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.

“How am I sexy? I mean, I have a label maker, for heaven’s sake.” He collapses into my arms like his joints have lost all strength. He’s got a hard shape in the front of his expensive jeans. I am very, very sexy.

I thought he’d be suave and dark-eyed-smooth, unhooking my bra with a fingertip, but he’s not the Casanova I always assumed he’d be. Teddy’s a hot mess in bed, but I mean it in the best possible way. For starters, he’s easily distracted. He sees a freckle on my collarbone and loses composure. His mouth muffled against me, I think he says something like, I saw this and I wanted to do this. Disorganized to the bone, he’s taken off one of my socks, undone the zip of my skirt, the bottom two buttons of my shirt (and a random middle one) and then forgot everything to pull the blankets over us.

“I’m dreaming,” he says, twisting kisses on my neck. “I’m in my bed, having one of my Ruthie dreams.” I feel him stretch; he’s reaching out to touch the wall.

I am probably dreaming myself; held in the patterned cradle of this bicep, I am kissed tenderly by someone who thinks the sun shines out of me. It’s not until I feel the warmth of his torso on mine and my sheets on my legs that I realize he’s peeled off my clothes. I guess he does have significant skills.

He feels me go still. We float together breathlessly, like in the swimming pool.

“Want to keep going?” he asks, and his eyes roll closed when I nod and put my hand in his hair. We sink. We gasp for air. He shows me things from my feverish midnight fantasies: what it looks like to see his tattooed hand on my breast, the weightless black silk of his hair on my pillow. Everything is fracturing around me now, the tiny flowers on my wallpaper and the daisies on his forearm as he slides his hand down, even lower down, and he tells me I’m like a dream.

He gloats at how turned on he’s gotten me. He demands ten different compliments and praises before he’ll move his fingertips. I get to four or five when he laughs and relents. I give him probably twenty more compliments after that. I never came close to finding satisfaction with my first boyfriend, Adam; I was too concerned about his comfort and the experience he was having. I never thought about my body as anything other than an instrument for him to find pleasure. All Teddy wants to do is make me smile and shiver, and his own body doesn’t seem to concern him. It’s his typical unhurried style that brings about my first orgasm. It takes me by surprise, because he didn’t seem to have a specific agenda, just a gently nudging thumb.

“Oh, nice,” he says as I shudder and spasm with his give hand between my thighs. If I ever thought touching him in return would be awkward, I was wrong: we are friends above all else, and we can talk about these things: I can tell him how I want to try this, and this … He lets me. “Perfect,” I tell him, when his penis is revealed. “But I thought there’d be a tattoo. Or a big metal piercing.”

“Some things are sacred,” Teddy explains with a half laugh. “I hope you’re not too disappointed.” He groans when I show him I’m not, and then links his fingers over mine. I give and take until he’s dewy with sweat.

When I decide I would like to take, he obliges with good humor and a courtly kiss on my cheek. “In the drawer,” I say, nodding sideways. “Melanie insisted I buy condoms. She said every pilgrim needed supplies for their journey, something like that.”

Teddy bites off the cellophane from the pack and spits it on the floor. “Glad you did, but they’re all mine now. Did you know,” he says in my ear, “I’m ruining all your dating plans from this point onward?”