A Quiet Kiss

A quiet kiss was all I ever asked of him – never more, never less, just one small kiss to concrete my fifteenth birthday and asendancy to Lord Knows What. I had always had dizzying, classical romanticisms at the ready for him, every second I saw him, I was preening and falling over myself as he watched on with those clear eyes, those oblivious eyes. He said I was the only girl to ever make him cry, except his elder sister, and she'd done it out of hitting him so it didn't really count. I don't know why I found pleasure in that – him caring enough about me to cry. We'd been thirteen and sitting in the nettle-infested, overgrown vacant alottment behind our rambling houses. There was a jetty and a small creek at the back of the lot that no one knew about. We stripped to our underwear to go swimming, and just as I was to jump off the rickety jetty and into the brown, bubbling water, his arm enclosed around the crook of my elbow and his fingers traced all the cuts and bruises and burns, lesions, my father gave as valedictions to our Lessons. I was so embarrassed when he cried, not for him, not for myself, but for the closeness of him, for the way goosebumps had erupted all over my arms, travelling down in a ripple effect from wherever he touched. He did not notice. He wiped his nose on his shirt and carried it in his hands as he walked back to his house. I watched his pale back retreat. I watched his spine and the back of his ribs and thought of how thin he was. I jumped in the water and cut my foot on a broken glass at the bottom. My mother spent the night picking out green shards and disinfecting it. I'll never forget her grey bun, the widow's peak and the way all that dead hair failed to shine in the lamplight. It felt lackluster, and I though of him, with ever sting. The frustrating thing with men, all men, is their utter incapibility to Notice. I have never met a boy – or man – who has noticed things about me that girl's instinctively pick up on, their predatory senses taking only a second to drink me whole. He never noticed the looks, the way I grabbed his hand desperately in the dark on those suburban nights when we sneaked out of our windows and down our roofs to walk together, in the lack of streetlight, be whole in the dark. I grabbed his hand and held on dearly – not because I was scared, as he assumed, but because the only time I could muster courage to do something so bold was when I could not see him. In our fourteenth years we both acquired boyfriends and girlfriends. I never quite liked mine – a boy who, two years earlier, had snapped my bra and giggled high pitched. His name was Edmund. I think. It could have been Wilhelm. It was some deviation from a usual name, anyways. He was like royalty, in our town, and I watched him walk to me as other girls hastily rolled up their skirts and put things in their mouths to try and distract him from his path. Edmund walked up to me just as he – he being the definitive he, the one I truly lusted after - was stacking books into the locker beside mine, dark hair falling in front of his eyes. Edmund asked and I, eyes sliding to try and gauge his reaction, accepted. He got a girlfriend too. Her name was Marie and she had honey-coloured skin and hair, giving her a strange appearance. I hated her on principle but she was too dull to bitch about. I saw them kissing once and thought of all the ways I could describe my heart being broken, how it was like so many different expiriences with pain I've had. All at once. He came to me afterwards – whiped his mouth as he rung the doorbell, I saw it through the window – and said he was going to break up with Marie. I was too mad at him to try and disguise any happiness – I agreed he should flatly, and two days later I broke up with Edmund, too. And so I asked him, mustering through courage and a belly full of beer, for a quiet kiss, beneath the somehow garish balloons and glitter and streamers, too childish but that my mother had set up pain-stakingly, and he stared at me over the tumbler of gin and tonic he had in his hand, and he laughed. My heart gave, and my stomach twisted and constricted. Music faded away around us. I stared at him, waiting for the romantic saver, the suave and charming, princely line, something so corny and plastic, clihe, something to tell the grandkids, maybe 'I thought you'd never ask', or 'i'm just a little stunned – i had no idea you felt the same way.' As I watched him expectantly, and he stared at me, he finally muttered, "Oh, Man, Lacey, you must be wasted. You know I'd never kiss you." I felt my father's disgust ring like alarm bells, true in my chest, I felt all the words my father had ever said to me that I'd been able to incinerate as Not True open through floodgates in my mind. I was disgusting and weak and pathetic and fat and such a stupid, stupid little bitch. I wanted to cry but I felt so sick that I couldn't. I turned around to another boy, one who shrieked, "Let's FUCK ON THE MOUTH, LAY-SEEE!"

an: keer-ist, if you're still reading, you're probably a saint. i know, i know, i learnt it in elementary school to: PARAGRAPHS. yes, this isn't a 'what the deuce?' moment for me. but everytime i try and break up this story into paragraphs... i don't know. i over-sentimentalize. i don't want to break one sentence from the other. so you've got a block of text there, and if you've read it, i salute you.