I was a good kisser, you weren’t bad yourself but for being caught unprepared, you see I was fully committed to this moment - this second - these lips and yours - and it surprised you. The fact that on top of all of the other ways I’d grown up - I could kiss.
I kissed with the same reckless abandon I danced with the homeless guy on the subway platform. Your reaction was the same then as it was when we kissed - what are you doing, and more importantly why am I smiling? As if you were catching yourself after saying something incorrect.
You see, I know you - and I know you don’t like to lose control - even for a second. We had been friends since we were 7. Attending different schools but growing up in the same neighborhood, going to the same church, our parents growing close as could be and inevitably we grew closer for it. You had gone to a small prep school and I went to the large public school, but we never grew apart because of it.
When you went to college in New England I thought you’d gone forever. Staying home and going to University in town was beneath you - and I loved you for that, even though I stayed home myself. You’d take weeks to respond to my emails and I had visions of you wrapped up with some trust funded, classic car driving, all American hero, taking you to his family’s beach place in the perfect sounding New England town and you forgetting about me, and where we were from, and the dreams we’d both dreamt. It’s with this vision, and this mild angst driven paranoia, that I decided to move to NY when we both graduated.
I’d never been out of the South, much less, the county really, and who knows what commitments you had in place when you moved there, it didn’t matter really, your Mom said you were going - against their wishes - and that I should visit you. I wanted to, but I had something to prove. I was going to show you that the shy guy you grew up with, the same guy that helped you pass Latin (even though his school didn’t even teach it), the selfless guy that was excited when you took the quarterback to prom (instead of me), that this same guy was grown up. That he was twice the man anyone would’ve ever imagined. That he felt like a superhero for taking the chances he taken and accomplishing the dreams we’d dreamt about.
And despite all of these accords and accomplishments, and all of these things I’d prove to you - I was still shocked, two months after setting foot in NY we were kissing, or shall I say, I was kissing you … but to your bewilderment, you liked it.
