Ned knows every near-kiss with Nancy by heart before it happens for real.
He's seven and she's six the first time, and maybe it counts but he doesn't think it does because even though their lips touch it's for a second and her eyes are bright after, and there's a set to her mouth. He just did it to make her feel better, and she sniffles and she looks stubborn as a bulldog. The next time Deirdre says something mean to her on the playground, Ned hears later, Nancy takes a deep breath and says "Well Ned kissed me last week," and all the girls pulled back, pulling in surprised awed breaths, as Nancy twined her fingers around the chains of the swing and smiled, her eyes fierce.
The next time he's nine and she's eight, and they're in the treehouse he and his dad built over the summer, the sun almost down, her lips stained from the fluorescent green popsicle she's eating. He sticks out his tongue and asks if it's blue, and she giggles at him and nods. He looks at her and he doesn't know what he feels, because it's like it's filling him up, like there's no space to breathe. Then his mother calls that Hannah is there to pick Nancy up, and she goes to the ladder and begins to climb down, and it's like an accident, that his lips brush her cheek, but she grabs his hand when they're both on the ground and they run inside together, and it's like a secret with no words.
When he's eleven, the kiss is stiff and barely a brush of his lips against her cheek, thanks to the mistletoe his parents hung over the back door while they decorated for Christmas. When he's thirteen it's on the anniversary of her mother's death and she's crying, and it's just his lips against the crown of her head while she leans against his shoulder with his arm around her. When he's fourteen and it happens at the end of a homework date while they're waiting on the porch for his father to find his coat and car keys so he can take Nancy home, it's a second, heavy as a gasped wish, and she startles away from him, eyes wide, but he can't name what he sees in her gaze.
At fifteen, it's at a co-ed party they lied to get permission to attend, with no parents and strangely bitter punch and girls with spiky mascara and aggressive lipstick, and games of spin the bottle. They end up in one of those games and his heart's beating fast, his palms slick, but when Nancy spins and it falls on someone else, his stomach turns and he sees her gaze on him, the color high in her cheeks.
At sixteen he knows what girls look like naked and what sex is, and he can't reconcile what his parents have said to the magazines his friends have shown him. When he thinks of Nancy there's no violence, only softness; no hurt, only sweetness. He knows it's love. And at the end of their first real date, by themselves, after dinner with his parents but a movie alone together with their hands joined on the armrest between them the whole time, they go out to the theatre lobby to wait for his parents to finish their movie and Nancy's talking about the plot and the effects, but his awareness of her had been too insistent for him to comprehend anything else.
He knows it's love and he has no idea what to do about it or how to tell her.
So his parents take her home and Ned walks her to her front door, their hands still joined. They've known each other for years, and maybe she doesn't feel it, maybe not yet or not ever, but he feels like he'll die if he doesn't tell her.
"I had a nice time." Her eyes are bright.
"I did too," he says, and it feels like if she just looks at him, she'll see it in his face, in every line of him, but he still can't say it. Maybe she only thinks of him as a friend. Maybe she'll only ever see him as a friend.
Then they reach her front door, and Nancy glances back at his parents' car, then up at him. "You have, just a little… if you could lean down," she tells him, reaching up and brushing her fingertips against his cheek, and he bends down obediently, trying to stay cool, but he's searching her eyes, trying to figure out that strange combination of signals and feels that will mean it's the right time.
And then she stands up on her tiptoes and brings her face very close to his, so that he can feel her breath against his lips, and then they're kissing, for-real, and her hand is cupping his shoulder and he has his arm wrapped around her and it's frantic and sweet and then soft. And then she relaxes so she's at her natural height again, her lips reddened, searching his eyes.
"I've been waiting a long time for that," she whispers, and then she grins.
He can't help grinning too, his arm still wrapped around her, and he's almost too close to her but he doesn't want to let her go. "So? How was it?"
Hesitantly she touches his cheek again, still gazing into his eyes. "Worth the wait," she murmurs, just before he leans down and kisses her again.