The Last Time We Met

3

Having Cedric in my room was a surreal experience.

I barely knew him, and I tried to see my bedroom from his perspective: the dull, muted browns and blues, the lack of clutter, the typewriter and the record player, my Pentax hanging from one of my bedposts from its leather strap, the photographs I'd taken and developed in my school's dark room neatly pinned above my desk.

It looked like the bedroom of an 80-year-old man. I wanted Cedric's approval for some deep, unknown reason, and I couldn't imagine someone who dressed like Cedric would approve of my spartan decor. He looked like an exotic bird among my boring old-fashioned things. I couldn't stop staring at him. Wondering if this was what it was to fall in love at first sight, and how I hadn't known before this moment that I could be attracted to men. I had thought I was straight, or as straight as someone who was asexual could be. Despite telling myself that this wasn't sexual attraction, my body refused to listen. I was too hot and my heart was thumping and I felt vaguely nervous.

Cedric briefly looked around, but he noticed the photograph on my nightstand immediately. Crossing my room in two long steps, he snatched it up and stared at it.  He whispered something I couldn't quite hear: something like Hey you or Honey.

"What?" I asked.

He shook his head. Moving the photograph further away, then peering at it closely again, he kept opening his mouth like he wanted to say something else. But no words came out. He put her down, and looked at me.

"Do you feel it?" I asked him.

I immediately felt stupid. No one else I knew remembered their past lives. I was making an idiot out of myself, for what? Some random guy I'd just met? Clenching and unclenching my hands, trying to release some of whatever-this-energy-was.  

"There is something," he said.

Then he just kept looking at me, not in a way that made me uncomfortable, but in a way that made me want him to come closer to me, to take my hand again. Did he want to do either of those things? Was I imagining it, my teenage hormones rearing their ugly heads at last?

The longer he looked at me, the more I wondered if this was what all those books and movies and songs were talking about. I teetered on the edge of something, so near to understanding. If he kissed me, I would know for certain if this unfamiliar feeling was attraction. 

When he did step closer, he startled me so much that I stepped back. He paused, shoved his hands in his pockets, while my heart felt like it might explode.

Which was why, in the end, I was the one who stepped forward, reaching up to touch his face, his lips. I nearly pulled away, thinking I had made a huge mistake, misinterpreting everything, but then he leaned in, hesitated a few inches away, as if to ask if it was okay. My response came in pressing my body forward and closing the distance between our mouths.  

IEyes closed, every sensation heightened. His hands touched my hips, cautiously, then circled my waist and tightened in a way that made it hard to breathe for reasons other than being too tight. We pulled away at the same time, and I found myself gasping for breath.

"This is something," Cedric whispered.

"It is," I whispered back.

I knew then, I had known before it started and I knew the moment our lips had met, that this was exactly the thing everyone had been writing and singing and screaming and creating art about for centuries, millennia. Cedric was my soulmate.  

Then we were kissing again, and falling back onto my bed, a brief interruption in the kissing.

Now locked in this embrace, a gap that had spanned decades closed, just a little. Not enough. Not nearly enough. By the time my lips had been kissed raw, we still hadn't let go. My arms around his shoulders, his arms around my waist. He ran his hands up and down the knobs of my spine while I grazed my fingers along the buzzed section of hair at the back of his neck.  

So much I could say, but didn't, because I knew he felt the same. I wanted to stay in his arms. The excitement of the day overwhelmed me, and my blinks grew longer. Every time I looked over at Cedric his eyes were closed, his eyelashes soft against his cheekbones. When I looked down, I could see both of our birthmarks, our tattoos. It meant something more. I traced my finger over the rough star shape of his birthmark. He smiled against my face and kissed my neck, distracting me.

"That was my first kiss," I said into his skin.

He chuckled, low in his throat. "And how was it?"

"Better than it looks in the movies." I kissed him again. "The best thing ever."

"I wish I could say it was my first kiss too, but I'm kind of a kissing slut," Cedric said. "It's never been like this, though."

Even though I knew what he meant, I had to ask. "Like what?"

He reached up and touched my hair, my cheek, ran his thumb over my bottom lip. When he kissed me he savored me, and I almost forgot about my own question.

"Like it was meant to be."

We were still kissing, our lips soft with exhaustion, when sleep overcame me, and a memory came to me like a car driving past with windows down and a song distantly blaring, bringing me back to a place and time that was not now.