nästan totalt fiction (VI)

Later that night they would make love in her small European bed, and it would be just fine as sex goes, but he always felt like (with a few very notable exceptions) most sex was all pretty much the same. But not kissing. Kissing was always different. There was nothing he liked more than a first kiss, and because he had had relatively few, each one was stamped in his memory. In the woods by a stream in the springtime. On top of a tiny college dorm bed. Under a blanket on a basement TV-room sofa. In front of a bookstore on a chilly Manhattan street-corner. Only a few others. He could call up the memory of the sights and sounds and tastes and smells of almost every one of them instantly.

After kissing for a while, she had moved to straddling him on the sofa, and while she was a bit of a big girl to have on your lap for what eventually felt like hours, he liked the angle and the way her bottom lip felt from just below and the way she often broke away from the kiss with a little bit of his lip in hers. “I think we kiss similar” she said to him at one point. They did. And that made it very natural and very very good.

They kissed for a very long time the way people who are kissing for the fist time sometimes do, and he would have gone home feeling good about the whole experience even if all that had happened was the kissing. And for a moment it seemed like it might actually be all that would happen. At some point, there was a break in the action and a trip to the bathroom. “Wellll…” she said when she returned, “The subways are going to stop running soon, so… you should probably go very soon if you are going.”

“Oh.” He paused but he didn’t answer.

After a few seconds, she added, “Or… you could stay.”

“I would like to stay.”

— — —

After they had finished having passably good if not mind-blowing sex, she confessed in the dark…

“This is honestly not what I had in mind when I invited you to my apartment tonight.”

“No?” he responded. And he couldn’t help but laugh a little, but he could not return the sentiment.