The Almost Kiss

Close enough that the question has already been asked. Somebody's hand has arrived somewhere it has not been before, neither of them is talking, and there are perhaps three seconds left in which this could still be nothing. The almost kiss is a set-piece rather than a plot: a single scene in which the kiss becomes imminent and does not happen. It is the genre's most-used pressure valve and the one most often deployed carelessly, because it appears to cost nothing. What the set-piece promises is advancement without payment. The relationship moves. Both parties now know something they did not know four minutes ago, and neither has had to say anything or own anything. The reader receives the charge of the kiss and keeps the anticipation of it, which is an unusually good exchange rate. The make-or-break element is whether the interruption changes something. That is the test and it is where the scene lives or dies. An interruption that merely postpones is a delay. An interruption that alters the situation is a scene. The right person walks in and now there is a witness. A phone rings and the call is the thing that has been coming for two chapters. Somebody says a name and it is the wrong one. The reader should be able to say what the interruption cost, beyond the kiss. The failure mode is the arbitrary interruption. A door bangs, a dog barks, a waiter arrives. Nothing about the intrusion connects to the plot, and the reader can see the writer's hand pulling the characters apart because the book is not ready. Once that is visible, every subsequent almost-kiss in the book is read as machinery. There is a second failure, which is repetition. Used once, the set-piece electrifies a middle act. Used four times, the reader concludes the writer is stalling, and the fourth instance actively damages the first three by revealing them as a pattern rather than as events. The strongest versions understand that the aftermath is where the scene pays. Both characters now have to be in the same room having not kissed, and the not-having is louder than the kiss would have been. The best writing in this set-piece is frequently the ninety seconds after it, in which two people discuss something entirely unrelated. There is also a variant worth naming, in which one of them stops it deliberately. That is a considerably stronger scene than an external interruption, because it puts a decision on the page: somebody has chosen not to, for a reason, and the reason is now the book's business. There is a placement question worth making explicit, because it determines how much the scene can carry. An almost kiss in the first third is an announcement: the reader learns that this is on the table. One at the midpoint is a genuine crisis, because both parties now have information they cannot return. One in the final act, after a rupture, is a different device altogether, closer to a failed reconciliation than to anticipation. Somebody steps back. Neither of them refers to it again that evening, and both of them are aware that this is a decision. That is the set-piece. Not the kiss that did not happen, but everything that becomes unsayable once it nearly did.