Page 21 of Counting the Days

As he lit the logs, he explained, “You said you’d never been camping. So…I kinda wanted you to experience some of it.” He had a shyness in his eyes, a vulnerability from making such a romantic gesture.

He removed a cooler from the bag and pulled out a package of wagyu hot dogs. Rhea stared at them. She had never roasted a hot dog over an open flame and did not realize until that moment that she was desperate to do so. She played off the sudden moisture in her eyes as a reaction to the wind as he skewered a hot dog onto a metal stick and handed it to her.

“Wow,” she said.

“Weird?”

“Wonderful.”

They sat on the blanket, and Danny poured red wine into two Yeti mugs.

“How’d you know I eat meat?” she asked.

“ ’Cause I watched you eat a pound of it at Tiny’s.”

She laughed, then convulsed with horror at the thought of him watching her wolf down a pile of beef, but covered with flirty confidence. “So…you were watching me at Tiny’s?”

“I mean, not in, like, a creepy way, but I might’ve spotted you in the crowd once or twice.”

They held eye contact until Rhea broke it.

“I only eat meat once a week, so when I do, I devour it,” she explained, with the acquired female need to make an excuse for eating food.

He looked at her with a funny expression, then said, “I only eat meat once a week, too.”

They obviously enjoyed having this obscure habit in common.

“It’s better for your health,” she said.

“And the planet,” they said at the same time.

“Well, aren’t we adorable?” she said.

They asked each other safe, small questions; Rhea told him she went to FIDM, and he told her he went to Wharton. He revealed that he was so burned out from the academic workload, he took a few years off, moved back in with his parents, and got a part-time job at a landscaping company.

“I was trimming people’s bushes and mowing their lawns. I just really wanted to work with my hands and not feel any pressure, ya know?”

Rhea did know; she told him about her stressful years at FIDM and how much she appreciated the relaxed environment of the boutique in comparison. He asked about hobbies; she told him about paddleboarding and hiking, but left out vision boarding and coveting her friends’ lives.

When she returned the question, he told her about yoga and meditation, how much they helped him get over his burnout and centered him enough to eventually use what he had learned at Wharton to start a business. As he described yoga retreats he’d attended in Bali, India, and all over the United States, she triednot to picture this adorable man surrounded by hard-bodied women clad in skintight high-performance fabric.

“So…why have you never been camping? You said it was a long story…”

She shook off the images of her handsome date standing behind a yoga goddess bent over in downward dog and said, “Oh gosh, so many reasons. I grew up with a very young single mom—she worked a lot and, ya know, camping was just not a priority.”

“Where does she live now?”

“She…passed away.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Me too. She died when I was fifteen, so I was shipped here to live with my aunt.”

“Ah, I see. The aunt who paid for your school.”

“Yeah…”

“I am so sorry you went through that.”