I thought we might celebrate Valentine’s Day with a first kiss. The scene below appears in a forthcoming story about a magical Love.

I know the Love is magic, because I live it daily.

The First Kiss

Time slowed as the elevator began its descent to the hotel lobby. In my final moments alone, I continued to wonder what I had wondered since October: where first would I sense her? Where first would I see her? Where first would I feel her presence? Of course the choices of where first narrowed in the weeks since we connected. Our phone calls, text messages, emails, laughter, and tears placed us together this afternoon in Montréal’s Hotel de la Montagne; but where would I first experience Sarah? Would she be to my right, or to my left? Would I bump into her without knowing, or feel her from across the room? Would I walk past, only to spot her like a businessman who scans the crowd for his placarded name held by an anonymous driver?

The elevator stopped on the third floor and a little boy and his dad joined me. We rode on in silence; they dressed in their winter coats and scarves to brave the cold, I only in my long sleeves and a sweater. At the first floor, little boy and dad raced around the corner to meet mom; riding in on their departure came the realization that I needed to look to my left as I rounded the corner of the hallway. Sarah would be to my left.

The lobby was a maze of traffic. Staff members and guests, young and old hustled about, swerving in and around one another, around luggage, and around the columns of the Grand Foyer. Jacob, sensing the nearness of Sarah, was oblivious to the whirling traffic around him. The din of the children’s cries, the clicking of luggage carts rolling past, the stomping of feet to shake off the cold, all grew softened until his silence was complete. Jacob could hear only his breath as he entered the foyer and looked where he knew he’d find her. He would later tell others that his breath stopped when he first saw Sarah.

My breath stopped. Time stopped. The world stopped, or rather, it continued in a flurry about me but all I could see, hear, and feel was Sarah. There was a moment before she saw me when she seemed to be hiding, almost ready to run back to her cab. Huddled beneath a black wool coat its collar up, a cap covering much of her curly black hair, and a scarf covering all but her red, red lips and her fire-lit brown eyes, Sarah paced behind two white pillars. She grasped the collar of her coat with gloved hands, almost as if she were playing peekaboo, or the child’s game of you can’t see me.

Once the fire in her eyes met mine, “I floated across the floor; I don’t remember my feet moving,” Jacob would later say. “It was like a tractor beam.” The muted world of the foyer grew ever more distant until at last the lovers embraced. Smiles were their only introduction. Jacob drew Sarah close, inhaling the lingering envelope of the cold damp still about her, and warmed by the hearth in her eyes. By the time he closed his, and touched her moist red lips, eternity melted, and the world around them disappeared, their thirsts quenched after a long drought.

Lifetimes passed during the embrace, neither could let go, and both held tight. Sarah’s eyeglasses got rearranged, but she hardly cared. “He’s strong,” she would tell her friends. Jacob nestled his chin on her curly black hair, and they rubbed cheeks, noses, and lips. Gentle kisses rained as they were filled with well-being and a healing sense of once again becoming whole.

The bustle of the Grand Foyer continued about them while Jacob and Sarah remained alone together in eternity.