Chapter 29

A lot of people want their first kiss to be special. I just wanted mine to be during this lifetime. I had missed my chances for special already. I missed them at the waterfall with Francesca and at prom with Evelyn. I was twenty years old, for crying out loud, and I’d still never kissed anyone. I didn’t care about special anymore. I needed only a pair of willing female lips and a little bit of courage.

I found both late one night when I was walking this girl Katie back from a party. Katie was a friend. But attractive enough. I was still head over heel⁹ for Lilly, of course, but I needed to get this first-kiss thing out of the way. What if Lilly changed her mind about me and we started dating? Obviously, I would need to have some skills to impress her. I wouldn’t want my tongue flopping around all awkwardly in Lilly’s mouth, revealing my status as a total kissing n00b.

I was sitting with Katie on a couch in her dorm.

“So I would kind of like to kiss you right now,” I said.

“Really?” She looked rather startled. But not uninterested.

“Yeah,” I confirmed.

“Maybe you should give it a try.”

“The thing is…” I glanced at the wall. “I kind of like this other girl.”

She drew back, her tone going cold. “So why would you want to kiss me?”

“Well, I mean, I like you, too. Not quite the way I like her, but, that is, I’m definitely attracted to you. Yeah, you’re really pretty.”

She inclined her head.

“Go on.”

“I’ve always had a little thing for you, and you know, it just feels right.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“So?” I asked.

“So what?”

“Do you think we should kiss?”

“Let’s give it a shot and find out.”

I frowned. “Yeah. About that. So… I’ve never kissed anyone before.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“Wow.”

“What?”

“It’s just that—how old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“Hmmm.”

“So… does that mean yes?”

And on it went like this for, I am not kidding you, over thirty minutes. Back and forth discussion about whether we should kiss, what implications it might have for our friendship, what our respective friend groups would think about it, whether as a Christian I was allowed to kiss her as an atheist, etc. It was all very scientific and analytical. Just the way I like it. But kisses are not supposed to be scientific. Or analytical. In fact, the longer you examine a kiss under a microscope, the smaller becomes its magic.

“So when are you gonna make a move on me?” she asked.

“Like I’ve been telling you, I really don’t know how,” I said. “You have to get us started.”

We sat in silence for a few moments, and then suddenly there was something wet and slimy inserting itself between my lips, prying open my jaw and exploring the concavities of my mouth. I realized that this was… her tongue. We were kissing.

Having never kissed before, I wasn’t aware that you are supposed to close your eyes. Big mistake. Her face was one inch from mine, and at that distance, I could see every pore, every eyebrow follicle, ever wrinkle of melanin-hued epidermis. I shut my eyes in horror.

“I’m not sure if this is allowed,” she said, grabbing my hand and placing it firmly over her breast. For a moment, I was too shocked to respond. Not shocked at her actions, shocked at how it felt. I had always assumed breasts would feel squishy and heavy, like a cross between a stress ball and a water-bed mattress. What I felt instead was unexpectedly soft.

That’s when I realized what I was touching.

“No!” I snapped my hand back. “Definitely not allowed.”

We got back to making out, and by the time I made it home the sky was beginning to turn light.

That turned out to be my first and only kiss in college. I didn’t do much dating there, either, because, as I said, I still liked Lilly. But I tried to keep it a secret. She was in my circle of friends, and I didn’t want to make things weird for her. Only Brad and Kyle and my other close friends knew I still liked her. And they didn’t say anything. That is, until senior year. See, senior year we were all twenty-one. And alcohol, among many other side effects, reduces people’s ability to keep secrets.

One Friday night, my guy friends and I were coming out of a bar. I should specify that this was not a cool bar by any means, but rather the karaoke night at a bar on the first floor of a hotel near campus. But in a small town like Williamsburg, there isn’t always a lot to do, so watching old people sing karaoke at a hotel on Friday night is, believe it or not, sometimes your best option.

I should also remind you that I didn’t drink at all until I was twenty-one, and even after I was twenty-one, I still had a religious hangover that made me afraid of more than one or two beers. So although some of my friends were a bit tipsy, I was pretty sober at this point. We stumbled out into the night air, and guess who was in the parking lot? That’s right, Lilly and some of her girlfriends. Hellos and “What are you guys up to tonights” were exchanged.

Side note: You’ve heard of a stage whisper, right? The term comes from live theater, like a play or whatever, when one actor pulls another aside and whispers to him loudly enough that the audience can hear it. The audience is meant to believe that even though the whisper had enough volume to fill up the auditorium, the other characters onstage could not hear it; it was a private conversation between the two characters who are “whispering” to each other.

Drunk people are prone to accidental stage whispers, inadvertently underestimating the volume of their whispering. Upon seeing Lilly in the parking lot, my friend Ben, who had apparently thrown back quite a few drinks while watching the karaoke, stage-whispered to me in a voice that was clearly audible to everyone in the parking lot—and probably everyone back inside the bar, too—“Dude, it’s your girl!”

Just in case it was not 100 percent clear whom he was talking about, he pointed his finger at Lilly, too, while tapping his other hand on my shoulder. I turned to Ben and whispered in his ear (an actual whisper, not a stage one), “Shut up, dude, she can hear you.” Drunk though he was, he could hear the urgency in my voice, and he shut up. I relaxed a little. It was over.

Or so I thought.

A week later I was hanging out at Lilly and Sadie’s apartment. It was late at night, and there were just four of us there: Lilly, Sadie, Brad (my roommate of three years), and I. We were sitting on the couches in their living room. And then, out of nowhere, Lilly dropped the bomb.

“What was your friend Ben saying the other night?” she asked me.

I was pretty sure I knew what she was talking about. But I hoped, I really hoped, that I did not. So I played dumb.

“What night?” I asked, putting a puzzled expression on my face.

“You know, the other night,” she said.

“Uh… no…”

Sadie and Brad were silent as they watched this exchange play out.

“You know, in the parking lot,” said Lilly. “As you guys were leaving karaoke?”

She had me cornered.

So I tried to acknowledge the night without having to answer her question. “Oh, right, that was a fun night. What did you all end up doing?”

But Lilly was undeterred by my attempt to change the subject. She pressed forward. “So, what did he say to you?”

I was trapped. She was obviously not going to let me off without answering her question. But I couldn’t tell her the truth. I couldn’t tell her that he’d said Dude, it’s your girl, because doing so would force me to reveal that I’d still had a crush on her all these years.

But I couldn’t lie. Could I? I am not a big fan of lying. For one thing, I’m not really good at it. I don’t exactly know how to lie, and I am always afraid that I’ll forget which lie I told to which person and get caught later when my stories didn’t match up.

But this, this was an impossible dilemma.

So I did the unthinkable: I lied.

“Oh—oh yeah,” I stammered. “He—he was saying—he was saying how he had forgotten his driver’s license and he had to go back to the dorm and get it so they would let him into the bar.”

See? Told you I was a bad liar.

It was, like, the worst lie ever. Ben had clearly said Dude, it’s your girl, and everyone knew it. I could’ve at least come up with a lie that sounded like a similar phrase. For example, I could have told her that he had said Hats off to the Duke of Earl. Nonsensical but similar. Instead, I made up this lie, which was an absolutely implausible story because, oh yeah, we had just walked out of the bar. Obviously, he had used his license to get inside in the first place.

But mercifully, Lilly did not realize I was lying. Or, more likely, she chose not to call me out on it. She glanced over at Sadie, a glance I couldn’t read but wished I could because I imagine it contained oh-so-much meaning, and then she said, “Oh, okay. His ID. I see.”

I changed the subject, and a few minutes later Brad and I said our good-nights. During the walk back to our dorm, we analyzed the earth-shattering conversation that had just gone down. My adrenaline was still pumping. We wondered: Did she actually know what Ben had said? Did she know I was lying? Did she know I’d had a crush on her for the entire four years of college?