“I’m sorry,” Teagan immediately said. Had he been neglecting Sloane? That was the entire reason he was at thisglorified summer camp. “I don’t have to go either. Do you want me to stay? We could do something together today.”
Sloane made an annoyed sound in the back of her throat. “No, Ido notwant you to stay. Go see beavers with the hot maintenance girl. Live a little. Jesus. Ask aboutherbeaver.”
“Sloane!” he objected in horror. She might be twenty-two, but he preferred to maintain the illusion that his baby sister had never heard of sex.
“What? Good for you. You both should have some fun.”
Teagan hesitated. “Do you really think so?”
Sloane growled and hurled her pillow at him. “Get out of my fucking tent, Tiggie! I’m going back to sleep. You’resodumb about this stuff.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, replacing her pillows on the bed and backing away from her. “See you tonight, I guess?”
He assumed he’d be back tonight. But he knew there were hotels in Yellowstone, and if it was three hours away and Darcy’s day off, maybe she’d want to stay there?
“Teagan?” Sloane called when he was almost out of the tent.
“Yeah?”
“Iamhappy you’re going. You look really happy.”
As Teagan walked through the wet grass to the rumbling pickup truck emblazoned with the wellness retreat’s logo, where Darcy waited with visible impatience, he was surprised to realize that was true. He probably should have gotten on antidepressants years ago. Or taken time off. He’d taken vacations since business school, of course, but most of them had revolved around other people’s weddings and bachelor parties and life milestones, and he hadn’t found them particularly relaxing.
This trip was relaxing, in a different way from runningon a treadmill until endorphins made his brain stop screaming. He felt quiet and whole after a day spent clearing trail with Darcy. Maybe it was Darcy. Maybe he just needed to spend time with someone whose demands on him were tangibly achievable. And maybe she was coming around on him. Maybe he was just too out of practice to realize it.
It had been a couple of years since he’d been in a relationship. If anything, he’d seemed to getworseat dating as he got older, and conversations that had moved easily when he was in his twenties had grown superficial and stilted. Women still asked him out from time to time—he didn’t think he was such a catch, but he was aware that just being single, gainfully employed, and interested in women his own age guaranteed a baseline level of marketability in Manhattan—but nothing had gotten serious for a long time.
Not that this could either, since he’d be gone in a couple of weeks, but it felt important anyway.
•••••
Teagan was full of optimism when they departed the wellness retreat for the first time in his three-week stay. “Jack and the Giant Tree Stalk,” Darcy said as she thrust a thirty-two ounce smoothie at Teagan’s chest and jerked the truck into reverse. “Jackfruit, kale, and lots of coconut cream.”
She’d made him drink worse things, so Teagan obediently put the straw in his mouth and settled into the passenger seat, as pleased to go on a morning car ride as a hunting dog who saw the game bag in the truck bed.
Nature! Scenery! A beautiful woman in the driver’s seat! Somehow, he’d thought his adult life would look a lot more like this, back when he was a teenager.
Darcy plugged her phone into the center console andfumbled with it, eyes mostly on the narrow unpaved road back to the highway. The phone connected, and a tinny artificial voice slowly and phonetically recited that the sea otter was a keystone species in Pacific Northwest kelp forests because it regulated the sea urchin population.
“Shit,” Darcy said, fumbling again with her phone and propping it on the steering wheel.
Teagan covertly put one hand on the bottom of the wheel as Darcy thumbed through her phone screen at forty-five miles an hour around a switchback.
“Can I help?” Teagan asked, glad that he couldn’t really manageterroras an emotion through the SSRIs.
“Finish your smoothie. I had to wake Kristin up to make it,” she said. She found what she wanted on her podcasts app and plugged her phone back into the truck.
The podcast that began to play was professionally produced, with slick background music. Darcy turned up the volume and settled back in her seat as they hit I-90.
“The first step,” the mellow-voiced narrator recited through the truck’s stereo, quoting the Twelve Steps. “ ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.’ ”
Teagan looked over at Darcy. She kept her eyes on the road this time, but she smiled with closed lips.
“So what does that mean to us?” the narrator asked. “The first step looks different to everyone I’ve ever met, because alcoholism looks different on every person.”
“Darcy,” Teagan said, abruptly full of foreboding for the rest of the car ride.
Darcy didn’t look back at him.
