He flips over to crawl on all fours off the path around the lake and up into someone’s yard.
Dammit.
Celebrities and professional athletes, Tavi. You date celebrities and professional athletes. Not small-town plumbers.
My soul really could use some work, couldn’t it?
“Where are you going?” I whisper as I watch Dylan crawl up the short hill. There’s a house basically right above us onshore. I can only see its outline in the dim morning light, but I know the house.
It’s this adorable redbrick bungalow with a wraparound porch that makes me think of Hallmark Channel Christmas movies every time I jog past it. If I ever build a real house in Costa Rica, I want it to look like that house.
That house says,Come in and have a cookie. It says,We’ll make you feel at home.
I am such a sucker forhome.
I think that’s half of why I love Naomi so much. She feels like the kind of home the Hallmark Channel says everyone can have.
“Hungry,” Dylan says, his voice a little more slurred now. “Can’t walk. Need tomatoes.”
Tomatoes.
While I, the supposed sugar-free vegan, would give my left arm for a sausage-and-egg sandwich when mornings dare invade the world too few hours after two measly shots of vodka, Dylan drinks a whole bottle of whiskey and then wantstomatoes.
“You can’t invade someone’s garden for hangover tomatoes.” The things I’ve said since moving here.
“Mytomatoes.” He disappears in the darkness, and I pull up my phone’s flashlight to follow him once again.
The man’s on all fours, making his way down a row of tomato plants,sniffingat them.
“Just because you want them doesn’t make them yours.”
He grunts, plucks a ripe tomato off the vine, plops on his back in the dirt, and takes a bite like it’s an apple.“Mmmm.”
Seeds dribble out the side of his mouth.
I’ve seen some weird things in my life, but I’ve never seen a man crave tomatoes for his hair of the dog.
Actually—
Those tomatoes look really good.
Yes, yes, I’m a fake vegan. But that doesn’t mean I fake that I like vegetables. They’re just notallthat I like. “It’s a good thing you all know each other around here.” I sit down next to him—who would I be if I left the man to fend for himself in this state?—and I pluck a tomato off a vine too.
“My tomatoes,” he repeats.
I bite into the plump flesh, and the possession in his voice registers as the tangy, sweet flavor of the world’s most perfect tomato hits my tongue. “Oh my God, this is good,” I say.
“Course it is,” he scoffs. “I don’t grow shit.”
It takes a minute for me to catch on that he doesn’t mean he didn’t grow this.
He means he wouldn’t grow crappy stuff. “You grew these?”
“My tomatoes.”
“This is—this is your house?”
He grunts again.
