Read After the Kiss for Free Online Page A

he’s the catcher for seymour high’s nationally ranked baseball team you aren’t the least surprised: he is a pyramid boy with atlas shoulders and merman hips—a boy with muscle to spare. he is a quick boy—moving to one of the coolers under the table, fisting a mouthful of chips—but not a fast one: the ease of him almost too easy, everything about him actually
too
and
easy
as you’re looking-not-looking at those glossy curls thick enough to balance grapes, the toothsome smile, the heavy hands that stay shoved in pockets while he talks. only thirty seconds in the room and everyone is moving around him like it is their birthday and he is the cake, even the other guys, the shorter soccer guys, the baseball-capped groupie guys and even those from tennis and track. he is stay-away-from-me handsome, likely all gimme hands and grabby mouth—one of the ones who knows so much and about whom you know lots better. you can spot them coming a mile away like a slowball high and to the right: this one no different with his chisel-chin-chin, except when he turns his eyes toward you its not a slowball but a curve—his soulful eyes a mirror that shows your own solitary reflection.
    hooking up
    not sure what time it is anymore—the room is full of smoke and mirrors but you could navigate it blindfolded, not a flitty bee but a smooth shark who needs no eyes, constantly moving and seeing with the edges of your fingertips, elbows—sensing with your earlobes. you are restless and it is time for something to happen. this one will not do and not this one either, too-tall/too-short/too-loud/too-just-too much leering there in the door frame. there is music you don’t like but don’t pay attention to—it’s all part of the vibration of the current by now, what keeps the kelp swaying and what keeps you camouflaged. twice around the room, one time more (so many rooms, so many rounds, you cannot keep them straight anymore only a curved glass barrier against which you pace). your glass was half-empty and now it’s half-full of something that vaguely tastes like rum. a friendly face you know swims before you, pale pulsing jellyfish aglow against the dark. the pyramid boy with the mirror eyes has disappeared but you are glad—there are simpler fish to shoot in this barrel. his name is josh his name is matt his name is kristopher his name is astrophel—it doesn’t matter you only have to say it once. the smiling is the rest: that tender hooked worm that he will soon snap and swallow whole. there is a cove there is a room there is a corner there is a hallway there is a place you go where itis dark and for a moment—when he doesn’t speak—where it is quiet. it’s there everything will be silenced and stilled and forgotten, only one mouth on the other, one hand in another fist, one body against another body and all the nattering talking remembering thinking parts of your brain dissolved and dismembered in a swirl of salt. there is only the fish brain working now, only the part of you that is octopus. the part that is disappearing now in a cloud of ink.

Becca
    Sunday Morning Shift
    Bacon-egg-cheese biscuit
    two coffees here is
    your change (seventythreecents). Nadia brings
    Good morning what can I get you?
    another basket of croissants from the back;
    â€”Yes ma’am here is your bagel the toaster is over
    there, here
    More coffee? Refills are
—how much?—
    ninety-eight cents
    plus two muffins equals three
    ninety-one—no four—my feet
    are killing me already
    Good morning what can I get you?
    even in these new shoes. There’s the phone ringing I
    hope someone else can get it
    â€”slice the bagel—what are the herbal teas again?—
    Here you are, sir.
    Yes whatcanIgetyou?
    Smile hi to Denver grinding another batch of beans;
    Yes thank you six eighty-one please.
    Someone will have to get that man’s
    papers off the table,
    and do I