Despertar

kiss kiss

Self-important young people are insufferable. I sometimes have metaphysical moments when I, as my future self, look back on myself at twenty-three, on this exact moment, and my loathing is so, very, intense.

I have five first kisses. All but two of them suck.

*

Eighteen and two thirds. I hadn't yet identified my feelings for Marcus yet as feelings, so when the other guy, an older guy, an engineering student, set his sights on me, I was confused by my own apathy.

He had a bunch of friends in their twenties with jobs in the city. He had an apartment with a wet bar containing nothing but a dozen bottles of Golden Grain. He used the imaginary word "mines" to indicate the first-person possessive, but he was handsome and considerate and obviously going places with his life. He already had a job lined up for after he graduated, which he was going to, that year. Just when I was getting settled in Atlanta.

Coincidentally, he had done summer work for a woman who worked for my mom. He was up north at a Verizon awards banquet in October, and I was my mom's date. We talked, he asked to take me out to dinner the next day. I said no thanks, but did he want to come to the mall with me? I had a Borders gift certificate I wanted to use before I headed back down south.

He did. He walked me to my car afterward, held the driver's side door open for me till I climbed in, shut it and fluttered his fingers at me. Just as I was sticking the key in the ignition, he opened the door again, leaned in and asked, with a strange intensity, "Hey, you aren't seeing anybody else, are you?"

"No," I said, because I didn't have time enough to decide whether to lie.

His face broke into a wide smile. "Great," he enthused. "That means I can do this."

He leaned in, turning his head ninety degrees sideways. He pressed his lips to mine and held them there, pushing against my face, for about five seconds. He didn't use any tongue, which was all to the good, as I had no idea what to do if he did. It was just his lips, which were full and supple without being moist, against mine, which, considering I was in the throes of ugly-duckling adolescence, were probably chapped.

Afterward, he straightened up and blinked at me. "Thanks," he said, smiling. "I just wanted to see how you kissed."

"So how do I kiss?" I had to ask.

He smirked and moved to shut the door. "About like I expected," he said. He shut the door.

We eventually stopped talking because he had all sorts of caveats with regards to what I could and couldn't do, per his comfort level. He didn't want me to talk to Marcus, with whom he perceived I had a weird chemistry, and I was secretly beginning to think Marcus was my (platonic) soulmate, so, there went that.

*

Nineteen and eleven twelfths. I had asked him, coyly, to save a New Year's kiss for me.

(What I actually asked, in the interest of accuracy, was for him to plan a quick trip up to visit me after Christmas. I wasn't as well-versed in his language then as I am now, so I didn't realize he was putting me off until he had, in fact, put me off. I thought when he said he would "try," he meant it; that if time and resources permitted, it would top his priority list. You and I both know better, now.)

He had just broken up with his girlfriend, a few weeks earlier; if I had to characterize his then-mindset with a song, it would be AC/DC's "Back In Black." Nothing pleased him more than to end his nights without obligatory phone calls. Knowing he felt that way, I somehow misguidedly interpreted his calls to me as signs of his voluntary devotion. He called at midnight, maybe twenty seconds after the ball dropped. There was noise on my end, noise on his end, but I yelled into the phone, more loudly than was necessary (to impress the people around me, or something), Save the first kiss of 2005 for me, okay? And he gave his standard noncommittal response, which I didn't yet recognize as bullshit, and I hung up happy.

Two weeks later, we were on a public bench in front of the school bookstore, freezing our balls off, talking. The subject of the kiss had come up more than once over the course of our hour-long conversation, we both knew it was coming, we hadn't yet breached the irreparable stronghold of our platonic relationship, but we knew we were going to.

A really cold wind blew past us, knocking his hat off. "I think that's my cue to go inside," he said.

I was chilled to the bone, but shaking with anticipation of our kiss. "Okay," I said, reaching into my pocket for Chapstik. "One last thing, first." I was religious about Chapstik, at that point. I never wanted anyone else looking as horrified as Erin did the day my lips cracked and bled all through class.

Marcus watched me apply my Chapstik and, unbeknownst to me, began to develop an erection. "That's making me so excited," he said after a few-second pause. "Because I know exactly what you're getting ready for."

(I swear I didn't remember this being so awkward.)

Even knowing I had no idea what I was doing, I took the initiative and plunged in. It had the makings of a good kiss, but ended up being really sloppy and wet because of my overzealous swivel action. I rocked my head back and forth for about thirty seconds, eyes closed, repeatedly trapping mouthfuls of mustache. I could feel his surprise, his repeated readjusting, his spit all over my chin.

We were seated side by side, poor positioning for our purposes. He placed a hand on my knee. I placed a hand awkwardly on his crotch and slid it back and forth, testing the length of his penis. I had never seen a penis. I had nothing to compare it to. Beneath my fingers it felt impossibly huge and hard. The more relaxed my touch grew, the more he seemed to enjoy the kiss. He leaned in further till I was leaning back.

After about a minute, he pulled away with a wet-sounding smack.

It was a full moon. I remember thinking my eyes probably looked rounder than the moon did. I had to reach up and wipe the spit off of my face. "You're a good kisser," I said. I meant it. I didn't know better.

"You are, too," he replied. "You're one of the better kissers I've ever kissed."

I didn't sleep that whole night, and instead spent it analyzing that line, throwing it fully under the microscope, testing its honesty. I knew he hadn't kissed many girls in his lifetime, not more than six or seven, so it frustrated me that he had said better instead of best. If I was in the top two, I reasoned, he would have said best.

In retrospect, it was a terrible kiss. We got better at it, more fluid, less wet. He sometimes complained that I didn't use enough tongue. I remained paranoid about recreating the messy wetness of that first time.

Anyway, you know how that turned out.

*

(Twenty. The non-kiss. I knew I shouldn't, so I didn't, even though we did lots of other, worse things. I kept telling him I didn't want to. He kept trying to catch me off guard, sneak his lips onto mine when my eyes drifted shut at the end of a long night of talking. I told him we shouldn't because I might catch feelings, and I knew that couldn't happen.)

*

Twenty-one and five sixths. The room was spinning, I was so drunk, and he had just ordered me another double mojito.

It was a ritzy event, and I was one of the hostesses. Out of some misplaced sense of duty, I tried not to stray too far from the main ballroom, even as I got drunker and drunker, misrepresenting myself and the carefully planned ball to all the guests.

He wanted to go upstairs and find an empty conference room.

He has a long-standing and fairly public attraction to my mother. She's better-looking than I am, this is well-known, so for (eleven) years I've found it flattering, rather than disgusting, that he calls me "Little [mom's name]." Specifically, he has a thing for her derriere, which is, God help me, pretty remarkable. Mine is the junior version, so to speak. Everyone knows this. He's known us for years.

I drank the first of the two mojitos and my good judgment was shot. I followed him obediently to the elevator, into an empty conference room, onto a couch.

There was a pretense of conversation. "I hate this dress," I told him. "It makes me look pregnant and it looks terrible on my butt. I'm starting to get a really big butt."

Without missing a beat, he slid a hand down my hip and said, in his most seductive voice, "Well, you get it from your mama."

Had I been sober, I would have found that come-on as offensive as it was hilarious.

Ditto when he leaned forward and said, "I'm gonna kiss you, [mom's name]." Not "Little [mom's name]." Just "[mom's name]."

I don't really remember that one at all. Later I drove home in the dark, crying hysterically, desperate to wash the memory of his taste out of my mouth. By the grace of God, I haven't seen him since then.

*

Twenty-two and seven twelfths. We went on a date. It was our first time acknowledging the sexual chemistry, the fact that our conversations sometimes lasted hours but felt like minutes.

It was kind of funny, how it happened. The whole thing started as a joke, his brand of faux-chauvinistic humor. "How many dates do I have to take you on before I can have my way with you?" "Thirty." An arbitrary, untested number. We were both kidding, but we started mumbling awkwardly, throwing out potential times. I eventually chose the night (a Wednesday) and he chose the place (the same place I'd been to on two other first dates that semester).

He was waiting for me outside our building, and it was the first time I had ever seen him in a sweater, totally clean-shaven. I missed his neatly trimmed little mustache and beard. I said, shocked, "You shaved!"

"You don't like it?"

"Well, it just looks different, but I like it," I lied. "Anyway, it's your face."

He shrugged. "Well, yeah, but if you like the look, I want to repeat it. If you don't, I won't. You don't like it, I can tell. Don't lie to me."

"I do. Like it. You're handsome no matter what your beard is doing," I tossed off. There wasn't any real pressure, this being last few hours in which I wouldn't care deeply about everything he said and did from then on.

We went out. It was okay.

We came back and stretched out on his bed to watch South Park. "All About the Mormons," still one of my favorite episodes. He put his arm around me and rested his hand on my hip, sliding it beneath the elastic waistband on my skirt once (an accident?), twice (probably not an accident), three times (definitely on purpose). Halfway through the episode, which I wasn't really paying attention to because of the butterflies in my stomach, I said something along the lines of "Oh, I get it, the chorus is the joke."

He flicked my hip in punishment. "You're kidding, right?" he said. "Look into my eyes and tell me you seriously didn't get it until just now."

I turned to look into his eyes to say just that. He was looking back at me with that hungry, vulnerable look men get when they want it. He was shifting his neck around, repositioning. I got nervous suddenly, pretended not to know what he was doing. "I really don't--"

He went for it. I shut up. There was exactly the right amount of lip, thankfully not very much tongue, no slobber. He held his breath during each period of contact and released it each time we parted. More than once I thought we were done. We weren't.

He neither complimented nor criticized my kissing. Maybe it was because for him, like me, it already felt like an old, comfortable routine beyond evaluation.

Maybe.

*

I don't remember kissing him for the first time. I only remember that he did it too often, and never seemed to notice when I didn't want him to.