It was really hard for her that she didn’t have an image of love in her life. She just knew that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Spencer. She felt safe with her, she was cared about. She hadn’t knewn bliss before but she guessed it was something like the emotion she experinced in Spencer’s arms. She wanted to give all the love in her heart to Spencer. She felt responsible for her, wanted to protect her with all of her love.

She meant all of this when she told Spencer she loved her. That is why it was hard to say it.

"I love you too" said Spencer.

She was touched when Ashley confessed her feelings in this way. Because she felt it somehow that this statement was more complex than it seemed.

Spencer had thought earlier that she knew love. She did it in some way. She loved her family. But it was in some way predestinated – we are a family, we love each other. At least, she thought that. As opposed to this, Ashley thought that someone doesn’t become a parent in the moment when his or her child is born or in the moment of conception. It is just a biological thing. Being and becoming a parent is rather a process or progress. Getting to know to the child, experiencing, exploring the tie that connects them, being aware of the responsibility of bringing up the kid, providing the best conditions. That is why Ashley wanted to keep her baby. She never felt these things and wanted to experience them.
Lately also Spencer got the evidence that unconditional, unquestioning love in a family wasn’t so natural and evident.

Spencer was supposed to know a different kind of love: the divine love. That Christ loves all of us, and if we feel useless and alone it is enough to think about him and we will knew that there is one person who loves us always, in every condition. Spencer could strengthen by this idea but it was so abstract. She wanted to be loved not because she was part of the mankind but because of herself, her own features, because she is Spencer Carlin.

She found this with Ashley. She knew that Ashley was good, that she was so eager to love but she had always seeked it in the wrong ways. But they found each other and knew that it was meant to be this way. That they belonged together.

Spencer’s love for Ashley made her realize that what she had thought to be love before was just some infatuation, excitement, nothing more. The real love was what she gave for Ashley and what Ashley gave to her.

They kissed each other.

In all of their kisses they could feel each other’s every emotion. All of their past, present and future was in their kisses. What they had been, what they were, and what they might have been, what they would be. All of their happy and sad moments, all their mistakes, good turns and possibilities were involved.

Spencer could feel all of Ashley’s ex-lovers, all of the boys and girls she had been with; still it didn’t hurt her. All of them gave something to Ashley, things which helped her to be herself. Spencer could feel Ashley’s unborn child and her grief as well.

Ashley guessed that they knew each other perfectly, yet their kisses revealed some hidden details which made her think that they are like mysterious books written in a foreign language. She liked that. This was that made them want to explore the other more and more and helped to strengthen their complex feelings.

The feeling we call love.

“Oh how much I love you, who’ve given
speech to both the universes:
the heart’s caves, its trickweaving deepenings,
sly involute lonelinesses—
and starry heaven.
As water glides from its own thunderous fall
you fly from me and we are cleft and parted,
whilst I, among the mountains of my life, still call,
still kneel, and sing, and raise the echo with my cry,
slamming against the earth and sky,
that I love you, step-nurse, mother-hearted!

I love you as a child his mother’s breast,
as the dumb caves their own bottomlessness,
as halls the light that shows them best,
as the soul loves flame, as the body rest!
I love you as we who marked for death
love the moments of their living breath.”