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The trick to loving Stanley was that it was important not to push him into anything. Or try to get him to talk when he didn’t feel like it.
Or make him do anything he didn’t want to do, actually.
The trick to Stanley was to just wait, and watch, and find out what he would accept.
“How many sit-ups are you planning to do?” she asked Roman.
“Five hundred.”
She picked up the calisthenics pamphlet. Her eyes scanned the instructions, but there were no counts on the page, just exercises. Roman was providing his own targets.
Five hundred sit-ups. Yeesh.
“Where are you at?”
“Four-oh-eight, four-oh-nine, four-ten,” he said, and then blew out an audible breath that she took to mean Piss off and let me do my thing.
“All right. I get it. I’ll leave you to your flogging.”
She ducked back into the Airstream for her bathroom stuff and took herself off for a shower in the bathhouse. An older woman was at the sink, blow-drying her hair.
“Morning,” the woman said.
“Good morning.?
??
“That you in the Airstream, with the sit-up guy?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice.”
“Thanks.”
“Airstream’s not bad, either.”
Ashley smiled, even though she didn’t feel like it.
The water was hot, the pressure strong. The walls and ceiling had been painted a sort of industrial mint since she was last here, years ago. Stanley took good care of his place, but he wasn’t big on aesthetics.
When she got back to the campsite, Roman had switched to push-ups. The back of his shirt had soaked through. His arms trembled.
“Would you like me to build you an obstacle course while you’re finishing up here?”
He ignored her.
“I bet Stanley has some old tires I could set out. You could use the bathhouse as your wall-climbing thingy. Pole-vault over the muddy area by the tent-camping sites.”
His body sank toward the earth, then rose again. Again. Again.
“I’ll make up a fifty-pound backpack, and you can wear it on your twenty-mile run.”
“I already ran.”
God. “How far?”
“I don’t have any way to know.”
