30 Day Writing Challenge: DAY TWO (First Kiss and First Love)

First Kiss

I was 14 and standing where two dirt roads met, holding hands with a boy who’d likely learned to walk on them, barefoot. He was older and probably wiser about a lot of things I had no business knowing and his hand was on my hip, warming my skin with a heat that had nothing to do with being cold.

When his lips covered mine, I sucked in my breath and shoved the gum I’d been carefully chewing to the roof of my mouth, willing it not to fall as his tongue met mine. Shocked, I opened my eyes and stared at his eyelids, squinted closed under a furrowed brow. He was concentrating very hard, it seemed. Finally, I yanked my mouth back from his and into the sudden gap, fell my gum. It landed in a green mess on the ground between us.

 We both looked down.

We both looked up.

And then we both used our sleeves to wipe our mouths, giggling.

I met him again when I was about 24. He was a customer I was serving at a local truck stop where I’d been for so many years, it felt more like a series of conversations over coffee, than work.

In any case, I teased him, the man before me, grown tall and handsome in a hard-life kind of way. Running my fingers across the tattoos that covered his arms, I traced a snake up to his neck and smiled at his friends: “This guy here...he was the first boy I ever kissed.”

And he chuckled and they hooted, the way I knew they would.

“I was,” he drawled, a bit embarrassed, a bit proud, I think. “We had no business duelling tongues that way, then, did we?”

I laughed out loud; charmed at the old-fashioned words and the shy way he delivered them to me, looking down as he was, at his boots.

“I guess not, but there’s no telling that to teenagers, is there?”

“Guess not,” he agreed and then snagged my hand in his. Surprised, I kept my fingers in a loose fist, until he gently pried them loose and pressed a small rectangle into my hand.

And he waited until my eyes met his and then he winked.

I uncurled my fingers and then burst out laughing, delighted: there, in the palm of my hand, sat an unwrapped piece of spearmint gum. Green, like the gum I’d been chewing, all those years ago.

“Now, every time you chew a piece of gum, you’ll think of me,” he said quietly and then curled his hand back around his coffee mug, titled his gaze up to mine and grinned.

That same sexy, dangerous grin that had captured my teenaged imagination – and mouth - a decade before.

I think of him from time to time.  Usually while chewing spearmint gum.

 It is, after all, my favourite.

 

 

First Love

It was glorious and hot and messy and heartbreaking and breathless and angst-filled and funny and not and I will always love him because he made the plain girl that I was, feel beautiful.