He chuckled. “Do you really think someone like me will fit in in the big city?”
I turned to look at him. He was wearing the pale-orange Stormtrooper shirt he’d been in when we met, along with grass-stained jeans and flip-flops.
“To be honest, I don’t think you’re fitting in here, either,” I said, smiling. “You march to the beat of your own drum.” That’s why I liked him.
He laughed and watched as I took more pictures of his flowers.
“So, what are you doing out here at this hour?” I asked after a few more minutes.
“I always come out here when I can’t sleep.”
I smiled playfully. “Worried I’m going to trounce you in our bet? I amsolooking forward to you finally admitting my brilliance.” Oh my God. Was I flirting?
He laughed, shaking his head. “Yeah, that’s it. Totally. But...” He narrowed his eyes and raised one brow. “Maybe I’m excited that tomorrow you get to bathe inmybrilliance.”
That was flirty. Totally. Both of us were flirting. My stomach seemed to flip upside down at that look in his eyes. I put my camera on theworkbench. “So, what do you specifically do out here when you can’t sleep? Dig? Arrange flowers?”
“Stargaze,” he said.
“Oh God.” I rolled my eyes. “Not that again. You’re a bit of a clichéd country boy, you know that, Rowan? You into tipping cows and, IDK...monster trucks, too?”
He laughed. “C’mon. Join me.”
He got a blanket from the greenhouse, then motioned me over to a grassy patch in the yard. After laying out the blanket, he sat and patted the space next to him.
“I told you before—I’m not really into stargazing,” I said, but still I sat cross-legged next to him on the blanket.
“How is anyone not into looking at stars?” he asked, leaning back on his arms so he could look at the sky. “They’re just stars.”
I shrugged. “The Toronto sky is nothing like this,” I said.
“I know. I’ve been there. Many times.”
Of course he had. I had a question on my lips. Would we keep in touch in Toronto after this summer? But I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.
I decided to ask an easier question. “What do you like about living out in the sticks? I always assumed people who lived in small towns were biding their time for when they could leave.”
“A lot are. Most of the kids in my class fantasize about living in Toronto or somewhere like that. But I don’t know. I like small-town living. It’s quiet. Lots of nature. I can rely on almost everyone. I mean, it’s not all sunshine and roses, and yeah, there are some profoundly close-minded people in small towns—”
“Racist, you mean.” I had actually experienced a lot less racism personally here in Bakewell than I expected, but I wasn’t a permanent fixture in this town and locals pretty much treated me like a tourist. And the tourists to Bakewell were about as diverse as they could get—seemedeveryone loved flowers. But I knew racism existed here, and I knew it had been aimed at Rowan and his family before.
He nodded. “Yup. There are people who definitely resent a successful Black family living their best life. Just like some people don’t like that Leanne is openly pansexual. But we’re all still here. We have more allies than not—the Black Lives Matter protests in Bakewell were pretty big. The pride parade, too.” He sighed. “I’ve heard racist slurs thrown at my family in big cities when we’ve traveled. And there are not a lot of people of color in architecture, landscape or otherwise. When I went to the campus, three people thought I was with the groundskeeping crew instead of interviewing for the landscape architecture program.”
“The racism in the fashion industry is a beast, too,” I said, watching his face as he looked at the stars. “And there’s a lot of Islamophobia. Last Toronto Fashion Week, barely eight percent of the designers featured were people of color. All of those were doing sportswear or streetwear—there are no POC in couture.”
“You seen any of that firsthand?” he asked.
I nodded, looking down at my knees. “Last year I tried out for this televised fashion contest, likeProject Runway: Juniorexcept on public-access TV. Anyway, they turned me down as a contestant because I was”—I made air quotes—“the ‘wrong kind of Muslim.’ They would have taken me if I wore a hijab so they’d get diversity points, or something. And once at school, a substitute teacher told me she hadn’t heard of Muslims designing clothes, and what was the point if my husband wasn’t going to let me wear any of this stuff, anyway?”
“Holy crap. What did you do?”
“Complained about the teacher to the school board and sucked it up about the show. Oh, and then I designed an outfit for my hijabi friend Ayesha to wear for the school fashion show as my own revenge. Ayesha looked hot.”
He chuckled. “You’re a force, Tahira, you know that? You think you’re going to have to deal with that stuff at that school in New York?”
“Probably. It’s an incredibly competitive school. Plus, I’m already going to have to work twice as hard there to make up for my lack of connections.”
“Why do you want to go there?”
