breathe now.
“Pourquoi?”
Why?
Why is it hard to breathe when you’re standing so close that it would take barely a movement forward until we—
“Arrête de penser,” he whispers.
Stop thinking.
“Dis-moi ce que tu veux que je fasse,” he says.
Tell me what you want me to do.
“Oui.” It’s a sound and a breath and a word, and everything in between and everything else.
It’s—
“Say it again.”
But I change it. “S’il te plaît.” Please. Only in French, it’s literally, if it pleases you. Which is so much better than just please. But it’s the same thing right now. Because I want it to be something that pleases him, because it would please me and—
“Tu es certaine?”
There is no word for how very certain I am. So instead of speaking, I part my lips and nod.
His eyes widen, and he bites his bottom lip.
If he takes a step back, if he breaks our locked gaze, I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know how we’ll move on from this moment, from being so close, from almost—
“Arrête.” His voice is barely a whisper.
There’s a moment, a moment that lasts, that extends and separates into two moments and then four, eight, and sixteen. And then shoots back, like an elastic pulled too far, hurling toward us.
And suddenly his hands are cupping my jaw, gently, and his lips are crushing mine. Like it’s not close enough, like as close as he gets it’s still not enough. And it’s not like that night at the bar, our noses bumping. His glasses are there but I don’t notice them, because his lips are the chapped Zeke lips I’ve been dreaming about, and I feel like everything is swirling around us, like everything is tilting and running and jumping and flying. The whole world is flying.
My fingers bury themselves in his hair and I’m sure I’m thinking somewhere in the back of my brain that is shouting Oui! Oui! Oui! Oui! that I need to hold on tight. That with all this flying and spinning and rocketing, I might fall. That he might move back. That we might hurtle to the ground.
Only when he does back up, he’s pulling me with him, our lips still intertwined, our bodies so close, so close. And he moves back, tiny step by tiny step until I feel the jolt of the back of his legs hitting my bed, and slowly, slowly, slowly, without breaking our connection, he inches down until he’s sitting and I’m sitting on top of him, one knee on each side.
Just like in the movie.
Only I’m wearing a hell of a lot more clothing than she was.
I pull my head back just the slightest bit, because I’m not leaving, I’m just checking. “Tell me this isn’t about the movie.”
“What?” It’s so hard to get the words out, and I can tell by the dazed expression on his face that it’s just as hard for him to understand them.
I have no idea what language I’m even speaking except it’s the language of please tell me this isn’t a terrible mistake.
“Tell me you aren’t doing this because of the movie. Because of what we watched. Because of—” Because of that crazy feeling in your body when you see the things we just saw. The reason that movie is probably rated NC-17 in the United States, the reason Marianne warned us.
“I’m doing this,” he says, pausing to kiss me again, his lips opening until the words are spoken directly into my mouth, my lungs, my body, “because I’ve wanted to do it for the last month. I’ve wanted to do it ever since you sat beside me in the common room, all convinced that we had nothing in common but the number of letters in our names. I’ve wanted to do it every time you said eff instead of fuck, every time you snort when you laugh, every time you say merde and I know you mean it. I’ve wanted to do it each time we’ve held hands. I’ve wanted to pull you closer and grab your other hand and kiss you until you stop complaining about baseball. I’ve wanted to do it each time we’ve walked through campus pretending we’re in Paris, during each meal we’ve shared, each movie we’ve seen together. So no, I’m not doing this because of the movie. I’m doing it because I simply don’t have the strength not do it anymore.”
“Merde.”
The silence sits between us, not uncomfortable but present. “I never thought that first kiss was a mistake,” I