[I wrote this for a nonfiction class I took in 2020. Stories are true (as far as I remember them) but the names are fake.]
Lauren
It’s one month after high school graduation, and we’re reclining on the porch of her best friend’s house. Everyone else is by the pool, intermittently shouting & laughing. Her face, partially obscured by bushy brown hair, is paler than usual in the full-ish moonlight. It’s very late and I’ve sobered up by now; I really wish I hadn’t.
I turn my head to look her in the eyes, and she stares back with the calm inevitability of a shark sizing up its next meal. I find it impossible to imagine what she’s thinking, but I’m thinking that I want to kiss her. I try to force myself to do it, or at least to try. My entire body is shaking, convulsing with the effort.
My body fails to move, so I try my voice instead: “Do you um, want to make out?” She doesn’t say anything, but leans forward slowly and kisses me on the mouth. It’s warm and wet, and tastes like the hard lemonade she’s been drinking. The moment our lips touch, my already hot face burns like a furnace under bellows.
After a minute she stops kissing me, and we’re both quiet for a while, breathing heavily though we haven’t moved from the bench. Her voice is soft but accusing when she says, “You should have kissed me in Ghana. In the rain. Remember?”
I do remember. In March we visited Ghana with a math teacher from our school. Each year he takes a cohort of students to teach at an academy he’d founded, near the rural village where he was born and raised. That day, after classes were done and we’d returned to the compound, it rained harder than I thought possible. Huge stinging droplets pelted our skin in great bruising sheets. We didn’t care—we stripped off most of our clothes, skipping and dancing with unrestrained glee.
At one point it was just the two of us—me in my black polyester boxers, her in a small red dress that clung tightly to her skin in the soaking downpour. I thought about kissing her then. But we were thousands of miles from home and wouldn’t be flying back for another week. What if she said no? It would be too awkward, and I would have nowhere to hide my embarrassment.
Back on the bench I’m embarrassed anyway, but it’s mixed with a confusing cocktail of joy and relief. The shaking has stopped and finally I reply, “How about I make it up to you now?”
June
Finally it’s just the two of us. All our friends have left to drink in their rooms or get stoned beneath various campus monuments. I’d been waiting all night for this moment, and I assumed she had been too. I turn my head to look her in the eyes. Her hair is bright blue, and she’s smiling. I grin back and say, “Hey, so, do you want to make out?”
Her face implodes, eyebrows scrunching downward in bafflement, smile contorting into an amused frown, “What? No. I thought you were gay!”
“Oh, uh… no, I’m not!” My face is hot, I force myself to keep smiling, and laugh nervously. “Sorry about that.”
She isn’t the first person to assume I was gay—that would be my dad—and she wouldn’t be the last. I’m guessing it has something to do with my close friends being mostly women, and my love for musical theater.
“Where did everyone else go?” she says, as if realizing only now that we’re alone.
My spine contracts, and I dig my hands into my jacket as if trying to keep warm. “Oh uh, I think they went to get high at Stargon,” I say, nodding vaguely in the direction of the distant metallic structure.
“Let’s go find them, yeah?”
The last thing I want is to be around other people, but my fleeting feeling of control has passed, and I’m swept up in the current. I look up with a half-smile of feigned indifference and say “Sure, yeah.”
Olivia
The house is packed, so we’ve been shunted into the only unoccupied room: the attic. It’s small and secluded, hot and dusty in any season, but more so now in late August. We’re lying atop an unzipped sleeping bag, pressed close together on an ancient twin-size futon. We talk for a while about the day, the upcoming semester, and my family, who she’s just met. After a while we stop talking, and just lie there listening to each other breathe.
I can’t tell if she is trying to sleep, or waiting for me to kiss her. I try to read the signs: her lean-muscled arm draped over my chest, her thin circular face pressed into my neck, her long brown hair mixing with my dirty blonde. It may as well be French or German—I recognize a few words, but the meaning is beyond my grasp.
Would she have agreed to sleep on this tiny pseudo-mattress if she hadn’t wanted me to kiss her? It wouldn’t be the first time I’d shared a bed platonically with a close friend. And of course, all the other rooms are full; we didn’t have much of a choice. After ten minutes I let out a whisper, “Hey.” When she doesn’t respond and I’m half certain she’s asleep, I address the silence: “Do you want to make out?”
Her body reacts like a springing coil, full of violent pent-up energy. She rolls on top of me and is kissing me fiercely. It tastes like cigarettes and vinegar, an acrid combination that I nonetheless find intoxicating. It goes on like this for a while; I have some concept of the possibilities that could open up after this, but no idea how to enact them. I never felt any agency in the events leading up to this point, so it seems pointless to start now.
When we break apart both of us are panting like we’ve just run a race. We don’t speak again, but lie still, clutching each other like shipwrecked sailors. Minutes pass and our breathing returns to normal, the tension slowly evaporating into the stifling heat of the attic. After a while, we fall asleep.
Alice
The day was brutally humid, but tonight it’s clear and temperate, drawing us outside and away from our air conditioners. We’re walking around a sprawling university campus, but not the one either of us actually attends. At night the place seems utterly abandoned—we pass classrooms and facilities, labs and dorms, but never see another soul. We’ve only been here for two weeks, so it’s still alien and exciting, even more so in the dark.
We’ve just gotten back from dinner; it was the first time she’d eaten sushi, and the first time I’d been on a “normal” date at all. We haven’t known each other for long, so our silences were still awkward. Between mouthfuls of salmon and rice, I worked furiously to come up with things to say. Twice, when the stress overwhelmed me, I retreated to the bathroom ostensibly to relieve myself, but really so I could check my phone and let my brain unwind.
For the once, though, I am fairly sure that this person, this entirely other thinking and feeling entity, actually likes me. We spent the last week trading emojis and annotated selfies. When I finally ask her out (like a coward, by text), she tells me she dreamed about us having sex the night before. The day before our date, she sends me a still frame from an episode of House. The subtitles are on, with the message: “I need oral sex.” But who knows—that could mean anything.
In the middle of our walk I stop in a patch of darkness, unlit by any nearby buildings. She keeps walking, her blonde hair exposed to white by a streetlamp. I call out, “Hey, come back for a sec!”
“What’s up?” she says, hurrying back.
“I was just wondering, do you want to make out?” She beams brightly, and I gingerly put my hands on her waist. I lean in—her face is hot, and her kisses are short and rapid, like a fish darting for food.
After a moment I pull away a few inches, giggling, “Hold on, slow down!” Her face goes lopsided, but when I lean in again the smile returns. We press our faces together, keeping contact. It tastes like soy sauce, and chapstick, and certainty.