Kiss Her Once for Me (56)

My stomach clenches again at those two fingers, at her closeness and the smell of her skin. At the thought of her picking out art that would live on my body forever.

“What’s the story behind your tattoos?”

Jack takes a step back and surveys her own arms. “What, all of them?”

“Your favorite ones.”

She points to her forearm, where there are three parallel waves. “This was actually the first one I ever got. I was seventeen, but a buddy of mine had a brother who did it for me. I was on the swim team in high school. It was pretty much the only reason I went to school, so I could be allowed to compete. Oh, and this….” She twists around to point to the Mount Hood tattoo on her bicep. “This was my first legal tattoo. I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest my whole life, and there’s literally nothing better than a sunny day in Portland, when the mountain is out. And this one.”

She twists again, giving me an unencumbered view of her long, lean neck, of the taut muscle between her jaw and her shoulder. “I got this one when I was twenty-one, right after I came out.” She’s pointing to a picture frame with two women kissing inside it.

“Wait. You didn’t come out until you were twenty-one?”

Jack slouches back toward the air dryer. “Nope.”

“Oh. I guess I just assumed, since you grew up here in Portland, that it must’ve been easier for you….”

“I think it can be difficult to come out no matter where you live,” she says with a shrug. “And technically, I grew up in Lake Oswego, which is like the Orange County of Portland.”

I stare at the story on her skin, the story I want to read and memorize by heart. “Was it hard because of your strict parents?”

“No. My parents don’t care that I’m gay. I have a grandpa who was a dick about it, but he’s just generally a dick about everything, so I don’t really care about his opinion. Figuring things out is just hard, you know?” She shrugs one shoulder, the tattoos dancing on her skin. “Look, I played a lot of sports, cut off all my hair, and insisted on going by Jack from a pretty young age, so I knew that people were speculating about my sexuality behind my back. Sophomore year of high school, I forced my best friend to watch The L Word with me, because I thought that would be the moment it all clicked.”

She somehow steps even closer to me, so it’s the heat of her body I feel even more than the heat of the air dryer. “But no one on that show really looked like me, and basically all the characters ever thought about and talked about was sex, so after a few episodes I was convinced I couldn’t possibly be a lesbian, because I wasn’t thinking about sex at all in high school. All I thought about was swimming and smoking weed and figuring out how to smoke more weed without damaging my swim times. I knew I wasn’t into guys, but I wasn’t actually sure if I was into girls, either. I didn’t even have my first crush until I was twenty. Is that…” She finally lowers her voice to accommodate her proximity, the almost-whisper of the words flickering against my throat. “Is that too honest?”

“No!” I say, too loudly, too enthusiastically—being altogether too much and completely incapable of restraining myself. Was it possible to have a hole inside you, cookie-cuttered into the shape of a person you hadn’t met yet? Because that’s how it felt when I talked to Jack. We were nothing alike and everything alike and— “No, not at all! You can never be too honest with me.”

Jack’s fiery eyes flash in the fluorescent lighting of the bathroom. “I guess that’s the rule of the game….” She lifts her right hand, like she might reach out for the tip of my braid, but lets it drop before we touch.

And I, like a bold idiot, do what I’ve wanted to all day. I push the wet clump of hair off her forehead. Her skin is clammy beneath my fingers, but she leans into the touch. It hits me, all at once, that none of the past six hours have felt like friendship. Jack is right here, close enough I can almost taste her, and Jack isn’t a footstool. She’s not just some person who’s being nice to me because I’m having a bad Christmas Eve.

“Are you… I mean, have you ever considered…?”

“If I’m aromantic or asexual?” she fills in for me, her smile widening. Her body arches, and our hips line up beneath the air dryer, parallel but not touching. “I have. I think I was just a late bloomer, though.”

She’s close, so close, I would barely have to move to kiss her. She would barely have to move if she wanted to kiss me. Her fingers come up to wrap around a loose strand of hair escaping from my braid. “I’m demi,” I say. Then, stupidly, I clarify, “Sexual. Not demiromantic. Or a demigirl. Or a demigod. Like Hercules.”

She doesn’t move away from me, but she does release my hair. “I didn’t think you were coming out to me as the mythological hero Hercules.”

“Sorry, I don’t always know what other people know about the asexual spectrum. I don’t experience sexual attraction like most people do, but I wanted to tell you because—” Because you look like you’re about to kiss me, and I want you to, so badly it aches. And I’m terrified of what that means, so soon. It’s only been six hours.

“Because although I really want to kiss you right now,” I force myself to admit, “I also don’t want to kiss you. Not yet.”