First Kiss

Do you remember the first person you kissed? I ask because I saw the first guy I ever kissed on tv last night. (Unlike most of my ex-boyfriends, it wasn't Cops or America's Most Wanted.) No, this guy is now a cop, who was helping with the cleanup of the tornado damage. It took me back to the summer I had just turned 14...

I used to babysit every night for a family down the street. The kids were terrible and the pay was worse, but at least it wasn't my house! Chad would ride his bike over every evening and talk to me on the front porch while the kids terrorized the neighborhood. One night, he came over after I had put them to bed. The knock on the door scared the Hell out of me, so my heart was already racing when I saw him. I was nervous letting him inside, but I did. We sat on the couch and watched tv for a while, saying very little. The whole time, random thoughts kept racing through my head, "does he like me? How could he, I'm ugly. Did he mean to bump my hand?..." As I look at old pictures of myself, I realize that I was not ugly, but a lifetime of being told that I was had eroded my self-confidence. Finally, he got up, and said that he had to go. I got up to let him out, when he turned around and planted one on me! Full tongue and everything. My head started spinning and my ears were ringing. He turned bright red, muttered, "bye", and left. I spent the whole evening replaying that moment over and over in my head. I couldn't wipe the smile off my face for hours! The next night, I waited, but he never came back. In fact, he never, EVER came back. I was convinced that it was because he could tell I had never kissed anyone before, and that I did it badly. I never told any of my friends- I had learned that almost anything can be twisted and used as a weapon against you, so I kept it to myself. When school started a few weeks later, Chad avoided me like the plague- in fact I don't remember him ever talking to me again. When I saw him on tv last night, I didn't immediately think of how hurt I was by that; I thought of how happy I was for one evening when I was 14. I can still remember how my lips tingled and my face flushed. I remember being ecstatic that a boy liked me! When you're that age, everything that happens is a major event, and the emotions are amplified a million times. Thinking rationally, the kiss was pretty bad- he flopped his tongue into my mouth like a dead fish, and got slobber on my cheek. But, to my hormone-drenched brain, it was Romeo kissing Juliet all over again (good thing I hadn't read it yet, so I didn't know how it ended!) I noticed that he was wearing a wedding ring on the news: I hope for his wife's sake, he's learned to kiss by now!