A long lane at night

2.4. KISS OF LIFE

** JACK **

I FELT SO PEACEFUL IN NATE'S ARMS. HE ALWAYS had the power to tranquilise me.

'Nate,' I called in the darkness.

'Hm?' He sounded sleepy, but I knew he was as awake as me.

'How long have you been hiding your feelings from me?'

He sighed.

'Fourteen years—'

'Wow, I didn't know it was that—'

'...Seven months and twenty-one days.'

I stayed in silence for a while.

'Do you think I'll ever be able to make it up to you?'

'Love me for the rest of your life.'

I smiled and placed a kiss on his forehead.

'Consider it done.'

Another moment of silence followed.

'Jack, does it feel weird to you?'

'What? Making out with my best friend? No. To you?'

'Not in the slightest.'

He jerked his head upwards to meet my lips. I got down in the couch to meet his face. We heard my phone buzz with a few messages. I panicked.

'Calm down, Jack. If it were an emergency, they would call you, not text.'

'Could you tell?'

'That you automatically activated your "new dad" mode? It was crystal clear.'

He let out a small laugh.

'What?' I asked.

'I've always been the paranoid one,' he answered, climbing over me and reaching for my phone on the small table where I had placed it shortly after we laid on the couch. He handed me the phone without looking at the screen and finished his thought. 'It will be nice getting to see you losing your shit from time to time.'

It was nice to see he could tease me like nothing had changed. In addition, what he said about it not being an emergency worked to calm me down. That brought another question to my mind.

'You know the thing that you do? When you just stay there and look at me?'

'Like I always do and you always calm down just like now?'

'Yeah. How long...?'

'That, if memory serves me right, I've been doing since the very beginning. I remember your first birthday tea. It's a very early memory, mind you, but I remember at some point you almost cried and I wanted to do something. Hug you or I don't even know what, I can't remember, but you calmed down when I appeared in front of you. From then I learned the trick. I like it. I don't have to call people's attention to the fact I'm trying to calm you down. It... it feels intimate.'

'So, as your best friend, I can say that being around you calms me down. But, as your fiancé, I can share a little secret and confess to you that every time you look in my eyes like that, the bond you create with me is so strong that I feel safe. I feel so safe that I still haven't even looked at my phone.'

'Here.' He took the device from my hand along with my index finger. He placed my fingertip where my digital print would unlock the gadget and placed the phone in front of me. It was amazing how he did all that without even trying to check the content of the screen.

'It's a message from dad Allan,' I told him. 'It says "We still haven't heard from you, so I guess things are fine between you and Nate. Spend the night with your man and come to lunch tomorrow. We'll have Henry over." And there is a picture of dad Brian sleeping on the couch with Alice on his arms, look. There's actually a lot of pictures of them together.'