299 Days
Louisca made Rhea try on every outfit in the store.
It was a particularly slow Saturday, so they were grateful for the assignment.
Each time she stepped out of the dressing room in a new ensemble, Louisca would ask her a question about Danny Beckett.
He was trying to get inside Danny’s psyche to discover exactly which combination of garments would spur him to fall madly in love.
Louisca’s task was made difficult by Rhea’s limited knowledge of her new suitor.
When Rhea stepped out in a pair of Agolde leather pants, Louisca asked, “Is he vegan?”
“I don’t know,” Rhea admitted.
“Better be safe and not do leather.”
“But you’re vegan and you’re always draped in leather.”
“Yes, but I am an enigma and most vegans are not.”
He motioned for her to go change.
“Is he a…bougie bohemian, like you?” he asked.
“I’m a bougie bohemian?” Rhea poked her head out of the dressing room.
“Well, you know, like, you opened a designer clothing store but…you wear feather earrings.”
“I have one pair of feather earrings and I barely wear them.”
“You own three dream catchers….”
“Point taken.”
Danny was picking Rhea up in exactly six hours for their first date.
She loved saying the phrase “first date” since it signified there were more to come.
Since it was the beginning of spring, Louisca eventually convinced Rhea to wear a floral Isabel Marant minidress, and since, according to Vogue, metallic footwear was among spring’s “most wanted shoes,” she wore silver Martiniano heels on her feet.
She spun around in front of the trifold dressing mirror a few times, trying to be kind to her reflection.
If she had come of age during a more mentally healthy era that embraced human bodies as they naturally are, she might have loved her physique.
Alas, she was a young girl developing a sense of self during the heroin-chic nineties and the fatphobic aughts.
So her gorgeous, healthy body did not stand a chance under her cruel gaze.
Rhea was a bit below average height. She had full breasts, which she knew society was cool with.
She also had a full waist, which she feared society was not cool with, and full hips, which she had witnessed society waver back and forth on for the past few decades.
Since Rhea’s breasts, waist, and hips were almost in complete alignment, instead of an hourglass figure, she thought she had more of a water glass figure.
“You’re a rectangle!” a sadistic body shape calculator excitedly announced after she input her measurements into its evil algorithm. She promptly deleted the app, but the word “rectangle!” replayed whenever she examined herself in the mirror.
She was once clickbaited into reading an article about some university conducting an actual study to answer the immensely vital question “What is the ideal female shape?” Thankfully, she stopped reading before they presented their findings.
She was sure to draw no benefits from learning the results of their quest and felt fairly confident “rectangle!” was neither the hypothesis nor the conclusion.
Rhea also had what she considered gangly appendages.
In some outfits, she felt like a block of cheese with toothpicks sticking out of it.
But the Isabel Marant minidress had a way of highlighting her supposedly attractive assets and minimizing the assets she was expected to feel bad about, which combated her fashion-industry brainwashing.
Even at cost, the outfit was ludicrously expensive, but that’s what credit cards were for, and the disturbingly fleeting, false confidence new designer clothes gave her was worth it.
It also helped that Louisca was showering her with encouraging compliments. She recognized some of them as his go-to phrases for convincing customers to buy whatever it was they were wearing, but she pushed that fact out of her mind.
“He is going to get on his knees and thank the baby Jesus when he sees you in this,” Louisca said, which was exactly what he’d said to a customer last week who was trying on a very different dress for her anniversary.
Despite that being a recycled compliment and despite all the lies Rhea had swallowed throughout her life about beauty, somewhere in the unfathomable abyss of her mind, a small part of her smiled because she knew Louisca was right.
—
Rhea was contorting her shoulders to zip up the back of her minidress when she heard a knock at the door.
The sound was startling for two reasons: First, it meant Danny Beckett was on time, which was unheard of in Los Angeles.
Second, it meant he had walked up all fifty-two steps instead of waiting in his car and texting I’m outside, which is what every other man had done in the three years since she’d bought the inconveniently placed cottage.
She crammed her feet into the silver heels and opened the door. She watched a plethora of emotions wash over Danny’s face. She tried to read each one but was unable to decipher what he was going through.
“Oh…my God, uh, you look…amazing,” he stammered.
Rhea was intuitive enough to sense the word but before it left his lips.
“But I’m so sorry, I should’ve told you, we’re gonna be outside tonight.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Rhea said, feeling relieved, “I’ll be fine.”
She moved toward the door, but he continued, “I don’t think you will be fine. It’s probably gonna be pretty cold…and windy.”
Windy? Where was he taking her? Chicago? Regardless, Rhea was determined to wear her tiny outfit even if it resulted in frostbite.
“I’m used to the cold…and the wind,” she said, moving toward the door.
“I feel like, since we don’t know each other that well, this is an opportunity for me to either earn or lose your trust…and I promise you’ll be angry with me if you don’t wear something warmer.”
Rhea was paralyzed. She felt more attractive than she had in months. She absolutely had to wear this dress on this date, but since it was an objective fact that there was almost no barrier between her skin and the outside elements, she didn’t know how to argue.
“And the shoes are also gonna be a problem,” he added gently, “ ’cause the ground…is soft.”
Soft? Rhea could not even imagine where she was about to spend her evening.
“Like, you should probably wear those”—he pointed to her sheepskin Prada boots kicked into the corner—“and that.” He pointed to her plaid wool blanket coat hanging on a nearby hook.
He wanted her to put on the two most comfortable, least flattering items she owned.
She looked at her beloved cozy-mornings-on-the-deck outfit with horror.
Her feet were crunched into silver torture devices, toes longing to be stretched out, heels aching to be firmly on the ground; they screamed up at her, Listen to the man!
Put on the flat boots! But she could not wear a wide, comfortable shoe in front of a cute guy she barely knew.
“Please? Trust me,” he said.
—
As Danny drove his electric Ford pickup truck through the canyon, with Rhea wrapped in her wool coat on the passenger seat next to him, he could not help but feel like he had just committed some sort of crime.
He thought of his father gruffly telling his mother what to do and prayed he had not come across anything like that man.
He would have felt guilty letting Rhea be cold, but he also felt guilty suggesting what she should wear.
He didn’t know if his intense desire to take care of women was something he was born with or some kind of psychological defect that developed throughout his life, but being a man in the modern twenties, it was a trait he constantly grappled with.
Women were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, he knew that, so why did he have such a burning desire to take care of them?
He judged himself, hoping it was not some buried need to infantilize them he’d inherited from his controlling father.
Holding open the door for a woman or making sure she got to her car safely felt like a misdemeanor.
Accidentally ordering for her at a restaurant or telling her to wear a coat felt like a felony.
To add to the list of offenses he had already committed that evening, asking Rhea to cover up her body definitely should have been illegal.
Her curves were ripped from the pages of his fantasies: round and inviting hips, generous cleavage bursting out of that ridiculously small dress, and he asked her to cover it all up?
He was reminded of a moment in adolescence, in the cafeteria, when Molly Brenna was taking off her sweatshirt.
Her T-shirt clung to her sweatshirt, so when she pulled the outer layer up, the inner layer came with it.
The entire population of Long Beach Middle School held their breath and stared at Molly’s filled-out bra, some with envy and others with lust. Molly had developed early and was often the subject of conversation in both the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms.
Without thinking, Danny jumped out of his seat and told Molly to put her arms down.
He spared her further humiliation but invoked the wrath of many of his fellow students who had been enjoying the view.
Growing up with three sisters made him sensitive to the hardships of being a girl.
He had not wanted Molly Brenna to be humiliated, and he did not want Rhea Darby to be cold, which meant he had to step into the shoes of a hardened criminal, tell a woman what to do, and sacrifice a stunning view.
But it was not just her body; everything about Rhea intrigued him.
She was funny and odd—his favorite combination.
He could not predict her next move, which put him off balance in a way that made him feel alive.
After the baby shower, he wanted to reach out to Tiny and get Rhea’s number, but when they parted ways, he couldn’t tell if she was just using the group photo as an excuse to end their conversation.