Truth or Dare?
Truth.
When was your first kiss?
Every girl has a different answer. “8th grade.” “At a pool party the summer after 5th grade.” “On the dance floor at homecoming.” “Nine years old in a friend’s basement.” “Sixteen but it was a stage-kiss so I don’t think it counts.” “Ten years old behind the shed at Grandma’s.” “Amber has been kissing boys behind the blackboard since kindergarten.”
Katie?
Pass.
You’re not allowed to pass in Truth or Dare. A dumb rule to a dumb game that I don’t want to play anymore.
Some time in college I stopped answering the question of first kisses truthfully. My friends’ answers grew more frequent, more common as they all received their first kisses. How could I ever tell these girls the truth? That I was the outlier, still waiting for someone to take enough interest in me to kiss me. There was no awkward story I could tell of a breeze kicking up and blowing a lock of hair into my mouth just as he leaned in. No story of him showing me his Pog collection at a pool party or leaning in during the last dance at homecoming. When the conversation would turn to boyfriends and kissing my heart started to race, eyes darting around, a student afraid to be called on not having the answer. So I lied… well, I stretched the truth.
Cody, in the seventh grade became my answer. We were playing truth or dare during a track meet at Pioneer Middle School. Sitting in a circle at the center of the field Hailey leaned back on her palms and turned to Cody. “Truth or Dare?”
Never one to shirk away from a challenge Cody shrugged. “Dare.”
“I dare you to kiss Katie.”
So the story I chose to tell was Cody.
Truth.
Cody was a good friend but he had no interest in kissing me. I was, like all seventh graders, an awkward, ungainly, little preteen. So, while the whole Grapeview Middle School track team watched, Cody leaned over to me, pressed his cheek against mine, and made a sloppy smacking sound with his lips. It wasn’t exactly glamorous or romantic and it certainly was not a real kiss.
Truth.
Age 22. St. Patrick’s day my senior year of college. It was the end of spring break and my friends and I decided to go dancing. All I wanted to do was dance so I volunteered as the designated driver. We all piled into my jeep and I drove us downtown to a crowded dive bar with bad lighting and sticky floors.
Still no kiss on the horizon. I was the last of my friends to be kissed. What made it worse was no one seemed to even be trying.
Do first kisses have an expiration date? Do you reach a certain age and learn that you will never be kissed? You change from a viable young woman to a tragic spinster overnight. Instead of pheromones your skin secretes a deterrent letting men know your kisses have reached their shelf life. Just like the bright colored frogs announcing the danger of coming too close, of the poison in my skin. The clock strikes midnight and, much like Cinderella, you transform to a creature of ash and toil. Is that age 22?
A man stumbled toward me. The drink in his hand sloshing. If I had noticed him he failed to standout in the sea of sweat and beer soaked “Kiss me I’m Irish” t-shirts.
His hand clamped around my waist, turning me abruptly. I tensed at the force of being pressed against a stranger's chest. He leaned in. The smell of beer staining his breath.
“What the fuck?”
I was sober. I was steadier on my feet than he was was. I was not interested in whatever it was he thought he was doing. I turned my face away slamming a fist down just below his waist. The would be first kiss released me, crumpling to the floor. I remember turning away and striding over to my friend Isabel. “I’m leaving. If you want a ride home you have five minutes to close your tab.”
Not glamorous or consensual and, fortunately, not a real kiss, but he had tried. Either he could not read the warnings coloring my skin or 22 is not quite the expiration date of first kisses.
My heart pounded the whole drive home.
Truth
First kisses faded from conversation.
The older you get the less people talk about first kisses and the more they assume you have been kissed. The more they assume you have done everything. Why wouldn’t you have? It’s not a topic of discussion just a reaction of surprise when they realize you haven’t been kissed. Friends look at you with shock and wonder. A new alien specimen to be studied. I will never forget the afternoon I spent sitting on my friend’s couch in LA discussing some of the more unhealthy ways our society and the people we know treat and view sex.
“Well, as a virgin I don’t have much experience but I can say that…”
She interrupted me. “You’re a virgin? But you’re gorgeous!” Her mouth and eyes wide. I remember flushing with embarrassment. Nevermind the fact that I had still yet to be kissed.
Dare.
Nearly thirty. Definitely past my expiration date. There was a time not so long ago when I really would be a tragic spinster and any suitable option for kissing would be, at best, a rake or, at worst, a confirmed bachelor. Even the lonely old maids in romantic comedies and harlequin romances found people who wanted to kiss them. Not me. It clung to me. A cloud of warning for any man who might approach; there is something wrong with this one. She’s broken. I had decided a long time ago that if no one wanted me then I would simply shut down that part of my heart. There were other things to focus on and think about. Not everybody falls in love. Who could possibly be good enough anyway?
My friends were starting to get married, moving in with their boyfriends, having second and third children, while I steadily turned to Gollum crouching alone in my apartment. Hair washed, makeup on but barricaded in my tower. Rapunzel after she cut off her hair and gave up on Prince Charming. That was until he walked into my life.
Who this particular Prince Charming was or how we met is not important. All you need to know is I met him and felt a flutter of butterflies breaking free of cocoons that had been dormant so long I feared they had not survived the icy winter, Here he was, a guy I liked and wanted to kiss. The first one in a long time. The only problem was he lived in another state.
I may have been looking for an excuse to go see him when I accepted a friend Isabel’s invitation to visit her in the same city. The day before I was supposed to visit Isabel, I climbed the long flight of stairs to his house, those butterflies thriving in the late summer heat. There he was, perhaps not Prince Charming but a Dashing Rogue. I was far too twitterpated to know or care which.
‘Remember,’ I took a deep breath, ‘this probably isn’t a date. Don’t get your hopes up.’
Almost three decades of anecdotal evidence had already proven I was a hopeless case. An unkissable spinster. So far no guy I had gone out with had wanted to kiss me. Why should this one be any different than so many others? Why? Perhaps because he just was different or I was different with him? As our evening went on, a small piece of me started to hope that I had been wrong for years. The cloud of warning tracing my skin was not from any expiration date but from a deep lack of comfort and trust buried deep in my core. Comfort and trust that I felt sitting beside this guy on his couch, a terribly romantic movie from our childhood up on the screen (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure).
I remember he stood up, half an hour into the movie, returning a minute later with a glass of water and placing it in my hand. “Oh, you’re my hero!” Instead of going back to his place on the far side of the couch he sat next to me. I felt a flash of warmth from his skin.
“So, where do you fall on time travel?” Turns out, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is the sort of movie you can talk through without missing much. “How do you think kidnapping historical figures would affect the timeline?”
“I think time is kind of solid, like it could all be happening at once. So if I went back and tried to prevent something from happening I would ultimately fail because the event and my meddling are in the past even though for me it is the present.”
“Classic paradox theory.” He took the now half empty water glass from my hand, taking a long drink and setting it aside. Out of either of our reach or way.
“Yeah, at least that’s how it goes when I write time travel. Although, I would be interested in alternate timelines.”
“Oh no! Not like Back to The Future! Oh, this is a good part,” he added, pointing up at the screen. My focus slid back to the movie while he reached across me to grab a fluffy blanket from the arm of the couch. He spread it out over his lap then mine. His shoulder and hip now brushing against mine, so close I could feel the heat of his skin. A hand rested on my knee.
My concentration hiccupped. This was new. In all of my years of watching movies with guys this had never happened. Was it okay? I was pretty sure it was. His thumb methodically sliding across half an inch of kneecap. If he noticed my eyebrows knit together in thought or the shift in my internal narrative from time travel to assessing my own boundaries he made no comment. Yes. This was okay. I had been wrong when I first arrived. This guy liked me. He wanted to give me his attention and I liked the feel of it. The question now; what to do with my right hand, no longer preoccupied with a glass and unable to return to the space between us. He answered this question for me too, pulling it into his, quietly tracing the lines of my upturned palm. Pondering out loud how deaf Beethoven actually was as if I was not a tangle of arms and legs and questions.
“I always believed Beethoven composed based off of the vibrations the way the music felt rather than the sound. He probably wouldn’t have been able to do that with an electronic keyboard.” I gestured up at the movie where the famous composer jumped from keyboard to keyboard in a modern mall. “But I don’t know much about music.”
“That makes a lot of sense.” He reached out capturing my free hand, letting the one he’d been holding curl around his arm, Leaning into the warmth of his shoulder. “I prefer pianos to keyboards because I can feel the movement of the strings behind the keys.”
I congratulated myself, no longer bothering to question if the feel of his fingers exploring mine was okay.
It was not okay. It was good. Warm and comfortable the way no other date had been. I rested my head on his shoulder and he leaned just enough that his cheek brushed the top of my head.
But was it okay? Was this what I wanted? His touch grew bolder. If he kissed me would he know it was my first? Cosmo, Allure, Seventeen and a dozen other sources explained in article after article how to kiss well. Where to aim. What to do. How much can reading an article help you when you’re twenty-eight and your heart starts pounding? I have read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; it is not the same as the feeling the waves lap against your feet. I felt his hand travel to my chin, thumb pausing on my lower lip, head turning just enough to glance down at me out of the corner of his eye.
No more questions.
The longer you wait to be kissed, the more important it seems. The more your heart races. The more your skin tingles. I wanted this person to be my first kiss. He would kiss me because I was someone he wanted to kiss. Not a dare. Not because he was drunk. He would kiss me because I was me.
His hand traveled back to my leg, fingertips reading my skin like braille. Slow and deliberate. Then, one eager motion he turned my body to face him, leaned over me and pressed his mouth to mine. Soft. Simmering.
“First kisses are always bad.” “Awkward.” “It felt like worms.” “I just couldn’t shut my brain off.” “It wasn’t romantic at all.” “Our teeth clattered together.”
First kisses are supposed to be awkward. Everyone told me so. I never had any reason not to believe them.
There has always been a disconnect between my body and my brain. Learning to dance, karate, yoga, I could see what the instructor was doing, I understood the muscles involved in every movement but somewhere along the way that understanding gets lost. I cannot force my body into those movements. My brain moves too fast. It won’t shut down. Panic rises in my throat and all I can do is wait until the dance ends and I can skulk away.
This was not like that.
This was the most natural thing I had ever done. I could not begin to describe how simple it was. How easy to let my brain quiet and my body take over when that first kiss finally came. First kisses are supposed to be awkward. That is what everyone told me. I found that what everyone told me or thought about me was wrong.
Some memories live in your skin; sea waves stealing the sand beneath your feet, soft grass, summer sun, a perfect first kiss.
He pulled back, looking down at me. “Is this okay?”
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