I was not expecting for Elliott to stand out from the crowd like he did.
Crab's Leg was a restaurant on the ground floor of the resort... and at 6pm, the night before Eric and Amy's wedding guests were to check out and go home, the place was shockingly packed. Packed to the point that people were spilling out of it like spilled milk.
Based on conversation I overheard from others, most of those outside the restaurant were actually waiting for any sort of vacancy to open up. It really was that packed.
And yet, in this mass of people, Elliott stuck out like a tree in a field. As I'd partly feared, he'd seriously dressed up for this occasion. And, I mean, everyone dressed up to go to Crab's Leg; it was that kind of restaurant. I'd decided to go with the dress I'd worn to the wedding. But Elliott... almost looked more dressed-up than he did at the wedding. The suit he was wearing looked freshly ironed, his hair was even more neatly combed out than usual somehow, and it was easy to tell he'd put the utmost effort into his appearance. I'd be lying if I said he hadn't managed to look super handsome.
He mostly stared at the entrance to the restaurant with a frown on his face, one of boredom and disappointment. He almost seemed a bit sad that Crab's Leg was going to be so hard to get into.
Immediately, the thought of grabbing dinner somewhere else crossed my mind. The resort also had a small sub shop that I had been surviving off of for most of my time there, and I was not opposed in the slightest to eating one more of their delectable sandwiches instead of sitting down in a stuffy restaurant, stuck within a sea of people, and looking to see I probably didn't want anything on their menu, anyway.
But what did Elliott think? Maybe it had been one of his biggest wishes to eat here, and tonight was probably his last chance.
There was only one way to find out, I thought, as I took a deep breath, then walked over to him and said "Hi, Elliott!"
When he noticed I was there, his face... lit up? Something like that. It first took on a look of complete shock before softening with a smile that made his eyes close. I wondered if I'd scared him.
"Hello!" he replied. "How are you doing this fine evening?"
"I'm doing quite good, thank you!" I said.
We both looked back at the entryway to the restaurant. The line hadn't moved an inch. I then heard Elliott sigh a sigh laced with sadness.
"I had so looked forward to trying some of Crab's Leg's famous... well, crab legs," he said. "But I'm not sure we'll be able to get in before they close."
I peeked around until I could see the place's hours printed on the fogged glass.
"They're open until eleven," I reported.
"Ah, are they?" Elliott replied. "Alright, maybe we just need to wait a little longer."
Maybe a minute later, a group walked out of the restaurant, allowing the couple at the front of the line to enter. As a result, the line moved up.
We ended up standing in line for about half an hour. In that time, Elliott and I alternated between various tangents of conversation and bouts of silence. Perhaps my favorite of those tangents was about all the times he had to whip out his notebook to avoid losing an idea he'd suddenly been stricken with. Once, it had happened in the middle of a medical checkup, right as the doctor had a stethoscope on his heart. If destiny existed, Elliott had been born with the destiny to become a writer, I was sure.
Half an hour later, the line had not moved. Quite frankly, I was growing impatient, and my stomach was starting to hurt with how empty it was.
I started to wrestle with whether going here was worth it. Yeah, I wanted to spend a little time with Elliott, and it probably would have disappointed him if I decided to leave... but what were the odds that all this waiting would be worth it? What if we got in there, and there was nothing on the menu that sounded good, and the back of my chair would be less than inches away from the back of someone else's chair...
It may have been the boredom of waiting, but Sam crossed my mind again. So did the realization that if he'd been the one to have asked me to dinner tonight, we wouldn't have been in this situation. We'd have been over at that sub shop, and even if it would have been my tenth sub that week, it would have been the best damn sub I'd ever eaten.
It was that thought that made me open my mouth to break it to Elliott that I'd decided on eating there instead.
Then, I noticed that an absolute river of people were flooding out of the restaurant.
The staff member standing out front then said "Four tables have opened up, so four parties will be allowed to enter."
The chatter among those of us outside the restaurant grew happier for a bit. Well, maybe "relieved" is the better word, but however it could be described, it was definitely louder for a bit.
It turned out that exactly four parties of people were ahead of us. We were told that a table would open up for us momentarily.
Just as I was thinking that I'd waited too long to not see this through, a couple walked out, and within another minute, the staff member motioned for me and Elliott to enter.
As I'd feared, the inside was absolutely packed. Wouldn't be wrong to compare it to a can of sardines.
"This place is just a sea of people," I said.
Elliott then chuckled a decent chuckle, to the point where I became confused and looked at him.
Seeing that I was confused, he asked "Was that pun intended?"
"Pun?" I asked, completely lost.
"A 'sea' of people?" he said.
"Oh, you're right!" I said, before laughing myself. He laughed again.
We found an empty table in the middle of the restaurant. I was a little disappointed that I wouldn't get to look out any windows, but with how posh this place looked, I wouldn't have been surprised if it charged extra for the window booths.
We eventually got our menus, and as I'd feared, I was disappointed by the lack of appetizing options. I hadn't ever eaten at an upscale restaurant like this, so I felt like I was being left in the dark with the lack of descriptions of the food. While Elliott ordered the place's famous Crab's Legs with at least one sauce I'd never heard of before, I figured it would be safest to simply nibble on some shrimp until I could leave here and get my tenth sub from that sub shop anyway.
By the time our seafood arrived, Elliott and I had talked about how peaceful Cindersap Forest was (I definitely went more often than he did, but he liked going now and then), the girl who lived in a cottage there (Leah, who was an extremely talented artist who Elliott wished would gain the confidence to show off her work), our hair care routines (well, Elliott's several-hour-long routine that involved some special creams and straighteners, and my brush-it-out-until-it-works "routine"), and his coexistence with the spiders in his cabin (he considered them companions almost as much as he did the citizens of Pelican Town).
I had to give Elliott one thing: you could almost never run out of things to talk about with him, and it was admirable. It helped to create a feeling of companionship between us, taking joy in speaking our minds and even gaining new ideas from each other. I guessed it was because he always seemed to be thinking, sometimes about the grand scheme of things and sometimes about the smallest details.
I hoped that whichever sap fell for this guy was prepared for that. He deserved someone he could talk to for minutes on end. That sort of thing was a blessing.
As soon as our food was set down in front of us, Elliott dug right in and cracked a leg open, dipped some of the meat in that sauce I'd already forgotten the name of, and tasted it.
"Oh, this tastes better than I could ever have imagined!" he rejoiced. "Although I believe it's all thanks to the meat and the sauce working in tandem. The smooth, subtle taste of the meat combined with the spice of the sauce work beautifully together."
"It does look good," I agreed.
I then looked down at my boring-looking shrimp, wondering if I shouldn't have ordered what Elliott had. The sauce, at the very least.
We ate in silence for a little bit. Well, he ate, and I nibbled. I wasn't the biggest fan of shrimp, so I was really just trying to kill time.
We had been there maybe twenty minutes, though, when the most jarring tangent of them all popped up.
"Being here has finally given me the inspiration I've needed," he said happily, even with a bit of relief. "In fact, my novel is at least halfway finished."
"That's fantastic!" I replied. "What's it about?"
"It's a romance novel about a man who dreams of being in a relationship with a woman, then finds her at a local bar in real life the next night," Elliott replied. "I've called it 'Put It On My Tab.'"
"Ooh," I reacted. "Any particular reason for that name?"
"I'm aiming for that to be the final line," he explained.
"That's cool," I said. "I love things like that, when the title's creatively incorporated into the work like that."
The fact that Elliott was clearly passionate about what he was talking about put a smile on my face. I didn't think I'd ever heard so much consistent joy in his voice before.
"I-If you'd like," he said. "I'm... particularly proud of an excerpt I wrote a couple of nights ago, if you'd like to hear it."
"I'd love to," I told him.
I then remembered the words that had been etched into the note he'd slipped under my door. What were the odds, though, that he'd be referring to that excerpt in particular? Probably not all that high.
He whipped a medium-sized notebook out of his suit pocket so quickly that it almost flew out of his hands and onto his crab legs. I couldn't help but get a brief laugh out of how he fumbled to catch it.
After my laugh was over, I noticed that his cheeks were tinted with a pretty obvious shade of pink, but I just figured it was because he was about to read some of his work to me. I'd be just as nervous to show off something of mine.
I dipped one of my shrimps in cocktail sauce and took a small bite as he flipped to the excerpt he wanted to read.
"'This may have been the second time he was seeing her, but she was no less breathtaking,'" he read. "'Her hair, the color of silky milk chocolate, curled all on its own and in its own ways. The lights overhead were like stars in her sea-blue eyes. The way she'd called him over replayed in his head over and over. It had been like a song in the breeze: delicate, refreshing, damn near musical. She gave him the smile of a goddess about to bless someone with a lifetime of fortune. She didn't even have to try, and she was standing out to him like a rose in a field of weeds. He knew she could have brought him that lifetime of fortune just by being herself, and with that realization came the subsequent revelation that he'd totally fallen.'"
At that, he proudly put his notepad away. I was at a loss for words. For one thing, that excerpt definitely had the words that were imprinted in the note.
"That was... amazing," were the first three words I could come up with.
"W-Well, thank you," he said, blushing again. "I believe I revised it a total of four times before tonight, and it's likely I'll be making some sort of change to it again."
"Well, that's just writing, isn't it?" I said. "Do what you will, but I don't think it needs too much changing. This is the moment the main character realizes he's fallen in love, right? It should be impactful, hitting the reader in their own heart. I'd say what you have there does the trick."
"Heh... thank you," Elliott said, rubbing the back of his neck and smiling super wide. I smiled perhaps just as wide, happy I'd made him happy.
By the time he was done with his crab legs, I had had enough of my shrimp.
When the waiter returned to ask how we were paying, I opened my mouth to say I'd be paying for my shrimp, only for Elliott to cut in and say he'd be paying the whole bill. I protested, insisting I could cover my side of the bill just fine, but he was adamant that he wanted to cover everything, that he wanted to thank me for my company. Not having it in me to protest anymore, I allowed him to cover the bill, but felt as guilt bit away at my insides.
We left the restaurant, said our goodbyes, and headed our separate ways... and my way was over to the sub shop, just as planned. Well, not precisely as planned; I had more to think about than anticipated.
Including the weird gut feeling that excerpt of Elliott's novel gave me. I couldn't put my finger on what felt... well, weird about it.