“I’ll just come in,” he says and uses the key I gave him. Now he’s in the doorway, backlit by the courtyard light and circling moths. He’s all I’m ever going to want. I have a date on Thursday, and it will be the first audition of my second choice. No one is ever going to measure up.
“What’s got you all riled up, Tidy Girl?” He reaches for me, maybe to smooth the hair back from my face, but my grenade pin is caught on his pinky.
“Don’t call me that.”
“But that’s what I call you,” he protests, sinking down about a foot shorter. He looks like I’ve smacked him with a rolled-up newspaper. “What’s happening? I’ll fix it. Tell me, tell me,” he says, crowding closer, sounding like he cares about me so much.
I push him with my hands on his chest. “Can’t you tell when someone just wants to be left alone? This is my place. Give me that key.”
“I want to understand what’s going on. Is it something I said?”
“It’s just really frustrating how you never think about how things feel for me.” I hate the concern and care in his eyes. I need to make him get out. “I’ve done what you wanted. I came with you, I kept you awake on the long drive. I saw your studio and your new apartment. What more do you want?”
That’s an easy answer, apparently. “I want you to be happy.”
“Impossible.”
“How did tonight make you feel?”
“Like I always do. Left behind.” I can’t stop the words. “You just rubbed your new life in my face, and look where I am again. I’m back at Providence, where I’m probably going to be forever because I’m terrified of change and making a bad decision.”
“I wasn’t rubbing it in your face. I wanted to impress you.”
“Why? Why bother? Are you trying to have a redo of your relationship with Rose or something?” The thought takes hold the moment I say it out loud. “You are. You’re trying to charm me to convince yourself you still can. I’m nothing more than a challenge you’re passing the time with. You won’t be satisfied until I’m desperately in love with you.” I put a lot of sarcasm into that.
His eyebrows go down. “I wanted to impress you because you’re really important to me.”
“I’ve helped enough handsome boys with their homework to know that the moment you get that studio key, the exam’s over and I will no longer be required.”
He’s completely bewildered. “No longer required?”
“How could I be? You’re leaving. Me.” I make myself put the words together. “You’re leaving me. You’re leaving me to go start a new life, and I’ll be back here with no one to care about me. No one to take care of me or to stand up for me. Sylvia will come back and put me in my place. I’ll have to watch PDC change this place and every person up that hill will eventually die. And here’s Ruthie. Forever. Stuck right here.”
“It kills me that you can’t leave.” He ignores my flapping hands and gathers me into a heavenly hug. “I was trying to impress you tonight because I wanted to show you that there’s a whole world out there for you, if you want it. You’re like a rabbit in a trap. This place is bad for you.”
I’m inclined to agree, but I shake my head automatically against his chest.
“I want to take you with me. That’s why I wanted you to love that bathtub.”
Have you ever been caught off guard by the sound of your own heartbeat? Maybe you’ve pressed your ear weirdly on your pillow, and now all you can hear is your own proof of life. You are confronted with your mortality in a base, clock-ticking kind of way: you have an engine room, and it has a finite timeline. What a miracle and a privilege.
I’m feeling like that now as his words sink into me.
“My entire life, I have prayed.” He says that softly above my head, cuddling me closer. “In every chaotic fuck-up moment I’ve ever had, I’ve said this random prayer in my mind. I wished I could find some kind of peace. Every lost wallet moment. During the divorce, when my mom turned up and threw fits on Dad’s front lawn. When neither of them could agree on who would take me. Always knowing I was in the wrong place. I prayed for peace, quiet, certainty. And it’s you. I’m in love with you.”
I take my ear off his chest and look up at him. “Wait, what?”
It’s the only words I get out before he holds my jaw in his hands and kisses me. I don’t have to ask him to repeat it now, because he’s telling me again with a smile on his lips and a laugh in his throat. Furniture touches the back of my body: counter, couch, wall? I’m not sure. All I know for sure is, Teddy Prescott loves me, and he is not holding it in anymore. Best of all: I believe him.
How many times have I wondered what it would be like to be his sole focus? I know now. He’s playful and affectionate with his mouth and hands, with a tremor in his body like he’s one second away from laughing out loud up at the ceiling.
He gets his wish when I pull his T-shirt off: he puts my wallpaper all over himself. The contrast of his sticker book-ink against the flowers and vines is something to behold. I behold him for several long moments, while he shivers and puts his hand in his hair, his breath coming light and fast.
I realize what’s putting that look in his eyes. He’s out on the ledge.
I step out with him and take his hand. “I am in love with you, too.”
His relief is my relief. It’s always been like that, from the moment I rescued him at the gas station. He sags, exhales, and reaches for me. Now I’m flat on the fairy-tale flowers, being woken from my slumber by true love’s kiss.
Tidy, messy. Give, take. Adorer, adoree. Together, we can be all these things. It’s the most natural thing in the world to be walking backward across the threshold into the one room Teddy has never ventured into, until now. He breaks his mouth from mine and gets overexcited.
“I have had dreams about this.” For a minute or two, I let him pick around on my dresser. I always thought it was because he had a reflex to take and acquire, but it’s because he just desperately wants to know me. His fingertip slides along the back of my hairbrush and he picks up a jar of moisturizer to read the label. “Aw,” he says fondly, “how cute. You don’t have wrinkles. Your face,” he says as he pulls me close again, “is all I dream about.”
As I am pushed gently onto my bed, he says into my mouth, “Please tell me what your bear is called.”
“Teddy.”
So it turns out that getting naked with someone can be fun.
I follow the patterns and lines along his body, all those flowers and jewels. Wishbones, goldfish, a queen of hearts card. I kiss a rabbit, a diamond ring, a crown. There’s a scary skull on his side, but I kiss it on the cheek. An entire section is just feathers and leaves. He’s a masterpiece, every inch, and I tell him this. (He laughs and says thank you.) My hands unbuckle his belt for something to do.
My unexciting white shirt and denim skirt are the most exciting thing that has ever happened to Teddy. The way he looks at me is with such frank appreciation that surely I’m misunderstanding this? It knocks me out of the moment and I have to get his eyes back on mine.