Page 21 of Lawless
“I can use a spoon,” I said. I tugged the handle of the drawer I’d seen some knives in a few moments ago, but Dominic was leaning against the end of it, blocking it. When had he moved closer? The line of his thigh was barely a hand’s breadth away from me.
“Sorry,” he said, his voice suddenly softer. He shifted away, and I pulled the drawer open with a rattle. I found a decent sized spoon I could squash stuff with.
I chopped the chilli, onion and tomatoes into as small pieces as I could, then dumped them in a bowl and used the back of the spoon to mash them together. Princess Frank got very interested when I opened the sardines and drained some of the oil into the bowl.
“She can have the sardines if you don’t want them. We just need the oil.”
Dominic’s face lit up almost as much as the cat’s when he gave her a sardine.
When the water boiled, I made Dominic take the crab out of the freezer and put it in the pot. He was so squeamish about it, it was funny. He had a job where he must have seen some bad stuff, but he needed me to tell him it was okay to put a crab in a pot.
When the twenty-five minutes was almost up, I ran the cold water in his sink, added some from the fridge, and then handed Dominic a pair of tongs. “Now get him out, and dump him in the sink. Then, when he’s cool, we bust him open and clean him.”
“Clean him?”
“Yeah, we have to pull the dead man’s fingers off him and?—”
“The what?” His jaw dropped.
“The gills.” I lifted my chin and held his gaze. “You’re on Dauntless now, copper. You have to learn your way around mudcrabs.”
His mouth twitched. “Oh, do I?”
“Yep.” I nodded at the pot. “Hurry up, or he’ll be overcooked.”
“This is so gross,’ Dominic muttered, but he stuck the tongs in the boiling water and lifted the mud crab out. He didn’t even drop it on the way to the sink. The cold water hissed as he slid the crab in. “Like that?”
“Yeah. It’s a crab, not open heart surgery. It’s easy.”
“All I’m saying is this lunch better be worth it.”
“It will be,” I said. “It’s going to be the best thing you ever tasted.”
And I pretended I didn’t feel another one of those fluttery jolts reverberate through my body as Dominic’s gaze slipped to my mouth and lingered there for a fraction too long to be an accident.
Chapter 7
DOMINIC
Lusting after my neighbour-slash-yard guy had not been on my To Do list, but here I was, eating the best fresh mudcrab I’d ever had in my life, and trying not to stare at Natty Harper as I did. The taste of the crab, dipped in the spicy sauce, was almost enough to make up for how gross it had been preparing it. I’d thought putting the crab in the freezer to die had been awful. Then I’d thought that nothing could top the cracking sound the shell had made as Natty had showed me how to remove it. But no, the most revolting part had definitely been pulling off the grey, floppy dead man’s fingers, and then all the other little stringy bits that had once been important parts of the crab’s insides. It had almost been enough to make me lose my appetite—but it turned out the best thing for getting over crab-related preparation trauma was eating fresh crab.
It was incredible, and so was Natty’s smile when I made appreciative noises as we ate.
My first week on Dauntless had been awkward, unsettling, and generally hostile, but today’s lunch almost made up for all of that. It had only taken a week to win Natty over. At this rate, if I worked my charms on every remaining islander, it’d only take five and a half years to get the community onside. Which was two and a half years longer than I actually had on Dauntless. Still, eating lunch with Natty felt like a victory. He wasn’t another outsider like Eddie, and he wasn’t obliged to talk to me like Red Joe the mayor, so I was allowed to feel optimistic about him, right? And of course it had nothing to do with how gorgeous he was. Nothing at all.
Still, it was hard to concentrate on how good the food was when I wanted to reach over my kitchen table and tug at a lock of that golden hair, just to see if it felt as soft as it looked. Maybe if I did, he’d jut out his chin in that mulish way he did, and call me “copper” instead of using my name, like he was still trying his hardest to pretend he didn’t like me. Just like I was pretending not to stare when he licked a smear of dipping sauce off his bottom lip.
“Hey,” I said, and he gave me a wary look over the leg of a crab. “So if I wanted someone to show me around the island, would you do that?”
He shook his head.
“Because I’m a copper and you’re an islander? That’s so dumb.”
“It’s how it is,” he said.
“It’s dumb,” I repeated.
“Doesn’t matter if it’s dumb or not. It’s how it is.” There was no heat in his tone—he was just telling me the facts. The sea was wet, the sky was blue, and nobody here was ever going to be my friend.
