Page 31 of Heartbeat

“Except—” he continued.

“What?”

“I’ve medicated before,” he admitted. “I’ve been around this stuff my whole life, you know? None of it is taboo.”

“Yeah, but—”

“There’s something else too,” he said quietly.

“What?”

He took a step closer to me. “When you say my name?” He slowly shook his head and said softly, “It’s like all I want to hear is that. You, saying my name.”

“Ethan, I—”

I didn’t finish. He didn’t let me finish. As I spoke, Ethan took another step forward, put one hand on my waist, and kissed me in a way I was left utterly breathless.

It was a single kiss, one that felt as though it was my very first kiss, ever. He slowly pulled away and pressed his forehead against mine, keeping his eyes closed.

“I knew it,” he whispered.

“What?”

“That you tasted good.”

Chapter Eight

First Kiss

My first kiss happened when I was nine years old, at Brian Harris’s birthday party, during a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven. When my turn came, the bottle landed in front of Amanda Salazar—the prettiest girl in school. I remember how nervous I was, during those seconds, when I had to stand up and lead the way into the incredibly small closet, where we were supposed to stay for the seven minutes. She looked beautiful, my hands were sweaty, and I kept wanting to do it right, even though I didn’t really know exactly what doing it right meant—or doing it wrong, for that matter. We tried to make conversation for a bit until I awkwardly asked her if I could kiss her, and she said yes.

I swear, I almost died.

I leaned in and clumsily placed one hand on her shoulder while our lips met. To this day, what always impressed me most were two things: how grown up I felt the very second we pulled away from each other, and how much prettier Amanda Salazar looked after that incredibly tender, albeit all-around mess of a kiss. It was a lovely experience that turned into a beautiful memory. But the one thing that didn’t happen during those minutes inside Brian Harris’s basement closet somehow remained with me ever since.

My heart hadn’t raced.

I didn’t know why, but ever since I was a kid, especially after that party, I seemed to have always been in search of just that. That time, that moment in time when my heart would start to race and all but leap from my chest, and I’d be in love. Maybe it was juvenile, too innocent, and possibly irrelevant in the real world, but it was what I figured love would be like—at least, it was how I pictured it in my head growing up.

Time passed, and I had my second and third kisses. Eventually, I met Summer, and we were friends for years before it turned into anything else. By the time we were attending Magnolia together, it was only a matter of time before we started something. So, on a hot summer night, as I walked her home from a party, I leaned in and kissed one of my best friends. We both laughed at how incredibly weird it was, but we also seemed unable to keep ourselves from doing it again. After three weeks of hiding it from everyone, we finally became a couple, and for the two years that followed, we were (mostly) happy.

My heart hadn’t raced though. Not really.

Ultimately, long before we even thought of breaking up, I decided my heart not going faster at the sight of someone didn’t mean I wasn’t in love. There was more to it than the way a heart beats, and it really wasn’t the only reason people fell in love. Love, after all, was basically a neurochemical con job, and as much as it might sound nice to claim a person could be responsible for irregular heartbeats, odds were there was as much a chance it was a faulty valve and time to see a physician, as there was a chance your brain had been fooled into believing it was something else.

*

Ethan and I kissed for the better part of two hours. I never knew kissing could be like that. In fact, everything that had happened during the past two hours was something I had no idea could be possible. I’d never been so conscious of it before either. So aware of everything I was feeling, so resolute about what I wanted to feel, and so amazed at how good another person could feel.

We were on the sofa, Ethan lying on his back, me on my side, with my head on his shoulder. As he held me, he lifted my right hand and brought it close to his left as if comparing the two, but all I could focus on was how strong his heartbeat was and how it sometimes beat faster, depending on whether or not I was kissing him.

“If you keep doing that, I’m gonna fall asleep,” I told him, as he stroked my hair.

He didn’t stop.

“Are we talking about this?” he asked quietly, running his thumb along the scar on my wrist.

The thin, straight, pink line, slightly swollen still, went down about two inches from my wrist. Most people hardly noticed unless they looked hard enough. Ethan was looking hard enough. He’d been rubbing it gently for the last few minutes, and it seemed as though he’d finally decided to acknowledge it.

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