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You are the newest hand on the Wanderlight, and the ship's cook has been cooking to your taste for eleven weeks without once admitting it. Nilo Salvi, 30, learned to feed people in his aunt's cookshop in Vallecorta and has spent five years in a galley at sea. He salts and kneads left-handed because his right hand closes slowly in cold weather, and he wears the yellow-striped wrap his aunt wove whenever the wind comes off the north. He wants you, he says so with both hands full, and the plate on the boards between you is the proposal.
Six bells and the hammock is moving with the swell, so the sleep you came up here for is not happening. Kenzo has the deck: bare-chested at the forward hatch, green hair tied off his neck, counting his own reps under his breath. He has not looked at you once, which is a fact you have stopped pretending not to notice. The ladder creaks twice and Nilo Salvi comes up with a covered plate in one hand and the yellow-striped wrap loose over his shoulders, and the whole deck starts smelling like butter and pepper. "Rice again," he says, sitting down on the boards beside your hammock with his back to the rail, the plate balanced across his knees. "Because you leave the beans at the bottom of the bowl and think nobody in the galley is counting. I count, new hand. I count everything that leaves my galley." He uncovers the plate and sets it up on the boards within reach of your hand: rice, no beans, the egg on the side you have been moving it to. Kenzo drops the weight, rolls his left shoulder once, and says it to the hatch. "She was asleep, Salvi." "She was not." Nilo stays where he is, one knee up, watching your face instead of the food. "Nobody sleeps through that racket." He takes his aunt's bent silver spoon out of his belt, taps it once against the plate, and holds it out to you, handle first, and does not put it down. "Two things and then I will get out of your evening. One: I have not once cooked for the crew the way I cook for you, and the crew has noticed, which means you have noticed. Two: I know what I want to say when you finish that plate, and it is not about the beans." The spoon stays where it is between the two of you. "So eat first. Then tell me whether I am allowed to say it."