Chapter XXV
XXV
Teddy
Here’s my definition of bliss: waking up to Marin’s warm body curled against mine, her hair a thousand different directions, and a puddle of her drool collected on my sleeve. This is an enduring personal truth I can’t deny even if it’s a complicated one.
Tiptoeing back to bed, I spot the notebook she pulled out at the bar peeking from her bag.
It’s not snooping if the entire thing is addressed to me, right?
If she put it in my hands and encouraged me to page through it the night before?
I reach for it. I extract it gingerly and crawl back beneath the covers, careful not to wake Marin.
On the front page, dated almost three years back, I read the first entry. “Teddy, you’re at Mayo, getting better, and I’m here, in Copenhagen, wishing more than anything I could be with you—wishing I hadn’t ruined that for both of us.”
The entries vary from there, one a diagram of her new fund’s thesis, another a list of birthday gift ideas she had for me but would never be able to execute.
Flipping at random, tears fill my eyes, and I land on a list of everything she’d tell her dad about me if she could.
“You’re the exact kind of person he asked me to hold out for when I was twelve and grossed out by the idea of kissing anyone.
You two have the same annoying trait of knowing what I need that I won’t admit that I need.
” I turn to watch her, chest rising and falling, and feel the warmth of all the things she could never say but, turns out, could write down.
The regret and hope she’d clung to these last three years.
I land on a note from nine months ago. “Sloane and Carter called to tell me they’re getting married, and I couldn’t be happier for them,” it starts.
“But when I got off the phone with them, I cried. I’m jealous that they both have what it takes to make this commitment to each other work when I failed you so completely.
All my life, since I was fifteen, I have been looking for escape routes to get further and further away from my past. To carry myself far enough afield that maybe I wouldn’t even be able to find my way back if I wanted to.
But being with you—it was like finding the exit lane that would take me back to myself.
Being with you showed me that I could be who I am now and who I was then, and that made me feel more whole than I had since my dad has been gone.
Even if we never speak again, you will have forever changed me. ”
My eyes are too bleary to keep reading, and a tear falls on the page.
“Mar,” I whisper, unable to stand another minute without her.
“Marin.” I smooth her hair behind her ear.
As her lids blink open, she jolts up to sitting, confused, before softening her face toward me.
For a second, I think we might kiss. I’m done wasting time.
Grabbing her hand, I press the little notebook onto her chest.
“I read it. I probably should have asked, but I figured if it was for me... Marin, I’m, uh.
..” She pushes the hair out of her face and opens her mouth to say something, but I continue.
“I didn’t know. For the last three years, I didn’t know what you were thinking or feeling, but now I do.
You love me, and that scares you. You can be scared if you want to be, but I’m not. ”
Marin’s face twists, and I watch in awe as something, guilt or relief, works its way through her body.
Then, without warning, she starts crying.
Sobbing. “I don’t want to be scared with anyone else.
” She gasps, her tears running onto my bare shoulder, our bodies pressed against each other as my own tears start to fall.
“You’re the love of my life. I think you know that,” I whisper into her ear, running my fingers through her hair.
Marin
The notebook. The notebook I couldn’t leave the house without for fear I’d have something I needed to tell Teddy and wouldn’t have a way to say it.
The pages I filled with ramblings of how I could work remotely from Iowa and how we could build a guest room for our siblings and host cornhole tournaments with Carter and Sloane.
On one of the last pages, on the plane, I drew a map of Iowa City and the spots there that now made me think of him, even though we’d never been there together.
“Everything reminds me of you,” I wrote, resigned to Teddy’s hold on all the places that matter to me for the rest of my life.
But here he is, at a roadside inn somewhere in Illinois, one hand cupping my jaw and the other reaching for my top button.
We kiss like we’re breathing, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, like survival.
He pulls the small of my back closer to him, reaching beneath my pajama shirt, sending the same message to my brain I get every time we touch: Why haven’t we been doing this forever?
Teddy sighs as he kisses my neck, his erection pronounced against my thigh.
No amount of fantasizing could prepare me for the very real, very desperate need surging between the two of us right now.
I peel off my top, and his mouth moves from my neck to my breasts, teeth clamping down gently on my nipples.
Never in my life has sex felt so present.
Like there is nothing else in the world, not even the room we’re in.
Every inch of my body and brain are lit up in Teddy’s touch.
I sit, straddling him, and drop my head to trail my tongue along his chest and his abs.
Watching him watch me, I pull his boxers off, move down his body, and wrap my hand around his dick, leaning down to lick before taking him in my mouth. “You,” he whispers. “This.”
His fingers twirl through my hair, and I close my eyes, focusing on the presence of his body.
The muscles where his hip meets his stomach tensing under my palm.
My mouth glides up and down him as he trembles, the press of his dick against the back of my throat and the groan it elicits each time it makes contact.
Being able to give him pleasure like this turns me on so much I start to writhe against his leg, desperate for friction between my own.
“Marin,” he pants, his fingers gripping my shoulder as my mouth fills with the taste of him.
He is still for a moment, head back and breathing heavy, but then in one swift and decisive motion, he pulls me up so we are face-to-face and starts kissing me forcefully.
His hand moves between my legs, his fingers spreading me open before he puts two of them inside of me.
“I missed this so much,” he whispers into my mouth.
“All of this.” His thumb presses firmly against my clit as he says it, and the pressure is too much, everywhere, all at once. As my orgasm crests, so do my tears.