Three. Exhale.
I breathe out.
Hold.
Somehow, I do.
One.
Dom is almost to me, and I’ve never been more scared in my entire life.
Two.
He’s never looked bigger than he does right now. I’m just a little guy.
Three.
The roaring sounds of the bar come back.
“I d-didn’t mean to i-i-interrupt,” I tell him as he reaches me. My voice breaks. “I’m s-s-sorry. I’ll g-g-go and—”
He kisses me.
In my tiny little world, in my tiny little brain, everything explodes in colors and shapes and stars, and all I see are stars, and they fill the world until I’m sure everything around us will blow away like so much dust. He moves his lips over mine, gripping the side of my face, and it’s him, it’s him, oh my God, it’s Dom, and he’s got a hold on me like he’ll never let me go, he’ll never let me leave again, and I think to myself, filled with so much wonder, This is nice, but I should probably kiss him back so he doesn’t think it’s like kissing a dead fish. And I do, and it’s awkward and wet and oh so perfect, and when he touches his tongue to mine, I understand fireworks and supernovas and life itself for just one brief, shining moment. This is what life is, these moments of fireworks and exploding stars and synapses blazing. These are the moments that lift us up when we think we can’t take another step. These are the moments that put us back together when we’ve fallen apart. These are the moments that make us whole.
It’s not a matter of breathing.
It’s who we are.
He pulls away, but barely. His eyes fix on mine. “I’ve been waiting,” he says almost angrily in that beautiful broken voice, “for the look you just gave me. Is this clear enough for you, Tyson? Do you understand now?”
Well, no, I don’t understand anything at all because I’m pretty sure I’m brain-dead and have an erection in the middle of a gay bar fifteen hundred miles from home after having the first kiss to end all first kisses. “Flarg,” I say rather eloquently. “Gah.”
“Good,” he says. “Just so we’re clear.”
He lets go of my face and turns on his heel, disappearing into the crowd.
“Gah,” I say again. No one seems to notice.
THE FINAL Sage:
It’s hours later and I still haven’t quite recovered from what I’ve determined to be a life-altering event of a magnitude that I can’t even begin to understand.
Dom and I haven’t said much to each other since we left the bar. To be honest, I haven’t said much to anyone as my speaking ability appears to have been temporarily destroyed, and I can do no more than make grunting noises to questions that I’m not quite hearing. It probably doesn’t help that whenever I look at Dom, he arches an eyebrow at me, asking me a question I cannot remotely comprehend.
Funny thing, though. I can breathe. It’s not even an issue.
And now everyone’s gone to bed and Dom is in our room, and I’m putting off following him in there because I’m convinced that either I’ve constructed what happened in the bar as some sort of elaborate fantasy and it didn’t happen, or it did happen and Dom is waiting for me in the bedroom so we can talk and kiss and maybe (probably!) get down to business, and all I can picture is that huge fucking dildo in the drawer and what if he wants to use that? On me? Or on him? Do I have to put a condom on it? Is it even clean? Can you get STDs from rubber dongs?
Yeah, I know. I sound ridiculous. But I can’t help it.
So instead of taking charge and getting what I’ve been waiting for all this time, I’m sitting in the dark in the living room on Sandy’s couch replaying that kiss in my head over and over and over again. Stupid, stupid, stupid—
The light switches on overhead.
“Gah,” I say. “Gah flarg!”
“Because that makes sense,” Sandy says with a yawn. “I thought I heard some noise out here. What are you still doing up? Can’t sleep? Me either. Takes me a while to calm down after a show.”