Bette paused. Then she laughed. “Yeah, okay. Are we snuggling now?”

“No…” I protested, wrapping my arm around her stomach, putting my nose in her hair. “Is that what this looks like? That’s not what this is.” Her body shook with laughter and I said, “That was my biggest fear, I think.”

“What, that you’d snuggle with me? Mine too.”

“Bette. I meant that I was afraid of not knowing what to do. For like, ever. Ever since I was a kid, I was always worried about working up to this one point in my life where I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“Were you ever at that point?”

“Didn’t I move in with you for a week or so?” I quipped. Bette chuckled. “It was just one of those irrational fears you get whenever you start thinking about growing up,” I decided. “And I had them all the time.”

Bette was silent. “I don’t know if everyone gets those.”

“You’ve never been afraid of just not knowing what to do?” I lifted my head to look at her. She stared at me. “Oh,” I said, “‘course not. You always know what to do.”

She didn’t seem to find this so funny. She averted her gaze. In the darkness, I could see her lick her lips before she said, “It isn’t about not knowing what to do. It’s about doing whatever it is correctly.”

I shrugged and put my head back down. I didn’t want to talk about it. I was a pretty firm believer in mankind’s ability to make mistakes, and I knew Bette wasn’t, at least not when it concerned her. After a few minutes, I checked to see if Bette was sleeping. She wasn’t. She was thinking.

The silence got to me, though, so I said, “Bette.”

“What?”

“I can’t sleep.”

She smiled. “Me either.”

“When I was a kid and I couldn’t sleep, I used to ask my mom for sleeping pills.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

I shrugged. “She used them. So, she’d pretend that she’d dissolved some of her sleeping pills in water and then she’d make me drink it and I’d get all tired. Like, she just told me two years ago that she’d been pulling a placebo effect on me the whole time.”