She smiles. “It’s a little intense.” We continue making out on the couch until she invites me to her room. I lead her to the bed, feeling oddly comfortable in her space. “You’re pretty,” she tells me, and I feel myself blush. I kiss her lips, her cheeks, her neck. Periodically she opens her mouth wide and breathes heavily into my ear, which I love. We keep our clothes on.

After a while we stop and lie beside each other. I look at my watch. “It’s late,” I say. “I should go.”

“You’re gonna leave now?”

She seems disappointed. I shrug. “Is that weird?”

She shrugs. “Has anyone ever left you in the middle of the night?”

Often, around four a.m., Anouk is up and anxious. I’m usually roused by her wakefulness, and she asks me to run my fingers through her hair. I pet her head softly, falling back asleep mid-stroke.

Anouk and I joke that my heart is a fleshy, blubbery, trembling whale of a heart, one that lies bleeding on an unidentified beach somewhere. Hers is guarded, hidden inside a cage, at the bottom of a well, tucked away. “This doesn’t bode well for us,” she tells me. And at times, she’s proven right. She rejects my sentimentality—when I buy her an iPod Shuffle and fill it with two hundred songs, she expunges the love ballads, keeping only the Cure. She’s demanding and particular and forthright, and I love her for these things but I can’t always live up to them. I’ve told her about my past relationships, and she’s afraid that once my infatuation with her wears off, I’ll lose interest. She keeps a distance to protect herself.

There is a constant fear inside me that any misstep could ruin everything. In my worst moments, I quell the anxiety of her leaving by preempting it. I threaten to end things. I hate myself for my immaturity, but old habits rarely go away entirely, and I can never fully escape myself. I relapse. I beg for her forgiveness, for her to be patient with me. Somehow, she is. She doesn’t excuse the push-pull, but at the very least, she gets it.

Eventually she begins to open up and allow herself to trust me. And as she does, I find that I love this version of her, with all of its circumstance, even as the initial excitement gives way to cozy routine, with its own kind of intimacy. I find that I enjoy the stability even more than the highs, certainly more than the lows. And whenever she catches me projecting idealized versions of herself onto her, she calls me out for doing so. Throughout our relationship, she insists on remaining real.

I nod in response to Anouk’s question. “People have left me,” I say. “Though I guess it’s usually me who leaves.”