And when you turned away I whispered, ‘Please don’t go.’

~ Romeo’s Quest

The show continued on, and I couldn’t take my eyes off Daniel for the remainder of the night. I could tell he loved what he did, and just the idea of that made me happy for him. When the final song finished, I stood with the rest and applauded in complete awe. He was brilliant. The whole band was ecstatic. Gabby would’ve loved them.

When Daniel looked down to me, I smiled and mouthed the words, “Thank you,” and he narrowed his eyes with a look of confusion, which I chose to ignore. I headed outside, knowing I’d stayed out longer than Hailey had thought I would, and she was probably having a panic attack, thinking that I’d stolen her car.

The warm air bustled through my hair. Digging into my pocket, I pulled out Hailey’s keys, ready to return to the place I had yet to call home.

“No name!” was shouted behind me, and I turned to see an exhausted-looking lead singer running my way. “What was that? Connect and run? You’re bailing without a goodbye?”

I opened my mouth and shrugged. “I said thank you.”

He slid his hands into his jeans. I could tell that the small breeze probably felt good against his bare arms after having stood under the hot lights in the bar. He stepped closer to me, and my body tensed up.

“I thought…” He paused and laughed. I thought he was laughing at himself. It was clear that I hadn’t done anything funny. “Never mind. It was nice meeting you.” He held his left hand out toward me and I shook it.

“Nice meeting you, too. Get inside and have a celebratory drink. You did amazing up there.” I chuckled.

He wasn’t smiling with his lips, but his eyes sparkled with care. “Was it your sister? Who you lost?”

I straightened up, taken aback by his words. “How did you know?”

Our hands still connected, he stepped one inch closer. “When you told the story about your golden, you spoke about her in past tense.”

“Oh.” That was all I could say. I didn’t know what else could be said, and just thinking about Gabby standing on that sidewalk was sending my waves of tears back.

“Still a new hurt?”

“Still fresh and ugly.”

“My mom passed a year ago. And last Friday I lost my dad to liver failure.” He stepped another inch closer.

My mouth dropped opened. “You just lost your father and you’re performing in a bar?”

“I’m pretty f**ked up,” he whispered, tapping his finger against his head. I knew the feeling all too well. “He was an English teacher. The band was his idea, actually—a Shakespeare-themed band. Only Dad could’ve come up with that.” He paused. “People tell you over time it’s suppose to get easier but—”

“It just gets harder,” I said, understanding completely and stepping closer to him.

“And it gets old to everyone around you. People get tired of you bringing it up. People get burdened by your sadness. So you act like it doesn’t hurt anymore. Just so you can stop people from worrying about you. Just so you won’t annoy anyone with your grief.”

“You want to know something that sounds crazy?” I felt a bit insane for talking to a complete stranger about losing a family member, but the truth was that he was the first person who seemed to understand where I was coming from. “When I drove over here, I could have sworn my twin sister was sitting next to me in the car.”

I watched as his eyes filled with such a look of despair. The words ‘twin sister’ had probably run through his mind, giving him that pained expression. I felt bad that I’d made him feel bad. A person like him should always feel good.

“It’s fine,” I whispered, “I’m okay.”

He shifted his feet around. “Sometimes I swear I can smell my dad’s favorite cigar smoke floating around me.”

We silenced our thoughts for a moment and both glanced down to our hands, which were still attached from our ‘goodnight’ handshake. Then a nervous laugh happened. I wasn’t sure if it was his nervous laughter or mine.

I broke the stillness and stepped backwards. Looking up into his blue eyes, I blinked once, hoping to not miss too much of his stare. “Ashlyn,” I said, offering him my name.

He stumbled back a few steps with a wide, toothy smile. “Ashlyn,” he sang. “Just when I thought you couldn’t get any more stunning, you pull out a name like that.”

I slipped my hands into my pockets and stared up at the night sky. It all seemed so simple. A bar with music that touched my soul. A boy who knew what it was like to lose a part of his joy. A light breeze that refreshed my entire being. “If there were a God, which I’m not certain that there is, do you think this night would be a form of apology for him taking away the things we loved?”

He released a breath and rubbed his hand across his mouth. “I don’t know. But I think it’s a good start.”

We were silent again. I’d never known that a silence could feel so much like home. He couldn’t stop smiling, yet neither could I. They were intense, cheesy grins that felt nothing but natural.

He broke the stillness and stepped backwards. “Well this has been a really f**king weird night.”

“I can second that.”

“All right then. I will stop bothering you and let you get going.”

“Yeah, of course. It’s just…” My words faded off, and he looked at me with narrowed eyes, waiting for me to finish. “I’m not ready to go yet. Because I know once I leave, all of this will be over. All of the magic of tonight that turned off my mind for a few hours will be gone and I’ll be sad Ashlyn again.”

“Are you asking me to make believe with you for a little while longer?” he asked.

I nodded with hopeful eyes, praying he wouldn’t think I was a total nut job.

He lifted my hand into his and nudged me in my shoulder. “Let’s take a walk,” he offered.

We took lap after lap around the block. I didn’t know why, but we started exchanging stories back and forth about our lives. On lap three, Daniel told me about his father, how they hadn’t been close until his mom died. Then they’d grown really close, and he regretted the years he’d lost due to being distant. He paused on the corner of Humboldt Street and James Avenue and took a deep inhale. Staring out into the night, he laced his fingers behind his neck and closed his eyes. I didn’t say anything because the regret in his body language was saying all that needed to be said.

I learned that he had a brother, but when I asked about him, Daniel’s body tensed up. “We don’t talk.” The words came out colder than anything I’d heard him say before. I didn’t ask more about it.

On lap four, we laughed about how overly tired we both were and how we hadn’t been able to truly sleep. On lap six, I cried. It started out with a few fallen tears but morphed into full-on waterworks, and Daniel didn’t ask me to explain. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me into his chest, soothing tones leaving his lips.

I tried to choke out the words to tell him that I would be all right, but he warned me against them. He said that it was okay to not be okay. He explained that it was fine to be broken for a while, to not feel anything but hurt. We stayed on lap six the longest, him whispering against my hair that someday, somehow, the hurt would be overshadowed by the joy.

Later, I told him about the bucket list Gabby had crafted for me, and he asked to read it. Reaching into my purse, I pulled out the folded piece of paper and handed it to him. He held it with such care, unfolding it slowly. I watched his eyes travel from left to right as he moved his way down the list.

“Hula-hoop in a department store?” he questioned, arching an eyebrow my way.

I chuckled, nodding.

“Sing a Michael Jackson song at a karaoke bar, including dance moves?”

“I know, right? That one was more Gabby than it was me,” I replied.

He smiled at the list before folding it back up and handing it to me. He asked me how many I have checked off so far, making me sigh.

“None yet. I was supposed to dance on the bar tonight…but as you witnessed, I had a minor mental breakdown.”

“So you haven’t read a letter from your sister yet?”

“Not yet. I kind of want to just rip them all open but…”

He laughed as he started to walk around the block again. “But you don’t want to be that girl.”

“That girl?” I questioned, standing in place, staring in his direction.

“You know. The girl who deliberately disobeys her dead twin sister.”

I smiled. I knew it was twisted, and some would call it wrong what he said, but I smiled because heck…it was funny. I really missed funny moments in my life. “You’re right. I wouldn’t dare be that girl.”

“Besides…” He turned around toward me and bit into his bottom lip. He walked closer to me and playfully nudged me in the shoulder. “You’re about to complete one of the tasks.” When he said this, my nose wiggled and my eyebrows arched.

He laughed at my somewhat dumbfounded stance. When his face grew closer to mine, I let the air release from my mouth, brushing against his lips. It felt like forever that our mouths were millimeters apart, yet it was only truly a few seconds.

His lips didn’t only look soft and kissable—they looked talented as well. Like they could kiss someone even if they were on the other side of the world and make that person melt. It wasn’t long before I realized just how talented those lips were.

Our lips connected in a way I’d never been kissed. There needed to be a new word for this type of kissing. Therapeutic. Poignant. Apologetic. Blissful. All of those beautifully diverse feelings—all at once. The overwhelming amount of emotions running through my body electrified the energy that traveled from me to him.

I knew I would never want to kiss another man from the way I kissed him. I never knew that kissing could be so simple yet so complex. He did all of the work with just his lips discovering mine.

He pulled me to the side of the bar and my back found the stone wall, but it wasn’t the wall that was holding me up as much as it was his touch. He leaned in closer to me and I felt his tongue part my lips, finding my tongue ready to become well aquatinted with his.

When his arms wrapped tighter around me, my leg reached up to find its final placement around his hips. A small gasp fell from me as his strong hands clasped around my bottom and lifted me up even higher, making my selfish want to wrap my legs around him become a desperate need in order to fight gravity.

Like a wandering star, my body fell into the depths of desire, and I began to beg the heavens that this wasn’t some depression-drenched fantasy—yet if it were, I hoped to never find reality again.

He moved his mouth away from mine, leaving me with my eyes closed and my heart open. I could feel his heart pounding against his t-shirt, and he placed his hand over my heart. Words were not needed because everything was felt from within, spilling out into each other’s fingertips.

One last time, his lips crossed mine, almost not touching, as a closing ceremony. When I opened my eyes, I found his stare, and he smiled toward me as he began to explain in more depth. “Number twenty-three.”

He slowly lowered me back to the ground. I looked down to the list still resting in my hands and quickly darted my eyes to number twenty-three.

#23. Kiss a stranger.

Well I’ll be damned. I kissed a stranger.

My eyes looked up from the list to find Daniel smiling at me. He took three large strides backwards and took a bow. “You’re welcome,” he joked.

I couldn’t contain my glee, and it was useless to try. Spinning around in a circle with my arms flung out, I let the night air wash across my body. I get to open a letter! I felt like crying, but I knew it would only be happy tears.