He was still holding my shirt.
I was still holding his face.
The foster room was very small and very warm, and Princess Consuela was watching us from her carrier with an expression that, on a creature with more facial mobility, would have constituted a smirk.
“Peter,” Benji said.
“Benji.”
“You’re shaking.”
And I was.
My hands, against his jaw, were trembling with a fine, visible tremor that I couldn’t control. My surgeon’s hands, which held steady through six-hour operations, which didn’t waver during emergencies, which had earned a reputation at the clinic for preternatural calm, were shaking.
“I haven’t done this in two years,” I said.
“Kissed someone?”
“Any of it. The kissing, the wanting to kiss someone, the showing up at someone’s door because I couldn’t sit in my room anymore pretending I didn’t want to be in theirs. All of it. I’m out of practice.”
“For a man who’s out of practice, that was a pretty definitive kiss.”
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I had time to prepare.”
“How long is a while?”
I considered lying, considered softening the truth into something less exposed, but decided against it, because I’d come to his door to stop lying or hiding or telling whatever half truths made life easier but didn’t express what I was truly feeling.
“Since the night you sat on my floor with Hiro,” I said. “You came into my room at 3 a.m. because you found a note about his phantom pain. You sat onthe floor and you didn’t say anything, and he put his head against your leg and went to sleep. You stayed until morning . . . on my floor. That’s when.”
Benji’s hands tightened on my shirt.
“That wastwo monthsago,” he said.
“I’m aware.”
“You’ve been thinking about kissing me for two months?”
“I’ve been thinking about a lot of things for two months. The kissing was one component of a larger situation that I’ve been processing.”
“Processing. You’ve been processing kissing me. Like a computer running a program?”
“The analogy isn’t inaccurate.”
“Peter.” He said my name the way he always said it, each syllable given its own space. I felt it the way I always felt it, in a place that had nothing to do with hearing. “You are the most impossible man I have ever met.”
“You’ve mentioned that.”
“I’m going to keep mentioning it, regularly, possibly daily, possibly on Post-it notes.”
Benji’s mouth quirked. “I’d expect nothing less.”
He let go of my shirt. I let go of his face.
We stood in the foster room and looked at each other. The looking was different now, changed by the fact that my mouth had been on his, and hishands had been on my chest, and we were standing on the other side of something that couldn’t be undone.
“What happens now?” he asked.
