Page 34 of Comfort Read

“Sage! Come on, man. You’re going to have to give me a better smile than that.”

This last is from the event’s official photographer—or, at least, from the sole photographer standing in the little booth across from the sponsor backdrop, where every star preceding them has paused for posed shots. This little booth, however, is surrounded by a horde of other photographers, snapping away behind them.

Sage rolls his eyes, but then straightens, smiles, puts a hand on Kit’s back and, out of the corner of his mouth, whispers, “Shift your weight towards me, onto your left leg. Better angle for the shot.”

Kit does, and then smiles out at the sea of cameras when Sage, minutely, nods at him. The clicking of shutters and bursts of flashbulbs overwhelm him for a moment, so he doesn’t realize at first that the tenor of the shouting has shifted somewhat.

“What, do you guys not like each other or something?”

“You can give us more than that!”

“Yeah, kiss him, Sage! Go on, you know you want to⁠—”

“—just asking for a little kiss, that’s all⁠—”

“You can give us a kiss, can’t you? For the photo?”

Sage glances down at Kit, panic in his eyes again. But there’s a question there, too, or a request for permission, or a gauge of willingness, or something. There’s too much happening for Kit to entirely parse it, but he understands implicitly that Sage is asking whether Kit would be okay with Sage kissing him. He nods, biting his lower lip with a mixture of nerves and anticipation, and Sage takes what’s clearly a deep, steadying breath and squares his shoulders.

Kit’s not entirely sure which one of them moves first, just that they both do, drawn towards one another as though magnetized. The moment their lips touch, Kit loses track of everything but the way Sage feels against him. The sounds of the paparazzi falls away; the red carpet under his feet disappears; the long line of limos floats off to some distant world, where things like that matter to people. Nothing matters to Kit except the insistent pressure of Sage’s gorgeous mouth, the glory of his tongue flicking between Kit’s parted lips. Sage’s hand is on the small of his back, pulling him closer—one of Kit’s hands is in Sage’s hair—God, Sage is making these desperately hot little growling sounds, low in his throat, for only Kit to hear. He’s not sure he’s ever been kissed like this. He’s not sure anyone has ever been kissed like this, and wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that Sage, in addition to his staggering theatrical talent and excruciatingly hot body, is also some kind of sexual innovator. He kisses like an innovator, like he could find dozens of ways to work Kit up into staggering ecstasies, and Kit means to give him every opportunity to experiment as soon as humanly possible.

He’s regretful when Sage breaks away, tries for half a second to chase his mouth and recapture it before the realization of where they are comes slamming back to him. Ripping his eyes open to the sounds of the paparazzi’s cheers of thanks, he finds Sage staring down at him. His cheeks are flushed; his carefully gelled hair is tousled out of place. His lips are very slightly larger than they were a moment ago, which perhaps is on Kit, who dragged the lower one between his teeth at least once.

But Sage doesn’t look pleased with being well-kissed. He doesn’t even look annoyed, like he regrets taking things too far or blames Kit for doing so—that would be understandable, and Kit could work with it. He could work with almost any expression except the one on Sage’s face, which is the worst possible thing to see after losing yourself in kissing someone.

Sage looks absolutely, utterly terrified.

THIRTEEN

The rest of the night passes in a blur. Kit meets a dozen people so famous that talking to them feels more like a dream than reality, and passes easily a hundred more actors he never expected to lay eyes on in real life. Under normal circumstances he’d be fascinated by them, forcing himself to rein in a whole list of questions, observing to see if the “Celebrities: They’re Just Like Us!” sections of various gossip rags are, as Kit has always suspected, full of shit.

He doesn’t do any of that. He can’t even begin to focus on anything but Sage, and kissing Sage, and the head-to-toe rush of tingling warmth that kissing Sage created. Kit expects the sensation to fade as the night wears on; it doesn’t. If anything, it intensifies: whenever Sage looks at him, whenever Sage moves, whenever Sage smiles at someone or greets them in the low, amused voice Kit is beginning to realize he reserves for his friends.

Kit’s not sure, by the time they get to the end of the night, that he and Sage are even still friendly, let alone friends. He stiffens whenever Kit steps close to him, and when their eyes meet for more than a second, his seem to cloud over with this frantic terror that makes Kit’s chest ache. Was he that bad a kisser? Surely not—he’s always gotten good reviews, though admittedly his list of previous partners is fairly short.

Also, Sage kissed him back every bit as passionately, so Kit’s pretty sure that isn’t the problem. Maybe it’s Sage’s unfortunate romantic history, or his relationship with the press—maybe he’s just embarrassed to have gotten carried away. The sense Kit has gotten of him so far suggests that he is, in general, a man who likes to be in firm control of himself.

Whatever it is, Kit doesn’t get to find out, because when they finally climb back into the limo hours later, Sage is reserved and quiet. Kit makes the attempt to bring it up anyway, on the theory that they really should discuss it: “Did, uh… did you want to talk about what⁠—”

“No,” Sage says flatly, not looking at him. “I don’t.”

Though he has to bite the inside of his cheek quite hard to manage, Kit keeps the hurt out of his voice as he says, “Right. Of course not.”

They ride in silence the rest of the way back to Kit’s hotel.

The next few days are a deeply confusing blur.

Their red carpet kiss goes viral, first of all, to the degree that it gets shouted out in multiple late-night show monologues. For the second time in his life, Kit finds himself being approached by people he hasn’t seen in years, friends of friends of friends, his niece and nephews’ teachers, the mailman. The only real difference between this and his first run at infamy is the vibe: Last time it had been all pity and cloying sympathy, and this time it’s mostly weird. People say things like, “Wow, that was some kiss!” or “I didn’t know you had it in you!” or “Bet that Emerson is feeling pretty silly now, huh?”

Kit’s surprised by how annoying he finds it. He would have guessed—he had expected—that being locally notorious for dating a movie star would feel a lot better than his previous claim to Cedar Falls fame. Instead, he discovers it mostly pisses him off, making him far angrier than any of the questions about his breakup ever did.

It’s not that he minds being asked about Sage. In fact, horribly, he’s grateful for the excuse to talk about him whenever someone brings him up. But the way people ask, like they’re entitled to details about Sage because he’s famous, like Kit should be perfectly happy to kiss and tell, and tell, and tell: It sets his teeth on edge. More than once he snaps, “He’s a person, you know,” or, “I’m not going to tell you that, he wouldn’t want me to talk about that—would you ask me that question about anyone else?”

It doesn’t stop any of it. If anything, Kit thinks it might encourage his fellow townspeople, who tend to act like he’s being especially romantic when he tells them to shove their questions about Sage where the sun doesn’t shine. This makes Kit want to throttle them, want to scream, “It’s not a romance at all, you dolt, it’s a fake relationship for image repair and half the time I’m not even sure he likes me,” though, of course, he doesn’t. He bites his tongue and keeps his mouth shut and does his best to keep himself to himself.

It’s not as hard as it would usually be, because for the first time in years, Kit is busy. He gets flown out to Los Angeles twice more between his initial red carpet appearance and Thanksgiving: the first time to attend a different awards show, the second for a movie premiere. He and Sage don’t kiss again, though the paparazzi clamor for it. Sage doesn’t even seem to trust himself to get close to Kit, keeping a careful distance between them, and bringing Frankie both times he comes by to visit the bookshop. He’s developed the habit of ignoring Kit entirely to curl up with a novel in one of the leather chairs by the front window, Throgmorten—the traitor—always turning up to sit on his lap, purring, within a few minutes. This is both good and bad: bad because Sage isn’t talking to Kit, but great for business, which always picks up enormously when passersby can see him, standing out like a beacon of intrigue against the overstuffed shelves.

It’s awkward, but Kit doesn’t see any way to make it less awkward that wouldn’t involve discussing the situation, which Sage seems incredibly loath to do. This is problematic for a few reasons, not the least of which being that Kit is beginning to worry that their dinner with Wayne the Mysterious Investor is going to be a total shitshow. How exactly are they meant to convince this man that they’ve been together for months if Sage can’t be alone in a room with him? However, the few times Kit tries to bring it up, he’s shut down almost instantly, and Sage always flees moments after the topic is approached.