It's stillness and pressure and rhythm and breathing.

I think I finally understand the saying like a moth to a flame. I’m the moth. My heart flutters like the paper thin wings. And he is the flame, incendiary, scorching my soul.He inhales so heavily, like he’s been holding his breath under water. He presses his lips against mine and tugs at my hair gently. My head falls back and my mouth falls open. His tongue, slick as silver, dances with mine.I’m wrong. I’m not a moth. I’m Icarus and I’ve flown too close to the sun.

I thought it could be something, I mean, eventually.' Harrison finally looks at us. 'My life I thought-but I mean... It's nothing.'Don't cry' Grace says. 'You have a lot of time.'No, I don't.'Yeah, you do.'No.-'Yeah! Yeah, you do. It's okay. Look-'She does something that is so amazingly selfless and also gross. She tilts Harrison's face up and gives him a sweet kiss on the lips and it lasts long enough for him to taste her back, to move his mouth against hers.Harrison stares at her dumbfounded but he's stopped cryingShe is so nice.

Do you remember our first kiss? I do. Not a day goes by I don’t think of the feel of that bicuspid against my tongue. It had such a distinctive feel, neither cuspid nor molar…but I’m not sure it knew that – that was what endeared it to me so. It was like the blunted tusk of a wild boar.

A great book increases my heartbeat as if I’m prey, melts my insides in anticipation of a first kiss, immerses me in its depths.

At the first kiss I felt something melt inside me that hurt in an exquisite way. All my longings, all my dreams and sweet anguish, All the secrets that slept deep within me came awake, Everything was transformed and enchanted, everything made sense.

I’ll help you, if you admit since our first kiss you imagined us together so many times that the images of us haunt you at night and sour the touch of any other man.

And then, without any warning at all, he presses his lips against mine. As his mouth covers my own, I find myself reeling, as if I have been tipped backward and am falling, falling, so that even the stars in the sky are spinning. His lips are warm and soft, the unrelenting pull of his desire for me as strong as the pull of the waves against the sand. It is not like practicing with Ismae, or even Sybella. It is not like any of the first kisses I have imagined over the years. It is far, far better and more wondrous, and yet terrifying as well, like one of the raging storms that pound against the convent walls in the winter, threatening to breach its defenses. So too does this kiss threaten something deep within me that I cannot even name.

He stopped walking. I stopped walking. He moved his face to mine. I stayed there. He put his mouth on mine, soft. We kissed like that, lips on lips, and I could feel the softness of his mouth and the rougher line where his lip was chapped. The shiver in my stomach was there. The way I knew it would be, only more. It was real.

And I know when your lips meet mine I feel as though I have never been kissed before.