Page 65 of Oyster

“Your dad was just kidding about Mbappé, right? I’m much quicker on the ball.”

“You’ll have to get used to him. He’s a total windup merchant.”

I reached around her for the cool box and my shucking knife. By now, she’d gathered quite a collection of oysters shells at the apartment in Paris. At the rate she scoffed them, she’d be needing a bigger coffee table. “Time to eat.”

“Not yet. I’ve got something to show you first. I’ve been keeping it secret all afternoon.”

“That must have been an enormous challenge for you.” Like sacks of confetti, after a period apart, she hurled her latest news at me within seconds of reuniting.

She giggled. “You wouldn’t believe.”

This evening, she’d changed into a floral blouse with little pink roses dotted across the front, like loops of a necklace. She’d made it herself, which explained the wonky collar. “Promise you won’t laugh.”

With another huff of laughter, she unfastened the buttons, exposing her matching pink bra. She eased the shirt off her left shoulder, taking the slim bra strap with it.

Putain, my sweet girl had gone and got herself a tattoo.

“What do you think? Too small? Too big? Should I have chosen brighter colours? I planned the design weeks ago. Then changed my mind, like, a million times. I drove Fabien mad.”

With my fingertip, I traced the outline. A hint of redness still clung to the edges. Éti craned her neck, trying to examine it herself.

“He’s ten days old. I had him done after the Monaco afternoon match. My agent arranged for a guy to come over tothe apartment with his kit. Took five hours! Can you believe he made me lie still for five hours! Almost killed me.”

I bet. She would have wriggled like crazy and not stopped talking. The poor tattooist deserved a Champion’s League medal himself for not screwing it up.

“How did you choose which artist? You don’t know anything about tattoos.”

She snorted with laughter. “Ça alors, Nico! Have you seen the amount of ink in the PSG dressing room? I mentioned to Ruiz I was thinking about getting one, and within five seconds, the whole team leapt up to add their centime’s worth! The biggest team-bonding exercise ever! I should do something like that more often!”

Maybe a little warily, her eyes met mine. “So? What do you think?”

I dropped my gaze to her pale shoulder, where a stubborn-faced angel stared back. Not plump and cherubic, like most angel designs, nor was he a religious, Jesus-like figure. Nonetheless, the tattooist her teammates selected for her knew his stuff; his artistry shone through. In the ordinary clothes, for instance—jeans and a plain T-shirt hanging loosely from a lean man’s body. And the tiny designs covering the angel’s long rangy arms, tattoos within a tattoo. The strands of the guy’s hair, wind-swept and messy. His eyes, dark, hooded, and staring straight at you. The serious line of his smile.

The angel’s wings were even more modest. Two sweeping misshapen curves, with the inked infill grey and uneven. Crude, to be honest, compared to the delicacy of the rest, unless you knew what they represented. My eyes pricked with tears—they’d learned how to do that a lot over the last few weeks.

“It’s you, Nico,” Éti said. “My guardian angel, with oyster-shell wings.”

Choked, I struggled to get the words out. “I’m no angel.”

“Yes, you are. You rescued me from the sea, from my misery, from a sad secret hidden behind cardboard Étienne. And I will have you with me everywhere now, even when I am pretending to be Étienne in Paris, and you at home waiting for me.”

She shifted, smoothing her fingers over the angel’s face. My face. “Not long after we met, you said your tattoos were a timeline of your life. Do you remember? And I said I didn’t have any because I hadn’t found anything important enough imprint on my body forever. But now I do. Because Éti’s timeline started when I met you.”

We got around to eating the oysters, but a lot of kissing happened first. If we hadn’t been on the beach, the kissing would have led to more because my woman dressed in her cutesy flowery blouse was sexy as hell. These days, my sex drive had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with her.

Afterwards, as always, Éti piled the empty shells on the blanket, to wash clean, then take back to Paris. With the last one, she rubbed her thumb back and forth along the smooth mother-of-pearl lining the empty insides, then tipped the shell this way and that, catching the iridescence in the sun’s dying rays. “So velvety,” she observed. “You’d never guess the inside of the shell was as magical as this from the outside, would you? Or that something as ugly could ever hold an object as beautiful as a pearl.”

“No,” I agreed. Oysters were truly one of the ocean’s remarkable gifts. Like Éti herself, my mermaid treasure. “Do you know how natural pearls are made?”

Taking the shell from her, I studied it. “They are part of an oyster’s defence mechanism. Mussels can make them too. A tiny grain of sand or a food particle squeezes into the shell, and the oyster can’t repel it. So, it responds by coating the invader in layers and layers of this shiny hard stuff, the nacre, trapping it there. Binding it tight so it can’t do any damage. All oystershave the ability, although most pearls made into jewellery are cultured. Finding them in nature is exceedingly rare.”

Taking the shell from my hand, she pressed it to her lips, because she was ridiculous like that, then returned it to the pile. Cuddling back into me, she rested her head on my shoulder. “Have you ever found any pearls, Nico?”

In a few minutes, the dying sun would dip beyond the horizon. The low clouds had a lit-cigarette edge to them now, the burning embers of another hot day. The same sunset the world over, the same that Éti, in her different life, saw in Paris. I’d try to remember that when she was away, and I was here. Burying my nose in her curls, I breathed her in.

“Just one, my sweetheart.”

Predictably, for the rest of the evening, she analysed the tattoo to death. Then, in her own inimitable style, Éti dropped her next bombshell. A much bigger one. Early in the morning, while I was trying to embrace sleep a little longer.

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