The Bed and Breakfast and The Kiss
That night, there were five of us. Sean brought his girlfriend, with whom I shared a very tumultuous history. That history floated between us whenever we were in the same room and it was readily detectable by anyone. Because of this, I rarely saw the two of them at the same time. But it wasn’t to save us the discomfort that Sean avoided these situations. Between the lines of a friendship, I was a reminder that the girl he loved had been with other men before him.We got a room in a bed and breakfast for no reason other than its hot-tub. Midnight, I read the guest book in our room while Sean and his girlfriend lay on the bed. Eva and Tom played War, a card game I had played thousands of time as a child.
Page after page of the guest book was signed by people who had proposed to or been proposed to in the same room the five of us currently shared. I had a brief sense of synchronicity which passed before it be could discerned from déjà vu. Some time later, wet from the tub, clumsy from the liquor, we walked the superficially cozy hallways of the building. The three other rooms in the building wre unoccupied. The second floor consisted of our room along with one other couple’s suite similar to the ours. There were subtle differences, however, in the “props” that decorated the rooms, crochet pillows, tin figurines of men riding horse driven carriages, various paintings depicting safe, easy scenes such as a field of wheat or a long, unwinding road through a forest. Obviously, rooms such as these are themed to provide an undertone of comfort and relief, perhaps reminiscent of one’s innocent youth. For reasons I couldn’t identify, that hue of comfort was slightly thicker in this room and I briefly wished that we had gotten this room instead of the other. I found its guestbook beside the bed. It was in rough shape, with half of its cover missing and the binder creased a hundred times. I opened it, expecting to hear more stories of young fantasy-love that only exists within the safe walls of a bed-and-breakfast. Oddly, the guestbook had no entries.
“Hey guys, there’s candy down here.” Tom called. I leaned my head into the less comfortable room to make sure Sean and Allison were aware of the candy. For a moment I stumbled. The two were entwined, watching a movie. Beside the bed, where I had sat moments before, on her stomach, propped up with her elbows, Eva was reading the guestbook.
The three of us descended the wooden staircase and found Tom in the first floor hallway. He was standing before a table that had brochures and a giant plastic punch-bowl half-filled with an assortment of sweets such as lollipops, jolly ranchers, lemon heads, and other things designed to be sucked. Sean groaned impatiently as I held up the queue, carefully fishing out as many purple jolly ranchers that I could find. I headed upstairs with Tom, watching Sean playfully throw a fistful of candy at Allison, who was repeatedly poking him in the back. Instintively, she put her hand up, splashing the candy through the entire length of the hallway. At the top of the steps, passing the comfortable room on the way to ours, I stumbled for a second time as I heard Eva say,
“Damn, I wish we had gotten this room.”
I joined the couple as they finished the movie, Tom and Eva finishing their drawn out game of War. They called it a draw. At the bottom of the television screen, words read “five years later,” as a lazy indication that everything had changed, while the overarching story remained the same. Sean and his girlfriend kissed. I unwrapped the fifth and last of my jolly ranchers. I thought about getting up to get more, but the catalyst required for such an effort was not there. I shifted my position on the floor. And suddenly the world was moving by at the speed it’s supposed to be moving. I felt synched with time, neither lagging behind nor sprinted ahead. I sighed in tempo with the universe and a tiny object bounced off the back of my head. I turned, step by step with time, and discovered a purple jolly rancher appearing to rest just above the carpet. I looked across the room. Eva had a small hand still arched and she was smiling playfully. Her eyes were open. I could smell her perfume across the room. A lock of exactly ten hairs curled over the corner of her left eyelid. Her throw had created an incredibly subtle breeze which bounced the tips of those hairs against the tenderness of her eye and she blinked instinctively. And she was adorable.
—
When the movie ended, Eva stretched her arms up, yawning.
“Well, I should get goin.” We both stood up; I stopped the tape with the remote.
“How are you getting home?”
“Oh, the 26C runs until 1 am, and it goes like right near my place.”
“That’s good… I’d give you a ride if I had a goddamn car…” She smiled, her eyes looked sleepy and I couldn’t tell if there were dreams inside of them. I walked her down the steps, the silence of midnight cauterizing the departure and I wondered if I’d be able to fall asleep. My chest was floating ten feet above my head, carried on the wings of butterflies. When she stepped outside, she turned, stretching her arms,
“Here… gimme a hug.” I hugged Eva. Something was traded between us. Preparations were being made inside and the hole was being cleaned out and readied. Her heart felt like a hummingbird, it beat six times to every one of mine. For the first time in my life I was afraid of death. I felt like I had something to lose and a part of me wanted to disappear before it was too late. For only an instant, I felt like pushing Eva down the concrete steps. When the embrace ended, we shared a single line of sight while our bodies separated. I saw a tiny line in the lower right of her bottom lip and I was afraid to look. I feared that if God caught me looking, becoming aware of this moment, that she would cease to exist. Such a collision is far too much light for this world of shade. For a moment, there was a kiss that existed between Eva and me. To an observer, we’d have appeared as two friends parting ways, hugging, never touching lips. But the color of experience paints a far different hue. In that moment Eva wanted to kiss me and I wanted to kiss Eva and somewhere in Mexico someone tore an infant inside out and somewhere in Colorado my mother was crying to a photograph of my father and somewhere in Canada a dog was freezing to death and somewhere down the street a heroin addict was fixing to be heavenly numb and Tom was being rejected by a girl he wasn’t even attracted to and Sean was asleep with a lit cigarette between his fingers and seventy-thousand other couples were falling in love for the first time. And even though I had nothing to do with any of that, the sound, the quake of our collision affected them all.
