“Here it is,” I announce, sweeping my arms wide with sarcastic grandiosity. “The location of my first kiss.”
My new boyfriend glances around the elementary school playground, and I follow his eyes across the jungle gym, the plastic slide, the painted murals on brick walls. It looks innocent enough. It doesn’t look like the birthplace of a future sex writer’s makeout career.
“It really wasn’t a great kiss,” I continue. My boots sink into the sandbox as I pace around it, trying to revive the memory. “We were playing Spin the Bottle after sixth-grade graduation. I spun and it landed on this greasy-haired punk-rocker boy who I did not want to kiss. It was a quick peck, no tongue. And then I thought: guess that’s what kissing is like.” I laugh bitterly. Sometimes I wish I could rewrite my first kiss, overwrite it. I bet many of us wish that from time to time.
My boyfriend hasn’t said much, but at this, he takes my face in his hands and kisses me. Long, slow, sweet. The barest edge of his tongue, and then a little more. Our bodies press together with flaring urgency. Overhead, the heavens part, and it starts to rain.
I laugh out loud against his mouth at the romantic absurdity of it. And I know, instantly, that this memory will forever trump that earlier one as my defining kiss in this spot. Maybe I can’t erase that first kiss entirely, but I can tweak its associations. Now this sandbox in a tucked-away Riverdale playground will always remind me of this moment, this boy, the rain gathering in our lashes.
“Was that kiss any better?” he asks, and I laugh and take his hand.
When I was 24, I fell in love with someone who didn’t love me back – and I became obsessed with the places we’d been together.
To him, our late-night drinks dates and chatty brunch stops were probably just a chaotic jumble – part of that summer, but not emblematic of it. In my mind, however, they formed a sacred map. There’s the diner where we got bacon and eggs the morning after he fucked me in the ass, I’d think, moonily, as I walked by it. There’s the Banana Republic where I watched him try on shirts. There’s the bar where he told me not to “catch feelings” for him. That sure went well.
For all the places we’d been together, there was one that stuck out to me as all-important and forever memorable: a secluded parkette where we once had an ill-advised tryst. Late one night, after a party at which I’d drunk an entire bottle of white wine to deal with the agony of simply being near him, I playfully bent over a stone planter in the park and joked that we should fuck there. He, too, was drunk enough that this seemed a brilliant idea – so we did, for a few messy minutes, before abandoning the task to go get Subway sandwiches.
Many months later, when my sick love for him had gnarled into something more subdued, more manageable, we walked through that park again en route to his house. Our conversation was of a completely different timbre: we chattered easily – soberly – about the boy I was dating, the girl he was seeing, the forward motion in our respective careers. It was almost like we were friends. Real friends, without the spectre of unrequited love looming over us, threatening to splinter us apart.
We arrived at that stone planter, and I could almost see our tipsy ghosts. “Is this the place where we…?” I asked, gesturing vaguely. He quirked a cryptic eyebrow at me and said, “I think so, yeah.” We shared in a pause that seemed to wonder if we were, at last, okay. And I felt, in that moment, that someday we would be. We’d probably never fuck in a park again – we’d probably never fuck again – and that was a good thing, probably.
Dates aren’t supposed to end in tears, but my second one with my current boyfriend did.
We capped off 24 whirlwind hours of flirting and fucking with a visit to the Upright Citizens Brigade to see an improv show. I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe – probably harder than I would if I hadn’t been flooded with new-relationship adrenaline – and this absurdly handsome boy held my hand and scratched and pinched my skin throughout, making me feel simultaneously subspacey and enamored.
But when we left, and headed hand-in-hand toward the subway station where we’d be saying our goodbyes, the mood shifted. I could feel sadness welling in him like a river threatening to burst through a dam – and I felt that sadness mirrored in my own body, heavy and foreboding. “I don’t want to say goodbye yet,” he murmured, meaning: he didn’t want me to go back to Toronto yet; he didn’t want the distance between us to feel insurmountable again like it had for the past month. I rarely saw this effortlessly smooth boy ruffled in any way, but now he clearly was. “I need more time.”
“Do you want to stop somewhere and talk?” I asked, thinking of aftercare: the common kink practice of debriefing and decompressing after a scene, so you can return to reality without totally melting down. Our day-long date hadn’t been a kink scene, exactly, but it was just as intense. Maybe we needed to unravel our sadness over cocktails or a late-night espresso.
But whatever was bubbling inside him felt more urgent than that, apparently, because he tugged me into the next private-ish spot we passed: the concrete mouth of a hotel’s parking garage. We stood in the corner and looked into each other’s eyes as if we’d find answers there – but there were none.
“What do you think this is?” he asked, searchingly. “What do you want me to be to you?”
We’d only been dating a month, and he had other partners; I didn’t know what was okay to ask for, and what wasn’t. But I decided honesty was probably best. “I mean… Ideally I’d like you to be my boyfriend. Eventually.” I saw immediately in his eyes that this was not what he wanted to hear.
“I was afraid of that,” he said. “I don’t think I can make that work. I didn’t think I could do that with two people, let alone three… I’m afraid I wouldn’t live up to your expectations for me. I wouldn’t be the boyfriend you need.”
I bit my lip and looked away, because if I looked at him for much longer, I would definitely cry. “That’s okay,” I said, although it wasn’t. “You don’t have to be my boyfriend.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “I don’t want you to be with me and be sad about it.”
I laughed a harsh, dark laugh. “I’d be sad if I wasn’t with you, at this point, so… whatever.”
He nodded bleakly and obliquely, and we continued our walk to the subway. I stayed silent so I wouldn’t cry. But inside, I was thinking: Why am I doing this? Why am I letting myself fall in love with someone who doesn’t have time for me in his life? Don’t I deserve better than this?
I stayed strong and didn’t cry until after we’d said goodbye and parted ways at the subway turnstile. As I walked to the train with my suitcase in hand and tears blurring my vision, I thought: What if I’m not okay with being his not-girlfriend? What if I want more than that?
Over the next few months, we figured things out. His life circumstances shifted in unforeseen ways, and he found he had more time and energy for me than he’d thought he would. “You are not optional to me,” he told me on our third date. “Will you be my girlfriend?” Somehow, that hit me even harder than the first time he said “I love you.” It was so unexpected. I’d given up on that possibility, and yet here it was, gleaming and real.
The next time I came to New York after that, we went back to the UCB for another improv show. Again, he held my hand, scratched my skin, laughed along with me. And again, when we walked past that parking garage, we stepped into its entryway, as if magnetized to that spot.
I felt that familiar sadness in my bones as soon as we arrived there: that sense of despair, of wanting more than I could have, of not deserving what I wanted. I saw in his blue eyes that he felt it too.
And then he took my face in his hands and kissed me with enough passion and heat to erase all that melancholy. “Kate,” he said between kisses, “I’m so happy you’re my girlfriend. So, so happy. I want you to be my girlfriend for a long, long time.”
This time, I did cry in front of him – because this time, it felt safe to. That older memory receded into irrelevance. I kissed him back, hard, and thought: This. This is what I want.