Second First Impressions Read online

  He gets up to go check in with Renata, and I am left sitting behind, stunned at the creation on my arm. It’s an angel, around five inches tall. She’s got flowing robes—or is it a cardigan?—wrapping a neat, curvy frame, tiny pointed bare toes and wings out, she’s reaching up to the heavens. And in her hands, smaller than half a fingernail in size, is the unmistakable outline of a tortoise.

  I don’t like it. I love it.

  I can see what we could be, in another reality where his dream wasn’t too far away and I hadn’t made a lifelong commitment to Providence. I’m probably going to have to take his advice and just accept it. It hurts too much otherwise.

  “Come on, I want to give you the rest of the tour,” Teddy says from the hallway. “Want to see my new bedroom?”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I’m too quiet on the drive home. The Parlonis aren’t; they’re collapsed sideways onto each other, openmouthed snoring. “Are you tired?” Teddy asks me. “Are you hungry? I can stop somewhere.”

  “I’m fine.” I hate how bland I sound. I need to do better. “It’s all just feeling pretty real, seeing your studio and your apartment.”

  “It’s nice, huh.” Teddy’s smiling and wrapped up in the glow of his new future. “My commute time will be even shorter than at Providence. I can fall down those stairs in about twenty seconds. What did you think of the bathroom?” This is the second time he’s asked me. “I lay in the tub to check that it’s comfortable.”

  Let the record reflect that I was really, really supportive as he took me upstairs to parade me around his new apartment. With his lovely warm give-take hands cupped on my shoulders, I was walked around and dutifully admired:

  The bathroom (“Wow, it’s brand-new—I love those tiles!”)

  The kitchen (“You could fit a turkey in this oven, Teddy!”)

  The living room (“Please don’t find a couch on the side of the road.”)

  The view (“I bet that tree is pretty when the leaves change.”)

  The more I gave him, the happier and more excited he became. I couldn’t say anything about the bedroom, because I’ll never be in it. But it was lovely, too. I have a full-body shiver just thinking of how he walked me in and massaged my shoulders while detailing the apartment’s heating system to me. It’s superior, naturally.

  “I think the spare room will be a good office space,” he enthuses now, reaching over to squeeze my leg before he turns down the air-conditioning and angles the vent away from me. “If I put my desk under the window, I’ll probably get distracted all the time. There’s room enough for two desks.”

  “I guess there is. It’s a nice big space.” It will be filled with sunlight in the mornings. “Set yourself up two desks, one for your art.”

  “Which wall would you put your desk on?”

  I’m all out of opinions. “I don’t know. The back wall.” We’re almost back to Providence. I just need to maintain this pleased façade a little longer, and then I can sink into the bath and feel sorry for myself. I’ve always known this was coming. My residents don’t move away and send me postcards. Now I have to begin to deal with the slow death of this special friendship.

  He says, “I’ll put my desk under the window. Nice and sunny for some herbs in pots there, too.” Decision made, he’s humming and happy as he drives us up to the upper parking lot so the Parlonis have less distance to walk. They’re bleary-eyed and tired, and Aggie is so heavy in the brace of my arm I’m exhausted by the time we unlock their door.

  The visit to Always and Forever (Fairchild location) was a success. Alistair was stunned that Teddy had turned up, let alone selected a new software to implement, but he hid it well. Their discussion became increasingly animated, from storage space to sanitation contractors. Alistair is now convinced of Teddy’s new professional approach and Teddy is muddy-piglet happy.

  I am truly happy for him.

  “I never saw the tattoo design,” I say to Renata as she settles into her armchair.

  “I like a grand reveal. I’m having it done next Tuesday.” She looks over to the kitchen, opens her mouth to bellow, then realizes that Teddy is already microwaving something for them. “Good,” she grumbles. “What a shame I have to find a new boy when I’d just gotten this one the way I like him.”

  “It is a shame, but we knew it would happen.” I put the TV remote within her reach and unbuckle her shoes for her. Aggie is already sound asleep. “I’m going to go now. Good night,” I call out in the general direction of the kitchen.

  “Wait,” Teddy replies, just like I knew he would, but I can’t wait anymore.

  The cold night air outside brings every frustration I’ve been packing down to the surface. He’s so oblivious. That’s what always gets me about Teddy; he’s so wrapped up in himself, always taking, not realizing how terrible it feels to be left behind. I pass by town house number 15 where I found Mrs. Higgins. She had framed photographs of her husband and children beside her bed. At this rate, I can’t say I’ll have the same when someone finds me someday.

  I’m having a mix of emotions: premature sorrow for the loss for Teddy; a sinking sensation that my time at Providence will just be punctuated by people I care about leaving. I loved Teddy’s new apartment. My cottage is dark and cold in comparison and I know I’ll never have the courage to find a new place, box my belongings, and leave.

  One day, Teddy’s going to find a girl who’s exactly his type, and she’s going to use that nice new oven and heavenly deep bathtub. “Goddamn it,” I yell up at the sky when I get to my front door. “Goddamn it.”

  I’ve got the key in the door when I hear his jogging footsteps. I’ve got it closed by the time he skids into the courtyard.

  “Open up,” he says. “What are you yelling about?”

  “I’m tired. I’m having a bath. Good night.” I look at the little tortoise-angel on my arm. It’s going to fade as soon as I soak it. My frustration twists tighter. Can I have anything for myself, forever?

  “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.

  “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.” H
e 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?”

  I’m distracted, because we haven’t settled who’s staying and who’s going, but Teddy arranges my limbs, asks me twice if I’m okay, puts his mouth under my ear, and pulls my knee up onto his hip. We forget everything now.

  “More,” I say, and we shiver and stretch against each other, until I have him. The tenderness in his fingers as he pulls some hair away from my eyes has me wanting to hide my face in his shoulder, but he won’t allow it; my face is tipped back and he watches my eyes as he moves. He’s open for feedback, and when a perfect alignment is achieved, he laughs at the look on my face. “Oh, there we go. Come this way, if you can,” he invites me. “But if you can’t, no pressure. I’ve got a lot of tricks up my sleeve.”

  “It feels like I’m going to come, if you stay just like that—and I do this—”

  I try to banish my thoughts. The bed squeaks and I’m so alive. I’m twenty-five and my blood is banging through my veins and his hazel eyes look at me with such amused affection, the way he always looks at me, and I tip over the edge and I’m coming, and he’s praising me, holding my shaking torso in a hug.

  It’s pleasure, more than I’ve ever experienced, because it’s shared with him.

  “Nice?” he asks me and I wordlessly nod. “Okay, good. Can you keep going?” Now we’re moving again. I still feel the aftershocks inside me, and now Teddy is taking his turn to move in the way that feels best for him; everything’s silky smooth and easy, but there’s a new angle and a new kind of friction.