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On the front porch of Melissa’s empty house, Gregory and Jacob stand together a little closer than necessary.
Gregory is lingering. He’s not going to come inside, though Melissa isn’t home, and Jacob doesn’t ask him to.
But Gregory is lingering, captivated by the way the automatic porch light shines off of Jacob’s hair, casts shadows on his skin. Gregory’s fingers twitch like they want to touch something. Someone. He tucks his hands into his pockets.
He can’t place the look Jacob is giving him. Interest, maybe. Affection.
Fascination.
Is it the same look Gregory is giving him?
Gregory’s heart beats steadily, but he can feel it.
He kissed Janine in a room full of flowers, transported to a different world, one that wasn’t so complicated, where it was just him and her and they had to touch.
Now, under the dim artificial light of a house Gregory’s never gone inside, he feels outside of the world he’s stuck in, the one with things he can and can’t do. The one where he’d never ask a question like, “Have you ever kissed a woman?”
He doesn’t really mean to ask it now either.
But he does.
He doesn’t know where it comes from, what he’s going for, what kind of conversation he’s trying to incite. Maybe he’s hoping Jacob will figure it out for him.
Except now all he wants to do is shove the words back in his mouth.
Jacob’s eyes go wide, lit up with glittering shock, and Gregory opens his mouth, closes it once, closes it twice, trying to get words out until finally: “Sorry, I don’t, I don’t know why I—I’m just gonna—”
“Wait,” Jacob says abruptly, even though Gregory hasn’t actually made to go anywhere. “Wait, it’s okay.” Oh, cool. He does understand. He knows what Gregory’s getting at. Gregory can’t wait to find out what it is.
He doesn’t move. Jacob gives him a small, slow smile. Gregory stares at his lips, the way they move when he says, “I have kissed a woman. We didn’t really go farther than that because it turned out I am, in fact, gay, but…yes. I’ve kissed a woman.” Jacob swallows. His voice is velvet-soft when he asks, “Have you ever kissed a man?”
Gregory feels a shock of realization—this is what you were getting at, wasn’t it?—course through him so violently that he almost recoils, but he stays statue-still. He shakes his head slowly. “No,” he says, voice low. “No.”
“Do you want to?” Jacob asks, almost in a whisper.
Gregory might be in over his head, or maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s wanted to do this for a while, in quiet moments at Rubenstein’s or in Gregory’s apartment or when Jacob is laughing and Gregory wonders what it would be like—
Gregory says, “Maybe.”
He’s not sure if he took a step forward at some point, or if Jacob did, but they’re even closer than they were before. The cool breeze around them doesn’t feel cold anymore.
“I mean, if you want to, you might as well give it a shot, before…” Jacob trails off, smiling a little, and then says, “you know.”
Gregory doesn’t know. All he knows is that he wants to close the gap between them. He wants to get this…this thing, the thing that made him ask that question, the thing that makes him look at Jacob like he’s looking at him right now, out of his system.
(Kissing Janine didn’t get her out of his system. Actually, it did the opposite.
It wove her even deeper into the wiring of his soul.)
“I don’t want to use you, man,” Gregory says, because he’d be the worst friend in the goddamn world if he said anything else, because he hasn’t said, I don’t want to kiss just any man, I want to kiss you, and the words refuse to escape him, and he can’t imagine what that lack of context sounds like on the other side of this moment.
“It’s fine, Gregory,” Jacob responds. His voice is soft, but it’s not unsure. Gregory doesn’t think too hard about the look in his eyes, because he suspects that if he does he’ll see that Jacob needs to get something out of his system too. “I know who you are, I know what we’re doing. I’m honored, really. Anyway, I’m sure I can trust you not to fall in love with me, and you can do the same, just, you know. Vice versa.”
Yeah, of course.
Gregory doesn’t say that, too busy moving forward to press his lips against Jacob’s gently, firmly. Jacob leans into the kiss, running a hand down Gregory’s arm.
Gregory doesn’t know when he plans to stop, break the kiss, never do this again, and he doesn’t have to, because Jacob pulls away first.
Jacob’s face is flushed and his lips are glossy, and Gregory feels his stomach swoop and then settle into the knowledge that it’s over.
He swallows. “Okay,” he breathes out, finally, uselessly.
Jacob gives Gregory a small, distant smile, reaching to cup his face, ghosting a thumb over his cheekbone. “Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Gregory’s lips tingle. He stays still because otherwise he might do something unwise. He clears his throat. He says, “And tomorrow we’ll just…?”
“Live,” Jacob says airily. “We don’t need to talk about it. We both know what this was, so…it’s fine. We’re fine.”
Gregory nods. “Right,” he murmurs.
He stands on the porch until Jacob goes inside.
The click of the door closing makes his chest ache with the finality of it all, though nothing ever started.
The whole point of this is that nothing ever started, and nothing ever will.
Nothing ever does, because the day after the kiss, Jacob is bouncing around him in the break room, chattering about the book he’s reading, calling him silly nicknames, and Gregory is laughing, and if he thinks about Jacob’s lips on his, if his breath catches when their knees brush, if his heart flutters at the sweet curve of Jacob’s smile, if his mouth goes dry at the sight of Jacob’s body in motion, it doesn’t consume him.
And then Gregory and Janine finally, finally close the space between them, and the kiss Gregory shared with Jacob isn’t on his mind much anymore, though he doesn’t forget it.
Of course he doesn’t forget it.
He keeps the kiss in a little box of treasured memories in his head, and every once in a while he’ll take it out, turning it over in his hands like a precious stone before carefully putting it back where it belongs with all the other little pretty things from the past.
That’s what the kiss is: a pretty thing from the past, like his feelings for Jacob will eventually be, because he does have feelings for Jacob, ones that only time will get out of his system. He can admit it to himself at this point, mostly because the point is moot.
He kissed Jacob because he wanted to, but he’s glad it never went farther. He’d never forgive anyone who treated his best friend like a consolation prize, not even himself, and that’s exactly what Jacob would’ve been, considering where Gregory is now: in full, terrifying, exhilarating love with Janine.
He’s in love with her without reservations, in a way he truly believes is going to last forever, and even though he loves Jacob deeply and truly believes he will forever, it’s not the same.
As much as he loves Jacob, he’s only a little in love with him, and he wants Jacob to be somebody’s first choice.
Gregory doesn’t regret the kiss, though. He can’t bring himself to, in spite of all the ways it could’ve gone wrong, because it didn’t go wrong.
It was a good kiss.
The perfect ending to a love story that never happened.