You called it a “practice kiss.”

Steven—Meeks to everyone who’s known him longer than an afternoon—pretended the phrase didn’t make his pulse falter. You said it at the end of a study session, casual as a comma.

“Actors do it,” you teased, flipping closed a dog-eared script you always carry. “They kiss in rehearsal so it’s not awkward onstage.”

Meeks, who has never successfully hidden anything from his freckles, tried to look scholarly about the proposition, nodding once, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He muttered something about empirical evidence: if actors used rehearsal to remove variables, who was he to doubt the methodology?

That’s how the two of you found yourselves in the quiet corner of the common room, under a lamplight meant for reading, not unraveling nervous hearts. The rules were simple—or so you insisted. One kiss. No over-thinking. Then back to flash cards and lecture notes like nothing happened.

Except Steven does over-think. It’s his native language. As he stood there, the distance of one failed heartbeat apart, he calculated the arrangement the way he parses an equation: • Known quantity: the tilt of your lips (slightly teasing). • Unknown: the exact length of time a practice kiss lasts. • Variable: what a heart does when a controlled experiment stops feeling controlled.

You touched his sleeve first, light as turning a page. Steven forgot what air was for a second; regained it when you whispered, “Ready?” He meant to answer with a confident yes, but it came out more like a surprised breath.

The kiss was brief—textbook, if textbooks ever bothered to describe warmth blooming behind closed eyelids. When you leaned back, Steven blinked once, twice, recalibrating reality. His mouth tried to form an academic observation; his brain supplied only static.

“See?” you said, voice soft. “Now it won’t be strange if a script calls for it.”

Strange was not the word he’d have chosen. Monumental, maybe. Cataclysmic in the smallest, sweetest way. But he nodded, adjusted his glasses again, and murmured, “Scientific reproducibility achieved.”

You laughed—bright, genuine—and handed him a flash card as if a syllabus could compete with what had just happened. He studied latin declensions that evening, but every second line translated to the curve of your mouth, the fractional hesitation before contact, the echo of your laugh.

Later—much later—Steven stood brushing his teeth in the dim dorm bathroom and wondered where, exactly, practice ended and permanence began. Because the next time he closed his eyes, he felt the phantom of that kiss like gravity, precise and undeniable.

He hasn’t told anyone. Charlie would make a song and dance of it; Knox would write sonnets; Todd would blush on Steven’s behalf. Cameron would ask for evidence, and Steven would have none except the way his heart reroutes every time you walk into a room.

So the data stays with him: one practice kiss, observed effects still unfolding. He’s recorded the variables in the margin of his notebook—date, time, ambient temperature, the exact color your eyes were under that lamp. Not because he fears forgetting, but because it feels like proof that it happened outside of his imagination.

Tomorrow, you two will sit side by side again. You’ll read lines or compare notes. Maybe you’ll call it research; maybe you’ll call it friendship laced with curiosity. Steven won’t ask for another practice round. He’s not sure he could categorize a second kiss as anything less than intent, and intent still terrifies him even more than organic chemistry labs.

But if you were to ask—if you were to say, quietly, “I think we need another rehearsal”—Meeks would push his glasses up, try (and fail) to slow his pulse, and agree in the name of scientific accuracy.

Because deep down, Steven knows one thing with absolute certainty: that single experiment rewrote his entire hypothesis on what it means to feel something more than theory.

And he suspects—you felt it too.