Page 91 of Pining for You

“You know, I think I’m being convinced,” she says, looking at me, not the view. Our eyes meet, and then she looks down at my hands, which are empty at the moment.

“Don’t you want to film this?”

“Oh,” I say, but then shake my head. “No. Sometimes a camera just can’t do justice to a scene. It’s too beautiful.”

“Well, when you do get back to filming, and your personal statement, I wanted you to have this.”

She reaches into her bag and pulls out what she grabbed from her room. It’s a book.

Introduction to Modern Humanism.

“It’s one of my favorites,” she says, and that’s evident by the battered cover and dog-eared pages.

She shrugs and puts her hands in her pockets. I’ve given countless gifts in my life, and there’s always a scary moment—when you know you’ve put a little piece of yourself into whatever the thing is, and you just really hope the person is going to like it. Gift giving can be such a vulnerable act, and it’s dawning on me that she’s putting herself out there with me, again.

“Wow,” I say, running my hand over the worn cover.

Sometimes it takes me a whole year to land on the right gift. And here Eve is, handing me something so meaningful, so thoughtful and perfect, and we haven’t even known each other for forty-eight hours. It actually makes me tear up, and I work so hard to fight the feeling this time.

“Thank you, so much. Really,” I stammer finally. “I love it.”

She laughs and I look up.

“You haven’t even read a word yet,” she says.

“Well, sometimes you just know…,” I say, and when our eyes meet again, they lock.

“Anyway, lots of good stuff for your project,” she adds. “Or, ya know—whatever it is that your heart tells you to do.”

My heart. What my heart tells me to do.

“Maybe… I’d love to…” I want to tell her that I’d love to discuss it with her after I read it. That I want to hear everything that’s in her head—about humanism, and life, and the future, and anything else she wants to tell me.

But with the way she’s looking at me, with the sparkling stars behind her head that are becoming fainter by the moment against the sunrise, the question that actually comes out of my mouth is:

“Can I… kiss you?”

And oh my god, I might actually choke, because my snack cake heart totally stops and I can’t breathe. I mean, who even am I?

But before I can fully dissolve into a puddle of nerves and humiliation faster than Olaf in summer, Eve looks at me, presses her lips together for a split second, then brings back the smirk I’ve now seen so many times in the last two days.

Slowly and so freaking smoothly, she puts one hand on my hip. She finds my belt loop, and uses it to pull me closer. My stomach tightens like a drum at her touch. Even through my winter layers, there’s the heat of her. With her other hand, she takes mine and it is soft. And I am certain there hasn’t ever been anything softer in the entire universe. That is, until what she does next. Because what she does next is put her lips directly on my lips, and now I know for sure that is the softest thing I’ve ever felt in my life.

I sink into her lips so completely, except somehow, even as I’m sinking, I’m also floating. Like a cloud. Like a Christmas ghost. Like a twinkling star hovering above the top of a tree.

Eve obviously knows what she’s doing so I let her set the pace. The kiss starts slow, but then it’s like we find a rhythm, and everything that seemed to be happening so slowly goes into overdrive, and her hands are on my waist and my hands are in her hair, and I’m smiling and kissing her at the same time. I am so inside my body but also living outside it, watching the whole scene, observing it like a documentary, taking mental notes so I can rewind and replay later, again and again and again. The reality of it all is so much more magical than anything in my wildest dreams or scripts. And just like Christmas, so totally worth the wait.

But then, just as fast as it started, we’re interrupted. It’s her phone, buzzing loudly. Again.

Our lips break apart and I’m trying not to blush too much, but Eve seems to be trying so hard not to smile too much, so I’m pretty sure we are both struggling to have even the slightest bit of chill.

She pulls out her phone and fully laughs when she gets a look at the screen.

“Shit,” she says, and shows it to me. It’s a message from Tía:

Eve! Are you seriously on the ROOF right now? What is going through your head?! Their ride is here, and they’re waiting on you!

I laugh too as she stashes it back in her pocket. We’re still close. We’re so close and so still that now I can make out the little green flecks in her brown eyes, which I never could have seen before. Sparkles for days. And then even though we’re both still laughing, we try to manage the business of kissing just a little more. I wonder if it all still counts as the first kiss, or if now we’re onto a second and third.