She leans forward on her toes. I've had this kiss twenty-one times. It isn't always here and now, but it is always for the first time.
I hesitate, looking at her smooth face, eyes twinkling in fairy light, and her rouged lips, deciding if I am ready to begin again.
This is not the moment she is in love with me. I have never felt that, though I assume I would with time. I don't know that I ever will, but I hope.
I've tried not to kiss her a few times, as an experiment and from frustration. Once, I lived thirty more years before we kissed. We had both married other people--fine people, though not the right ones. She had a kid in college, a daughter who looked so much like her that she could have been a clone. I sought her out, exhausted with my divorce and with having resisted this fateful kiss.
We kissed and were both eighteen once more. It was first-year orientation; a room crowded with late adolescents on the verge of existential panic. She looked new, pretty, hopeful. Innocent, in a truer sense. Her future lay before her. She had no idea who she would be (a marine biologist once, a high school teacher another).
That was the most brutal kiss, the one when we had lived so long before. I saw for sure the life from which I was ejecting us both. It may not have been perfect, but it was a life that we had both grown into, one we had earned. I unmade two marriages--both failing--and her lovely daughter with this kiss. In an unfaithful kiss staring out at the lights of the city beneath us melting into the stars above, I eradicated for her all the pain and joy she suffered without me.
It kept me from that next first kiss, the overwhelming guilt of my selfishness. I lasted a year, watching as she kissed other men, as she always existed on my periphery because I couldn't quit myself from her. Selfishness upon selfishness. How could she have forgiven me?
She told me later that, in this iteration, she was attracted to my respectful brooding, though I could not let her know its foundation. Any other guy would have swept her up in his arms after a cheesy line. I only looked at her as though she were something too beautiful to touch.
I introduced myself yet again, as though I didn't know her, didn't know decades of her future without the kiss. She only noticed my heterochromia--one eye hazel, the other blue or green depending on the light. She's made that clear to me most times we have done this, but not all.
She doesn't remember. I thought she would the first time. It took months for her to kiss me that iteration, once I had managed to convince her that I was more than the "weird guy." She believed eventually that it was an awkward attempt at a pickup line and came to feel flattered that I would act such a fool for a chance to talk with her.
The original lasted weeks before we kissed. She wanted to kiss me that day and, of course, knew that I wanted to kiss her, but she didn't want to have me think that she was the type who would do that. We hung out, first with friends, then on a date to see a concert on campus. It was inevitable then. Outside, under soft rain, she kissed me in delight and infatuation.
The fastest we kissed was an hour, me flirting using everything I had learned about her to seduce her out of the orientation. I thought that it all might have been a matter of bravery and speed, though it wasn't. Hastiness could not break me from the cycle.
We kissed, and I was back an hour before. I introduced myself. I love her, of course, having had the time to do that properly. I have tried not to love her, but this is an inseverable bond.
One day, I will have a second kiss. I am not sure how, but I assume that I must.
I've had five majors, though I had graduated only twice before I kissed her.
No matter who I have tried to love instead, nothing has felt like my initial romance with her, no matter how long or short it is. You can entice a woman only so long before she will try for a kiss, and you will let her. It is pointless to spurn her. I want to love her, for her to fall for me. She has done it so often. It is our best habit.
Outside our relationship or lack thereof, things do not stay the same. It is not as though I can remember lottery numbers to provide a lush life with her. It is the Butterfly Effect, I suppose. Everything I do that was different than before ripples out, changing the world in ways I cannot fathom. So, I stopped trying to fathom and fixed on the only mystery that matters.
This iteration has been only four months. It is nearly Christmas. She wanted me since mid-September when she saw me talking avidly to her roommate--her roommate and I have gotten on well through most iterations--and realized that she was jealous. I knew her tells better than I knew physics and the occult arts-neither of which offered direction on how to break this loop. I sensed every time that she was about to confess herself and defer it, which only made her want me more.
Now, as the flurries started overhead, as we walked with our gloved hands almost touching, it was going to be too much to resist. I didn't want to. Her kiss, though it put me back to that moment, felt like nothing else. It was my reward for trying again, my carrot to give it another go.
Our lips touch. I knew from long experience that I had until our lips parted, but I do not force this kiss longer than she wishes to give it. I revel in the moment as though it were only the first kiss of many, as though this were nothing else but two people beginning to fall in love.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.