“I have a lot of conditions,” she says with a grin. She expects him to laugh, but he looks troubled. Underneath the covers, he untangles his hand from hers, sitting up.
“Listen, I’m really sorry about yesterday,” he says. “When my daughter called…I didn’t mean to be so weird.”
Greta sits up too. “It’s not like I don’t know you have a family.”
“I know. I think I just— It’s like I forgot about my real life for a second. And then Avery called, and everything came crashing back, and I felt so guilty.”
“For being away?”
“For being with you,” he says, rubbing his bleary eyes beneath his glasses. “This is all such new territory for me, and I feel like I’m having some sort of identity crisis. I know I’m always going to be this responsible suburban dad, and I love being that. I do. But I’m also supposed to be using this time to see if there are other ways to be happy, other ways to live, and then the minute I let myself off the hook long enough to actually flirt with someone, it felt like the universe was saying, Not so fast, Ben.”
Greta raises her eyebrows. “That was flirting?”
“I didn’t say I was good at it,” he says with a rueful smile.
“You seem way too practical to believe in karma.”
“Maybe it’s just the guilt then. But it’s frustrating, because there’s no reason I should feel guilty about this. We’re allowed to see other people. It was part of the deal. And meeting you…” He looks suddenly nervous. “Don’t read too much into this, because it’ll sound way more intense than it actually is…”
She rests her chin on her knees. “Okay.”
“It’s the best thing that’s happened to me in a while,” he says, looking at her in a way that makes her face feel warm.
She waits a second for the alarm to set in, dependable and familiar.
But to her surprise, it doesn’t.
“And not just because you’re so much cooler than me,” he continues, still serious. “Or because my seventeen-year-old self would be freaking out that I’m in bed with a rock star right now. Though he definitely would. It’s because you know exactly who you are. And you have no idea how refreshing that is.”
“It’s possible,” Greta says, “that you might be giving me a bit more credit than I deserve. I have no idea who I am. Especially right now. I’m a complete mess.”
“Everyone’s a mess,” Ben says with a shrug. “But you do it with style.”
She laughs. “Thanks. I think.”
“Listen, I’m very aware of how all this sounds,” he says, sitting forward. “So please don’t panic or anything. It’s not like I don’t know what this is.”
“I’m not panicking,” Greta says. “Do I look like I’m panicking?”
“No,” he says. “You look beautiful.”
She shakes her head, smiling in spite of herself. “Okay, that’s too much now. Take it down a notch, Wilder.”
He laughs and holds up both hands. “Sorry. My point is that I know this isn’t real life. So I don’t want you to think I’m getting carried away or anything.”
Greta glances out the window. At the foot of one of the mountains, there’s a small cabin, the first they’ve seen in miles, and it looks so lonely there—so stark and windswept and forlorn—that it gives her a chill. She slides out of bed, picking her way past the piles of their clothes—thrown off so hastily only a few hours before—and pulls the curtains shut again, erasing the stamp of light on the bed, returning the room to a dusky gray.
When she turns around, Ben is watching her with an unreadable expression. They gaze at each other across the small space for a moment, and then he lifts the corner of the blanket.
Real life, she thinks, the words pounding through her head as she burrows back under the covers. Her father believes her whole adulthood has been an exercise in avoiding it: dodging anything too permanent, running from whatever might ground her. But what she’s tried to do is the exact opposite: she’s tried to live a dream. And maybe it’s possible for those things to coexist; maybe you can bend your life into some combination of the two. Or maybe you can’t. Maybe you have to trade one for the other at some point along the way. Maybe it’s not that different from growing up.
“There’s this quote from Jack London,” Ben says, then pauses. “Well, some academics question whether the words can truly be sourced to him, because it actually came from—”