Beware of Love in Technicolor by Kirstie Collins Brote Page B

on my shoulders. We each stared at the water for a few moments. I turned around and looked up at him. The dappled light from an unseen lamp in the trees made strange, dancing patterns on our faces. Without much effort, he lifted me up and sat me down on the railing of the bridge. We were almost eye to eye. He stood between my knees.
    “I lied,” he said. “I don’t want to be your friend.”
    “What is it you want then?”
    Our first kiss was there on the bridge in the woods. How do you describe a first kiss? It is like trying to hold water in your hands.
    I forgot all about the cold. His lips were soft, as I had imagined, and he was certainly not a novice at the craft, as I was. I felt enveloped by him, and safe. He used his hands to cup my face, and took his time, which I have since learned does not come naturally to most men.
    There is an ancient Chinese proverb that compares kissing to drinking salted water. “You drink, and your thirst increases,” it says. Time, I’m sure, passed by, but we remained unavailable for comment.
     
     
    ***
     
     
    John walked me back to Wyndham. On the stairs outside we kissed some more.
    “Is this the part of the movie where I invite you inside?” I asked during a break in the kissing.
    “Only if you want to,” he laughed.
    “I want to.”
    Once inside, we crept quietly past the door to the study lounge where I was supposed to be watching Steel Magnolias or some such piece of melodramatic crap, with Molly and the other girls from The Pit who had yet to find a life on campus. I opened the door to my room, and we slipped inside, unnoticed.
    I slid his coat off my shoulders and draped it over my desk chair. He put a Kate Bush CD in my stereo, and we sat down on the bed. My heart was beating like a hummingbird’s, and I was thankful for Kate’s soaring soprano as camouflage for my nervousness.
    “We don’t have to do anything you don’t feel comfortable with,” he said to me. He tucked my hair behind my right ear, and looked in my eyes. His hands were soft. As he leaned in and began kissing me again, the song Wuthering Heights came on, which I am sure he planned, but made an impression nonetheless.
    A minute may have passed. Maybe an hour. I knew when he turned off the light and locked the door that I was going to have to come clean. I just wanted the moment to stay as it was. Just keep kissing me, and don’t stop, and don’t ask any questions, and please don’t expect too much of me.
    “What’s the matter?” he asked.
    “Nothing,” I lied.
    “You’re lying,” he said. He took hold of both my hands and looked in my eyes. The light coming in from the street lit us up in strips seeping in through the blinds. The whoosh of water raced through the pipes that ran down the wall behind my bed.
    “I’m pretty new to all this,” I finally said. I dropped my eyes and looked down at how tiny my hands looked in his. They looked like a child’s hands.
    “How new?” he asked gently.
    “My last ‘boyfriend’ was Greg Cohen, and I let him kiss me after a night of mini golf in the summer of ‘88,” I replied lamely.
    “Wow,” he said, almost under his breath. I noticed his shoulders drop.
    “I’m sorry, I should have said something.”
    “No, no,” he said, cutting me off. He squeezed my hands, and bent his head down so that I had to look him in the eyes. “I’m just a little stunned is all. How did you go through high school without a real boyfriend?”
    “Nobody ever asked me out.”
    “What a bunch of idiots,” he said. It made me laugh.
    “To be fair to the idiots, I didn’t really look like this in high school,” I admitted.
    “And I’ve spent all this time being intimidated by you,” he said. He looked at me intently, his slate blue eyes moving downward over my nose, and resting on my lips. He traced their outline with his index finger, then leaned in and kissed me again.
    He kissed my lips, my nose, my chin. I wanted to push the curls out of his