Crossing the Line

I kissed him first, in the doorway of the Longshore office, before either of us had said anything that made it inevitable, because I’d spent four days rehearsing every version of not doing it and none of them had worked.

He went very still, the stillness I’d learned in him for weeks now and knew meant the opposite of what it looked like from the outside. Not withdrawal, but a man holding himself exactly where he was so as not to move too fast toward something he still half expected to be taken away. Then his hand came up along my jaw, careful, the same way he’d touched me in my kitchen four days earlier, and he kissed me back like he’d been waiting for permission he hadn’t quite believed he’d get.

The four days had been ordinary on the surface, which was exactly why I hadn’t trusted myself to…