180 Days
Rhea Darby began spending most of her time at Danny Beckett’s house. She got used to the post-work commute and was beginning to feel a little too at home in Pasadena.
Since taking a bath was her favorite activity and Danny had a bathtub the size of a kiddie pool, they began taking baths together regularly.
Rhea watched Danny leaning back on his side of the tub with his eyes closed.
Her love for him was so overwhelming, she wanted to hold his head under the water.
Her heart was wide open, but her throat was blocked.
She needed to talk to him but could not find the right moment.
She felt she had done everything she could to brighten the idea of parenting; now she needed to broach the subject and find out where his head was at, but every time she tried, her throat closed up.
The fear of losing him was too great. If he learned she still wanted to be a mom, would he end the relationship?
If she confessed to all of her manipulative tactics, would he be angry?
If she was going to come clean, she first wanted to mentally photograph every part of him; that way, if she lost him, she could go through all the photos in her mind forever.
She memorized the way his long eyelashes rested on his cheeks, his jugular vein gently pulsating on his neck, the water dripping off his earlobes.
“You’re so beautiful,” she said softly.
He smiled. “Right back atcha.”
“…The first thing I noticed about you was your eyes…. The way they crinkle when you smile, I love it so much,” she said.
“Well, it’s a good thing you make me smile a lot.”
She smiled at this.
He opened his eyes and studied her face. “The first thing I noticed about you was your nose—”
Rhea’s hand involuntarily flew out of the water and covered her nose. “What?”
“What? I love your nose. You don’t?”
“Why? What do you mean? No, it’s not that I don’t—I just—What? Why do you like it?” She sat upright and craned her neck to look in the mirror.
“Why wouldn’t I like it?”
“No reason,” she said quickly, trying to seem less stunned.
“When I was, like, eleven, we were in London,” Danny began, “and we went to a museum and I saw this marble bust of Helen of Troy. My mom told me she was considered the most beautiful woman in the world and I became, like, obsessed with this statue.” He laughed.
“Like a little weirdo, I made them buy me a book at the gift shop ’cause there was a photo of the statue in it.
Full disclosure…it was the first picture I masturbated to. ”
Rhea’s mouth was hanging open.
“Don’t judge me.”
“I’m not.” She closed her mouth.
“In my defense, this was in the good old days, before kids had easy access to porn. Anyway, when I first saw you, that’s who you reminded me of. You have her nose; you have her whole face.”
“Helen of Troy?” Rhea looked in the mirror again.
“Yeah, you look exactly like her.”
The moment she walked in her front door the next morning, she hungrily opened her laptop and searched for a Helen of Troy bust in the city of London.
She found a marble bust of Helen and stared at it for an exceedingly long time.
Rhea Darby and the face that supposedly launched a thousand ships to kick off the Trojan War could have been twins.
The bust was not of the real Helen; she was Helen as imagined thousands of years after her supposed existence by an Italian sculptor, but that did not change the fact that this sculptor believed wide, long noses were beautiful.
And it wasn’t as if the general population had revolted against the bust. They all seemed to agree with the artist’s rendering: This is an objectively beautiful face.
The large-nose trend was not in some far-off, imagined future; the trend had happened a mere two hundred years ago. Which meant, like all trends, it had to circle back eventually. She hoped she would not be dead by then.
An anxious thought gripped her: If she had surgically tweaked her nose, would Danny never have noticed her?
Was she born with her exact face so her soulmate could find her?
Was every human face a map that guided them toward the life they were meant to have?
Or were faces truly like houses, much easier to sell after an extensive remodel?
Rhea ripped the teenage nose off her vision board and threw it away. She printed the Helen bust, cut it out, and glued it where the teenage nose had been. She closed her eyes and tried to manifest a future Rhea Darby who believed she was beautiful exactly the way she was.
Which beauty trends to ignore and which to follow? This groundbreaking discovery made Rhea want to ignore all of them.