Page 57 of Counting the Days

“You’re mine,” he whispered.

His kiss was fervent. He tasted of patience, of yearning, of all the desire that had passed between them. He broke the kiss, trailing a path of heat over her jaw, down her throat…. He shifted, aligning their bodies as his rhythm quickened. His earlier gentleness giving way to a driving intensity, each thrust seemed to powerfully release his months of restraint. She felt her body falling through the mattress as the exquisite friction compelled her to let everything go.

“Fuck…Rhea,” he whispered.

The tension inside her built until she felt she could not bear it; she called his name again as her tension mercifully released, and every muscle in her body melted. He kept moving, and her tension built and released over and over until finally, he joined her. He made a noise that she felt deep in her abdomen, a noise that made the ground move.

It took her a moment to realize the ground was actually moving…as well as the walls and the ceiling.

“Earthquake…?” Danny’s lips brushed her ear.

Two framed pictures fell off the wall, and the loud crash made them jump as the bed rattled like an old roller coaster. Danny wrapped his arms around Rhea’s head and covered her body with his own. An even louder crash outside her bedroom door made her yelp.

“Jesus…,” Danny said.

Rhea hoped this was not a bad omen. Were her three unborn children furious with her? Was the goddess of earthquakes punishing her for picking the wrong path? She tried not to think about the precarious placement of her cottage and the ancient foundation their lives were dependent on.

She heard another, even louder crash, and adrenaline shot through her body. She clung to Danny, gripped with a horror of something happening to him. She pictured all her beloveddesigner clothes unrecognizable in a pile of rubble and all of her furniture smashed at the bottom of the canyon. Then she considered the possibility that she might also be smashed at the bottom of the canyon. Apparently, she came in fourth on her list of concerns after Danny, clothing, and furniture.

Grief constricted her lungs. The thought of dying without children felt suffocatingly final; there would not be one single piece of Rhea Darby left on earth. No one would pick up her ashes from the crematorium, so an employee would have to throw them in a dumpster on their cigarette break. She would end up in a garbage bag, in a landfill, not able to decompose for thousands of years.

Or maybe Tiny would pay to have her body buried in a cemetery. Her epitaph would read:Here Lies Rhea Darby. Neither a Beloved Wife, nor Mother, nor Sister, nor Daughter. Why were epitaphs so dependent on one’s relationships? Rhea had no relationships…other than friends, and epitaphs rarely mentioned those.

A tear fell from her eye. Danny noticed and kissed it off her cheek—a reminder that Danny was on top of her, human-shielding her from falling frames, a reminder she was precious to him, and her epitaph might read:Here Lies the Edible Gardener’s Girlfriend, or at least:Here Lies the Woman the Edible Gardener Dated for a Few Months, and that thought cheered her up significantly.

“I love you too,” she whispered, and he held her tighter.

After several aftershocks, the near-death experience was over. They stayed still for a couple of minutes while their hearts stopped hammering. They sat up in bed and looked around; glass littered the floor, but other than that, her room looked okay. Rhea reached under her bed for the pair of emergency earthquake sneakers she kept tied to the bedpost.

“Wow, you had those ready to go,” Danny said as she put them on.

“I may not garden or make lemonade, but I’mverygood in an emergency.”

She put on a pink bathrobe and offered Danny a white one. She retrieved Danny’s shoes and socks from the bathroom. The sun was setting, and the power was out. After Rhea learned she had no batteries for her many flashlights, she lit every candle she owned. Together, they surveyed the damage and discovered her toilet tank lid had fallen off and cracked the tile floor.

“I can fix that,” Danny said.

In the hall, several more frames had shattered on the ground. Rhea felt immense relief; so far, her cottage was intact. Their sneakers crunched on glass as they stepped into the living room and discovered the source of the loudest crash. Every shelf inside her living room closet had fallen off, and all the random items she kept stuffed inside had spilled out into the room.

“And I can fix that,” Danny said.

Rhea spotted her vision board among the rubble and threw it back in the closet.

“What was that?” Danny asked.

“Nothing! Just something embarrassing I made alongtime ago.”

She hated lying to him, but she really could not allow him to see her vision board. Especially since she had removed the pieces of construction paper, and all the child models were now glaringly visible. She shoved it to the back of her destroyed closet and threw an old coat over it.

Danny laughed. “I can’t wait to see whatever that was…no rush, we have plenty of time. But I just might ask for that for my birthday.”

Rhea tried to laugh and be casual, but her heart was racing.Danny started picking up the bigger shards of glass as Rhea got a broom, and they slowly put the house back together.

Danny looked at his phone and saw the epicenter of the earthquake was in Malibu. The city of Los Angeles had been largely spared, with no major damage to any structures. Rhea responded to concerned texts from friends. Danny texted a few of his neighbors; they said the earthquake was mild in Pasadena, and he felt confident his house was okay. Rhea was shocked that Danny knew his neighbors’ phone numbers; she didn’t even know her neighbors’ names.

Eventually, her house was clean, and the floor was safe for bare feet. They ordered Chinese food, wondering if it would make it to her door, hoping there hadn’t been a landslide that might have closed Topanga Canyon Boulevard. An event that occurred quite frequently when one’s neighborhood was a cliff.

To their delight, the food arrived. They ate on the couch with chopsticks, passing takeout boxes back and forth in the candlelight.