But what a kiss...

I wasn’t supposed to be kissing him. See, there are kisses and there are KISSES. You can engage in an underlined one. Or one in italics. Bold or regular. There are kisses you forget almost immediately afterwards, and kisses that linger for forty years. So that when you think back, you bite your lip and look off into the distance, and you can still feel his hands in your hair and his body against yours, and most importantly his lips.

Oh, his lips.

I wasn’t supposed to be kissing him. Let’s get that straight right up front. I wasn’t supposed to be kissing anyone except the man I lived with, and that man didn’t want to kiss me anymore. If you’re going to judge me, judge me now. If you’ve got to go on your way because cheaters are cheaters, there’s the door in the wall.

My ex got me. Landed me. That had been his goal. I was too young to understand I had been put into a cage. Although I was able to sense the bars. I was too young to cotton onto the fact that my beloved wanted me in a choke collar. A training collar. Wanted to shock me into submission. He craved a little wife-y.

I wasn’t wife material. He wanted a cashmere twin set. Pale pink. Pearlescent buttons. I was all inky black goth denim dipped silver hardware. I wouldn’t have minded a collar, but not the invisible type. How on earth we had gotten together is still a question I ponder. I think he saw me as malleable. He would mold me from his own rib if need be into the woman he wanted. While I had tucked my wild tendrils into a box, and I put on the persona of the docile girl he desired.

My betrothed talked about a time when I would drive our future children around in our future station wagon, buying me future Tupperware for our future pantry, and I would go out behind the building with a Romeo my own age and let him feel me up and let him tell me I was beautiful and let him kiss me without any murmuring of station wagons or plastic containers with resealable lids.

But that’s not how it started. How it started was that I worked in an office building in a chi-chi neighborhood. I was barely 20, a personal assistant, wearing hand-me-downs from my high-end boss and tripping around in heels without understanding how to walk in them. I dressed as if I were in a play. Costumed. A starlet one day in a plunging sundress. A sexy burglar in a velvet catsuit the next. On the day I first saw Marcus, I was wearing a cotton-candy dress cut like a 1940s sailor outfit and dangling faux crystal earrings.

He put a post-it on my coffee cup that read “You are beautiful.”

I wasn’t beautiful. I was different.

Hindsight gives you bifocals, as they say, and I wasn’t a bottle blonde with a fake tan and tits scooped from a muffin tin. I was wispy and wily, and I marched to my own jukebox. Which played 60s standards. And the occasional Tom Waits.

Marcus looked like a pin-up. He had that swagger. He had that lean. He was blond, pompadour, chiseled, blue-eyed. I had never been struck like that before. My older boyfriend, he with the key to my life in his pocket, insulted Marcus whenever he got the chance. Because my obsession worked in the coffee shop of our building, and my man had reduced Marcus to a pretty boy, a paper cutout, all shiny wrapping and no present.

But my fiancé was wrong.

From the first time I saw Marcus, the first time he saw me, the first time his fingers touched mine when he handed me back my change, there was a connection. We had that raw, stripped-wire chemistry. The type to blow up a lab if you’re not careful, if you don’t have on your safety goggles, if you don’t pay proper attention to the formula on the chalkboard.

We weren’t careful.

But at first, we engaged in a let’s-play-make-believe narrative that we weren’t going to. Ha. Dear readers, we were going to.

I started to drink a lot of coffee. Lots more coffee than I had before. At some point, I think he asked me to go out back with him on his break. And we pretended we were just two innocent people talking outside on a break. Nothing to see here, folks. Nothing to set the earth on fire.

We set the earth on fire.

I should also tell you that I was in the deepest of depressions. I had been with my man for two years, we were heading toward an aisle, and we never had sex. Because that’s not what you did with a wife-y in his estimation. He gave me the silent treatment if I forgot to pick up his dry cleaning. Humiliated me in private while praising me in public. I had fantasies of driving my car into a freeway underpass every single day.

The truth was I didn’t know how to let people down. Or not care if I did let people down. I didn't know how to extract myself from the path I’d been set on without everyone being angry at me. Without the look of disappoint on so many faces and in so many eyes. And at 20, I still cared about that. Cared enough to think that death was a possible way out.

Except when I saw Marcus.

At some point, we went to the movies. Two friends. Two people who knew each other randomly. A coffee and a cup. Nothing to see here. Nothing to get your panties in a twist over. Although I did lie. I lied and made up a friend from work who I was going out with. Her name started with a D. She had red hair.

Nothing happened at the movies. Nothing happened except I could imagine holding his hand, imagine saying screw the movie and falling into his arms. His elbow brushed mine. I burst into flames.

After the credits, we went to a cantina and sat across from each other and pretended everything was normal. I do not know what we talked about. I do not even know if we talked. I know that when we paid, he walked me to my car, and we stood there for a minute as if we weren’t going to.

And then we did.

You might kiss a lot of people in your life and you might not. You might remember specific kisses and they might all blur together.

We invented kissing.

We blew up the lab.

Or at least, my life as I’d known it. We kissed in a way that I hadn’t know people could kiss. Like you will die if you don’t kiss. Like this kiss is saving your life. His hands were on me, and his lips were on mine, and I couldn’t breathe or think or feel anything except what we were feeling in that exact second. And then we parted and moved away from each other, and it was clear from our expressions that something was going to happen.

Something else. Something big.

Something like us kissing every which way everywhere possible. Behind the building at work. In his car. In my car. We kissed in hallways. He would bring me up coffee to the office, and if my boss was out, we would kiss on my desk. If we weren’t kissing, we were thinking about kissing.

And then finally someone saw us together and the word spread and my fiancé asked for his ring back and his key back, and I lost my job, and I moved out and life continued and I didn’t have to drive my car into a wall. Which is my way of saying this story had a happy ending.

All because of a gritty, incendiary, you aren’t supposed to even be here, oil slick on the pavement, exhaust in the air, not Paris, not Rome, but a back alley parking lot kiss.

On, but what a kiss.