Love this chapter, and here's your backstory, @RoseTangle.
thirteen
We were just sitting on the Greens’ dock. The two of us. Our feet were in the water, and the sun had almost set. All that could be heard were the faint sounds of crickets and cicadas and the rather intrusive noise of Charlie Brooks’ Fourth of July Playlist (currently, it was stuck on Eminem’s White America). There were easily fifty—probably more—people enjoying a party at my summer home just a few yards to our left, though they felt light-years away. Just like that one night—or, like, morning that she spontaneously took me into town, everything immediately around us seemed to be contained in a metaphysical snow globe. Time had stopped and nothing moved. It was just Lilah Tov and I.
I leaned in closer to her, and she leaned in closer to me. Our faces were inches apart. I grabbed her waist with one hand and rested my other on her cheek. She wrapped her arms around my neck. We continued to slowly creep towards each other, though it was like there was an infinite stretch of space in those inches, as we never connected—we just kept getting closer and closer. Her lips parted and mine instinctively did the same. We were so freaking close. It was going to happen. I was going to kiss her or she was going to kiss me. I wanted to kiss her, and she wanted me to kiss her. Though, it was unclear who would ultimately cave in first.
By kissing Lilah first, that was giving in. It was what society wanted. The guy was always supposed to lean in and make the move. It was also what Lilah wanted. She wanted me to kiss her—she didn’t want to kiss me. It was probably because we were both stubborn, but as our faces neared, it was like an unspoken stalemate, waiting patiently for a verdict. My eyes were glued to her lips, and her eyes were on my mouth. We were both thinking the same thing, which was probably the problem. We shouldn’t have been thinking. We should’ve been doing.
“Kiss me,” she dared in an intonation.
As she said the two words, her lips practically brushed across mine. And that was when I lost it. I made the move. My face closed the gap between us, and then my lips were on her lips, and her lips were on my lips. There was nothing separating us. All the tension had evaporated into an unrelenting magnetism. I couldn’t pull away from Lilah, even if I wanted to—which I didn’t. We were meshed together, and though at first it felt like I lost and gave up, as I tasted her fruity lip balm, it was clear that this was no loss. If anything, it was a victory to put all other triumphs to shame.
Every other girl that I had ever kissed no longer mattered or compared. Now, they had all been moved to my joint list of Bad Kissers and Irrelevant. Because right now, I was kissing Lilah Tov, and after this, I knew that there was no way I could go back.
The kiss started off simple. We were just getting a taste of each other. Our mouths moved on their our accord, locking and moving and kissing. I wrapped my entire arm around Lilah’s waist, bringing her flush up against me. She ran her hands through my hair. Then our tongues came into play, and they decided to go on explorations in each other’s mouths. My eyes were shut tight, and I assumed that Lilah’s were, too. Kisses weren’t the types of things that one enjoyed with the sense of sight. Everything was better sans the vision, because it was just more instinctual. Every nerve was heightened, and it was a better kept secret, because you couldn’t see it—you could only feel.
Soon, our upright position didn’t work. So we backed up farther onto the dock, so that our feet weren’t in the water. Then I climbed on top of Lilah, making sure not to squish her, and continued to kiss her as I held her waist. Even with our bodies so together, it still felt like there was too much space.
“I never pegged you as a Top,” Lilah gasped, suddenly breaking the kiss.
She wanted to talk. Fine. I started kissing up and down her neck and every appropriate place I could think of. My lips came to a particular spot, and I stayed, kissing and sucking and trying not to give her a hickey, but knowing in the back of my mind that hickeys weren’t the worst things in the world—though my mother would disagree, as I had learned firsthand and from Charlie that one time he wouldn’t take his scarf off when he came into the house.
“To me, Tops have always been the more—OH—dominant ones, and I never guessed that out of the two of us, that’d be you,” Lilah continued as I sucked her neck.
I stopped for a moment to say, “If I’m going to kiss a girl, I’m sure as hell not going to be a wimp about it. I’m always a Top.” And it was true. In all my experience of making out with girls, I never opted for being a Bottom—which was a reference to our current prone position. I was on top, thus making me a Top, and Lilah was on the bottom, making her a, well, Bottom. Tops had the power, and Bottoms tended to be more submissive. While in general I was a rather acquiescent individual, when it came to kissing, I settled for nothing less than a Top.
“And I am so not going to complain about that, but let me take a turn.” And then Lilah managed to flip our spots, so that she was on top and I was under her. Her legs straddled my hips, and all I wanted to do was go back to kissing her. But she had other plans in mind. Her fingers played with the hem of my shirt, and then in a swift movement, they darted underneath. She launched her lips at my neck, and then began to do the same thing that I had been doing just a moment before. I couldn’t focus on anything. Lilah’s mouth was working my neck like a vacuum, and her hand was investigating my toned stomach.
“I knew that you just wanted me for my abs,” I mumbled.
“My cover’s been blown,” she sighed, electrifying me with every touch. As she said the words, her mouth was momentarily unattached. I took the opportunity and captured her lips in another kiss.
As our osculation (I had always thought that that word had such a clinical ring to it) grew, I became increasingly less content with being a Bottom. So I rolled us around so that I was on top once again. Lilah’s hand dropped from my chest and drew back to my hair. One of my hands was still on her face, while the other tested the waters and wandered to the edge of her shirt. I was about to place my fingers on her stomach (in the hopes to get further), but Lilah slapped my hand away and broke the kiss.
“Not so fast, bucko,” she said.
“That,” I said, “is a double standard.” Because she had gotten to feel up my stomach and chest, so why I couldn’t I do the same to her?
“Are you complaining?”
“Not at all,” I quickly denied, sweeping her up into another deep kiss.
The last girl (like, before Lilah) that I kissed was Emily Albert. Emily was a year younger than me (“Will, ever the cradle robber,” Charlie had taunted when he found out) and was easily the most innocent girl I had ever hooked up with. Like, this chick made me look like a total perv, which I wasn’t, just because she was so starkly naïve. Before me, she had kissed one other guy, and as far as I knew, it lasted barely a minute, there wasn’t any tongue, and it was basically chaste. This other guy happened to be one of my good friends, so when I pointed her out one day during a free block, my friend told me his experience. I told him that I could go further with her. It was kind of a scummy assumption, but I knew my aptitudes well and how girls usually reacted to me.
One weekend, I went to the school library, where I heard she spent most of her time. And sure enough, Emily Albert was in the library, reading some book. It had a blue cover and I was pretty sure that there were tears streaming down her cheeks. Which was weird, because all she was doing was reading a freaking book. When I read books, I didn’t cry. My parents probably thought I did (because I was the “sensitive” one), but I didn’t. I just read and internalized everything. I didn’t plug the book into an outlet in my mind labeled “EMOTIONS,” because I was a dude, and I didn’t do that type of shit. If a book miraculously affected me, all I would do was plausibly think about it for some extended period of time. That was it.
So, I walked over to Emily and sat down in a chair next to her. With my quick-pick-up-line skills inherited from Charlie, I said, “What book is that?” even though I was fully capable of reading the title myself.
Emily looked up from the book and over to me. “Uh, The Fault in Our Stars,” she said softly, clearly intimidated by me—because, like, I was a super attractive and brilliant sophomore, and she was but a budding freshman.
“Never heard of it,” I commented.
At that, she shut the book and stared wide-eyed at me. “You’ve never heard of it?”
“Nope,” I shook my head. “Who’s it by?”
“J—John Green,” she said, “he’s basically G-d.”
When someone equated a human being to G-d (whether I believed in the said divinity or not), I took it to mean that the person she or he was describing happened to be brilliant. Emily Albert likened the author of her book to G-d, so that left one thing for me to do. “Can I see the book?” I asked her. She tentatively gave it over to me and I read the back. “Oh, it’s a cancer story.”
“No,” she said sharply, “it’s a love story that just so happens to involve cancer.”
I made a mental note to read the book later, because if a timid freshman girl was that passionate, there had to be some substance to it. (When I did eventually read the book, I thought it was good. The writing was good, and the story was good. I didn’t mind the sad ending, because it was more realistic. I didn’t think that it was the best book ever, and because I read fast and a lot, I then checked out more stuff by that John Green dude. My favorite was Looking For Alaska. I related to it the most, and it was just, like, the best). But the reason I was in our school’s library on a Saturday wasn’t because I intended to check out a book or do some hardcore studying—I was there to hook up with Emily Albert, though she didn’t know it at the time.
Thinking back, I wasn’t even entirely sure why Emily. Sure, she was cute in an I-can-make-cardigans-hot sort of way, but honestly, I didn’t really care who she was. I was bored in boarding school and wanted some action. I saw her on the quad one day and picked her out at random. There was nothing special about her (like, to me—some guy would be sure to find something special about her one day), and the only reason I wanted to hook up with her was for the sake of hooking up and saying that I did it. Emily and I weren’t going to start dating. I knew that for damn sure. When I wanted to date a girl, I got to know her before we kissed. I didn’t want to know Emily. I just wanted to hook up with her.
So, instead of learning about her literary icons, I used a trick that Charlie had taught me and went with a rather direct approach. I cut the crap, and asked, “So, hey, Emily, do you want to go hook up?”
“You—you know my name?” was all she could say.
After that, it wasn’t very hard to convince her to go behind a bookcase in the basement of the library and, like, hook up. Shit. That made me sound like a total rapist and maybe even a borderline molester. Whatever. I wasn’t. All I did was kiss the girl. She wasn’t even that good of a kisser, which I attributed to her lack of experience. But we exchanged saliva and I did it and the point that I initially was trying to internally make was that kissing some nobody (not to say that she wasn’t a somebody in someone else’s story) like Emily Albert was nothing like kissing Lilah Tov.
Lilah knew exactly what she was doing. I had kissed girls in the past who knew what they were doing. But none were like Lilah. And Lilah wasn’t just another side effect of boarding school boredom. We were neighbors for the summer and even if she was a watered down and snooty version of herself, I probably would’ve ended up in the same situation, but, like, she wasn’t. She was Lilah Tov. In being Lilah Tov, that came with a slew of opinions and mischief and adventure. That was probably what I liked the most—Lilah’s sense of exploration. Even while kissing her, it was palpable. Because the most daring thing that the girls I knew did was smoke or drink, and that wasn’t really adventurous. Well, not in the way that Lilah was.
She just seemed invincible, as if she didn’t have a single fear in the world. And I admired that in her. I had a lot of fears. Okay, so maybe they weren’t fears, but more, like, anxieties. I got anxious and I worried. I knew that about myself. With everything I did, I had to weigh out the benefits and consequences and all that shit, because it was just what I knew. But with Lilah, she didn’t have to worry, because in the time that she could’ve spent worrying about all the possibilities, she was living. Like right now, we were on her aunt and uncle’s dock, and there was a party going on super close to us, so anybody could totally come over and see us, but Lilah didn’t worry. She just lived.
A detonation of color and sound was what initially eased us apart. I still hovered over Lilah, but we momentarily stopped kissing to focus on the fireworks set off from my backyard. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Charlie was the culprit, so I was really glad that I wasn’t near him while he was using a lighter and objects that contained gunpowder in them. Another burst of red and blue shot into the dark sky, creating quite the spectacle. I had never really liked fireworks, but that wasn’t to say that I didn’t like them. But right now, I felt nothing but abhorrence for the legal explosives, because they were currently preventing me from kissing the only girl I could think of.
Lilah planted one more kiss on my lips and then pushed me off of her. She sat up and crossed her legs as she stared up at the display. “That was nice,” she commented like she was talking about a sandwich or a movie or a song. It wasn’t the type of thing one said after a kiss—especially after a kiss like the one (or two or three or eight) that we had just shared. Because the kiss wasn’t nice. “Nice” made me think of something that was easy and calm—like a sandwich. I wasn’t sure why that was the example stuck in my mind, but it was. Sandwiches were typically hearty and the type of food that caused one to feel content. They were nice. Kisses and sandwiches didn’t relate in general, so on the Description Scale, they didn’t correlate, either. Because unlike sandwiches, kisses weren’t supposed to be “nice.”
So I said, “No, it wasn’t.” I wasn’t sure why I allowed the words to come out of my mouth, but I did. They were the truth, and while I stayed quiet most of the time, not daring to express my opinion or the truth (which were usually interchangeable), I couldn’t let this go.
“It wasn’t nice?” Lilah inquired with tilt of her head.
“No,” I declared firmly. “‘Nice’ is an understatement, and that wasn’t the type of kiss that was meant to be understated.”
“So then what type of kiss was it, Will?”
“Definitely not a ‘nice’ one,” I mumbled.
“On a scale of one to ten, how high did it rank?”
“Why do you assume it ranked high?”
She shifted her gaze on to me for a moment and then returned it to the sky. Not a word was uttered, but her silence spoke volumes. We both knew fully well that she hadn’t assumed that the kiss ranked highly. It just did. There was no assumption about it. Because we had both shared the kiss, and we both were aware that in addition to not being “nice,” a kiss like that couldn’t be ranked lowly on any hypothetical scale.
“Eleven,” I said after a while.
“Damn,” she sighed. “Well, at least that leaves room for improvement.” I didn’t understand. Lilah knew that I didn’t understand. Her question had been very direct: rate the kiss from one to ten. I ranked it at eleven, which surpassed the maximum. And yet, Lilah had implied that she could’ve been ranked even higher. So she enlightened me: “My aim is always a twelve.”
“I still don’t get it,” I admitted.
“Like, if I ask someone to rate a kiss, they usually lowball me with a five or six to be funny,” explained Lilah, “or like you, they say ten or eleven. So I strive for a twelve.”
I wanted to tell her that if I put any more thought into it, she probably would’ve far surpassed twelve. But I didn’t. I just provided more evidence for a thesis entitled “Why Will Brooks Is A Loser” by saying, “Oh,” and nothing more.
I didn’t want to think about the other “someones” Lilah had asked to rate kisses. Because it meant acknowledging that there were other people. I was pretty sure that they were all guys, because she didn’t seem like she swung the other way (maybe one day in college during her experiential phase, but not now). And though I automatically felt the need and compulsion to compare Lilah to the other girls I had kissed, I didn’t want to think about those other guys. Like, yeah, it was kind of a double standard (apparently, we were big on those tonight), but I knew that she had kissed before me, because with kissing skills like hers, there was no way that she couldn’t have. But I didn’t want to face the reality of the situation that with those other kisses came other guys who weren’t me.
The thought of someone else’s hands on Lilah’s hips and their mouth on her mouth made me sick. Not physically of course, because currently the only slightly physical issue I was undergoing happened to be an overactive heart (a side effect of kissing Lilah Tov), but emotionally (there was that “sensitivity” shining through) and mentally, I was sick. Okay, probably not mentally, but shit, that only left emotionally, and if I was emotionally sickened by the thought of Lilah with someone else, then I didn’t even want to consider what that meant for me. Whatever. Lilah with another guy was gross, because he wasn’t me. And it was a two-way street. Me with another girl was also gross, because she wasn’t Lilah.
“I’ve never really liked the Fourth of July,” Lilah said.
“Ummm…” was all that came out of me, because I wasn’t really sure how to correctly respond to something like that. If Charlie overheard her saying that, he would probably wash her mouth out with a USA-made soap, but Charlie wasn’t here. He was there, leaving only me to deal with the radicalism of Lilah’s mind.
“To me, it’s just always seemed a little overstressed,” she continued. “Like, yeah, our country’s independence is important or whatever, but do we really need all these fireworks and red, white, and blue?”
Though her question was probably meant to be a rhetorical one, I couldn’t keep myself from saying, “Yes. Yes we do.”
She grinned at me and said, “You’re one of the good ones, Will. Don’t lose that.” And then she stood up from the dock and began to walk away. Halfway up, she turned back to me and said, “Happy Fourth, William Brooks.”
And I said, “Happy Fourth, Lilah Tov,” and tried to figure out what I would do next. Because I kissed Lilah Tov, and nothing else seemed to matter or make much sense. Not even the fireworks.