Kiss Me Like That
In the dark of his bedroom, Dane lay on his stomach, gazing at the little heap of silver on the mattress by his head. He stirred a finger in the coils—It’s a kilo-koil, Diane said—picked out an end and stretched the chain long. Then gathered it all in his fist.
He’d lied downstairs, of course. Saskia didn’t have Nomi’s necklace. She would one day, but not yet. Dane still needed it. It was one of a dozen little psychological arrangements a mourning father and daughter had made. Another one being Dane would wait a year before he started dating.
He rolled on his back and put the bunched necklace into the hollow at the base of his throat.
Was that the moment you three fell in love?
They’d long been in love. The moment Nomi, clothed in her silver again, fell onto Dane’s chest and Ethan fell on her back, love went from abstract to actual. From spiritual to physical.
Dane closed his eyes and his hands reached into the past. Time threw a veil over memories, softening and blurring recollections, but not this one.
Dane remembered everything. He could recreate every detail.
How Nomi’s spine rolled up, vertebra on vertebra, her chin lifting last as she fell back onto Ethan.
Ethan took her. Got her cradled in the crook of one arm while the other hand spread wide across her throat in a way that made Dane’s breath cease.
Ethan was holding her like a lover. Strong and sure.
That wide palm moving up to the side of her face, thumb stroking a cheekbone.
He was going to kiss her. You couldn’t hold someone’s face like that and not kiss them.
Kiss me like that, Diane said. Kiss me. Please hold and kiss me like that. I want to look like him and feel like her…
Then Ethan did kiss Nomi, but not her mouth. His head bowed and he pressed his lips between her eyebrows, his hand in her hair now, thumb stroking her temple. “I love you,” he whispered.
“I love you.” She kissed his face all over, saying I love you. He wiped the tears from under her eyes, brought her body up, then gently pushed it over into Dane’s arms.
Her hands went to his face. “Oh my God, I love you.”
His hands went to her head. “Nomi…” And he could say no more.
Dane drew a pillow toward him. He took a corner in his hands and kissed it.
He could feel her heartbeat in his mouth.
He could taste her pulse and her tongue was on his and her crying mouth was on him, in him, for him.
Her hands dropped from Dane’s face and her arms wrapped around his neck.
He could feel her bound chest against his broken chest as his fingers traced the silver at her neck and then he reached around her and took hold of Ethan’s shirt, pulling him against Nomi’s back, pulling him through Nomi.
Nomi was crying again, but she was smiling, too, the apples of her cheeks curled into Dane’s palms. Her mouth left his and she put her face in the curve of his neck. Over her shoulder, Dane and Ethan now looked at each other.
Ethan took Dane’s face and drew it close.
While Dane had seized and devoured Nomi’s kiss, now he instinctively held his desire in check and let Ethan come to him, feel him out.
This kiss was slower, softer, a little uncertain.
More like putting their shyest smiles together and breathing.
Still Dane could feel Ethan’s pulse pumping hard and fast, and in just his lips Dane could taste an intense vulnerability.
So Dane said it first: “I love you.”
“I’m scared how much I love you,” Ethan said.
“No, don’t be afraid,” Dane whispered against his pillowed lover, just as he whispered into Ethan’s mouth while Nomi held Dane tight and breathed against his neck.
“Don’t be afraid.”
They held each other tight, rocking on their knees in the soft grass.
“Don’t be afraid.”
The past and the present and the future.
“Don’t be afraid.”
Hearts and brains and bodies. A threefold energy taking turns to come in from the side and cross over the center, weaving them into a braid of silver.
“Don’t be afraid.”
Three pairs of hands and each had something to hold.
Three mouths and each had tasted abandonment.
Three hares who had been left at firehouses, thrown in the garbage and put in the cruel hands of strangers.
But one at a time, immediately or eventually, they’d made their way to Schoenfeld’s.
Now they were binding themselves into a cord, bonding their lives.
Putting their heads together, each turning an ear into the wind of the others’ stories, until it was not three stories but one.
And in the clearing ringed by wisteria, at the base of a stone that had no business being there, the three hares claimed each other.
Unafraid, they began to spin.