I woke up late the next morning to the smell of coffee, and nothing had ever smelled so good. The night before had passed in a blur of sleep, a shower, foraging for food in his kitchen in the middle of the night, changing bedrooms (there had been some blood), talking, and the joining of our bodies, an endless, joyful, fun, funny, serious, intense, amazing, experience I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams.

I put on my nightgown, knowing as I did so that I'd never look at snaps the same way again, and went in search of the coffee and my lover. I followed the smell and my midnight memories of the dark house in search of the kitchen, and found it, a light filled, sunny room, painted bright yellow, facing the riotously flower filled back garden, with Teddy standing in the middle of it, in only his sweat pants, opening boxes filled with pastries.

"Good morning, love," he put everything down and turned to envelop me in his long arms, hugging me to him tightly. "I'm amazed you can walk," he said with a laugh.

"That's a rather crass joke," I said, looking up at him. "You going to kiss me with that mouth?"

"I am," he said smugly, kissing me very thoroughly. "And I'm only being honest. "God, I can hardly walk myself. I've never been so sore. I think I was bleeding near the end."

I merely gave him a look and found a mug and poured myself some coffee. I rooted around in the fridge for some milk, found some, added it, and took a sip. Ah.

"Where'd you get the yummy looking pastries?" I asked.

"This is London, we're a modern metropolis, as I keep trying to tell you," he said, turning back around. "I had it delivered. Let's eat quickly, I have stuff to show you."

We sat at a little round table and pretty much wolfed the food, as we were both starving, and carried our second cups as he showed me around the house.

It was gorgeous. I smelled fresh paint, and asked about it.

"Yeah, after I found out you were coming, I had it painted. I wanted it to look nice," he said with a little smile.

"Teddy, you didn't have to do that," I said, touched. I reached out and held his hand.

He was starting to act kind of strange, not embarrassed, exactly, but like he was expecting to be embarrassed shortly. I started wondering what surprises were in store for me.

"Okay, first thing, quick, quick." He pulled me along, back to the bedroom we had vacated in the middle of the night, which was sort of confusing. What was there to show me in there? He pulled open a drawer and took out something familiar and pink, which he placed in my hands.

It was my sweater. My mother's sweater, the one I thought was at the bottom of the koi pond in Nikko. I held it to my face as I looked at him, mystified.

"How on earth do you come to have it?" I asked. "Did the hotel mail it to you here?"

He looked at me. "I wish I could say yes. I feel so fucking awful, and I'm so, so sorry. I took it. That night. You left it hanging over the railing by the bridge when you went back to your room, and I took it back to my room with me."

I continued to stare at him, if anything, more confused than before.

"But then why didn't you give it back that night? Or if not that night, the next day? Why keep it all this time?" I had so many more questions that I didn't know which ones to ask.

"I was feeling crazy that night, Birdie. Kissing you had really fucked with my mind. All I could think about was how much in love with you I was. I knew it, I'd known it for a while, but after that night I had to admit it to myself, and I could hardly walk straight after you left. That's why I stayed at the bridge, I knew if I left with you I'd just make another pass at you at your room, and you'd shoot me down again. So when I saw your sweater, I decided to take it back to my room with me, so I could, um, so I could sleep with it."

At the look on my face he held up his hands and backtracked, saying quickly, "No no, nothing like that, oh my god! I just wanted to hold it. It smelled so good, Birdie, it smelled like you, god, it was almost like holding you in my arms. It was the best night's sleep I'd had in a long time. So I was going to give it back to you the next day, the first chance I got, but I wasn't alone with you all day, and before I got a chance, you came in and told everyone you'd lost it, and I lost my opportunity. After you came in telling everyone it was gone, I couldn't very well say, 'Hey everyone, no big deal, I had it the whole time, surprise!', could I? Plus, there was something else. You remember the photograph you took of me that morning when I was sleeping? When you left the haiku on the Post-It on my door?"

"Yeah, I remember," I smiled.

"Well, I guess you didn't look very closely at that photo, did you?" He pulled out his phone, pulled up the picture, and showed it to me. I remembered it, the shock of messy brown hair sticking up out of his blanket, visible above his pillow. He pointed next to his head, between the pillow and the blanket. And there, in the corner, a blob of pink, with sparkly glass beads, an unmistakable corner of my sweater, enfolded in his arms. Once you saw it, it was impossible to miss.

"I was terrified one day you'd be scrolling through your photos and you'd see it," he said. "I worried every day you'd discover my secret, and I didn't know what to do. It wrecked every single day, I couldn't concentrate on anything, I was a mess."

"So that's why you went all the way to Mitsukoshi to buy me all those sweaters," I said.

"So that's why I went all the way to Mitsukoshi to buy you all those sweaters," he said. "I felt so guilty, it was killing me."

"Please forgive me for putting you through that, Birdie. Please forgive me for letting you believe for weeks and weeks that you'd lost a priceless irreplaceable family heirloom. Can you?" He looked at me out of those gray eyes, filled with guilt and regret, and what little, minuscule amount of anger I might have felt simply evaporated.

"I forgive you completely and utterly, Teddy," I said, hugging him and kissing him soundly on the mouth. "I have never received a more heartfelt or sincere apology. I love you for it. I adore you for it. Let's put the whole thing behind us, hmm?" He nodded.

He led me into a small room filled with book shelves, from floor to ceiling, an oval room with comfortable chairs and sofas, nice lamps and big windows, and a rolling ladder attached to the wall so the tallest shelves could be reached. The smell of fresh paint was very strong in here. A library, straight out of Agatha Christie, how charming! I wandered over to look at some of the titles as he followed behind, his hands behind his back. All of the classics, the titles I'd hungered to own, from Tolstoy to Chekov to Shakespeare to Faust. I looked back at him, impressed. There was another section of just children's literature, Collodi and Milne, some first editions, too. I was enchanted. The other side was modern, with many paperbacks. I looked closer. These looked familiar. I pulled a few out and looked inside. "Aileen Foster", with my LA address. I looked back at Teddy.

"I thought I'd unpack for you, thought it would be nice for you to have your books where you could get at them instead of all boxed up," he explained. I looked around. Nearly this entire side of the room was filled with my books, all dusted and alphabetized. Of course, my eyes filled up. I turned back and tried to thank him, but nothing came out. I couldn't even remember the last time I'd seen all of my books unpacked and on shelves. "Keep looking," he said, smiling, so I looked at the next set of shelves. I'd assumed they were his, because even I didn't own that many books.

These books looked familiar, too, but I couldn't quite place them. I looked more closely, and I realized with a shock that they were in Japanese.

They were my grandfather's. The last time I'd seen them was at my grandparents' house in Tokyo. I'd spent my last few summers reading them, enjoying his annotations in the margins. After his death, I'd had them boxed up and put in my storage unit, but I hadn't seen them unboxed since Japan. He had been a professor of Japanese classics at Waseda University before he retired and he had a wonderful collection of literature. Obviously these were in no particular order, but they were all here, all of my memories in one room, waiting for me. I walked back to Teddy and did my usual and buried my face in his chest. His arms came around me and we just stood that way in the sun filled room. I heard him pull a tissue out of a box and felt it in the general vicinity of my nose.

"Blow," he said gently, and I did.

"Ready?" he asked, and I nodded. We moved on, hands held. Next he showed me a huge room at the front of the house. It didn't get much direct light, since it faced north. It obviously wasn't used much. It was formal, had massive pieces of furniture, which included a mammoth concert grand piano. From across the room it was difficult to tell the color, but the cut of the legs looked familiar, and as I got closer I could see that it was wood grain, not black. I saw the Kawaii logo, and as I got even closer I saw the rich red and dark brown striations of the sapele mahogany. It was my piano. My dream piano. How could this have happened? I looked at Teddy.

He looked anxious. "Do you like it?" he asked me.

I touched it reverently. "I love this piano," I breathed. "I've wanted this piano since I was twelve years old. I turned to him. "Why do you have it?" I didn't wait for an answer, but sat down and opened the keyboard cover.

I played a couple of scales and chords. He lifted the lid. The tone was rich and creamy, gorgeous. I played a short piece by Satie. It was perfectly in tune, it must have been tuned within the last week. I gave him a questioning look, but decided to save the questions for later, after I'd seen the rest of the house.

He took my hand and led me on. We went into the back yard, or the garden, as he called it. There was a lovely patio with outdoor seating so we could sit and enjoy the view, which was filled, with flowers, roses of every kind, almost all of them fragrant, with honeysuckle against the back fence, and some lilacs anchoring the corners. There were some raised beds which had been prepared for vegetables on the other side. And was that a koi pond? This was a huge yard by London standards, surely? This was an urban area, property costs had to be through the roof. How could even Theodore Shelley afford all this property? And everything looked freshly planted, the earth looked freshly turned over.

"Teddy, this is gorgeous." I put my arms around his waist. "I didn't know you were such a flower lover. Why did you never say? All those times I talked about my mother's garden, my grandmother's garden, when we were in Japan and I was talking about the rose gardens and stuff, you never said a word. Why?" He just looked at me with an enigmatic smile.

"Oh, one last thing to show you." He grinned, leading me back indoors. We went into the large, comfortable room which opened off the kitchen, and he had me sit on the squashy sofa and wait with my eyes closed. "No peeking," he admonished as he left.

"I'm not ten," I called out. "I won't look."

He returned in a minute and had me hold out my hands, close together. Into them he placed two warm, soft things, and had me open my eyes. I was holding two kittens, tiny, long haired, a lot like Maine Coon Cats, except I didn't know if they had those in England. They were enchanting. They were so young their eyes were still blue. One had a white bib, and one had white feet. I held them up to my face, listening to them purr.

"They're sisters," he said, pleased with my reaction. "I found them."

I looked up at him. "You found them?" I asked skeptically. "Where did you find them, Teddy? The same place you found the piano? And the flowers I happen to love? And the freshly painted bookshelves?" I placed the babies in my warm lap, where they promptly fell asleep. "Please, tell me where you found these two gorgeous little kittens, Theodore Shelley."

He sighed, ran his hands through his hair, looked around the room, and looked back at me. "The RSPCA," he admitted. "That's good, though, right? At least they're adopted, I didn't buy them from a pet shop or anything."

I sighed, shook my head, and patted the seat next to me. "Sit down and tell me what in the hell is going on, please," I said. "I feel like I've stepped into an episode of the Twilight Zone," I said. "Do you get that reference?"

He nodded. "Yes, I get that reference," he answered.

"So?" I waited.

He sat down. I took his hand. "I wanted," he began. "I wanted you to want to stay here," he said simply. He shrugged. "That's all."

"What do you mean, 'that's all'?" I said. "How much money have you spent on all of this?"

"Why on earth does that matter?" he asked. "I've told you before, money doesn't matter to me."

"I told you, one of the prerequisites of my coming here was that you give me the opportunity to pay you back some day," I reminded him. "How can I possibly pay you back for all this?"

He looked away, then back at me. He didn't say anything.

"Was the reason you had to rush back here from LA something to do with all this?" I asked.

His non-response was all the answer I needed.

I sighed, and petted the sleeping kittens in my lap.

"Please talk to me, Teddy," I said quietly, stroking his cheek. "You did all of this in less than a week? I mean, even with all the money in the world, how is that possible?"

He closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, looked at me, then began to speak.

"You remember that day on the bus, when Ronan accidentally gave you too many of Gethin's pills?" I nodded. It seemed like a lifetime ago. "You left your laptop open and your secret Pinterest was open on it. So I looked. I know I shouldn't have. But I was already head over heels for you, and you were so secretive about everything, Birdie, you wouldn't tell us anything about yourself. I was going crazy. I was so happy to learn anything about you, you can't imagine how wonderful it felt to know things about you. But most of the things you wanted weren't even things! Some of them were, but most of them were experiences, trips, travel, a place for your books, a garden, bloody animal shelter kittens, for Christ's sake. You didn't even want anything from Tiffany's, you wanted a fucking box from Tiffany's! All of the girls I knew wanted stuff, you know, handbags, jewelry, cars, clothes, stuff I could get for them. You weren't like that. It was so frustrating. So when you agreed to come to England, I decided to get you the things I could, all of them, to try to convince you to stay with me, whether you could love me or not. I didn't even care anymore. I just wanted to be with you. Even if you ended up with Matty, if I could somehow get him to live near me; I'm serious, that's how crazy I was.

"I realized one day when I was texting back and forth with Patrick about all this that basically what I was making for you back here was a home, that what you wanted was a home."

I looked quickly up at him when he said this. It had never, ever occurred to me. But he was right. I looked back down at my lap.

"Patrick texted me something about how I was finally getting serious about turning my party pad into a home, and I realized he was right, I was turning my house into a home for you, and I was happy to do it."

He kissed my hand. "That's what I've made for us. I mean, I'm not stupid enough to believe paint, bushes, furniture and pets will turn a building into a home, but that's what I've tried to do. I want you to stay with me. I know when you get into school in New York, you have to be there for however long it takes, two years—?" I nodded. "Okay, so two years, I can live with that, I can buy us a place in New York, too, but I want to be with you. That's what all this means. That's why I did all this. And the stuff on the list I didn't get to? The travel and all that? We can't do those things right now, we're both too busy, but we'll get to them, I promise, I'll take you to all those places. When we have time. I will. And dogs? Well, cats do fine on their own for a bit, so I started with them, but when we're around more, settled, we'll have dogs too, okay? And children? I want children with you, I do, Birdie. If we don't have time for dogs, obviously we don't have time for children, but when we do, we'll have boatloads, we'll be like Ronan's mad circus of a family, okay? I'd love nothing more than to make babies with you, see you carrying our children inside you, to see babies made from both of us, with your beautiful eyes and crazy mad talent..."

I looked over at him again, to see his eyes swimming with tears.

"Theodore Shelley, what have I told you about crying in front of me?" I said through my own tears. "Don't do that, please, I can't stand it."

"What the hell kind of double standard is that?" he said with a smile. "You're allowed to wallow in your own tears, absolutely break my heart with them, but I'm not allowed to have a good cry once in a while?"

"Really? I break your heart with my tears?" I asked him.

"Into little tiny pieces, every single time," he assured me.

"Then I guess I'll just have to figure out some way to make you feel better," I said, moving the kittens off of my lap and moving onto his.

He wrapped his arms around me and pushed my hair behind my ears. I put my arms around his neck and ran my fingers through his hair. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked down at me and kissed my scar, making me tremble.

"Can we get on to the 'unsnapping of the nightie business', please?" I whispered in his ear with a smile.
The End

Okay, so that's it for book one, and if you somehow haven't read them out of order, then now is the time to move on to Diving Deep, which is the second of this series. Then comes Learning to Fly.They are the only three on Wattpad, but I think they work okay as a stand alone trio. Like I said, the others are all available on Amazon, but I can't post them here because of Amazon's rules, I'm sorry. I put this one up as a thank you to everyone for their support of me and my work. I hope you enjoyed it!