Page 100 of All the way home

Zach raises both eyebrows.

“It’s always just—getting started is hard. Someone always has to be brave, and you never know who it’s going to be until it’s happening, and if it’s you then it’s just abjectly terrifying, right?”

Lifting a shoulder, Zach says, “I wouldn’t know. I didn’t see it coming.”

“Okay, well now I have to know.”

“It was stupid,” Zach warns.

“Most first-kiss stories are.”

He shakes out his shoulders before he begins, nerves jangling. It feels important, how he tells this story. “We were . . . what? Sixteen? I wasn’t really out yet, but I wasn’t really not out, if you know what I mean.”

Kieran nods.

“I’d been friends with Seth for ages,” Zach tells him.

Well. Friends is a stretch, since their “friendship” had mostly consisted of Zach staring at Seth—instead of the lighting panel—from the back of a dark theater every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon of junior year.

“In a peripheral way,” he tacks on, because it feels dishonest not to.

Kieran’s eyebrow lift is very knowing.

“Okay yeah, I had a debilitating crush on him,” Zach admits. “But it wasn’t like I was going to do anything about it.”

“Why not?”

Incredulous, Zach gestures at himself. “What about all this hasn’t become obvious to you? I have no game.”

Kieran laughs. “So, you had a debilitating crush on him, and then?”

Clearing his throat, face burning, Zach says, “He was into theatre, I was a lighting tech, star-crossed lovers, the end.”

“Absolutely not.” Kieran straightens, stabbing his index finger into the table. “That is not a story. I need more detail than that.”

“Ugh.” Leaning his elbows on the table, Zach buries his face in his hands. “Fine. But you’re not allowed to make fun of me.”

“I wouldn’t,” Kieran says, so solemnly that Zach feels helpless to do anything but continue.

“Okay.” He sits up, the details of the story leaking back in miserable increments as he tries to figure out how to tell it properly. “We did two productions a year—fall and winter—and there were always cast parties after.”

Kieran laughs, like he already knows where this is going.

“Anyway.” Zach ignores the flutter in his stomach—that laugh—and presses on. “Fall production. I only found out afterward that Mara had been dropping hints about me, so I was totally oblivious. From my perspective, I was just minding my business dragging some of the sound stuff back into the green room when he showed up and just—”

When Zach cuts off, Kieran leans forward. “And just?”

“And just kissed me.”

“My, my.”

“I know.” Cheeks flaming, Zach elects to leave out the details: the way Seth had grabbed him by the front of the sweater as though they’d prearranged this moment—as though they’d ever even spoken—and how Zach had been too shocked to speak. How it had been a flare of heat, his first kiss over in five seconds. “And then he just left.”

“Like, he accosted you and ran?”

“Something like that.” Zach scratches the side of his nose. “Later on he said he was testing me.”

“What?”