Side Stage

Nana Voss was twenty-eight years old and had exactly one theory about herself, which was that she could do anything if she treated it like a case study. She was a therapist. She had the license and the office with the sad little fountain and everything. Most of her friends assumed that being a therapist made her endlessly self-aware, and she mostly let them assume it, but the truth was she spent all day being self-aware about other people and had her own insides filed somewhere she never bothered to visit.

She also believed, on pretty solid evidence, that she was fine alone. She'd had one fling at twenty-six, a fellow grad student named Derek who was nice and dull in equal measure, and it had been fine too. Fine kissing, fine everything, and when it ended she'd felt mostly relief, like canceling a dentist appointment. Since then she'd kept her own company and liked it, and if anyone asked she said she was happily single, and she even meant it about sixty percent of the time.

The other forty percent lived in the apartment next to Rhys.

Rhys had already been there when she moved in two years ago, a freelance illustrator with ink stains on his fingers and a bike he carried up the stairs like it owed him money. They'd done the neighbor dance. Borrowed sugar. Borrowed a corkscrew. Stood on their adjoining balconies on summer nights talking about nothing until it got too dark to see each other's faces. He was twenty-nine, funny in a dry way, and he always looked at her a half-second longer than the conversation required, and Nana had filed that observation under "later" and left it there. He knew she was trans, the way neighbors know things, because she'd told him over the borrowed corkscrew one night, and he'd said "okay, cool," and showed her a terrible drawing he'd done of the corkscrew, and that had been the whole conversation.

The Birchwood Arts Festival was three days of craft booths and food trucks and two main stages crammed into the big park down the hill from their building. They had a shared balcony overlooking the park, which was the real reason they'd both rented those apartments, not that either of them said so. Saturday morning they were out there with coffee, watching the crowd flow in, when Nana saw the booth.

It was a pop-up kissing booth, run by the local theater troupe as a fundraiser, and taped to its side was a sign she could just barely read from the balcony: KISSING CONTEST, 2 PM. CROWD JUDGES. WINNER GETS A TROPHY AND A FREE DRINK.

"Huh," she said.

"Huh what?" Rhys said. He was sketching, which he was always doing, some little line drawing of the food trucks that would probably sell for forty bucks by Sunday.

"They're doing a kissing contest down there. Crowd votes by applause."

He didn't look up right away. When he did, he had an expression she couldn't classify, somewhere between delighted and braced. "You going to enter?"

"I don't know. Maybe." She sipped her coffee and watched a guy in a jester hat set out folding chairs. "Why, are you?"

"Could be. Depends on the competition."

She should have let it go. She knew that even then, some part of her knew it, and she said it anyway. "I bet I could win it."

That got his full attention. He set down the sketchbook. "You want to bet on a kissing contest."

"Sure. Why not."

"Against me."

"Against whoever. Mostly against the field." She heard herself building the case the way she built cases for clients, which was a tell, and kept going anyway. "Here's my actual theory. Kissing is a physical skill plus performance. Applause measures performance. Feelings have nothing to do with it. I think I can win without catching a single feeling, and I think that would prove something."

"Prove what?"

"That I'm wired the way I say I'm wired." She gestured with her mug, nearly slopping coffee on the railing. "Everyone always says you can't separate the two. That intimacy comes bundled with attachment. I've never bought it. I think you can kiss a stranger in front of three hundred people and feel exactly nothing afterward, and I'd kind of like to have data on that."

Rhys looked at her for a while. Long enough that she almost asked what. "Okay," he said finally. "Terms?"

"Loser buys the winner a drink."

"Fine. And," he said, and here he grinned in a way that was maybe a joke and maybe not, "the loser also has to kiss the winner however the winner wants afterward. House rules. Festival rules. Very official."

"That's not a rule, that's a prize."

"It's in the bylaws. I checked."

"You did not check anything, you made that up on a balcony."

"Made it up in a legally binding way," he said, and shook her hand before she could argue, and that was how she ended up committed to a kissing contest she'd invented forty seconds earlier.

They went down around one. The booth had a little stage by then, a folding table, a jar for donations, and a troupe emcee with a feathered hat and the volume of a man who had done summer stock for twenty years. The rules were simple. Contestants took turns kissing volunteers from the crowd, or each other, and the crowd voted by applause. Loud applause. The loudest kisser won.

Nana signed her name on the signup sheet and noticed her hand was steady, which she was unreasonably proud of. Rhys signed under her, then drifted off toward the food trucks with a wink and a "don't scout the competition without me," which she took to mean he was buying them both fries and stalling.

The early contestants were a mixed bag. A couple who clearly did this at parties. A man in his fifties who dipped a woman so far back her braid swept the stage and got the biggest applause so far. A theater student who performed a kiss like it was Shakespeare, all flourishes and eyebrow work, and got polite claps.

Then they called Rhys.

His volunteer was a woman from the crowd, game and laughing, maybe thirty, wearing a sun hat. The emcee did his build-up. Nana stood at the edge of the little stage with her arms crossed, telling herself she was studying technique.

She was studying it, all right.

Rhys took the woman's hand, said something to her that made her laugh before anything even happened, and then he kissed her like the kiss was a story he was telling and she was in on it. Slow to start. One hand cradling the back of her head like he had all afternoon. When they broke apart the woman had her eyes closed a beat too long, and the crowd came up off their folding chairs.

The emcee yelled something about a perfect score. Rhys bowed, found Nana in the crowd, and pointed at her with two fingers, casual as anything, and the crowd, not knowing what that meant, cheered again.

Nana felt something complicated happen in her chest and labeled it competitive irritation and moved on.

"Your turn, champ," he said when she climbed the steps. "No pressure. I set the bar at 'woman in sun hat considers leaving her husband.'"

"Shut up."

"Good luck out there."

Her volunteer was a stranger, which was the point. A tall guy with a beard and a festival wristband, who'd raised his hand when the emcee asked for volunteers with the enthusiasm of a man who had already won something just by being there. He was maybe twenty-eight. He smelled like sunscreen and beer, and when he took her hands he was actually gentle about it, which she appreciated.

The emcee counted down. The guy leaned in and asked, quiet, "You okay with this?"

"Yeah," she said. "Kiss me like you mean the trophy."

He laughed and he did. It was a good kiss. Genuinely good, she'd give him that. Confident but not pushy, a hand at her jaw, a tilt of the head, a nice unhurried build. The crowd made the appropriate noises. She did her part, sold it a little, one hand fisted in his shirt because that photographed well and she knew it.

And through all of it, the honest data point, the thing she'd come to test: nothing. It was pleasant the way a good massage is pleasant. Her pulse did its normal job. Her brain, the part that was always running, stayed running, somewhere off to the side taking notes. No heat behind it, no drop in her stomach, no hitch. When they broke apart she was smiling because performing a smile was part of the skill, and underneath the smile was a calm, flat, satisfied nothing, and she thought, well. There it is. Confirmed.

The applause was solid. Maybe not Rhys-level. The sun hat woman clapped loyally.

The bearded guy squeezed her hand and said, "Good luck," and meant it, and she said thanks and meant it, and that was the entire exchange, and it cost her nothing, and she walked back to the edge of the stage feeling like a scientist whose experiment had gone exactly as designed.

Rhys was waiting there, arms crossed now, mirroring her from twenty minutes ago.

"Well?" she said.

"You're good," he said, and he didn't sound like he was flattering her. He sounded almost troubled. "Like, annoyingly good. You sold that."

"It's a performance. That's the whole thesis."

"Sure." He looked out at the crowd, then back. "Next round's in ten minutes. You're up against the dip guy, so warm up your back."

She laughed and went to get water, and behind her she could feel him watching, which she filed, as usual, under later.

The second round was where things got interesting, though not in the way anyone on stage intended.

They ran it like a bracket. Winners advanced, crowd applause decided everything, and the emcee with the feathered hat worked the microphone like a man who had indeed done twenty years of summer stock and remembered every trick. There were six pairs left by then, and the sun had climbed high enough that people were holding programs over their heads for shade.

Rhys went first in the pairing order. His volunteer this time was a different woman, young, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, with glitter on her cheekbones and a group of friends screaming her name from the third row. She was excited. Rhys was good with excited, Nana had noticed. He had a way of meeting people where they were.

Except this time he wasn't quite there.

She saw it from the side of the stage. He took the glittered woman's hands, said his opening line, whatever it was, and the girl laughed, and he leaned in, and the kiss started fine. Soft, well-paced, technically everything the first one had been. But about four seconds in his eyes opened. Not a peek, not nerves. He turned his head slightly, over the girl's shoulder, and his gaze swept the crowd the way a person checks a room for someone, and it landed on Nana and stopped.

The kiss died right there. Not with a crash. It just ran out of air, like a phone call where one person has started thinking about something else. The woman with the glitter pulled back first, blinking, and said something Nana couldn't hear, and Rhys said something back that was probably charming, but the crowd felt the seam in it. The applause was polite. Half of what he'd gotten in round one. The emcee, a professional, covered with a joke about second-album syndrome, but Nana watched Rhys walk to the edge of the stage and she watched his ears, which were red.

She waited until he was beside her. "What was that?"

"Nothing."

"That was your A material. You've been insufferable about your A material all week."

He shrugged and looked at the folding chairs instead of at her. "Lost the thread. Happens."

"Lost the thread." She turned it over. "You don't lose threads. You draw for a living. You're the most threaded person I know."

"Thanks for the review," he said, and drank from his water bottle, and she let it go because the emcee was calling the next pair and because some part of her brain, the part she didn't consult, had already started assembling the data. He'd looked at the crowd. He'd looked at her specifically. He'd been fine until he wasn't. She filed it under later, where the Rhys folder was getting noticeably thick.

Her own second round went the way her first one had. Her volunteer was a stocky guy with a shaved head who smelled like grilled onions and asked her twice if she was sure, which she respected. She was sure. She kissed him well, the crowd clapped, and underneath it all the instrument readings stayed flat and calm. Zero point two on the flutter scale, maybe, and she was being generous. It was starting to feel less like a hypothesis and more like a diagnosis, and she was oddly proud of it. Twenty-eight years old, one fling at twenty-six with Derek, who had been sweet and forgettable in the same breath, and a working theory that she was simply built to keep her own company. The festival contest was the biggest test she could legally arrange on a Saturday afternoon, and she was passing it.

Then the bracket did the thing brackets do, and the final pairing was announced, and the emcee leaned into the microphone with visible relish.

"Ladies and gentlemen, our championship round. From earlier today, the woman who made a bearded stranger believe in destiny. And her opponent, the man who peaked so hard in round one that we're still getting fan mail. Give it up for the neighbors."

They had told him they were neighbors, apparently, at registration. Nana made a mental note to have a word about her personal information. The crowd laughed at the word neighbors like it was funny on its own, and she realized they were all going to be insufferable about it, and she decided she didn't care, and that decision itself was interesting.

"So," Rhys said, low, as they moved to the center marks taped on the stage. "Still want to win?"

"That's the dumbest question you've ever asked me."

"Just checking. You seem loose."

"I'm always loose. I'm a therapist. We're professionally loose." She was aware she was talking too much and that he knew it and that he was letting her, patiently, the way he did everything, and it irritated her and warmed her at the same time, which was new, which was data, which she declined to examine.

The emcee ran his build-up. Twenty years of practice, and it showed. He got the crowd chanting, he got a drumroll out of a guy with a bucket, he made the trophy gleam under a flashlight. Nana's pulse picked up, but that was adrenaline, performance chemistry, the same thing that happened before she presented at conferences. She knew the difference. She'd built a career on knowing the difference.