Keepers by Gary A. Braunbeck

station because he got to hold you and kiss you and all I could do was sit there and watch him do it? You haven’t dated one guy that I didn’t immediately want to run over with a power mower just to hear him scream. Whenever you hug me, I won’t wash the shirt for a week because the smell of your musk oil lingers in the material. All my life girls have either made fun of me or treated me like I was their brother. My first kiss I got only because I was at a party playing ‘Spin the Bottle’—it pointed at Linda McDonald, who was the new girl at school and didn’t know I was the class joke. The only girl who’s ever kissed me like she meant it is you. I’m never really happy unless you’re around, or I know that I’ll be seeing you soon. When I’m an old man sitting in a nursing home with oatmeal dribbling down my chin, I’m gonna bore the piss out of the nurses because I’ll keep telling them over and over about this girl named Beth who was the great love of my life, but because she was also my best friend so I did the noble thing and let her slip away.
    “Whoever you wind up with, whichever guy out there has the brains to know he’s just met the greatest woman in the world the first time he meets you...the two of you can be together for sixty, seventy years, you can have dozens of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and build the most unbelievably fantastic life together, but when you’re holding his hand at the end and looking into his eyes and seeing him remember the richness and fulfillment and joy he’s known because his life has been spent by your side, at that moment, that very moment, he won’t come close to loving you half as much as I do right here, right now. So, yeah, Beth, I love you, and I’m in love with you, and nothing you’ve said or done in the past has changed that, and nothing you can say or do now is going to change it. There? Happy now?”
    “Actually,” she said, slipping her arms around my neck, “I am. Very happy. Because I love you, too.”
    Earlier, when I said the first kiss Beth gave me that day was the one against which all others would be compared and come up lacking...I was wrong. The kiss she gave me at that moment, a kiss just as soft and warm and deep and long and moist as the first, but this time with the hint of hunger on the tip of its tongue and a heat around it that you experience once and once only in your life if you’re lucky, because it’s a heat that burns into the core of your heart and tells you that this is it , kiddo, run for cover, this is the Real Thing, Taking No Prisoners, give it up, you’re doomed, because Love has just kicked your teeth down your throat, ain’t it grand?— this kiss was the one whose summer taste and autumn passion would linger on my lips for all the rest of my days.
    When she pulled away—not taking her arms from around my neck—we both let out a long, hot, staggered breath. She pressed her forehead against mine and stroked the back of my neck, swallowing once before saying, “Oh, my ,” ending that second word on a smoothly descending note of embarrassed laughter that snuggled down in the back of her throat and wrapped itself up in something like a purr; I could almost feel her voice with my fingertips.
    “Just wait until I’m legal, huh?”
    “Oh, I think we passed the ‘waiting’ part about thirty seconds ago.” She lifted her head and looked into my eyes again. “Before I picked you up today, I rented a hotel room downtown. Can I take you there? Can we leave right now?”
    “What are your friends going to think?”
    “I don’t care. If they’re my friends, they’ll see in you everything I see. They’ll accept you or they won’t stay my friends.” She kissed me again. When had my pants gotten so much smaller? They’d fit just fine when I’d put them on this morning.
    “You were right here, all the time,” she whispered in my ear. “I’m sorry it took me so long to figure it