Page 48 of Cut Off
“Why didn’t you?” she says.
There are a hundred answers to that question, and I’ve spent the better part of four years cycling through them, mostly at three a.m. in hotel rooms in cities I can’t remember. “Because just a touch of you made me feel too damn good.”
“Afraid it’d be a mistake?”
“Maybe. But it would’ve been the best mistake I ever made.”
The gym is still.
Outside, a delivery truck reverses and beeps. The A/C kicks on. Normal house sounds. Normal life sounds. Normal Wednesday morning in Dickens sounds, while I stand four feet from a woman in a sports bra who I’ve just told, out loud, that I’ve wanted to kiss for four years.
She looks at me a second longer, then walks toward the door.
I should take it back, say I didn’t mean it, except I did. Maybe I should apologize anyway.
But I don’t say anything because she stops walking and turns. She stands with the bottle of water tucked into her elbow, looking at me with a gaze so direct it spikes every last nerve ending I have.
It’s the look of a person recalculating. The look of someone who’s been running every simulation, every risk, every possible outcome, and just decided to fuck it.
She takes one step closer, then another. The distance between us is a thousand miles and also two feet, and it’s closing like a pressure change. I cannot, under any circumstances, move first. So I just stand there, watching her, hands still braced on the weight rack, body so full of adrenaline and want my hands shake.
She’s a full head shorter than me, but she stops close enough I can see the texture of her skin, the way a barely-there scar runs through her left eyebrow, the way her pupils are dilated and focused on me.
It’s not how I pictured it. Not at all.
I thought if this ever happened, it’d be a crash. Years of unsaid shit detonating at once, teeth and tongue. But for the longest time, nothing happens. Just a long stare. The kind that lives in the throat, not the eyes. Her lips are parted, and she’s breathing in that way you do when you’re trying not to pass out. I’m still not moving.
Then, with an exhale, Zoe tilts her chin. Just barely. Like a dare, and I don’t know what to do with that. I lower my head, like this is a game of chicken we’re both determined to lose.
Our lips are a breath apart. And then they’re not.
The kiss starts so soft it barely qualifies—more an accident, a brush of two people who both know exactly how much this might cost. Her mouth tastes like mountain spring water and mint and also like every fucking thing I’ve missed in my life. She kisses me slow, like she’s not sure I’ll let her, and that alone nearly does me in.
It’s slow for a long time.
Until it’s not.
The angle of her jaw, the set of her shoulders, the way her fingers knot into the cotton of my T-shirt. She pulls me down, properly this time, her hands come up to my face, and the kiss turns sharp and hungry. I lean into it, into her, my whole body pressed against hers. She makes a sound, low and furious, and it ends me.
Now comes the desperate collision.
I’ve been kissed before. I’ve been kissed against lockers and in bars and in the backs of Ubers and once on the floor of an Airbnb in Madrid. This is not like any of those. It’s like boiling water. Like every word we haven’t said is burning its way out of us. If I could live here, in this moment, I would.
She breaks away first.
She steps back, breathing hard, her hairline damp and her cheeks full of color, and for a second neither of us can look at each other.
When our eyes finally meet, her mouth curves up in a way I can’t read.
Then she walks to the door, turning back to say, “This didn’t happen.”
I stand with one hand braced on the weight rack, and I watch the door click shut behind her.
My gym, the room I built specifically to feel in control of things, has never felt so out of control.
I’m a wreck of a man with no plan, no strategy, no playbook, and absolutely no chance of getting any of this back into the box where it came from.
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