warnings: gross? 🤮
The day was gray and sloshy, that icy, sleety rain that might have been snow if it were only a couple degrees colder. Maria sat beside Jordan in his parked his truck on the sodden gravel driveway of the farm where they were sent to source some free range duck eggs that were supposed to be the best in the state. They waited silently for a full minute for the scene to change.
It didn’t change.
Maria’s brown curls were already frizzing up around her face in a puffy mess. And she wore brand new suede boots, too tight and stiff on her feet and she’d only been sitting in a truck so far. He said to wear boots, so she wore boots.
These were not the kind of boots he meant.
“Do you like coffee?” he asked her.
“Uh, sure. Why? Do you want to get a coffee?”
He chuckled. She felt stupid. He wasn’t inviting her out for a coffee, was he?
“If you want, I could drop you in town. You could hang out, kill some time, get the shopping done?”
“There’s a town here?”
“Ha, barely, but yeah. The hike will probably be long, and muddy.”
“We’re going to hike?” She was horrified. “I didn’t think it would be that far. Because, we’re driving a truck.”
“I mean, it’s a farm, everything is far,” he said. “We’ll bring the truck, but we’ll probably have to walk between the bird houses, then carrying crates back to load up. I can just run out and back. You won’t even know I’m gone.”
Doubtful, she thought. She always noticed when he was gone. And she wanted to stay with him for every moment that allowed it. “No, it’s fine. I’ll come along.”
Maria Boone didn’t dream of becoming a widow and single mother at such a young age, but she wasn’t asking anyone to feel sorry for her, either. Almost four years later and she should have been dating again by now. Twenty-six was far too young to write off romance for the rest of her life. But she couldn’t bring herself to bother when she’d already found the perfect man right here. Jordan was handsome, strong, friendly, generous. Too bad he wasn’t exactly single. He wasn’t married or engaged, either, or even exactly partnered. The situation with his boys’ mother was more complicated than Maria knew how to explain.
But she had come on this work errand because she jumped at the chance to spend hours upon hours in his company. What was a little walk in the snow? Actually, didn’t that sound charming?
“Hang on, I have an umbrella,” he said.
He came around the passenger side, opened her door gallantly, extended his hand for her to take and step down out of the truck, while he popped open his sons’ child-sized umbrella over her head, the top of which was emblazoned with a Spiderman web.
“Milady,” he said with a comical little bow, suppressing a laugh.
But she couldn’t suppress hers. She cracked up. “That’s very stylish. Classic. It even matches my outfit.”
She let go of his hand reluctantly, thanking the heavens that she even got to touch it. But, oh, her poor suede boots in all this slush. This little umbrella was never going to save her boots today.
“We could share,” she suggested.
And she saw that he thought about it. Oh, he did. Then shyly said, “No, that’s okay, it’s just a little snow.”
It was a lot of snow. Wet, heavy, icy snow, the beads of it melting and dripping down his face. At least his coat looked water resistant.
He looked her in the eyes, holding her gaze, so warm and gentle. So pure. So easy. Don’t do that, she wanted to say, It’s not fair.
“Sorry,” he said.
And she panicked for a moment, thinking he’d read her mind. “What are you sorry for?”
“You could be back at work in a warm cozy kitchen, if only I knew the difference between a duck egg and a chicken egg, or, hell, even a dinosaur egg.”
“I don’t mind,” she said, grinning, embarrassing herself. “You know, chicken and duck eggs aren’t so easy to tell apart. I don’t know if I could help you with the dinosaur egg, though.”
“Red does suit you, by the way,” he said, and her cheeks must have blushed the color of the very red umbrella.
He wasn’t flirting, she didn’t think. She didn’t know. He was just a friendly guy, offering a friendly playful compliment. He was probably just being silly. Overwhelmed, she looked down to the slush at their feet. “Come on, let’s go see about these eggs.”
Being out here with him and being paid for it on a work errand was sure to be the best day of her life. And hey, it was even her birthday, not that anyone knew it. She couldn’t imagine a better birthday present.
So they began to walk, heading for the small covered porch to go score the best duck eggs in the state to make brunch crème brûlée for the kind of people who cared about the best duck eggs in their crème brûlée.
Someone answered the door and they set off for the barns, taking the truck a quarter mile down a gravel path to the bird houses. Walking from barn to barn, they didn’t ask her to carry anything, but she trotted along behind them like the actual ducks did.
“Are you warm enough?”
If I said no, would you warm me up? No, she didn’t say that out loud. “I’m fine,” she said.
He looked around the freshly falling snow, the hills, the sharp breeze. “I kind of love it out here.”
“It’s very… fresh,” she said.
“I kind of always wanted some land like this,” he said. “You know, raise some chickens, maybe a couple of cows. Live off-grid. The boys would love it.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Colette hates animals,” he said. “She hates the countryside, too. She especially hates being off-grid.”
“Wow. That probably kills the dream a little.”
He chuckled softly. “But who knows? She’s probably right. Maybe I’d get bored and change my mind.”
He and the farmer were talking farm stuff. Tractor stuff. Travel stuff. It wasn’t a conversation Maria felt included in, but she didn’t want to hurry them along, either. It wasn’t their fault she wore stupid boots. It wasn’t their fault she didn’t ask Jordan to stop on the highway when they passed a rest area and he asked, “Need to pee?” And she said, “Nope!” because she was mortified for him to know that her body had normal human functions like peeing.
Now she really needed to pee. They had driven away from the farm house, now out into the pastures and bird coops. She could hardly bring herself to ask, “Is there a bathroom out here?”
“Outhouse around the back, sweetheart,” the farmer said.
She looked at Jordan, in a whisper, “What’s an outhouse?”
Jordan bit his lip, trying not to laugh, then pointed through the window, toward the field, to what looked like a metal shed. “There’s really nothing else over there. You can’t miss it.”
She glanced in that direction. She saw the metal shed in a field of mushy gray snow, finally starting to stick. Now they’re talking about fishing, now basketball, now dogs… She stood there turning and thinking about it for so long, Jordan asked, in a polite whisper, “Do you want me to walk you over?”
“No, totally no.” Yes, she thought, actually, but she was too embarrassed to say so. Screw it. How bad could it be? So she started for the outhouse.
So today was the day Maria would discover what an outhouse was, and she’d truly never encountered a more revolting thing in her life. It was a hole in the ground with poop in it. But she willed herself to use it anyway only because peeing her pants would have been slightly more traumatizing. Now she felt filthy, in addition to tired, starving, and her feet were sore. Maybe she was too much of a princess for this country life, and she should have stayed in town after all. She could have finished the shopping by now and been warm and dry, sitting beside a crackling faux fireplace, enjoying a frothy vanilla latte.
She shimmied her jeans down, taking care that no cloth or skin touched anything, a fire burning in her thighs—quadriceps, were they? She didn’t know because she rarely exercised. Then, as she stood from her precarious crouch, carefully pulling her pants so not to touch the seat, her phone fell from her tiny useless women’s jeans pockets.
It fell in.
Yes, that actually happened.
And it didn’t even submerge, but instead rested on top of a blue chemical pile of excrement and blue tissue paper, nearly solid in the freezing temperatures. She was horrified. In equal parts, she needed that phone—her contacts, Johanna’s baby photos (were they backed up in a cloud somewhere? had she turned that setting off?), her game progress on Candy Crush, and the years-long text thread with wonderful Jordan filled with subtle flirts and joy. That phone. Her entire life was on there. And it was swimming in the poop water.
But as precious as that device was to her, the thought of that horrible liquid cocktail seeping into the phones speakers and charging port, it would never be clean if you blasted it with a nuclear bomb. The phone was lost to the world now.
She was so mortified, she wouldn’t dare tell a soul. But she was also so mortified, she just wanted to go home and cry. She returned to the barn, their conversation still on dogs. She must have looked like she regretted everything about this day.
In solidarity, all of Jordan’s playful grins and suppressed laughs ended, his face turning grave and worried.
We were not having fun anymore. Fun was dead.
“Hang on a sec,” he said to the farmer, and took Maria aside.
“I have an idea,” he said. “Wait here.”
In less than twenty seconds, he dashed over to the truck and started it up, coming back to her with a wadded fleece blanket in his hands.
“Sorry, we’ll just be another few minutes,” he said to her. “All we have to do now is load up the truck. The heat’s on. You can listen to the radio if you want.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling both completely useless, but also completely ready to surrender. But what sealed the deal was this fleece blanket, which bore the Cheetos crumbs of his nine-year-old boys, but it was a damp thirty-something degrees outside, and he wouldn’t have to twist her arm very hard to take it. If he was trying to keep her from falling in love with him, he was doing a very bad job.
The truck was warm and cozy. Climbing inside, taking the weight off her feet, her frozen toes tingled as they thawed. She could have cried out in relief. The temperature had finally dropped that couple of extra degrees, turning the sleet to fluffy snowflakes. They collected on the windshield, piled up, and obscured the view of almost anything outside. She didn’t tinker with the radio. She rested her head on the window and she must have closed her eyes and slipped off enough to dream lightly.
Jordan was in her dream, here in this cold, dreary countryside, needing to traverse a muddy pond, and he swept her up into his arms and carried her through the water. Then, because dreams are random, the pond transformed into a warm Mediterranean beach and he laid her down on the hot sand and made passionate love to her beside the crashing waves.
Wake up, sleeping beauty.
What? Was that real? Did he really say that? Or was it part of her dream?
She sat and rubbed her eyes. Jordan’s face behind the glass of the passenger window. He walked around the drivers side. “Maria,” he said, definitely real this time and in a slightly song-like voice. “We’re all done. Let’s head out.”
He finished the deal without her. He got the right eggs. She felt completely useless, but he didn’t say so.
“I’m literally starving to death,” he said. “You hungry?”
After the phone incident, honestly, she was not. “We can eat if you want.”
“I called Sharon already. I told her we’d be back late with the delivery.
Do you need to call your sister about Johanna?”
Horrified at the memory of her lost phone. “Can I borrow your phone?”
“You didn’t bring your phone?”
“I guess I must have left it back at the hotel.”
With the eggs safely bundled in the truck bed and the children at home all checked on, Jordan drove them into town so they could grab a quick bite to eat before they got back on the road. There was only one place in town, a Cracker Barrel. But after a long day in the cold mud, it was more than fine. Jordan ordered a warm bowl of chili and a sandwich. With her appetite destroyed, Maria chose a salad. But then after his food was delivered, she wished she’d ordered something of more substance.
“How is your dinner?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said.
“You look a little disappointed.”
“Oh, do I? Well, maybe I was looking at the cake, but then I thought that was silly. Don’t you always regret not ordering the thing you really wanted? It would have been silly to have cake for dinner, but it would have been a nice treat. It’s not like Johanna can bake something for my birthday.”
“It’s your birthday? Happy birthday! Damn, you should have told me, I could have taken you somewhere nicer than Cracker Barrel.”
She smiled kindly, nodding out the window at the one-highway town with farm fields on either side. “There’s nowhere nicer in this town.”
“So, why didn’t you take your birthday off?”
“Single mom,” she said. “I can’t afford many days off.”
That wasn’t entirely true. Her husband’s death benefit left her sitting comfortably. Truth be told, she loved coming in to work when Jordan was on the schedule.
She’d had a crush on Jordan for the longest time. She thought it would pass, but it hadn’t. And what do you call a crush after years but a deep, impossible, tragic love?
But Maria was hardly married for a minute before her own husband perished. What did she even know about love? She knew she didn’t aspire to be a home-wrecker. Even if Jordan wasn’t married, he and his partner had twins and a decade of history together. Ten years was a longer relationship than Maria ever had. But, after so long, Maria couldn’t help but wonder which one of them didn’t want to get married.
“So, probably not your best birthday ever?”
“It wasn’t quite what I imagined at the start,” Maria said. “I don’t think I’m a country girl.”
“But aren’t you glad you tried? Wouldn’t you rather live a life where you tried things, instead of one where you sit around wondering if it ever could have worked out?”
Some profound thought flashed across his face for a split second, perhaps he’d humbled himself by his own sage advice. It made her wonder what thing he dared to try in his own life. Kissing her, she could only hope, but she’d done enough wishful thinking for one day to get her hopes up anymore.
And just when she’d decided not to hope, he didn’t ask, but sliced off half of his toasty sandwich, warm with melty cheese and steaming roast beef, and he slid it in front of her.
“Happy birthday,” he said. “I know it’s not cake, but better than salad?”
“Thanks,” she said. I love you, she didn’t say. “Actually, maybe I’m hungrier than I thought.”
The day was gray and sloshy, that icy, sleety rain that might have been snow if it were only a couple degrees colder. Maria sat beside Jordan in his parked his truck on the sodden gravel driveway of the farm where they were sent to source some free range duck eggs that were supposed to be the best in the state. They waited silently for a full minute for the scene to change.
It didn’t change.
Maria’s brown curls were already frizzing up around her face in a puffy mess. And she wore brand new suede boots, too tight and stiff on her feet and she’d only been sitting in a truck so far. He said to wear boots, so she wore boots.
These were not the kind of boots he meant.
“Do you like coffee?” he asked her.
“Uh, sure. Why? Do you want to get a coffee?”
He chuckled. She felt stupid. He wasn’t inviting her out for a coffee, was he?
“If you want, I could drop you in town. You could hang out, kill some time, get the shopping done?”
“There’s a town here?”
“Ha, barely, but yeah. The hike will probably be long, and muddy.”
“We’re going to hike?” She was horrified. “I didn’t think it would be that far. Because, we’re driving a truck.”
“I mean, it’s a farm, everything is far,” he said. “We’ll bring the truck, but we’ll probably have to walk between the bird houses, then carrying crates back to load up. I can just run out and back. You won’t even know I’m gone.”
Doubtful, she thought. She always noticed when he was gone. And she wanted to stay with him for every moment that allowed it. “No, it’s fine. I’ll come along.”
Maria Boone didn’t dream of becoming a widow and single mother at such a young age, but she wasn’t asking anyone to feel sorry for her, either. Almost four years later and she should have been dating again by now. Twenty-six was far too young to write off romance for the rest of her life. But she couldn’t bring herself to bother when she’d already found the perfect man right here. Jordan was handsome, strong, friendly, generous. Too bad he wasn’t exactly single. He wasn’t married or engaged, either, or even exactly partnered. The situation with his boys’ mother was more complicated than Maria knew how to explain.
But she had come on this work errand because she jumped at the chance to spend hours upon hours in his company. What was a little walk in the snow? Actually, didn’t that sound charming?
“Hang on, I have an umbrella,” he said.
He came around the passenger side, opened her door gallantly, extended his hand for her to take and step down out of the truck, while he popped open his sons’ child-sized umbrella over her head, the top of which was emblazoned with a Spiderman web.
“Milady,” he said with a comical little bow, suppressing a laugh.
But she couldn’t suppress hers. She cracked up. “That’s very stylish. Classic. It even matches my outfit.”
She let go of his hand reluctantly, thanking the heavens that she even got to touch it. But, oh, her poor suede boots in all this slush. This little umbrella was never going to save her boots today.
“We could share,” she suggested.
And she saw that he thought about it. Oh, he did. Then shyly said, “No, that’s okay, it’s just a little snow.”
It was a lot of snow. Wet, heavy, icy snow, the beads of it melting and dripping down his face. At least his coat looked water resistant.
He looked her in the eyes, holding her gaze, so warm and gentle. So pure. So easy. Don’t do that, she wanted to say, It’s not fair.
“Sorry,” he said.
And she panicked for a moment, thinking he’d read her mind. “What are you sorry for?”
“You could be back at work in a warm cozy kitchen, if only I knew the difference between a duck egg and a chicken egg, or, hell, even a dinosaur egg.”
“I don’t mind,” she said, grinning, embarrassing herself. “You know, chicken and duck eggs aren’t so easy to tell apart. I don’t know if I could help you with the dinosaur egg, though.”
“Red does suit you, by the way,” he said, and her cheeks must have blushed the color of the very red umbrella.
He wasn’t flirting, she didn’t think. She didn’t know. He was just a friendly guy, offering a friendly playful compliment. He was probably just being silly. Overwhelmed, she looked down to the slush at their feet. “Come on, let’s go see about these eggs.”
Being out here with him and being paid for it on a work errand was sure to be the best day of her life. And hey, it was even her birthday, not that anyone knew it. She couldn’t imagine a better birthday present.
So they began to walk, heading for the small covered porch to go score the best duck eggs in the state to make brunch crème brûlée for the kind of people who cared about the best duck eggs in their crème brûlée.
Someone answered the door and they set off for the barns, taking the truck a quarter mile down a gravel path to the bird houses. Walking from barn to barn, they didn’t ask her to carry anything, but she trotted along behind them like the actual ducks did.
“Are you warm enough?”
If I said no, would you warm me up? No, she didn’t say that out loud. “I’m fine,” she said.
He looked around the freshly falling snow, the hills, the sharp breeze. “I kind of love it out here.”
“It’s very… fresh,” she said.
“I kind of always wanted some land like this,” he said. “You know, raise some chickens, maybe a couple of cows. Live off-grid. The boys would love it.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Colette hates animals,” he said. “She hates the countryside, too. She especially hates being off-grid.”
“Wow. That probably kills the dream a little.”
He chuckled softly. “But who knows? She’s probably right. Maybe I’d get bored and change my mind.”
He and the farmer were talking farm stuff. Tractor stuff. Travel stuff. It wasn’t a conversation Maria felt included in, but she didn’t want to hurry them along, either. It wasn’t their fault she wore stupid boots. It wasn’t their fault she didn’t ask Jordan to stop on the highway when they passed a rest area and he asked, “Need to pee?” And she said, “Nope!” because she was mortified for him to know that her body had normal human functions like peeing.
Now she really needed to pee. They had driven away from the farm house, now out into the pastures and bird coops. She could hardly bring herself to ask, “Is there a bathroom out here?”
“Outhouse around the back, sweetheart,” the farmer said.
She looked at Jordan, in a whisper, “What’s an outhouse?”
Jordan bit his lip, trying not to laugh, then pointed through the window, toward the field, to what looked like a metal shed. “There’s really nothing else over there. You can’t miss it.”
She glanced in that direction. She saw the metal shed in a field of mushy gray snow, finally starting to stick. Now they’re talking about fishing, now basketball, now dogs… She stood there turning and thinking about it for so long, Jordan asked, in a polite whisper, “Do you want me to walk you over?”
“No, totally no.” Yes, she thought, actually, but she was too embarrassed to say so. Screw it. How bad could it be? So she started for the outhouse.
So today was the day Maria would discover what an outhouse was, and she’d truly never encountered a more revolting thing in her life. It was a hole in the ground with poop in it. But she willed herself to use it anyway only because peeing her pants would have been slightly more traumatizing. Now she felt filthy, in addition to tired, starving, and her feet were sore. Maybe she was too much of a princess for this country life, and she should have stayed in town after all. She could have finished the shopping by now and been warm and dry, sitting beside a crackling faux fireplace, enjoying a frothy vanilla latte.
She shimmied her jeans down, taking care that no cloth or skin touched anything, a fire burning in her thighs—quadriceps, were they? She didn’t know because she rarely exercised. Then, as she stood from her precarious crouch, carefully pulling her pants so not to touch the seat, her phone fell from her tiny useless women’s jeans pockets.
It fell in.
Yes, that actually happened.
And it didn’t even submerge, but instead rested on top of a blue chemical pile of excrement and blue tissue paper, nearly solid in the freezing temperatures. She was horrified. In equal parts, she needed that phone—her contacts, Johanna’s baby photos (were they backed up in a cloud somewhere? had she turned that setting off?), her game progress on Candy Crush, and the years-long text thread with wonderful Jordan filled with subtle flirts and joy. That phone. Her entire life was on there. And it was swimming in the poop water.
But as precious as that device was to her, the thought of that horrible liquid cocktail seeping into the phones speakers and charging port, it would never be clean if you blasted it with a nuclear bomb. The phone was lost to the world now.
She was so mortified, she wouldn’t dare tell a soul. But she was also so mortified, she just wanted to go home and cry. She returned to the barn, their conversation still on dogs. She must have looked like she regretted everything about this day.
In solidarity, all of Jordan’s playful grins and suppressed laughs ended, his face turning grave and worried.
We were not having fun anymore. Fun was dead.
“Hang on a sec,” he said to the farmer, and took Maria aside.
“I have an idea,” he said. “Wait here.”
In less than twenty seconds, he dashed over to the truck and started it up, coming back to her with a wadded fleece blanket in his hands.
“Sorry, we’ll just be another few minutes,” he said to her. “All we have to do now is load up the truck. The heat’s on. You can listen to the radio if you want.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling both completely useless, but also completely ready to surrender. But what sealed the deal was this fleece blanket, which bore the Cheetos crumbs of his nine-year-old boys, but it was a damp thirty-something degrees outside, and he wouldn’t have to twist her arm very hard to take it. If he was trying to keep her from falling in love with him, he was doing a very bad job.
The truck was warm and cozy. Climbing inside, taking the weight off her feet, her frozen toes tingled as they thawed. She could have cried out in relief. The temperature had finally dropped that couple of extra degrees, turning the sleet to fluffy snowflakes. They collected on the windshield, piled up, and obscured the view of almost anything outside. She didn’t tinker with the radio. She rested her head on the window and she must have closed her eyes and slipped off enough to dream lightly.
Jordan was in her dream, here in this cold, dreary countryside, needing to traverse a muddy pond, and he swept her up into his arms and carried her through the water. Then, because dreams are random, the pond transformed into a warm Mediterranean beach and he laid her down on the hot sand and made passionate love to her beside the crashing waves.
Wake up, sleeping beauty.
What? Was that real? Did he really say that? Or was it part of her dream?
She sat and rubbed her eyes. Jordan’s face behind the glass of the passenger window. He walked around the drivers side. “Maria,” he said, definitely real this time and in a slightly song-like voice. “We’re all done. Let’s head out.”
He finished the deal without her. He got the right eggs. She felt completely useless, but he didn’t say so.
“I’m literally starving to death,” he said. “You hungry?”
After the phone incident, honestly, she was not. “We can eat if you want.”
“I called Sharon already. I told her we’d be back late with the delivery.
Do you need to call your sister about Johanna?”
Horrified at the memory of her lost phone. “Can I borrow your phone?”
“You didn’t bring your phone?”
“I guess I must have left it back at the hotel.”
———
With the eggs safely bundled in the truck bed and the children at home all checked on, Jordan drove them into town so they could grab a quick bite to eat before they got back on the road. There was only one place in town, a Cracker Barrel. But after a long day in the cold mud, it was more than fine. Jordan ordered a warm bowl of chili and a sandwich. With her appetite destroyed, Maria chose a salad. But then after his food was delivered, she wished she’d ordered something of more substance.
“How is your dinner?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said.
“You look a little disappointed.”
“Oh, do I? Well, maybe I was looking at the cake, but then I thought that was silly. Don’t you always regret not ordering the thing you really wanted? It would have been silly to have cake for dinner, but it would have been a nice treat. It’s not like Johanna can bake something for my birthday.”
“It’s your birthday? Happy birthday! Damn, you should have told me, I could have taken you somewhere nicer than Cracker Barrel.”
She smiled kindly, nodding out the window at the one-highway town with farm fields on either side. “There’s nowhere nicer in this town.”
“So, why didn’t you take your birthday off?”
“Single mom,” she said. “I can’t afford many days off.”
That wasn’t entirely true. Her husband’s death benefit left her sitting comfortably. Truth be told, she loved coming in to work when Jordan was on the schedule.
She’d had a crush on Jordan for the longest time. She thought it would pass, but it hadn’t. And what do you call a crush after years but a deep, impossible, tragic love?
But Maria was hardly married for a minute before her own husband perished. What did she even know about love? She knew she didn’t aspire to be a home-wrecker. Even if Jordan wasn’t married, he and his partner had twins and a decade of history together. Ten years was a longer relationship than Maria ever had. But, after so long, Maria couldn’t help but wonder which one of them didn’t want to get married.
“So, probably not your best birthday ever?”
“It wasn’t quite what I imagined at the start,” Maria said. “I don’t think I’m a country girl.”
“But aren’t you glad you tried? Wouldn’t you rather live a life where you tried things, instead of one where you sit around wondering if it ever could have worked out?”
Some profound thought flashed across his face for a split second, perhaps he’d humbled himself by his own sage advice. It made her wonder what thing he dared to try in his own life. Kissing her, she could only hope, but she’d done enough wishful thinking for one day to get her hopes up anymore.
And just when she’d decided not to hope, he didn’t ask, but sliced off half of his toasty sandwich, warm with melty cheese and steaming roast beef, and he slid it in front of her.
“Happy birthday,” he said. “I know it’s not cake, but better than salad?”
“Thanks,” she said. I love you, she didn’t say. “Actually, maybe I’m hungrier than I thought.”
———
a quick note about time, in just this first chapter (parts 1 & 2), it all takes place in one day. Specifically January 25th, 2088, which is Maria’s 26th birthday. 🎂
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