Jamie looks at me. His eyes are blue and bright and carrying something enormous, the weight of a first that is about tohappen, and the weight is visible because he is not hiding it. The walls are down. The checkpoint is off. The boy from Duluth is sitting on my couch with his whole self showing, unprotected, unperformed, and the vulnerability of it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
"I don't want to wait," he says.
He leans forward. The six inches close. His mouth finds mine.
The kiss is gentle and unpracticed and slightly off-center and it is the best kiss of my life.
His lips are warm. His hand comes up and touches my face, tentative, the touch of a person who has never touched another person's face in this context and who is discovering that faces are soft and warm and responsive, and the discovery is happening in real time, on my couch, in my apartment, and I am the person he's discovering it with.
I kiss him back. Carefully. Without urgency. The urgency is mine to manage because I have done this before and he has not, and the disparity requires patience, and the patience is not a sacrifice. The patience is a privilege. Being the person who gets to be here for this, for his first real kiss, for the moment when the unnamed thing becomes named and the name becomes physical, that is not a sacrifice. That is the most important thing I have ever been trusted with.
His other hand comes to my shoulder. The grip is firm. The grip says: don't go anywhere. I'm not going anywhere. I'm here. The glasses are off and the notebook is closed and the journalist is gone and the person is here, on this couch, with this boy, in this light.
He makes a sound. Small. Involuntary. The sound of a body that is experiencing something for the first time and that does not have the vocabulary to process it through any channel other than sound. The sound is a vowel, open and unformed, and ittravels from his mouth to mine and I feel it vibrate against my lips and the vibration is the most honest communication that has ever passed between us, more honest than any word in any hallway or any press conference or any notebook.
I pull back. Not far. An inch. Enough to see his face.
His eyes are closed. His hand is still on my face. His expression is the expression of a person who has just landed a jump they didn't know they could land, and the landing was clean, and the sound was right, and the body knew what to do even when the mind was terrified.
He opens his eyes.
"That was..." he starts.
"Yeah."
"That was nothing like prom."
I laugh. The laugh is the laugh of a man who is falling in love with a nineteen-year-old who just compared their first kiss to prom and found prom lacking, and the comparison is the funniest and most devastating thing anyone has ever said to me.
"Good," I say. "Prom is a low bar."
"The bar was underground. That was..." He touches his own mouth. The gesture is unconscious. The gesture of a person who is cataloguing a new sensation, the way he catalogues skating mechanics: with precision and wonder. "That was the first time my body and my brain agreed about something."
The sentence lands in my chest and stays there. The first time my body and my brain agreed. The first time the wanting and the being and the naming and the acting all pointed in the same direction. The first alignment.
"We go at your pace," I say again. "Whatever you want. Whatever you need. There's no timeline. There's no expectation. We go at your pace."
"My pace right now is: can we do that again?"
I kiss him again. This time his hand goes to the back of my neck, which is a gesture he learned from no one and which is instinctive and confident and sends a signal through my body that I manage by keeping my hands very deliberately on the safe territory of his shoulders. Because the pace is his. The pace is always his. And the pace right now is kissing on a couch in East Atlanta with the books and the amber light and the residual smell of jollof rice, and the pace is perfect.
We kiss until the kissing becomes its own kind of conversation, a language we're building together, his mouth learning the geography of mine, my hands learning the boundaries of what he's ready for (shoulders: yes; back: yes; the hem of his shirt: not yet, and the not-yet is communicated through a slight tensing that I register and respect immediately).
Eventually we stop. Not because the stopping is wanted but because the stopping is necessary. Because this is his first and the first should not be rushed, should not be consumed in a single evening, should be parceled and savored and returned to, because the returning is its own kind of joy.
He rests his forehead against mine. We breathe.
"Declan."
"Yeah."
"Thank you for leaving the beat."
"Thank you for making it worth leaving."
He smiles. Against my mouth. The smile is the real one, the one I saw in the hallway, the one that made me sit in my car for two minutes with the engine off. The smile that started everything.
"We go at my pace," he says. "But my pace is faster than you think."