• It was so simple, so incredibly easy. And yet he stammered. He had rehearsed, practiced, talked to his friends, made them swear to silence, had thought of every possible outcome. But this was something else entirely. Her face was like the sun shining down through the thin clouds on an autumn day, where you knew that something was underneath, more beautiful than the outside, something secret and silent and just…mysterious. He looked at her and he melted away, mind racing from one thought to the next, impossibly incoherent.

    She raised an eyebrow quizzically, and said something, but he could only focus on her lips, her eyes, and the way she quirked the edge of her mouth up when she found the meaning of a joke, the subtle way her hair swished as she walked. She went to turn away and he was struck by lightning. He knew, deep in the recesses of his being, that he had to act. So he did the only thing he could think of.

    He clasped her shoulders in his hands, and stood there, like a diver does before the plunge, admiring the unmarred surface of the water. He bent down, and saw her expression, comprehension dawning in her flawless face. Her eyes widened the slightest, and he could feel the shock through the tenuous connection, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care that several people looked on, gawking. His entire life centered on that kiss, that one symbol of love. And he sensed that she had fallen in tune with him, a complement in the great symphony of bliss that was his.