Winners Don't Have Bad Days (Watty 2020 Winner, Romance)

When a total stranger knows what eats you, maybe they are your one true love. Even if you don't know it yet. ||

On Friday the 13th, two twenty-something, Daya and Mike, end up in a mutually beneficial arrangement: she is his caregiver after he breaks his foot; he provides room&board to help her out with a teeny-tiny cash flow problem. Not a whiff of a romance, strictly business.

And for a while, all is good... for about five minutes, that is.

What can an overweight man, a video game obsessed librarian, know about her quitting a challenging sport of figure skating, Daya scoffs. He needs to get off her case and sort out his binge eating!

What does a celery-chewing skating diva care about his failure as a PhD candidate, Mike wonders. She is just replacing her dreams with his non-existing problems instead of pursuing her one true passion!

With the two already teetering on the brink of mutually assured destruction, oil splashes onto the flames when Daya resumes her never-ending quest for skating triumph at Canadian Nationals. (Well, that should make Mike happy, right? Right?)

But isn't there *something* worth fighting for *together*? Like, you know, love?

COMPLETED. First Published: August 19, 2019

Trigger warning: This story contains themes of eating disorders and body image insecurity (male).