“Correct,” Everett said. “But it isn’t finished. I’ve spent weeks trying to give this thing a genuine personality, and I can’t do it.”
“What do you mean, a genuine personality?” Teddy asked as she sat down on the bed, which felt a little bit forward but he was the one who’d brought her in here (and anyway, they both knew that Candy Land was functioning as board-game-based foreplay). She looked around his room again as he sat down beside her; it was clean, with dark green walls, a plush comforter, and even throw pillows.
“Wait,” she said. “You have throw pillows. Did you pick those out yourself?”
Everett laughed. “I went to the store, looked at a display bed, and said ‘I’ll take that whole setup, please.’ Home décor is another one of those things I don’t have much time for.”
Teddy smiled. “Okay, so back to what I asked before. How can a puppet have a genuine personality? Don’t you give it a personality?”
“That’s what a lot of people think,” Everett said, “but that’s never been the way ideas work for me. I can’t will them to happen. I just have to keep working and eventually, if I try enough things, something will come to me. It’s like magic.”
“Magic that involves you working very hard and trying lots of things,” Teddy corrected. “That kind of sounds like . . . work.”
Everett smiled. “Right. But it doesn’t always look that way on the outside, you know?”
Teddy sighed. “I wish I had what you were talking about earlier. A calling. Something that I love enough to keep working on it until I get a breakthrough. Something that feels like magic, even if it isn’t.”
“You’ll find it,” Everett said. “Or maybe it’s not one thing for you—why limit yourself? Maybe there are tons of things out there that you love to do. A calling isn’t always your job, you know. Maybe life itself is what feels like magic.” He paused, looked away, and then looked back and met her eyes. “I can definitely say that my life feels a little bit more magic when you’re in it.”
Perhaps it went without saying that no one had ever told Teddy anything like that before. She’d spent most of her life feeling like she was objectively unmagical and now, hearing Everett say this, it was like a balloon was inflating in her chest.
“Magic?” she asked softly.
“Yeah, Teddy,” Everett said, his eyes moving to her lips. “You’re magic.”
Teddy could have justified this as doing something that scared her, could have pretended that closing the space between her and Everett and grabbing his face with both of her hands as she kissed him was something that required bravery. But it wasn’t. Kissing Everett in that moment and letting him roll her back onto his bed was the most natural, comfortable thing she’d ever done. It didn’t feel scary in the least.
* * *
—
WHEN TEDDY OPENED her eyes the next morning, it took her a moment to realize that she wasn’t in the closet at her apartment listening to the sounds of Kirsten and the Viking talking over breakfast or Eleanor singing in the shower. She was in Everett St. James’s bed, snuggled—snuggled!—against him like they were two bears in hibernation.
But she couldn’t hibernate forever. Luckily, she’d remembered to check her phone before she fell asleep the night before. Kirsten and Eleanor had sent her numerous frantic texts asking if she’d been abducted, but once she told them she was spending the night at Everett’s, they’d switched to sending various sexually suggestive emojis and gifs. But even if her best friends were no longer worried about her, she had places to be, and surely Everett had things to do that didn’t involve her. So she got up, pulling her clothes on as quietly as she could.
“Where are you going?” Everett muttered without opening his eyes. “It’s early.”
Teddy stopped, her hands frozen on the buttons of her shirt. “I was going to make you breakfast.”
“Come here,” Everett said, pulling on her arm. “Why did you put clothes on?”
She smiled and sat down on the bed. “Don’t you have things to do today?”
“All I wanna do is spend time with you,” Everett said, lifting the blankets and pulling Teddy under them. She let out a happy shriek, then situated herself under his arm.
He wrapped his fingers in hers and she stared at their hands, his so much larger than hers. These hands that did such