We stopped right before the beach curved around the bend, and Nathan took my hand as we looked out at the ocean. I gazed at the glinting black water and the spread of stars above, at the cloudy glow of the Milky Way and Cassiopeia like a W within it. I’d never felt this way before, as if every molecule in my body had turned into a vessel for anticipation. Nathan tugged me closer to him, and he said jokingly, “You sure you should be out here alone with me? You barely know me.”

I looked up at him, his face a shadow in the starlight, and I said, “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it? Besides, maybe I’m the dangerous one.” I felt like I was coming into some kind of power I hadn’t known I had, but which arose as instinctually as holding my hands out to catch my balance.

“Dangerous how?” Nathan asked. “What are you going to do to me?”

After he said that, I had to initiate it. I reached up and put my hands on the back of his head to pull him down to me. I felt his surprise travel through him in a brief gasp, but he didn’t resist, and then his lips were on mine and I thought: This is it. I did it.

For my first real kiss, I think I did a decent job. I tried to mirror his movements, my mouth pushing back against his. I was surprised by how focused I was on the technical details of the kiss. Were my lips too firm? Were my hands in the wrong places? I had expected something more—you know, fireworks—but when Nathan’s tongue prodded my lips open, all I felt was a dim confusion at the bizarreness of having someone else’s tongue in my mouth. A wet, slithering muscle I couldn’t control, that tasted slightly sour. I realized he’d been secretly drinking beer. He pulled me closer, pressing our bodies together, and made a weird groaning noise in his throat that almost made me laugh. That was when I felt it between us, a hardness that hadn’t been there before poking at my stomach, and I realized, Oh my God, that’s his penis. My whole body flushed, half mortified, half pleased.

This was incontrovertible evidence that he liked me, and I think it was that knowledge that thrilled me, not Nathan himself. I didn’t feel anything special when we kissed. I’d spent fewer than two hours with him, and I didn’t know what kind of person he was. It didn’t matter. I had planned to kiss a boy, and now I was.