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“I keep hearing about this method,” Teddy grumbles. “I hate being left out.”
“I don’t think making anyone scream is in my near future.” I can’t believe I said that out loud, in an office. Neither can they; they’re both open-mouth-delighted. I look at the Post-it on his chest and ask Melanie, “Did you unlock the rec center this morning?”
“Why are you so obsessed with it?” Teddy is so bored with it he yawns. I’ve seen every arctic-white tooth in his head by now.
Melanie says, “It was already unlocked. I thought you did it.”
Under the background of Mel’s relentless chatting as she begins filling out the petty cash record, Teddy asks me, “Ruthie, what’s going on?”
“I screwed up.” All I can do is regulate my breathing. I’ve never been so grateful for a Melanie interruption.
“Magazines are so pricey these days. I’ve got a new renovation project that would impress even PDC. Want to guess what it is?”
Teddy’s unwilling to take the interruption, eyes still on my face. “You’re okay, you didn’t screw up,” he promises me fiercely. And my body believes him. Each breath is easier, until I’m back in my body.
Melanie says with a flourish, “Ruthie Midona is my project. I’m fixing her right up.”
Teddy seems offended for me. “My old motorbike in storage needs fixing up. Ruthie doesn’t.”
“She needs to rev her engine all right,” Melanie parries back smartly.
I interject. “Ruthie has not agreed to this plan yet.”
(Ruthie is also privately amazed to be talking to people of her own age like they are her friends. Maybe Ruthie should lean into this?)
Melanie continues, “I am creating a dating program designed to get her out of her turtle shell. Fun and dates and meeting new people and romance. We need to do something important from the movies.” She likes
leaving dramatic pauses, and this one is a doozy. “. . . Makeover.”
Annnnd I’m leaning back out. “That’s a no.”
“But look at her,” Teddy says to Melanie, like she’s going to be fighting an uphill battle. I begin to recoil inside like a big painful spring until he finishes with, “Why mess with perfection?” He holds my gaze in a way that feels like a steadying hand.
Melanie says, “I agree, of course. She’s an amazing person. But I think if she could just jack up her confidence, she’d let other people see how funny and smart she is. Cue soul mate, and me in a lilac bridesmaid’s dress.”
I stare at her. “You are getting so far ahead of yourself it’s insane.”
“But is that what you really want?” Teddy asks me and the question feels too intimate to reply. He perseveres anyway. “If it’s what you want, then I’ll help you too.”
Melanie’s pleased. “Ruthie, we’re both helping you, that’s settled. Please let me have my makeover montage. I have been dreaming of plucking your eyebrows from the moment we met.” This is said with sweet ardency.
“I tried to be cool in high school and it didn’t go so great for me. I don’t want to date someone who meets me when I’m hot from my Melanie Makeover. I want someone to actually be into . . . this.”
“And how do you describe ‘this’?” Melanie has her notepad again. “I didn’t get too far in the profile draft. You gave me nothing to work with.”
“A tidy girl,” I borrow Teddy’s phrase to make him laugh, but he just stares deeper into my eyes and I cannot look away. The room goes black and the flecks of gold in his eyes are my only light. My other senses heighten and I can navigate this new world purely by touch. I try again. “Buttoned-up tidy girl seeks . . .”
His eyes put images and thoughts into my head. Tidy girl seeks a tall messy man to press her up against things. She wants to get messed up, flat on a bed, on the edge of desks, walls, moonlit lawns. Every door unlocked, always. All she wants is skin, the satin heat of it all, a thick rope of black silk hair coiled in her palm . . .
A chair squeak breaks my train of thought. Teddy’s leaned forward. He wants to know my next words so badly his knuckles are white. “What?” His voice has a dare in it.
I think about what the word give means and how much I want to take.
Melanie, the creator of dramatic pauses, can equally be counted on to fill a silence. “Cute twenty-five-year-old professional seeks same.” She hesitates, eyes sparkling, then goes for it. “You must know fifteen ways to make her scream.”
Dead serious, Teddy says, “I know thirty ways.”
If Teddy Prescott came into my bedroom and showed me what he knows, it wouldn’t matter how thin our walls are or how much noise I made. He’d be the only one at Providence who’d hear me.
