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It was a question she’d found herself asking since she was eight years old. The question never changed but the context shifted with every birthday, every competition, every city they lived in.
At eight, she wondered if it would be awkward and sweaty and really what were kisses supposed to feel like? She could smell his breath when they skated and it usually smelled like peanut butter and she wasn’t sure if that would affect in some way. She wondered if she ate chocolate that their kiss would taste like a peanut butter cup.
She discovered the answer at the Ilderton carnival that year. It did. But it was still sweaty.
At thirteen, she became fixated on his lips. She couldn’t quite pinpoint when the change in how she thought of him had happened, but it had. Mostly, she realized, it was weird that it wasn’t weird. It helped that he still looked just as young as she did; it meant that he was still Scott. He may have been fifteen and acting like it, but he was still gangly, all skinny limbs and goofy smile. She wondered if he would kiss her as softly as his lips looked that they would.
Then in the closet at Terry Shipman’s fourteenth birthday party, she found out that his lips trembled hesitantly against hers, and he wouldn’t look her in the eye afterward.
At seventeen, she wondered if he would still kiss her like he wasn’t supposed to be doing it. If he would have that same ashamed pride he’d carried with him out of that closet in 2002. She wondered if he kissed like Fedor, like it was battle that he wanted to win. She wondered if he did other things like Fedor too. She hoped not.
When he pressed her up against the door of his truck one summer night late that August, she got her answer. He did everything different than Fedor.
At nineteen, she wondered why she had ever kissed him at all. He didn’t deserve it. He didn’t deserve anything at all. Especially that last soft kiss just as he slipped out of her bed the night before she left Canton for the surgery. His kiss had said one thing. His actions said another.
Through hot angry tears she swore that she’d never kiss him again.
At twenty-one, she wanted to take that back. They’d won a gold medal and her life had become a dizzying whirlwind of appearances and talking and performing and he was the only stationary thing she could see. It was strange but part of her felt as though kissing him was the only thing that would slow down the world.
And then it was October and they were in California for All That Skate LA and there had been pizza and there had been beer and she was under him on the couch and she didn’t really remember but she thinks she was glad she broke that promise to herself.
At twenty-four, all she wanted was to feel something that wasn’t pain or anger. She thought that if she could just get his mouth on hers and his hands around her and him in her then maybe the pain in her legs and the betrayal in her mind would be quiet - just for a little while.
After Four Continents, she did. It didn’t.
At twenty-six, she tried not to think about him at all - let alone what kissing him was like. Most of the time her talent for denial and repression and every other skill that had gotten her through her adolescence in Canton, Michigan worked just fine. But there were nights, when she’d wake from a dream, lips tingling and skin sweaty, where she couldn’t help it. With her eyes closed against reality and her hand sliding into her shorts, she’d let her mind run through all of the places that he could kiss her.
In Scotland, she let him.
At twenty-seven, it was all she thought about. They spent their days wrapped up in each other - physically, mentally, emotionally - preparing for their return to competition and allowing themselves to relax into the relationship they’d denied themselves of for years. She felt intoxicated by him all of the time, drunk on his kisses and aching for more as soon as they ended. She’d never felt anything like it before.
Every night as soon as they made it into her apartment, regardless of how tired or hungry they were, he would find the nearest flat surface - door, floor, counter, it didn’t matter - and he would kiss her so deeply and so thoroughly that she couldn’t help but melt into him, at his mercy, until he decided that he was done.
At twenty-nine, it became increasingly common for him to kiss her teeth. She told him she was sorry, but he responded fiercely that she should never apologize for smiling so much. It wasn’t like she could help it anyway. She smiled her way through Stars On Ice, she smiled her way through Fantasy On Ice, through France, through prep for the tour, and every time they performed this wonderful, joyous thing they had created together.
Before every show he taunted that he was going to kiss her during the show, just because he could. She didn’t believe him. He waited until London.
At thirty-two, she was livid when someone leaked a photo of their first kiss as a married couple to the press. They had done everything they could do to keep the ceremony as private as possible, but it turned out that there really was no fighting the power of the internet and public interest in their relationship. After seeing it splashed across every possible kind of social media available, she realized that she couldn’t quite remember what it had felt like in that moment in front of everyone they loved, and she began to think of it as yet another part of them that belonged to the world.
She tried not let it show how cute she found it that Scott had started saying, “you may now kiss the bride” every time he went to kiss her, just so they could have more private first kisses than public ones.
At thirty-five, kissing was the last thing on her mind. Sleep, that was a high priority; a shower would be nice too. The soft smell of baby could wipe away many discomforts, but she really was not built for so little sleep. Through tears, she would insist that taking care of a newborn was harder than anything that she had done in her life. Some days she was inconsolable. The doctor passed them pamphlets about postpartum depression, Scott reached out to JF to ask for advice on someone she might be able to talk to, and she got up every morning and hoped that one day she would feel like a mother.
And every day he made sure that for every kiss the baby got, Tessa got two.
At seventy-five, she had long since lost count of how many kisses there had been. She thought that by then she had experienced every kind of kiss that life had to offer.
At eighty-eight, she realized that there was one more.