Page 45 of The Mayor and the Mystery Man

“Well, see, these are things I need to know.”

“You were going to kiss me with tongue?” I gulped a heavy lump in my throat, which relocated to my balls. Dusty’s tongue, sweeping over mine…I drowned that urge in wine before it had a chance to come up for air.

“Go easy, there,” Dusty said as I refilled my wine glass. “Or else you’re going to give yourself a nasty hangover.”

He didn’t realize that this was top-quality wine from Italy, which didn’t include sulfites, i.e. hangover-free. And I needed this sulfite-free wine to calm my growing nerves.

“You’re nuts.”

“I think we should kiss with tongue.” Dusty edged closer to me on the couch. “Not like slobbering teens. But a classy amount of tongue. How many couples barely touch lips when they kiss like they’re blotting lipstick?”

Deirdre and I kissed like that. We went through the motions years before I finally admitted the truth to myself that I was gay.

“We aren’t necking at Applefest.”

“Necking? Where are we, Lover’s Lane?”

“A nice peck on the lips,” I said.

“We should practice. It has to be believable.”

The more I pushed back, the more logical he sounded. If our kiss looked bad or fake, it would cause more headlines than any of the good. It would be a salacious detail that elections get hung up on.

“Why do we have to practice?” I felt like we were going in circles, but that was me filibustering on kissing my best friend.

Because what if I liked it? A lot?

“Think of it as rehearsal. On TV shows, the actors block the scenes so that they don’t stray off-camera. Again, we don’t want to make asses of ourselves at the Pumpkin Party.”

“Applefest.”

“I’ll need to know which way you tip your head, for one.”

He maybe had a good point. We couldn’t look like a first kiss up there.

“We’ll try one kiss. No tongue.” I put my authoritarian voice to good use, laying down a law I was dying to break. Dusty licked his plump lips. My dick jumped in my pants.

“Deal.”

He inched closer to me on the couch. My heart rate shot up. Thoughts of us over the years, thoughts of those early times in college when I freaking mooned over him in my own very private way, they all came crashing into my head. I shoved them away. I had to.

This was a professional kiss.

Dusty had a relaxed smile on his face. This was business for him. Not the culmination of a years-long crush I thought I had properly extinguished.

“Awkward, I know,” he said with a dimpled grin, breaking some of the tension. But not enough.

“I don’t really kiss guys,” I blurted out.

“Why not?”

“Huh?” I asked, caught off guard.

“Don’t you hook up with guys via your handy-dandy apps?”

“Not all the time. When I do, we just…I don’t really like kissing them. I’ve never been that into kissing. Kissing has been about getting to an endpoint.”

I scanned through my past relationships and hookups, and the truth smacked me in the face. I liked to get down to fucking. Kissing brought an intimacy that scared the shit out of me.

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