“Yeah. It was,” agreed Rhonda. She and Dave had gone on a sledding trip to the Snowmobile Club for Trivia Night. And it had been fun. But Dave didn’t have to come all the way over to tell her so.

“Yeah. It was,” Dave reaffirmed. And then he just stood facing Rhonda and didn’t say anything. And looked nervous. Or scared. Or sick.

“You sure you’re okay?” asked Rhonda.

“Yeah. I just also wanted to let you know that…” Dave stopped breathing—again—and realized—again—that he didn’t quite know how to tell Rhonda what he had come all the way out to her house to do. So he tried to think of something—anything—else to say. And finally came up with, “So that was fun tonight, huh?”

“Yeah,” said Rhonda, wondering why Dave was stating the obvious. They always had fun when they went sledding on Friday nights.

“Even though you whupped my butt!” added Dave, laughing.

“Well, that’s what you get for ridin’ an Arctic Cat. You get your butt whupped,” teased Rhonda. It was also what he got for taking on the Northern Maine Snowmobile Association’s Snowmobiler of the Year, but Rhonda didn’t say that because she didn’t want to rub it in.

“Yeah,” conceded Dave.

“And I whupped it!” she teased, giving Dave a playful kick in the butt.

“I know, I know, I’m not sayin’ you didn’t!”

Dave and Rhonda laughed. And thought about how much fun they always had together.

And then Rhonda looked at Dave, and she felt like he had a lot more to say than that he had had fun sledding, but he wasn’t saying anything, so she said, “Look, dude, I’m workin’ tomorrow—first shift. I gotta be up at the crack o’ butt, so what’s up?”

“Oh—sorry—um. I just wanna … can I, um…” Dave couldn’t stop stammering and was about to give up on trying to do what he had come all the way out to Rhonda’s to do when he felt a strange lightness fill up his insides—a lightness he had been feeling whenever he thought about Rhonda lately. And whenever he was around her. It made him feel like the blue flame from a gas burner on a stove was glowing inside him. And like he was about to be in zero gravity or something.

Rhonda waited for Dave to finish what he seemed to be having a lot of difficulty saying. And when it didn’t seem like he was going to be able to finish, she asked impatiently, “Dave, come on! Can you what?”

The lightness Dave had been feeling suddenly seemed to fill him with courage, and it made him blurt out, “Can I come in?”

Rhonda was a little taken aback by the question and asked, “Huh?”

“Can I come inside?”

“Um…”

“Just for a second,” added Dave. “I just—have somethin’ I’d like to … do … in there.”

“You got ‘somethin’ you’d like to do in there’?” asked Rhonda.

“Yeah.”

“In my house?” Rhonda was scowling.

“Yeah.”