Not now. Not tonight.
Because, despite my usual reaction to all things girly (eye roll, look of disgust, general feeling of nausea), tonight I was positively giddy and swooning. I couldn’t help it—I had seriously underestimated the effect a little romance can have on a girl.
Dream date.
Unlike the general population, my idea of a dream date would once have been simply defined as not eating roasted lizard or Dumpster scraps for dinner. But my first (second? Did the one at the movies count?) “date” with Dylan was certainly more than that.
Much, much more, in fact.
I stared up at the sight before me, jaw on the ground and eyes bugging. See, when Dylan came up to me after school and said “Follow me,” I thought, What the heck? I’ll just go ahead and follow the guy, let him show me whatever fascinating new discovery he’s made. I had expected him to demonstrate that he could fly backward or show me a cool rock formation he’d found—something like that.
Let me tell you: I was not expecting this.
“H-how did you…?” I stuttered. We were nestled within the branches of a huge fir tree, about thirty feet up. I felt the warmth of Dylan’s hand on my lower back, steadying me as I leaned backward and gaped up, still trying to take in all the amazing details of the house. My house.
“I’ve been building it ever since we got here,” Dylan said, smiling shyly at my speechless astonishment. “I went exploring the first day and found this tree, and I knew you liked tree houses….”
I grinned dopily at his perfect face, his soft, anxious eyes. I knew you liked tree houses. Dylan had taken the time to listen to what I liked, had been making notes about things that made me happy. The guy
had actually been paying attention.
And this… this was more than a tree house. It was like the Swiss Family Robinson tree house, Oregon edition. It had a floor, walls, windows, a roof. All of it was beautifully constructed out of branches and planks, and sort of camouflaged with leafy twigs and vines. From the ground, it would blend with the rest of the tree canopy. But from up here, on this branch, it was stunning. I saw a doorway covered with a green cloth curtain.
“Come on,” Dylan said, taking my hand.
Together we leaped the fifteen feet from the branch to the balcony that ran around three sides of the tree house. Dylan held open the door curtain and the warm glow of candlelight flowed out into the deepening dusk. That’s right—candlelight. The whole shebang.
I swallowed and stepped inside. When Dylan dropped the curtain, it shut out the rest of the world. Dylan and I were alone, out here in the mountain woods, a five-minute flight away from Newton and the rest of the flock.
Dylan looked at my face intently, as if trying to read my expression. I felt the flush creeping up my cheeks, my heart getting all loud and poundy. The combination of the violet dusk and the yellow candlelight made his features even more unbelievably gorgeous.
I turned away from him and walked around the space, running my fingers over the gleaming wood, seeing the notched joints, the clever design. It wasn’t huge inside—maybe eight feet by eight feet. But it was cozy, and plenty big enough. For what? I wondered.
“I stole the supplies from woodworking class,” Dylan said, answering my unasked question. “Do you like it?”
“I love it,” I murmured, with more ache in my voice than I’d intended. “It’s so th—”
I stopped and sniffed the air.
“So th…? So th what?”
“Do I smell… food?”
“You do indeed,” said Dylan. “Roast chicken, pasta, buttery garlic bread, and—”
“Chocolate cake?” I moaned. There was a short, square table in the middle of the room, set up with two pillows to sit on. To the left was a low shelf holding everything my hypersensitive-when-it-comes-to-sniffing-out-all-edible-things nose had caught, plus more.
Dylan’s face lit up with another grin, and he made a sweeping gesture for me to sit on one of the pillows. I sank down, starting to wonder if this was just an elaborate dream my traitorous subconscious had concocted. No one had ever done anything like this for me before. No one had ever gone to so much trouble for me. It was… unnerving. I looked up at Dylan and felt—what?
Gratitude. Gratitude and pure happiness. Right there, in that moment, he seemed too amazing to be real.
Dylan sat down on the other side of the table and passed me a plate—a real plate, not, like, a paper one—and a glass of sparkling cider. It was so prim and proper I almost—almost—wished I was wearing a dress or something.
“Eat dinner with me?” Dylan asked shyly. I could feel the heat of the candle between us as the reflection of its flame flickered gorgeously in his eyes.
“Heck yeah,” I said as normally as possible, ignoring the fact that my heart was rumbling even more than my stomach. “Pass the chicken.”
We spent the next few minutes in silence as we worked our way through the delicious dishes in a way that only calorie-starved mutants avoiding sticky emotions and heightened sexual tension could. I was on my last bite of my third piece of chocolate cake when Dylan leaned toward the window and stuck his head out into the night. He whistled, low and long, like a Native American signal or something.