Cold Kiss

say no to kissing.
    I have so little to give him. I hadn’t considered that—I thought I was giving him everything he could ever want that July night, candlelight hot beneath my palms as I chanted. For once, I didn’t think I was being selfish.
    I’m wrong a lot. Anyone will tell you.
    Anyway, I miss it, the kissing, the comfortable weight of his arm around my shoulders as we walked home from school, the clean smell of his sweat after he’d been playing guitar with Becker and Ryan in Becker’s basement, all warm, musky boy. I miss him, too, when I’m away from him all day.
    “You remember the first time?” he says. He’s laying me down, and the sheet is cold through my sweater, slightly damp in the October night air. His hands are even cooler, smooth and solid as marble, and I shiver when he runs a finger over my cheekbone. “Remember when you kissed me?”
    He asks me things like this all the time now. The first movie we went to (a terrible horror movie that made me laugh so hard, I choked on a piece of popcorn), the first time I met his parents (a Friday in late December, in the close, overheated crush of the drugstore, where everyone was buying bows and foil-wrapped chocolate Santas), the song that was playing on my iPod the first time he called me (the Brobecks’ “Visitation of the Ghost”).
    He likes it when I tell him the stories out loud, and goes still as he listens—too still, silent. His eyes are the only things that move, watching my face, my mouth, as if he’s trying to picture what happened so he can hold on to the memories.
    I worry that he’s trying to remember what those moments felt like, what he felt like then. One day he’s going to understand that he’s not that boy anymore.
    “It was three weeks after we met,” I tell him, whispering even though no one can hear us way up here. I twine my fingers in his, holding tight. Even now, his hand is familiar, huge around mine, the long bones of his fingers sturdy. “We were outside the library, and it was almost dark and really cold. You put your algebra book down on the ledge so you could wrap your scarf around my neck, and I grabbed your hands and pulled you down and kissed you. Right in front of Tommy Gellar and that freak cheerleader he was sleeping with.”
    It’s not romantic the way I tell it, but Danny smiles anyway, and the hard focus in his eyes softens. “You tasted like Juicy Fruit,” he says, and rests his forehead against mine. “I remember that.”
    I do, too. I remember so much more than I tell him, because it makes me hot and uncomfortable to say some things out loud, even now. There was the way I could feel the length of his thigh against mine while we went over his tragic attempt at explaining the symbolism in The Glass Menagerie . The warm, sort of spicy smell of him in his layered T-shirts. The electric hum beneath my skin when he leaned close to ask me a question and his breath whispered over my cheek.
    If I’d wanted to, I could have lifted right out of my chair and touched the ceiling that night, just sitting beside him in the library. And when I kissed him, opened my mouth to taste him, I shut my eyes to find the darkness melted into old gold.
    I still have that scarf, tucked away in a torn cardboard box under my bed.
    “I would have kissed you, you know,” he says, and slides his palm along my ribs, ticking off each one with his thumb. “If you hadn’t kissed me first.”
    I believe him. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. I’ve always been a step ahead of him, even when I don’t know where I’m going, or where I might take him.
    The house is dark when I let myself in the back door. It’s almost eleven, a school night, and Robin’s probably up in her room talking on the phone. I cross through the kitchen and glance into the living room, where my mom is curled on the sofa, lights out and the blue glare of the TV flickering over her face. I freeze for a second—she’s usually asleep by now these days, at least since she broke up with Tom.
    Her boyfriends never last long. I wonder if they get discouraged when they see the picture of my dad on the mantel. Even though he’s been gone for ten years, that picture never moves. Mom says it’s there for Robin and me, but I see her looking at it, too.
    Memories of Dad are what I couldn’t bear to have Danny become—a faded, flickering impression of a stubbled cheek scratching my face when he hugged me, the pine scent of aftershave, the low