Duvet Days & Vanilla Ice Cream

If a kiss could become a click...

It was a moment I desperately wanted to capture on film. I was new to Montana and, after months in quarantine and even more months in agony trying to get over Max, I was unaccustomed to feeling so…alive. So…happy?

I couldn’t stop looking at him. His tan skin, the muscular curves of his arms creating a sort of topography amongst the sheets. We lay there, my finger tips languidly tracing his mountainous body, our legs braided lazily together. I couldn’t take my eyes off him but also couldn’t just enjoy it. All I wanted to do was reach for my camera.

There was no way I could accurately remember just how beautiful he was, or exactly how his back curved, like it was carved out of golden marble. I remember thinking that in that moment he wasn’t a boy, he was art, and who can remember every detail of a painting?

I don’t know if it’s Instagram or just my arty, frenetic mind that can never just BE, but I’m constantly caught in “capture versus experience.” Do I try to preserve this moment on film as a crutch for my saggy memory? A little visual time machine that I can only pray is infused with not just how something looked, but how it smelled and tasted and felt.

Or do I just live in it and hope that somehow it stays with me? That I remember exactly what our fingers looked like grazing my leg or how he hummed along to the Waylon Jennings song he put on, which I pretended I knew because Montana girls (even new ones) should know Waylon. (I’m surprised TSA didn’t check my Spotify before they let me on the plane to Bozeman…)

I have a problem being in the moment. I can obsess about a boy or a situation or anything and when I’m finally doing it (or him) (…) I still can’t be present in it. I think this is the nature of high achieving girls; we’re always on to the next thing.

“It’s the anticipation and the remembrance, it’s never the actual act,” my best friend Chrissy told me back in high school, and it’s stuck with me because it’s only gotten more true. I joke (“joke”) that I’m a predator and people always misunderstand that as me wanting to seduce and destroy, like I’m some toxic weirdo prowling the streets.

But that’s not it. I want the anticipation. I want the chase. I don’t want to be fed—I want to hunt.

So when I actually get something I…kind of don’t know how to enjoy it.

But I was going to try with this one.

I sighed a little, resigning myself to not ruining a delicate, intimate moment with a photo that wouldn’t even capture the hazy Sunday morning magic anyway. I buried my nose in his neck and traced my hand down his spine. I had seen what his body can do, how quickly it could move and how ferocious it could be.

I felt like I wasn’t so much touching him but petting him, like he was dangerous cat who’d curled up next to me, and I didn’t want to alarm him with anything but a feather-light touch.

I planted kisses all over him, wishing that each one would somehow be a photo. Kiss, click. Kiss, click.

Then I did something I almost never do with a boy. I curled my hands in his hair and gently tugged him back, so I could look at him. Not at his body, but his face. In his eyes.

When you think about it, it’s strange how infrequently we look a boy in the eye. Someone could be literally inside us and yet somehow that unflinching eye contact seems too intimate, more than even two body parts locked together. Those parts were, like, two feet down from my eyes, whatever they were doing, they were on their own.

But I kind of wanted to see what would happen if I did just look at—and into— the boy on top of me.

Would we (ok fine would I…) blurt out something weird like i L0ve yEw because that’s what movies have taught me to say when we look at a guy for too long? I hoped not because, well, I didn’t. But I say things I don’t mean all the time (“The salad is great, thank you!”) why would this be any different?

Before I could veer into destructive awkwardness, he leaned down and kissed me so softly it was like his lips were made of sugar and slowly dissolving against mine. Then he kissed me harder, the way a woman should be kissed— possessively and greedily.

I read once that the origins of the kiss were basically so a husband could snoop in his wife’s mouth and see if she was stealing his grain alcohol. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it would track for how so many of us want to be kissed: like he’s looking for something, something that I took—maybe not mead, but maybe his heart, his peace. The sense of himself I saw and brought to life. Something he can only find deep inside me.

Like the antidote is under my tongue.

Because, I realized, letting the months of misery and history melt away under the weight of him, my antidote was under his.