night.
"You don't have to come," he said as we parked.
"I need to," I said. "I need to understand."
The ballroom was bright with families and cameras. People moved like choreographed birds, and Ezra moved among them with the cool ease of someone who had perfected a public smile. I walked in with August, who kept his hand at my back like a small anchor.
Ezra saw me first. He lifted his glass and said, "Congratulations."
I looked at him steadily. He walked beside me onto a balcony. People watched from below, the hush of interest all the louder because it was an engagement—a moment when secrets pretend to be small.
"Did you ever love Jayla?" I asked.
He laughed, ridiculous and brittle. "Of course. I loved her like a fire that burns other people to keep itself alive."
"Then why were you not with her when she needed someone?" I pressed.
He shrugged. "We are young. People make mistakes."
"You told me once that you liked August," I said. The memory of him softly claiming "I never loved you, I guessed" hung in my mind. "You said you couldn't be the man for her."
There was a sharp edge to the way he looked at August. The guests below leaned nearer; some of them had cameras keyed to any twist.
Suddenly, Baptiste stepped forward, and his voice carried across the terrace like a bell. "You should not speak so lightly of missing people."
"What do you mean?" Ezra asked, with a smile that had no steadiness.
Baptiste held up his phone. "I remember the night you met my niece. I remember the calls. I remember the texts. I have kept things because I thought someone might need to know the truth."
There was a murmur. People turned toward us, a tide of curious eyes.
August's face was still. I felt him squeeze my hand.
Baptiste did not look at Ezra with malice. He looked at him with the honesty of a man who had cared for children and seen the cost of carelessness.
"You pursued her after knowing about Jayla," Baptiste said. "You were near when she needed space. You were in the places you should not have been and you claimed you were there for her."
Ezra's smile slipped. "You have nothing," he said.
Baptiste set his phone on the railing and hit play. A message thread scrolled up across the screen. Guests leaned in; their whispers turned into a rope of talk. There were recordings—voicemails Ezra had left on nights he said he was elsewhere; there were pictures that contradicted his story.
"No," Ezra said, as if a single word could stop the images. "You can't—"
Baptiste's voice was steady. "You told Jayla to be careful and then you told her not to worry. You visited the alley she feared and laughed with the men who were there. You told lies to make yourself look brave. You used her."
He turned to the crowd. "He wanted something from August and he wanted revenge. He chose to weave a story around a girl who could no longer speak."
A woman gasped. A man took out his phone. Someone whispered, "Is that...?" The room drew breath.
Ezra's posture changed: from smooth control to brittle denial. He pushed a hand through his hair. "You are making a scene," he said, voice tight. "This is private."
"It is public now," Baptiste said. "Because you made it public in your actions."
"I never—" Ezra started, and then the next clip played. It was him laughing about 'teaching August a lesson' and boasting about how he would make the town see who had been wronged. Another clip: messages where he boasted about using a girl's trust.
"He told you to move on," a woman near me said to nobody. "He put on a show."
Ezra's eyes flicked to me. They were not the eyes of a man who had lost someone he loved; they were the eyes of a man who had lost an audience.
"I didn't—" he tried. "You all don't understand."
"People do understand," August said quietly. His voice was not loud, but when he spoke, the crowd listened. "You played with people like toys. You claimed to love, but you only wanted to prove you could have anything that belonged to someone who hurt you."
Ezra's face changed in a sequence that looked like the narrowing of a storm. First there was confusion, then anger, then a tiny panic as microphones and phones were pointed his way. A camera flashed. Someone called out, "Is this true, Ezra?"
He swore. "You have no right!"
A woman shoved forward. "How could you—"
"Stop!" he shouted. "Stop! You don't know anything about what I felt."
Ezra's voice broke into thin fragments. He took a step closer to the railing as if to leave, as if distance could restore him. He looked smaller than I had expected.
"Look at him," someone whispered. "He used a girl to hurt someone else."
A few people began to clap softly, an awkward rhythm of relief and moral justice.
Ezra's denial faltered. His face went white. He tried to laugh and it sounded like bark. "I loved her!" he said, as if repeating it would make it true. "I loved Jayla. I never meant—"
"You meant to hurt," Baptiste said. "You meant to hurt August and you used my niece's memory to do it."
There it was: the crack. Ezra's expression peeled away. For a second he looked like a man who had been discovered in the dark with muddy hands.
"No," he whispered, then louder, "You can't do this—"
People around us had phones out. Someone recorded him. Another person recorded Baptiste. The videos would spread tonight. Ezra clutched at his suit jacket like a man trying to hold together a garment that had been torn.
He shifted from defiance to pleading, the pattern of a downfall. "Please," he said to no one in particular. "Please, I didn't mean—"
A few young men in the crowd hissed, "Shame." Someone called for security. A woman shouted, "Go away!"
Ezra's voice thinned into terrified fragments. He looked at August. "You—why are you letting this happen?"
August didn't say much. He let Baptiste speak. He let the lights of truth fall where they would. Afterwards, when he took my hand, his fingers were trembling, but his face was the most steady I had ever seen.
Ezra's reaction changed in stages: first the practiced arrogance, then the brittle denial, then a reckless attempt to blame and rewrite, then the slow collapse into a man who found his props gone. His shoulders slumped. For the first time, people who had only heard rumors saw the pattern of his cruelty. A few guests whispered things like "He used her," "He was dangerous," and "He deserved to be found out."
It was messy and loud and public. People took pictures, people called for statements, someone applauded Baptiste for speaking up. Ezra tried to fight, to explain, to demand privacy, but the room had turned. He left the balcony with his engagement guests but he did not walk tall.
The punishment that night did not include jail or fines. It was not quiet rehabilitation. It was the social exposure that is modern and relentless: cameras, words, people turning him into the man he wanted to be and finding only a liar inside.
I could see, in the small crowd, faces I knew from the way small towns catalog mistakes. Some nodded in approval at Baptiste's courage. Some wept a little for Jayla's memory. For me, the moment was sharp and also disorienting. I had wanted closure; I had not expected the public peeling away of a man’s pretenses to be such a raw spectacle.
Afterwards, in the quiet that fell like rain, Ezra's eyes found me again. They were wet in a way that didn't feel like sorrow but exposure.
"Forgive me," he said to me in a hallowered voice that sounded less like apology and more like the last crumpled note of a song. "I—"
"No," I said, and my voice was small but firm. "Don't ask that from me."
He staggered away into the lobby. Cameras followed.
Baptiste put his hand on my shoulder. "You were brave to come," he said.
"You were brave," I corrected.
August only smiled once he was sure I was safe. He drove me home with hands on the wheel like a captain after a storm. On the way back, his silence was not empty; it was full, like the sea after tide goes out.
I boarded the plane months later. August told me to go and told me not to. He showed up at the airport with a brown scarf and a bowl of peeled shrimp that I ate in the terminal and thought of as an odd, lovely talisman.
"Return to me," he said at the gate.
"I will," I promised, though I could not know the world well enough to promise the directions of a heart.
We wrote letters at first. Then late-night calls. He visited once while I was away, roofing his days around business trips and small excuses. Once he surprised me in the school cafeteria and sat across the table like a tired knight.
"You smell of paper and coffee," he told me.
"You smell of sea and salt," I said, and we laughed like people who had learned to make each other breathe.
Years later, he stood at the water with me again. Not in guilt this time, but at a small bench where Baptiste had set down his cup.
"I used to see a galaxy in your eyes," he said and kissed me, the kind of kiss that didn't demand pardon but offered an entire future.
We were not perfect. Nothing spared us that. Ezra's name sometimes rose like a cough in conversation; people still whispered because the world keeps whispering. But the public unmasking of him had shifted the town like an earthquake shifts stones. It allowed small new things to grow.
One night, Baptiste told me in his own small voice how he had watched me go to school, how he had sat under dorm hall lights and breathed until my message popped up: "I made it." He told of the nights he feared the worst and the morning he finally let himself sleep.
He said, "I was stupid once, and I thought bringing women by the house would scare you straight."
"You used to bring women here?" I laughed.
"I did," he admitted. "Because I thought if you saw someone else, you'd wake up. I was ashamed of that now. You were twenty; you were building yourself."
"I know," I said. "You did what you thought was right."
"I brought men, too," he added with a sheepish grin, and we both laughed at the ridiculousness of grown people playing at matchmaking as punishment.
In slow measures we rebuilt what grief had cracked. August and I learned to call each other before thunderstorms. We learned to be small daily safe houses: a steaming bowl of soup after a bad day, a hand to hold in a crowded street, a look that meant "I have your back."
In the end, the bowl of peeled shrimp remained a small private relic. Once, in the quiet of our kitchen, August peeled shrimp for me and said, "This time, I will always peel for you first."
"I will remind you if you forget," I said.
He grinned and said, "You would be so relentless."
"Only the good kinds of relentless," I said.
When I finally came back for good, months after the closing of Ezra's scandal, we went to the little seafood restaurant by the harbor. Baptiste saw us and waved like someone who had been waiting a long time.
"Eat well," he said.
We did. August peeled for me, and I watched his hands, how steady they had become. He did not need penance to be kind now. He was kind because he had chosen to be.
"I thought you came to apologize to the sea," I said.
He shook his head. "The sea keeps secrets better than people. I came to apologize to the living."
We ate under lights that made the water glitter. My cup was whole this time. When it clinked against the wooden table, the sound was ordinary and healing.
Later, when August kissed me beside the window and the sea breathed long, I saw the galaxy in his quiet eyes again—small stars, whole and true.
I set the little bowl of peeled shrimp beside the empty plate at the window, and the harbor kept its steady, patient counsel.
The End
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