“You’re not too pretty to sing with me, Sam,” Tiel yelled. She scrunched her eyes shut, rocked her head with the rhythm, and tapped the drum beats against my back. If I hadn’t been so close, I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish her voice from the sound thumping around us.
When the chorus rolled through, I yelled the words with Tiel, and as I stared at her, I believed them.
Warmth spread through my chest and I laughed out loud. Ididwant to get better. I wanted every night, every day, every last ounce of my life to feel like this moment.
The song ended too soon and she dragged me toward the door. Though I wasn’t ready for this night to end, I followed her to the alley.
“Hi,” she whispered, her hands flat on my chest.
City noises surrounded us, and though it was long past midnight, it was disgustingly humid and only slightly cooler.
“Hi.”
“We’re friends now, right? After a near-death experience, we have to be. We’ll tell stories about this for years,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“And sometimes friends kiss, right?”
Not understanding the meaning behind her words, I nodded like a fool. Tiel smiled, her hand shifting from my chest to wrap around the back of my neck. She urged me closer, and before any of this made sense to me, her lips were pressed to mine.
A moment of painful anxiety overtook me, and somehow I forced myself to focus on the way her body felt against mine, the taste of her mouth, the pressure of her tongue.
It was the first time I’d kissed a woman in five years. And there was so much more in my secret trove of nevers.
I didn’t kiss, I didn’t date, I didn’t touch under clothes, I didn’t let anyone touch me save for a particular appendage, I didn’t fuck in beds, and I didn’t undress.
Ever.
Ever.
Women liked to interpret it as my urgency to pull my cock out and get inside them, and it was good they invented that little story for themselves. Reality was less romantic.
Save for my siblings and medical professionals, no one had ever put eyes on my infusion set and it was safer that way. I couldn’t handle anyone else seeing it, being horrified by it. Technology had improved over the past twenty years and it was smaller now, less conspicuous and revolting, but there was no getting around the fact I was never free from invasive medical equipment. It was just another piece of me that was better off hidden.
Fully dressed, stand-up sex also came with the benefit of distance. There was no intimacy to be derived from exposing nothing more than the required pieces, and doing it somewhere as impersonal as a coatroom. That kind of sex never tricked my mind into thinking any of it mattered to me, or that I could matter to someone.
And yet it was staggering to realize that, for all my manwhoring and working my ass off to avoid legitimate human contact, I had been missing out on something as simple and wonderful and fleeting as this.
Then she leaned back, and it was over.
“I just had to kiss you,” she said with a shrug. “I couldn’t not.”
But I didn’t want it to be over.
“There’s a word for that. Basorexia. The uncontrollable urge to kiss,” I said.
Tiel laughed and brushed her thumb over my lips. “I guess I’m feeling a little basorexic.”
“Is that right?” She nodded, a shy smile teasing at the corner of her mouth. “Let me help you with that.”
My lips brushed against hers, tentative and in absolute fear of screwing up this one moment when everything—fuckingeverything—seemed to fall into perfect alignment. I was free and normal and alive, and even if it only lasted for right now, I didn’t want to lose one second of it.
“Just relax,” she murmured. “We’ve already survived all the terrible things that could happen, right?”
Her tongue slipped into my mouth, as easy and sweet as a summer day, and I wanted to believe her.
“OH, MOTHERFUCKING HELL,” I groaned. “I am too old for this shit.”
