A/N: This is both an on the fly one shot to test my computer, and a quick announcement for those who read my works. Go to my profile, and vote if you care to. It will decide the next fiction I bring to completion. Details are in the profile as to why this is happening.

For the rest of you, on with the fiction!

Tentative Kiss

My eyes were closed, I was afraid to open them, to see her looking back at me with anything besides malice. I wanted to mend old wounds, to slip my fingers across her cheek and make it matter. If I could do that, I thought that I could come to some sort of reasonable decision about how to guide her heart back to me. To allow me to cradle it, just once more.

I didn't deserve her trust, and she didn't deserve mine. We'd hurt each other too much for that. It would have to be a blind leap of faith. Forgetting transgressions, laying pains in the dust to be buried. How to go about that, neither of us really knew. It wasn't something so simple as a confession, but, it wasn't complicated either.

I wanted to be with her, that was it. That was all I cared about, right then, I was determined to see my goal through. To prove my feelings, lay them all out on the line, indisputably. The evidence had to be from me, instantaneous and I had never been good with words. Thinking I was good at, but talking? Talking left me with a tied tongue and angry at myself.

Talking drove me to confusion, kept me restless, and held me bitterly in a grip of promises I felt forced to keep. Both for myself, and for others around me, as if...as if stupidly I had something to keep me tangled in a never-ending loop.

But I didn't want my feelings to be like that. I wanted them to be open for her, a book she could read and decipher without my logical brain getting in the way. Shizuru was more than that. She wasn't an addiction to me. I didn't really need her, and I'd never really been one for desire...she was just herself.

That one person in my life that just fit, without a label. Checking all of the boxes, and supporting me, Shizuru was just Shizuru to me. I loved her for that.

She was guarded, so was I.

I could feel it in her trembling lips, taste it in the salt the lingered there from her tears. In spite of my early denials, I really did love her, and I wanted her to know that. Among the otherwise shallow endeavors of spoken word, I had nothing else to use to convey the meaning. This kiss, it was my only chance.

All that I had was this one single moment, drifting in between reality and fantasy, present and past.

I knew that the moment I broke the kiss, it would no longer be something I could reasonably come to grips with. Because I loved her, because I chose to express that, I knew. The moment would be gone, and I…

I didn't want it to end.

I had to hope that she didn't either.