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It is barely even a kiss.
It is a kiss, for sure: their mouths touch, their lips flatten, smush--the slightest, lightest bit. Ever so gently: ever so gently.
There is no other way Ed could possibly do this, could ever have done it, would ever have done it. Not with this erratic, flaring butterfly. You can watch it, but if you touch it, it's gone. So don't touch it, just watch it. And do neither with a bare face.
(It's gone.)
Ed has never been good at not being loud, not being brazen. There is such a thing as too much, and Ed is it.
(--Stede, too, is too much, but in all the genuine, best ways; there is nothing wrong about Stede's genuineness.)
(If Stede is a butterfly, Ed is the moth. He lives to burn, and burn he will.)
You don't touch things like that with bare hands, your bare face. But Ed is. Ed cannot not touch this.
So it is barely even a kiss.
Stede looks at him with wonder, confusion, as if the act bespeaks a more terrible truth than the terrifying words that had come before. Perhaps, it does: to Stede, a man with a secret closet, it does. Not so to Ed, whose words already were the chain around his ankles. It's just a clarification. It's just making sure on which line of the sand he stands, before Stede mistakes it for anything else.
Ed is bare, now. There's nothing but bareness to him. He's lighter, feels like a butterfly but is the moth, and in the literal and metaphorical face of Stede Bonnet, he's all but forgotten who he is.
(--a curse. He, himself; the forgetting.)
(Just for once, he wants to believe.)
So he believes. And he touches. Fingers trembling on that face, mouths touching, lips smushing, slightly, so lightly. Ed is bare, Ed is gentle, Ed is burning. Stede is flaring, and Ed has caught fire.
It hurts more than his blackest memories ever have.
It is barely even a kiss.
The most violent things are often the gentlest.