I lasted about forty-five seconds, which was actually longer than usual. It might’ve been a Benji Kwon World Record.
“He kissed me,” I said.
Jacks’s face didn’t change. His body did not move. He simply stood there, holding a bottle of Ketel One. The absence of reaction was itself a reaction. It was the careful stillness of a man who had expected exactly this and was choosing not to make a production of it.
“Peter,” he said, not a question, because who else would kiss me and cause my hands to shake until I murdered a poor, unsuspecting lime in the blaringneon lights of Barbacks?
“Peter came to my door last night, to the foster room. He knocked. Then he stood in my doorway and told me he couldn’t write because his brain was in the kitchen holding a blanket, which is the most Peter Loupier sentence ever constructed. Then he stepped inside and kissed me.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And how was it?”
“His glasses hit my forehead.”
Jacks smiled.
“He told me he’s been thinking about kissing me for two months,” I continued, because the dam was breached now and the water was going wherever it wanted. “Since the night I sat with Hiro.Two months, Jacks. He’s been sitting across from me at that island every morning for two months drinking his coffee and reading his newspaper and thinking about kissing me, and he didn’t say a single word about it until last night. I need you to understand the level of restraint that implies because I can’t go forty-five seconds without telling you about it.”
“Different operating systems.” Jacks shrugged.
“He has a completely different relationship with time and information than any human I’ve ever met. He processes things the way a glacier processes alandscape, slowly and thoroughly and by the time you notice something’s changed, the entire geography is different.”
“And you process things—”
“Like a fire alarm. On crack. And it has to pee. Really badly.” I blew out a dramatic sigh. “Yes. I’m aware of the contrast.”
From the kitchen pass-through, came Rod’s voice. “What’s happening out there?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“He got kissed,” Jacks shouted, because Jacks was apparently done protecting my dignity.
A pause from the kitchen.
Then Rod appeared in the pass-through window, his face wearing the expression of a man who has been given information he considers both unsurprising and significant.
“Peter?” Rod said.
“Why does everyone immediately know it’s Peter?”
Jacks crossed his arms and huffed a laugh. “Because you’ve been talking about him for two and a half months and you bought him a forty-five-dollar moisturizer and you know his shower takes twelve minutes. The variable was when, not who.”
“The shower timing is acoustic—”
“Who kissed whom?” Rod asked.
“He kissed me. He came to my door, said he was done saying, ‘Not yet,’ and that he wanted whatever came after. Then he put his hands on my face and kissed me. His hands were shaking, and I am currently not okay.”
Rod nodded once, slowly, the way Rod nodded when a brisket had reached the correct internal temperature. “Good,” he said, and disappeared back into the kitchen.
“That’s it?” I called after him. “Just good?”
“What else is there?” his voice came back. “A man kissed you. That’s good. Everything else is details.”
Mia arrived at noon, three hours before her shift, because Mia had the same sixth sense for my emotional crises that migratory birds have for magnetic north. She walked through the door, assessed my face from across the room, and was on the bar stool in front of me before I could even begin constructing the fiction that everything was normal.
