“I need to not say, ‘Not yet,’ again.”
His head somehow cocked even further, causing locks of hair to dangle like tiny, dirty blond nymphs clinging to his scalp lest they fall to the floor.
“I’ve been saying, ‘Not yet,’ for two years. I’ve been saying it to everything, to people, to my manuscript. Hell, I’ve been saying it to my own life.” I let out a deep, pained sigh. “And I said it to you last night. It was true. I mean, it was the truth of where I was in that moment; but I’ve been sitting at my desk all evening, and the truth has moved. I don’t want to be in ‘not yet’ territory anymore, not now and . . . not with you. Benji, I think . . . I think I want to be in ‘whatever comes after.’”
Benji’s face did the thing it did when something too big for the performance arrived. It was the dropping of every mask, the stillness that was nothing like his manufactured quiet but was instead the involuntary pause of a person whose body has stoppedbecause his heart needed all available resources.
He stood slowly, closed the distance between us in two strides, and stopped in front of me. He stood close enough that I could feel the warmth of him, close enough that looking at him required tilting my head down slightly, because I was taller than him by several inches, a fact I’d been aware of for months and that had never felt as relevant as it did in that moment, with his face turned up toward mine and his eyes dark and steady and holding nothing back.
“After is good,” he said. “I’ve been in after’s waiting room for a while now. The magazines are terrible.”
I laughed.
It surprised me, the way my laughs always surprised me these days. It arrived before I could catch it, and Benji’s face broke into something so warm and real. His warmth did it, his warmth and his joke and the fact that this man could make me laugh while I was standing in his room shaking myself apart, that he could hold the weight ofthatmoment and the lightness of it at the same time without dropping either.
I leaned forward and kissed him.
Not carefully or with the measured, analytical approach I brought to everything else.
Oh, no.
I put my hands on his face and I kissed him, and it was clumsy because I was out of practice and because the angle was slightly wrong and because my glasses bumped his forehead. I didn’t care about any of it, not the clumsiness or the angle or the glasses, because his mouth was warm, and he tasted like coffee, and his hands came up and gripped the front of my shirt and held on.
Three seconds.
Maybe four.
Maybe longer.
I lost the ability to measure time, which was unprecedented and which the clinical part of my brain noted with distant interest before the rest of my brain told the clinical part to shut the ever loving fuck up for once.
I pulled back but kept my hands on his face.
His eyes were closed.
They stayed closed for a beat after I pulled away. His face in that moment was the most unguarded thing I’d ever seen, stripped of every layer. He was just a man with his eyes shut and his hands on my shirt and an expression that made my chest ache with something I hadn’t felt in years. I recognized it all the way one recognizes a song he hasn’t heard in a long time: not immediately, but completely, the name and the melody and the memory of what it feltlike the first time he heard it.
His eyes opened.
“Oh,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You kissed me.”
“I did.”
“You came to my door and told me you couldn’t write because of a blanket and then you kissed me.”
“That’s an accurate summary.”
“Your glasses hit my forehead. My forehead grease is on your glasses. There might be makeup, too. I use base. You know that, though.”
“I’m aware.”
“I didn’t mind . . . the kiss, not the smear. I’ll clean the smear. I have Windex. It works on glasses, too, you know?”
“That’s good,” I said, and I could feel myself smiling.
