Disclaimer: I do not own The OC.
Notes: There just isn't enough Oliver/Seth out there.
If Oliver really thought about it, actually pulled back for a single moment to take a much needed but highly overrated breath of fresh oxygen, he would have realized that in all technicalities, that he got his first kiss from Seth Cohen.
It wasn't as if he had never been kissed before, of course. After all, he had been nearly seventeen, wealthy, attractive – if he did say so himself; and anyway, even if it wasn't true, his therapist told him he was, and therapists didn't lie, because they were professionals and his father paid them good money to be brutally honest – and a healthy – physically, anyway – red blooded American boy.
It was just that he had never been kissed before.
In years past, when Oliver had found himself with his lips pressed against heavily glossed, slippery, deceptive lips, it had been nothing more than a byproduct of his usually half-obsessed, hormonal desires. It was always him, only him, that had wanted to feel something more than a physical satisfaction, wanted to feel some part of his love and dependency mirrored back in sweet, gentle kisses, in harsh, passionate touches, in anything where he could feel skin on skin and hair beneath his fingertips, in anything where he could feel minutely requited.
But in the end, always in the end, it turned out that kisses, like everything else, only had weight with him. They only meant something to him. The attraction, physical and emotional, was always purely one sided.
At least the emotional, anyway.
Because as it had turned out, some girls could kiss him, could run their fingers through his hair and touch his shoulders, could lie underneath or on top of him, and for all the physical sensations and warmth and comfort, still not feel a single thing. Not in the heart, not in the inside, where it really mattered.
So those kisses, those fleeting touches, had all been a futile attempt for affections he could never hope to gain.
They didn't count.
But Seth's lips weren't covered in glittery gloss, and Seth's lips weren't sloppy, and Seth's lips could never lie – not to him, not to anyone.
So, perhaps, if Oliver really thought about it, the only kiss that ever mattered was the kiss – kisses, actually; plural – he got from Seth Cohen.
However, thinking was never really high on the priorities list when Oliver was kissing Seth. The only thing that had mattered was lips that he was not familiar with, but growing quickly accustomed to, lips that were soft and dry and cracked but still the most beautiful thing Oliver had ever touched. The only thing that had mattered was hands, long and calloused on the fingertips, roughness caused by paper cuts from the corner pages of comics and books and magazines, hands that felt good being intertwined with his, hands that were cool when they traced over his collar bone. The only thing that had mattered the fact that Seth kissed with something behind it, something not tinged with cruelty or roots for self-satisfaction, it was something that meant, 'Yes'. It was something that meant Seth was feeling him, feeling him on the inside, where it counts, where it will be remembered.
Now that Oliver has a chance, has the time – all the time in the world, because he's been informed that he'll be vacationing in the California Men's Correction Facility, a.k.a. Hell, for a very, very, very long time – to think about it, to go over all the moves, he realizes that Seth's kiss was the only thing, only thing ever, that mattered.
For all the regrets in Oliver's life, all the hurt feelings and pain and anger he has with himself and the rest of the world, he can't regret that it was Seth. He can't regret that it was the first kiss with Seth that he recalls as his first kiss, that it was his first time with Seth that he recalls as his first time, that it was his first declaration of love for Seth that he recalls as his first declaration of love.
And he would give anything, everything that he ever had and didn't have and lost, to be the one thing that Seth didn't regret, too.