Chapter 8: An Itch
After that morning, Cup Cake and I were practically inseparable. Every day was like a page from a Neighcholas Sparks novel. We did everything side by side. We worked together, we ate together, we slept together, and we even shared the same piece of mint- flavored dental floss. (Okay, that last one might be a lie.)
And yet... at times, I felt like there was something missing between the two of us. A single, solitary thing that kept me from being completely satisfied. A quiet, nagging doubt in the back of my head. I guess you could call it... an itch. Like an itch right in the middle of your back that you can't quite reach, no matter which arm you use. No, worse than that. It's one of those itches that's easily in reach for you to scratch it, but then you realize that it feels like the itch is coming from inside your body, and you wish you could just slip your hoof underneath your skin and give that itch the scratching of a lifetime.
Okay, that metaphor got really gross in a hurry. But you get what I mean.
For weeks and weeks, I struggled to find out what the itch was coming from. And then, out of nowhere, it hit me.
It happened one night at the bakery after closing time. We were up in my bedroom, having a viciously competitive tickle fight, as we often did on weeknights after work. I had her pinned down onto the bed with one hoof and was mercilessly tickling her ribs with the other.
"Ready to give up?" I taunted.
"N...never!" she uttered in between bouts of hysterical laughter.
Just when I thought I had her on the ropes, she managed to slip out of my grasp, shove me down onto the mattress face first and put me in an ankle lock. Immediately, she started to give the underside of my foot a thorough tickling. I frantically tried to wriggle free, but she continued to hold onto my ankle in her vice-like grip. It was no use.
"All right, all right!" I cried, unable to take the tickling for a second longer. "I-I surrender! Mercy! Just sto-o-o-o-p!"
Cup Cake grinned smugly and released my ankle. I rolled around on the mattress laughing myself ill, still reeling from the tickle torture she gave me. As soon as I was able to catch my breath, I just let myself collapse in a heap, ready to pass out from sheer exhaustion.
"You... you win again," I sighed.
"'Twas a valiant effort on your part," Cup Cake said semi- mockingly. She grabbed me by the shoulders, pulled me close and started snuggling me.
"You're so fun, Carrot Cake," she said, burying her face into my chest. "You're like the perfect stallion."
And there it was. That was the source of the itch.
"What's so perfect about me?" I asked her, raising an eyebrow.
Cup Cake's contented smile quickly shifted into a concerned-looking frown as she lifted her head up from my chest and looked me in the eye. "What do you mean?" she asked.
"Well," I said, "I think you're a wonderful mare, and I couldn't be happier that we're together, so don't get me wrong about that. But sometimes I can't help but wonder what it is you saw in me."
That was the nagging question in the back of my head. I knew why I was with her, but I wanted to know why she was with me.
She sighed. "It's a little complicated, Carrot, but I'll do the best I can to explain it.
"I mean, I'll be honest with you: the first time I met you, I thought you were kind of a dork. A cute dork, but a dork nonetheless. I still remember how you spent all that time cowering behind the counter in shame just because you let me see you with your apron off." She giggled. "You do realize that most ponies don't normally wear clothes, right?"
"W-well," I stammered, "t-that was... you see, I... it's not really... just go on."
"But for the rest of that night, I couldn't help but feel that there was more to you than I saw. I sensed that there was another side of you that was just begging to show itself."
"How'd you sense that?"
"Eh, you know, mare's intuition and all that," she said dismissively. "Anyway, the point is that I wanted to coax you out. You were like a shy little tortoise tucking its head inside its shell, and I thought I could try to beckon you to poke it out."
"So what happened?"
"What happened is that you did! You stepped up to the plate and completely transformed your life in less than a year."
I shook my head. "Cup Cake, you transformed my life."
"Don't be silly," she said. "You were the one who took the initiative and decided to come out of your shell. All I had to do was give you a little motivation."
"So is that why you were constantly-"
"-toying with you, yes. I knew there was a tiny little part of you that wanted to be in control, that wanted to be the dynamic, outgoing stallion you've always dreamed of. So I just kept on teasing it until it burst out of you at full force!"
I chuckled. "It did, didn't it?"
She nodded. "You know, change isn't usually an easy thing to accept. It's even harder when you have to be the one who initiates the change yourself. A lesser stallion would have shrunk away from me and continued to live his life hiding away in his little shell of boring routine. But that's not what happened, is it?
"It took a lot of courage to do what you did, Carrot Cake. A lot of it. That's what makes you the perfect stallion, in my eyes."
She wrapped her front legs around me and resumed burying her face into my chest. "You've got a lot of strength, Carrot Cake. Don't ever let anypony tell you that you don't."