My very first kiss was a rather out-of-character move out in San Diego. During a trip to an Irish pub with two friends, two Marines struck up a conversation with us and after learning that the other two were already married, one, named Justin, started flirting with me. Despite having a big nose (sorry, it's true though), he was cute and before long we were making out right at the bar. Yeah, we were one of those disgusting people you can't stop judging when you go out drinking. Soon, the five of us were laughing and running through the rain, me on Justin's back with his jacket over my head, to continue hanging out at the other Marine's apartment.
While it was wild and daring for me to make out with someone I didn't even know, the novelty eventually wore off and I just wanted this man off my face. My friend's attempt to act as a buffer when he finally got up for a drink and some oxygen were thwarted when he came back and lodged himself right next to me. Eventually the two men fell asleep to a DVD of old SNL episodes (*yawn*) and the three of us quietly snuck out of the house in the middle of the night, leaving no note or digits, hailed a cab, and went home never to see or hear from them again.
***
The Lawyer was the first guy I dated and after replaying our month-and-a-half-long stint again in my head, I don't see how we could have ever worked for much longer. He clearly knew what he wanted while I was still extremely timid and cautious around men. Our first attempt at a kiss came after a night of watching endless cartoons on TV. We both sat on the couch, my head resting on his shoulder, when I noticed that he kept looking at me instead of the television. "What?" I asked suspiciously."I'm thinking about kissing you," he said with a smirk.
I smiled and looked away because inside the alarms were going off! "Holy crap! What do I do?! What do I do?! Ugh, why did he even warn me??"
Before I knew it, he was leaning...into...me...so...freaking...slowly that it gave me too much time to think about the cheesiness of it all and how nervous I was. So at the very last second, I turned away. That's right, I gave him the cheek and promptly got up to go hide in the kitchen.
"Oooh!" he flinched. "Rejected!"
Luckily, he was a good sport, we had a nice laugh about it, and a few days later, while I sat on his apartment floor listening to Luis Miguel and translating Spanish ballad lyrics for him, he surprised me mid-sentence and gently stole his kiss. I immediately felt my face flush and buried my face in his chest.
***
Now I'm not lying when I say my first kiss with A. has been the best one yet, but you should know that I nearly sabotaged the whole thing, too. I met him shortly after deciding that I needed more time before dating again. I'd broken up with Mr. First nearly two years before, but the wind was still knocked out of me and the thought of going through it all over again with someone new just wasn't appealing to me. So when I met this boy and quickly found myself getting caught up in talking to him, thinking about him, and then actually making plans to visit him, my knee-jerk reaction was to put the brakes on the whole thing. I was scared that I'd start to fall for him."I want to hang out and keep this a casual/friend type of thing, but the pressure/expectation to possibly do something I'm not yet comfortable with was a bit too much for me," I wrote. I didn't want him getting any ideas especially after the flirtatious banter we'd been enjoying since we met. After all, I was just being a tease right?
Well turned out I had already been sucked in. I showed up at his apartment that Saturday night and spent six hours having a great time and just wishing that he'd lean in and kiss me. But the man never made a single move!
"Ugh, I totally turned him off," I thought on my way home, wanting to kick myself. "He probably doesn't like me anymore because of that stupid email."
The next day, I told him what I'd wished for and he said we were on the same page then because he was just being a gentleman and didn't want to freak me out. But then the next time I swung by his place do you know that he made me wait until he watched a season finale of Dexter before doing anything else? "Very important!" he said. So there I sat pretending to be super focused on finishing up my Christmas ornaments and drinking my glass of Champagne when we both knew full well what was coming. Shortly after the episode was over, he said he'd forgotten to do something the other night, came over to me, and kissed me 'til the room spun around. It don't know if it was the intensity or the bubbly that did it that night, but two years later, A. can still make the room spin with a kiss.
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