Confession

His eyes linger bright on my face. They're a glossy, crystalline blue, and his pupils swelling in the poorly-lit jazz club vestibule look like gaps in the ice, revealing impossibly deep waters underneath. He leans agains the door next to a brass umbrella rack and shuffles his Doc Martens on the carpeting-- plain black, Cat the club owner wanted Oriental but jazz has few tenants in suburban Ohio and there was no way she would pay for cheap knockoffs. The light of the hot yellow stage lamps and the shadows of the frenzied band on stage, swerving and flailing as they hammer out some chaotic fusion number I couldn't name, dance across his skin and make his smooth hair shimmer. I am three feet away from him, at an oblique angle from the light, my palm pressed into the door hinge for support. I'll need it, for what I'm about to say.

"Hm?" he mumbles, his voice just the right amount of deep that it sinks under the shrilling trumpets and screaming guitars and over the liquid bass and rumbling drums. Any other moment I would question what I'm about to do right now. A thousand times, in school, in writer's circle, watching his silky hair bob against his green denim jacket as he walked off the bus, I felt the words gather like saliva around my tongue, ready to spew forward all over his chemistry papers or the transluscent hairs on the back of his neck. But they always slid into my trachea, into my lungs, and choked me dead in my spot before I could let them free. And it was just fine, because I didn't want to spit on him, to tarnish an inch of his swinging body or wipe the little smile from his oddball face. He wasn't even hot, I told myself, and yet I absorbed his strange conversations, and listened to the hard bop albums he loaned me, and got his voice stuck in my head. I lingered in the joy of him.

And now, seeing the adorable twist of confusion on his face, that joy floods over me a hundred times over. My breath deepens on a sixteenth note, inhaling the very air he exhaled and tasting soft pretzels, cheap cologne, denim covered in sweat. I feel my lips stretch out like gum, the corners of my mouth dry and expectant, heart buzzing like a succubus hummingbird. My lips open with a barely audible smack, and I stare at his own face, the loveliness of his too-large nose and his perpetually furrowed brow, the slight pretentions of his newsboy cap, the absolute pure picture of calm confusion.

It doesn't matter how he responds, to the words coming out of my throat.

This was the moment when everything was possible.