We got ready for bed, and I was remembering his offer to sleep on the floor. In the interest of both fairness and wanting to be close to him, I didn't feel that was necessary. To that end, I think I said something like, Look, I'm not about to sleep on the floor when there's a double bed, and I sure as hell don't expect you to, either, if I'm not willing to do that, so don't worry about that. Of course, being the weenie that I am, I conveniently neglected to mention the wanting-to-be-close part. Well, actually, not total weenie-dom on my part. I wasn't sure what was going in his head at that point, and I didn't want him to worry about the possibility of unwanted advances if he shared a bed with me. Fortunately, he seemed to have no objections to the shared bed. Whew! The small bit of encouragement I felt was dashed when he - in retrospect, no doubt being the gentleman again and not wanting to make me uncomfortable - stretched out on the outside of the covers, instead of underneath them, where I was. Ack.

Being on opposite sides of the blanket was going to make it a little more difficult to curl up with him without some more, ah, definitive action on my part. Hmm. Not sure I wanted to risk making things more awkward if his intentions were different from mine. And things were a little… well… awkward. Every time one of us would turn over and inevitably bump into the other in the limited confines of the double bed, we would apologize and scoot back to our own side.

Looking back on this, I have to laugh. Why were we being so careful not to possibly offend or make uncomfortable the other if we weren't concerned about what the other person thought and felt? As ludicrously obvious as that thought seems now it was hidden then.

Things only got worse when the lack of output from the ailing air-conditioner in our room resolved the opposite-sides-of-the-blanket dilemma for me - I was sweating, and there was a clear reason for me to kick off the covers. Now every time we failed to stay on our respective sides of the bed, there was no longer the wall of separation of the blanket. After a while, the whole trying-not-to-bump-into-each-other thing started to drive me bananas, both in terms of the prospect of getting any restful sleep and/or the consolation of touch, and in sheer desperation, I was finally driven to do something, as things could go on like that all night. After we'd bumped into each other and apologized for about the thousandth time, I said something on the order of, "Look, for godsake, don't worry about bumping into me, it's a double bed, and neither of us are midgets." At this point, I recall turning over and flopping face down on my pillow with my arm brushed up against Alex's, thinking, well, he can take that as he wants, either interest, or my really not giving a damn about the bumping against each other in bed, and if it's not the former, then I've already made my point about the small bed.

For what seemed like most of the night, we were both moving closer to the other, but in such tiny baby steps, it was as thought each of us was absolutely terrified of fucking things up, misinterpreting the other's intentions and making asses of ourselves, or putting the other person off. Which, in point of fact, I was - terrified, that is. I guess Alex was, too, at least to some degree, because I think every move we made to literally put ourselves one small increment closer to the other was done in such a way that the interpretation was left wide open. Blame it on the happenstance collisions that occur when two rather tall and big people share a double bed, right? I wasn't edging closer to Alex, I was just turning over onto my side. We weren't leaning one up against the other for any reason other than the size of the bed, really, and how we happened to bump up against one another in sleep. Alex's arm just sort of fell across me when he rolled over. It was all just the product of movement during sleep and the tight sleeping quarters. I laugh, simply because any fool fly on the wall would have seen the obvious that evidently neither of us could see at the time. Meanwhile, though, both of us being who we are, and not being the type to easily let our guard down, things had to go their inevitable slow route. I finally couldn't stand it anymore, despite the fear that I had that made what I was doing feel like jumping off a cliff. We'd somehow rolled up against each other, me on my back, Alex on his side, with his hand on my hip. I took the leap, and rolled over and put my arm around him in a way that was clearly not accidental, not knowing what he would think. To my profound and utter relief, he put his arm around me and pulled me close.

We lay like that for some time. It felt good, comfortable. What I'd thought curling up with Alex might be like. But not, in some ways. I guess in my head, when I turned over toward Alex and put my arm across him, I knew there was no turning back, I was going to "make my desires known," so to speak, and by god, I was going to kiss the guy if it was the last thing I did. When I could get my courage up. Whenever that might be. I remember lying there, literally unable to breathe while contemplating the situation, and wondering how I was going to get the guts to do what I needed to do - I just don't kiss guys very easily. And what if I was reading all this wrong, and he didn't want this as much as I did? What if I was wrong? I couldn't stand to have him know how I felt if he didn't feel it back. As it was, I didn't see how he wouldn't be able to tell that something was up. I couldn't take a deep breath without shaking by then, and we were holding each other so close, how could he miss that? I remember thinking, God, if he would just meet me halfway, I could do this, but I can't do this alone, I need him to help me, god, if he would just meet me halfway. . . All this time, we were kind of shifting closer to each other, my face pressed up in his neck, our faces closer to each other, getting about as close as we could get to a kiss without actually doing that. And I was still scared. And then he bent his face down to mine, I moved mine to meet his, and BAM! The kiss happened. The kiss happened, and it still blows my mind when I think about it, because I've just never had something like that happen before the way it happened with Alex. I couldn't fully describe it then, and I can't now, as much as I'll try. It was like something in me met something in him, some mix of feeling and thought and spirit, some intensity in him that matched the same thing in me, and things just exploded. I've never felt that in a kiss, that kind of a connection with the other person. And certainly not with someone I'd just barely met. I still can't explain it. Well, yeah, I can, sort of. There was something there that was right, fundamentally right on some deep level, something I could trust, and my gut knew it, even if my brain hadn't totally pieced it together. That was another thing about that kiss and that night. I'm normally the kind of person that thinks and analyzes everything to death before I do it. If I had thought about this all, it never would have happened. Never. But it was like once, just this once, my brain obeyed some higher order of logic, and stopping analyzing it all and stepped back and let what needed to happen simply happen.