Every writer's dream was to fall in love with a reader.

For Helga, it had happened accidentally: she couldn't have known, on that first rainy day of pre-school, that her football-headed savior was an Agatha Caulfield fan who read by starlight in his room each night. She also couldn't have known, years later, when she'd finally mustered the courage to confess her love to him, and about a year after that, when he'd reciprocated that love, that he'd want to read all of her poems and diary entries about him. In fact, he wanted to read everything she'd ever written, but her poems and diaries were all she had to offer.

Though Arnold had been flattered and fascinated by her literary professions of love at first, he found himself wishing, when her inspiration for them never seemed to dry up, that she'd write about something besides him. Not because her words bored him - quite the opposite: he was as enamored with them as he was with her - but because he knew she was capable of more. He told her this, but assured her, "No matter what you write, I'll still want to read it, and so will other people. You have serious talent, Helga."

She raised her eyebrow - which she'd stopped plucking as a show of kinship with the artist Frida Kahlo - but followed his advice.

The stories and poems trickled out slowly at first, then, with Arnold's encouragement, more frequently. Growing up in the boarding house, he'd learned that sometimes you had to bang on the faucet and wait patiently for the water to flow.

And flow it did, urgently: Helga wrote about living in her sister's shadow shivering from her parents' neglect; she wrote about her best friend Phoebe, who'd kept Helga's secrets locked inside of her even when Helga's cruelty toward her had threatened to wrest away their key; and sometimes, yes, she wrote about him still, though her words were no longer so full of painful longing. Instead, she expressed gratitude for the little moments of their relationship: for, for example, his long, lithe fingers thrumming the strings of her hair, her sighs of pleasure like a song they'd learned by heart, as they lay entwined in his sheets and in each other.

Sometimes she worried, she confessed, that her drive to create would abandon her now that her love for Arnold was no longer unrequited, that she'd grow lazy and apathetic in her contentment. How could she be a tortured artist when her torture had ended? And indeed, there were days when she lacked inspiration as she hadn't before, when she pounded the keys on her laptop and crumpled sheet after sheet of paper, more motivated to express herself in kisses than in words - or so she claimed, batting her eyelashes at him. It was hard, but on these occasions, Arnold shooed her out of bed and back into her office, ignoring her scowls of protest. Later, when he relocated the discarded balls of paper from the floor to the trash can, he smiled at how much sense it made that he had ended that Valentine's Day in fourth grade with "Cecile" instead of with Ruth.

There were times when Helga's work was clearly autobiographical and times when it wasn't. When it was, she never published it, or, if she did, she made sure to give it a tweak first. Arnold alone read both versions, knew her work in all forms and at every stage of completion.

Even though he read all of her drafts, he still got excited to experience her work anew when she shared it with the world. He refreshed the page on her blog again and again until each new post appeared, snagged a front-row seat at all of her poetry readings, and bought her first novel the day it was released. It was he who'd been there when she'd finally received an offer of representation after months of querying agents, he whose hand she'd squeezed the blood from as she read the email. Seemingly endless months of fidgeting with her bow, drumming her fingers against her jeans pocket until she could no longer resist scooping out her phone to check her email, and nights spent pacing and crying instead of sleeping had proven worth the struggle to endure.

Especially because Arnold had not left her, as she still feared he would, despite his attempts to quash her insecurities and the paranoia that resulted from them. He remained her loyal reader, her champion when she succeeded and her comfort when she failed, and - oh! - how she loved him for that and for so much more.

"You did it, baby," he said now, his arm around her as he touched the pages of her first book reverently.

And she thought, as she watched him, twisted The Ring around her finger, How did I get so lucky? How did I ever get lucky enough to fall in love with someone who holds my words as dear to him as my heart?

Maybe every other writer dreamed of falling in love with a reader, but not Helga; for her, this dream had been realized all too easily.

Her dream, instead, was to write, someday, in a blessedly fast-approaching future, "Reader, I married you."

A/N: Written because this is my dream too; dedicated to my own someday love.

Thanks for reading,
AllIWannaDo