“Of course not,” I stammered.
He clucked his tongue. “Shame.”
I cleared my throat, effectively breaking the spell. “What is all this anyway?”
He held his arms out wide. “Sustainability. Sustenance. Survival when the aliens attack.”
“That’swhat you’re concerned about when the aliens attack? Cucumbers?”
“Duh. I gotta earn the aliens’ favor somehow.” My eyes widened when he held up the biggest cucumber I had ever seen, large enough to stick out of either end of Jared’s massive mitts. “Besides, have you seen the size of my cucumbers?”
“Okay, so you know your way around a cucumber. What about the rest of it?”
“Tomatoes, squash, kale, loofah—”
“Like a shower loofah?”
He nodded while pointing toward some large green pods hanging over a vine-covered trellis. If his cucumbers were big, then his loofahs were enormous.
“Those just need to dry before I peel them. After that, scrub a dub dub, angel.”
I loved that he knew that. I loved that he had hobbies and passions and community, unlike a lot of people—especially men—I had previously dated.
One person could not and should not be your everything.
There was no one magical vagina or penis out there to cure all your ills. It was a tired and, frankly, dangerously misleading trope in romance novels that I absolutely despised. At the end of the day, I was just a girl, standing in front of a boy—or girl or nonbinary babe—asking them to sit with me in comfortable silence. Preferably while eating chips.
“Sorry,” he said. “I know we said three o’clock, but I left my phone inside and sort of lost track of time.”
“That’s okay.” I tilted my head toward his abandoned carrots. “Do you want some help?”
“Are you sure? You might get . . .”
He trailed off, gesturing toward his clothing caked with dirt and sweat.
“I’m not afraid of a little dirt, Jarey-boy.” His eyes glittered with interest when I kicked off my sandals and threw my hair up into a ponytail. “Now, tell me about your eggplant.”
Time ceased to exist after that. We might have been out there for thirty minutes or maybe three hours. I let him show me everything there was to know about cultivating a home garden; he allowed me to switch up the music selection—because I was one of those grinches who refused to listen to holiday music before Thanksgiving.
It was . . . perfect.
That was, until it started to rain.
And not the demure or cutesy kind of rain. No, this was a torrential downpour, like something straight out of a romance movie. Only, there was nothing romantic about tripping over a fallen branch and eating shit—er, mud.
My sandals went flying out of my hands when I fell.
“Fuck, Nessa.” Jared raced over to offer a hand up. “Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself?”
I climbed to my feet and brushed away the mud clinging to my jeans. It would take a lot more than a muddy fall to keep me down. Genetics had blessed me with extra cushioning for a reason.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told him, smiling through the pain. My ass was going to be bruised tomorrow, but it was a small price to pay for a beautiful afternoon. “Oregon’s going to Oregon.”
I rubbed my hands against my thighs. The rain-soaked denim did next to nothing for my dirty palms. It did even less for my thighs that had nearly rubbed themselves raw during the short jog from the garden.
The one time I forget my anti-chafing stick.
“Jesus, it’s really coming down now,” Jared griped.
