The Other Guy Read Online Free PDF

sticks from the front of her stand. "Wait," I said to Nate. "It just looks like a baby octopus or actually is a baby octopus?"
He smiled at the hawker, receiving the maybe baby octopi in a little plastic bag with red sauce at the bottom, and then turned the smile on me. "Which one is more likely to persuade you to eat it?"
"That is a great question," I said.
"It's really good, I promise," he said, though how he could have so much confidence in just to what extent our gastronomic tastes merged was beyond me. "Okay, if it helps, I'll go first."
He swirled the octopus on a stick in the bag, picking up as much sauce as he could, and then stuck the whole thing in his mouth, scraping it off the stick with his teeth. As he chewed, he made the kind of face celebrity chefs make when they taste whatever divine creation they have assembled in front of the cameras in under thirty minutes.
"That good?" I asked, skeptical. I couldn't recollect ever making that face when I'd had calamari before. They're kind of the same thing, essentially -- tasteless, rubbery cephalopods, and I said so.
Nate held the bag out to me, the remaining stick lolling around the mouth of the bag as he shook it lightly. "Just try it?"
He looked so earnest that I had to accede to his offer. "Okay," I said, sniffing experimentally at the sauce, "but if at the beach tomorrow I get attacked by a giant kraken for eating its beloved spawn, it'll officially be your fault."
With one hand on his heart, Nate proclaimed, "I promise I'll be consumed by guilt for the rest of my life. I will build a bronze shrine to your memory."
"Well, that seems pretty fair," I said, returning his smile.
Dunking the thing several times into its saucy surroundings, I did as Nate had done and ate the octopus in one go. It was smooth and chewy, and infinitely tastier than I'd imagined. I may have made the face, because Nate looked excessively pleased with himself.
"I see your point," I conceded.
He grinned. "Want another?"
"Kind of, yeah."
Emboldened by this culinary delight, I treated him to two more sticks and spent the next hour ambling up and down the street with him, looking for the next great thing to eat. Some were recommended by Nate, who, as I found out, had arrived three days before, and was therefore three days more experienced in the consumption of night market mysteries; others we dared each other to eat -- though eventually I had to draw the line somewhere, and that line was at anything with more than four legs (octopus notwithstanding).
As far as impromptu jaunts with somebody I barely knew went, it was surprisingly enjoyable and made me feel lighter than I had in days.
When we had eaten our fill of everything deemed worthy of our mad standards (the more unidentifiable the better), Nate and I walked back toward the resort, slowly, to aid digestion.
A gibbous moon hung neatly in the sky among a confetti of stars, and I stopped at the side of the road to look up. Back home, in the city, the nights are always so relentlessly, artificially bright, you don't get to see skies like this very often.
Nate stood beside me, craning his neck backwards. "Know your constellations?"
"Nah, only the Dippers," I said. I pointed up to a straight row of three stars, bordered at four corners. "And that one, Orion the hunter. I knew a bunch more when I was little, but those are the only ones that have stuck, I guess."
A breeze danced in, ruffling the treetops as it twirled past.
Nate glanced at me, and then jerked his head in the direction of our hotel. "Come on, I know where we can get a better view."
It probably says a lot about my self-preservation skills that it didn't occur to me not to trust him until we were halfway there, winding through the boughs of the resort and toward the beach it jutted up against. But then I guess I'd already mentally accused him of shilling timeshares and stealing innards today, so I'd met my quota.
There was a small handful of other people taking quiet walks along the