Two finals, six meal points and seven days stand between me and sweet, sweet summer. The kids constantly playing Frisbee on the quad and the beautiful weather are actually too much to handle when I’m writing papers and reading textbooks I neglected all semester. Summer is in the air.
So is success.
Thank God, because I really was not looking forward to the “I’m actually still kissless, but it’s fine with me because I’m a better person and I learned all these great lessons anyway, and some day my Mr. Knightley will come find me” final installment of this adventure. Wonderful readers (I’m talking to you, copy editors. Wink.), I’ve been kissed.
Romeo was getting more and more distant. He cancelled our date for a “conflict” and stopped texting me every second of the day. To be honest, it was probably a good thing. I was trying to give him a fair shot, but I still wasn’t really feeling it.
It’s always weird when two people let a fling fizzle out, and now we’re going to have to be awkward around each other until the end of time. It’s a good thing that’s coming up soon or I would be worried. If we fell apart in a week, though, I can’t even imagine what kind of mess we’d be in if we tried to make it work. I quickly bid adieu to Romeo and accepted my kissless fate.
Enter: Steve (musical, writer, kind of a nature boy). We were the kind of friends who acknowledge each other in the street and occasionally end up at the same house or apartment on the weekends. I had just gotten back from dinner and was looking forward to a quiet evening of homework when my phone vibrated with a text message. Steve had an extra ticket to a show. Since I still had a paper to write and a few chapters of history to read, I grabbed my coat and headed out the door.
Three hours later, we were making out.
I’m kidding! Well, not really, but I’ll tell you the whole story! I promise. So there we are, at the show, kind of bored and a little unimpressed.
“Do you want to leave?” he asked.
He grabbed my hand, and we did. We wandered around downtown in the dark, stopping at benches and ducking into empty bars, just to explore. It was basically a ton of romantic, “(500) Days of Summer”-esque IKEA shit, let me tell you. Finally, we found our way back to his apartment.
Kissing is weird. The best part isn’t the kissing itself, but the moment before the kiss, right before two pairs of lips find each other. Your heads lean together, and there’s a mutual understanding of what’s coming next. This is just a theory, but Winnie the Pooh agrees with me, and he’s my go-to philosopher, so I think I’m on the right track.
“‘Well,’ said Pooh, ‘what I like best,’ and then he had to stop and think. Because although eating honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.’”
Something about the electrical anticipation that leads up to a kiss is better than the kiss itself. I mean, since I’ve been kissed once, I’m basically the authority on the matter. This theory applies not only to the few seconds before a kiss, but to the semester I spent waiting for it.
Not that it was anti-climactic — it was actually the perfect circumstance for a first kiss: at a time I didn’t expect with a guy I didn’t expect. But the buildup was way more fun. Now, somebody change that banner up there from “Kissless” to “Kissed.” Who do you think I am, Sandra Dee?
