She talked softly and thoughtfully, like she was telling me a secret, and I leaned in toward her, suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that we must kiss, that we ought to kiss right now on the dusty orange couch with its cigarette burns and its decades of collected dust. And I would have: I would have kept leaning toward her until it becomes necessary to tilt my face so as to miss her ski-slope nose, and I would have felt the shock of her so-soft lips. I would have.