Kissing Sloane Carter

She looked like an angel in white and Sam struggled to breathe when he looked at her, even after all these years.

He didn’t have any memories of a time before knowing Sloane, but every time he thought of her wearing white, they were in church, just as they were today.

They had been neighbors since before they were born. Their mothers had been best friends since middle school and had determined that Sam and Sloane would be friends even before they were conceived. Sloane twinkled into existence just three months before Sam and the wheels were set in motion. One of their earliest photos was both of them in long white gowns being baptized, both red-faced and crying, though of course neither of them remembered it.

The first time Sam could remember Sloane wearing white was at their First Communion. She wore a frilly dress with baby’s breath in her golden hair and shiny white shoes with little straps that she hated. Sloane was a straw-haired, freckled whirlwind of a girl, not the type who enjoyed lace and hair pins.

“Sam, stop blinking. Sloane, get closer. Your face is in the tree's shadow.” Sam’s mother barked directions from behind her camera. They were outside the copper roofed church, sweating in the Florida sunshine amidst a sea of parents snapping photos of children in varying stages of discomfort.

“Sam, go closer to Sloane. There’s too much sun on your face. Sloane, stop scratching that bug bite.” Sloane’s mother stood shoulder to shoulder with Sam’s, taking what must be a nearly identical picture.

Sam and Sloane groaned and forced smiles that both of their mothers called grimaces. The moment the photos were done, Sam yanked off his tie and loosened his suffocating collar. Sloane leaned against the tree to investigate the ant bites on her shin that her lacy white socks didn’t hide. Sam didn’t say anything when he noticed the green streaks across her backside from the moss. He just stood close beside her, hoping that her mother wouldn’t notice.

It was a foolish hope.

“Sloane, how do you always get dirty? Look at Sam! He’s clean, and he’s a boy!”

Sam purposely tripped on the way back to the car so that his khakis were stained on the knees for the party. Both mothers had frowned at him, but Sloane had grinned, her cornflower blue eyes crinkling at the corners.

Most of his memories of her didn’t involve the church, but the woods and the creek near their houses. They spent most afternoons stomping through scrubby ferns and mangrove roots, returning home with filthy fingernails and dirt-streaked shins. By the time they were eight, they were allowed to roam the woods without grownups, as long as they promised not to go in the creek, and to come home if they saw an alligator. Their eight-year-old strategizing to avoid child-hungry alligators - run in a zig zag, they always said at school - led to them searching for the perfect tree. The idea of daringly climbing a tree to escape a ferocious alligator was a childhood fantasy that never came to fruition, largely due to the laziness of alligators, they later realized, but it didn’t stop their hunt for the perfect tree.

Finding Their Tree took years. It was an ancient oak tree with wide branches spread low enough that they could dig their fingers into the ridges of the bark and scramble up through the branches until they were high enough to catch the brief hints of a breeze, even in the clinging humidity of Florida summers. It was better, of course, during the fall and winter, when the air was less likely to suffocate someone without even trying.

“Did you know there are places in the world without mosquitos? And they barely even have flies or ants or anything. Mostly just fat, fuzzy bees.” It was April, and they were ten, swinging their dirt crusted sneakers in the air and drinking warm juice boxes in Their Tree.

“How?” Sam narrowed his eyes. Sloane had also said that fairies lived in the old mossy oak stump at the far edge of the woods when they were five, but all they had found were palmetto bugs when they looked.

“My cousin went to England for Spring Break. She said there were no mosquitos and people didn’t even have screens on their windows.”

“What? No one would have windows without screens.” Sam scowled at her. She must have made that up, like the fairy tree.

“Nu-uh. Cassie swore it’s true.”

Sam didn’t mind Sloane’s made up stories, really. It gave them something to do when their mothers invariably said, “Go outside. You can play Nintendo when it gets dark.” It was such a common refrain that they had stopped even asking by the time they were teenagers.

Sam had a crystal clear memory of the time they found the rusted remains of a car half hidden in the golden leather ferns, more scraps than skeleton. Even though they were fourteen, and too old for make-believe anymore, he liked to hear Sloane’s crazy version of things. He liked it even more when she would flash her toothy smile at him when he played along, so he always did.

“I bet it was a bootlegger’s car,” he said the first time they approached it. Sloane pushed her straw-colored hair out of her face to grin at him and his cheeks flushed. It was a chilly day in January, so he couldn’t pretend it was from the heat.

“Or star-crossed lovers escaping their parent’s wrath.” Sloane had been very interested in star-crossed lovers ever since her cousin Cassie had seen her school production of Romeo and Juliet. Sam had never been a fan of Cassie before that year. She was three years older and almost always convinced Sloane to paint her nails or put on makeup for hours when she came to visit. This time, though, Sam thought she might be some sort of angel. This year, she was filling Sloane’s head with thoughts of yearning romance and stolen kisses. Yesterday, for the first time in her entire life, Sloane had blushed when she looked at him, when Cassie told them that there was such a thing as a French kiss.

Sam had never seen Sloane blush before in her entire life. Not even when she threw up three popsicles on his feet last Fourth of July or when her aunts cooed over the hideously embarrassing picture of the two of them as naked toddlers in a bathtub together that Sloane’s mother inexplicably kept on full display in their living room. Sam had considered burning that picture at least half a dozen times, but Sloane never seemed to care. Now, though, her cheeks were rosy at the mere mention of kissing, with or without tongues.

They avoided looking at each other when they investigated the rusted chunks of metal, devoid of broken liquor bottles or romantically entwined skeletons to prove either of them right.

Exactly two weeks later, Sam knew his fate was sealed.

“Your mom said you were still asleep. She was going to work when I came in.” Sloane flung herself onto the bed beside him as he groaned and pulled the blanket higher. “You know it’s nine, don’t you?”

“You know it’s Saturday, don’t you?”

“I had to get up early to take Cassie to the airport. She did my makeup before she left. She said she thinks this shade of lipstick is perfect for me. Don’t you like it?” Sam rolled onto his side and opened one eye to look at her, his view impeded by his dark curls falling over his face. Sloane’s lips were a shade of raspberry that didn’t make any sense for fishing in the creek, which is what they were supposed to do today.

“I guess.”

“Anyway, her flight was delayed, and we got home twenty minutes ago and now I’m bored.” Sam grunted and closed his eyes again, but Sloane was nudging his shoulder. “Go brush your teeth. I have a surprise for you.”

“Is it breakfast?”

“No. And even if it was, I wouldn’t tell you. That’s the whole point of a surprise, Sam.” Sam considered for a moment. She wouldn’t leave, no matter what he did, so there was no point in fighting it.

“Fine.”

Three minutes later, teeth freshly brushed and grumbling, he returned to find Sloane sitting cross-legged on the bed.

“Come sit.”

“Why do I have to sit? Is it a bad surprise?” Sam halted in the doorway. The worst surprise Sloane had ever brought was an enormous frog she had found on her front porch two years ago. It would have been a nice surprise if Sam’s dog hadn’t eaten it and been sick all over the carpet.

“Just sit down.” Sloane was fiddling with her fingers, which she never did. Sam approached slowly, keeping his eyes on her pockets, which did not seem to contain any amphibians.

“Well, what is it?” He flopped down on the bed, arms spread like Jesus about to be crucified. Whatever it was, it probably wasn’t worth waking up at nine on a perfectly good Saturday in January. They always got up earlier than this to fish in summer, when the weather was stifling by nine, but in January you could fish at noon and the air was still brisk. That meant the surprise was probably some stupid story about something Cassie had said. He let out a withering sigh.

“I think we should practice kissing.”

Sam snapped upright like a mousetrap that had been sprung. Had some secret, silent prayer of his been answered? Was he dreaming? Was he dead? Did Sloane Carter kiss people in heaven? If so, he wasn’t entirely disappointed by realizing that he was dead.

“What?”

“I mean, in case we ever want to kiss other people one day. Like if we ever have a boyfriend or a girlfriend and we don’t want to be embarrassed because we’re bad at kissing.” Sloane’s cheeks were bright pink and her spine was rod straight as she looked at him.

Sam felt perfectly divided between falling on his knees to thank the patron saint of kissing and throwing himself in front of a bus at the thought of Sloane practicing kissing to impress some future boyfriend.

“Practice?”

“Yeah, just practice. We can go fishing after.” Sloane nodded as though this were the conclusion of a business negotiation. If Sam hadn’t broken out in a cold sweat, he would have laughed. He had been ready to kiss her since her eleventh birthday party when he had realized that she was beautiful and that he wanted to put his fingers in her straw-colored hair.

“Okay.” He turned to face her. He had dreamed about kissing Sloane plenty of times. In his dreams, they sometimes kissed in the rain, or in his living room, or sitting in Their Tree with the oak leaves whispering around them in cool breezes that made her lean further into him. Every time he dreamed about it, though, they were already kissing. He had never considered how to start kissing her.

Before he had even fully formulated the thought, she had pressed her mouth on his. It was fast: an aggressive peck that knocked her teeth against his. Sam’s eyes widened as Sloane leaned back, her pupils so big that he could hardly see the blue of her iris. He had kissed Sloane Carter, and it wasn’t anything like his dreams. It was infinitely better.

“I don’t think I did it right.” Her hands were gripping the tops of her thighs like she might fall off the earth if she let go.

“I think you did.” Despite how much time they spent outdoors, there was no tan that could hide the way his face was burning. “Do you want to try again?” It was one of those rare occasions where words did not come bursting out of her like water from a fire hydrant. She just nodded and leaned forward.

“You start this time.”

He moved slower than she had, keeping his eyes locked on hers in case she changed her mind, until the moment their lips met. Her mouth was softer now, less anxious, and he kept his mouth pressed to hers, breathing in the soapy smell of her skin. She didn’t lean away, so he kissed her again, putting his fingers in her hair, just behind her ear, the way he had wanted to since they were eleven. She smiled without taking her mouth off of his.

“I like it better when you start it.” Her minty breath was warm on his mouth as she kissed him again.

He had kissed her thousands of times since then. They had kissed in Their Tree and in the shade of the mangroves while fishing. He had kissed her at Easter in front of her whole family. She had kissed him back and her mother squealed “I knew it!” half a dozen times. He had kissed her at every school dance and at every football game. They had kissed in a hundred other places that blurred together after so many years. Their mothers had both framed the picture of Sam and Sloane kissing at graduation, their blue gowns flapping in the sultry breeze that did nothing to dispel the blanketing humidity of Florida in May.

Today was different. Today he would kiss her surrounded by white satin, in the same church they had been baptized in. Every eye would be on them, at the front of the church, drenched in the rainbow of the stained glass. Sam looked down at the shades of gold and brown on his hands, the colors of the panes that made up Jesus and the cross, and noticed that the shade of flax over his ring finger was the exact color of Sloane’s hair in the dark, when the golden streaks were hard to see. She talked in her sleep, usually disjointed muttering in the darkness, aside from the time she sat bolt upright in bed at two in the morning, a week after they got engaged.

“You’ll regret it.” Sam rubbed his eyes and put an arm over her to pull her back into the pillows. She had talked in her sleep since they were kids, though he had never seen her do it with her eyes open. “We shouldn’t get married. No boy wants to marry the only girl they’ve kissed. You never sowed your wild oats. You need to go sleep with someone else or something. Don’t tell me about it, though. Wait, no, actually, I think you--”

“Sloane, you’re crazy.” He sat up and kissed her on her perfect cupid’s bow mouth that he had spent the past ten years kissing and was planning to kiss until the day he died. From the first time they had kissed, he had never been able to imagine a future with anyone but Sloane. “I love you. I could never want anyone else.”

It had taken him almost an hour to convince her that there was nothing he could ever regret about marrying her, and today, all these years later, he was still right.

I regret nothing, Sloane Mayhew.

He looked down at her, perfectly still as she had so rarely been in life, lying with her hair spread across the white satin pillow, her eyes closed like she was sleeping. She would have hated how perfectly someone had curled her hair, too. It wasn’t her hair, of course. Sloane hadn’t had any hair in more than a year.

Today was the last day that he would ever kiss Sloane, surrounded by white, under the same stained glass of the same church where they had gotten married four years ago.

He leaned over the casket, holding his breath because she didn’t smell like her soap, and kissed her on her stiff, rubbery mouth, ignoring the weeping from the pews. He had cried all of his tears already and he had none left to offer today, just an aching, endless hollowness.

Sloane had told him, of course, that she wanted him to go on living after she died. She told him he was still young and he should find a new wife and have a wonderful life. It was probably the first time in his life that he wasn’t going to listen to her.

Sam sat on the hard folding chair, but he couldn’t see her from this angle, so he stood up again.

It wouldn’t be like this for him. No one would have to suffer through the pageantry and kissing lifeless faces that should have been rosy and laughing. He had decided the week before Sloane died he wouldn’t subject anyone to this.

It wouldn’t be hard to do. They hadn’t used the boat in years, not since Sloane got sick, but it still ran well enough. The gun was in a box under the center seat, and he would leave tonight from St. James City. He could get 50 miles offshore on one tank of gas before he did it so that no one would ever find his body. No one would have to look at him lying on a satin pillow with unnaturally pink lips inside a shiny oak casket, bathed in the light of the stained glass of the church. There would be no body for them to cry over the way they all were now.

Sam didn’t cry as he looked down at her because he knew that if there was a heaven, Sloane Carter Mayhew would kiss him there, and he was going to see her in just a few hours.