“You’re really good at kissing,” I told him.

“I told you so.”

He had. I hugged him tighter. “You’re also the only person I’d want to do this with.”

He kissed my forehead. “Same.”

I settled into a pretty awesome routine—I spent my days cleaning up dogs and taking care of Sunshine, and my nights were all spent with Noah. We kept practicing our kissing, and things kept improving. My attacks were definitely lessening in intensity and length.

And he was so good at the touching and caressing and non-mouth kissing that he got me all worked up until I couldn’t think about anything but kissing him. And he made me want him and his kisses so badly.

I’d never imagined I would feel that way.

It was almost like exercising. The more we did it, the more comfortable I got, the less it seemed to take out of me.

Everything between us became more enjoyable and delicious. Like, I hadn’t known there were so many different ways to kiss someone. The light, delicate butterfly kisses. The playful ones that had us both laughing. The intense, hormone-driven kisses that drove me out of my mind. The exploratory, give-and-take ones where we discovered new things that we liked. The intimate ones that seemed to make us even closer. Where it was like he could see into my soul.

The kisses where he made me feel like I was the only woman in the world who mattered to him, and I always would be.

Our homemade exposure therapy was working remarkably well. I thought maybe we should write a book.

And when the two weeks with Gladys were up, I was actually delighted when she texted me from Montana and said that she needed to keep helping her sister and asked me to stay on for another two weeks for another fifteen hundred dollars. I happily accepted. I loved being this close to Noah and Magnus.

Some nights he cooked for me. Others we watched movies. A few nights he read out loud to me, and he was like the world’s best audiobook, because in addition to dramatizing the voices, he couldn’t help but make faces while he was reading—a wry smile, a raised eyebrow, a frown. I loved how expressive he was.

But most of them were spent talking. We laughed and shared stories and kept getting to know one another. One of his secrets that I uncovered was that he knew about Days of Our Lives, a soap I used to watch with my mom and still occasionally caught up with. Noah’s on-set tutor had also been a fan of the show, and we bonded over our favorite story lines.

It was also how I found out he had very strong feelings regarding his grandmother.