Writing kissing:
In "The Tip of the Tongue," Felicia Davin wrote:Two weeks in, Kei said, “So should it be the mage or the knight?”
“What?”
“In the story. Should Lily end up with the mage or the knight? I think they’re both jerks, but I guess the knight has his moments.”
“Oh,” Alice said. Kei had been sitting with her faithfully every night, and Alice had tried to share her rediscovery of the alphabet. She hadn’t realized that Kei had been listening — through her strained, syllable-by-syllable pronunciation — to the story. “She ends up with —”
“Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know the end yet. Which one do you want her to end up with?”
Alice hesitated, looking down at the text. Kei nudged their shoulders together, and Alice took a breath and said, almost as slowly as if she were reading, said, “I always wanted her to end up with the witch.”
When she risked a glance at Kei, she saw that a smile was lifting the corners of her eyes, even though her lips were pressed together like she was holding back what she wanted to say.
“Percy’s a dolt and Tristan is insufferable,” Alice explained. Kei’s silence made her anxious, even if she was smiling instead of edging away. Alice had said too much, but the only solution she could think of was to say more. Her opinion was entirely justifiable, after all. “The witch always seems to know so much more about the world than everyone else, and she listens to Lily when no one else will, and she always knows exactly what to say —”
“And she’s beautiful.”
“Well,” Alice said, and then she didn’t have to think of the rest because Kei kissed her. It seemed sudden, but only because Alice’s pulse was thrumming under her skin. The kiss had not been sudden. Kei had accomplished it with her usual grace, reaching across to cup Alice’s cheek and turn her head so that she could bring their lips together. Kei kissed deliberately, with certainty, the same way she did everything else. She brushed the pad of her thumb across Alice’s cheek and drew her fingertips over the shell of Alice’s ear. The soft press of her lips formed the shape of some unknowable word. Alice answered in kind, discovering a whole new language at the tip of her tongue.
When they finally broke apart, Alice reached over to brush Kei’s hair away from her face. “She’s very beautiful,” she said, and Kei laughed.