The first time you kissed was behind the lid of a pizza box, in the furthest backseat of her mom’s van, en route to a movie.
It was clumsy, but you both leaned in with expectant smiles because this was nothing more than curiosity. This was nothing more than practice.
Her lips were overly wet, like she’d just had a glass of water or she’d just come out of the ocean. Yours were chapped and warped and broken. They always are.
The pizza box wasn’t big. You had to duck down to hide, so your moms all the way in the front wouldn’t see you.
It started delicately. You tried to slot your mouth against hers the way you saw people do so in the movies. It didn’t really work, but it was fine because you weren’t kissing for any sort of pleasure. You were kissing to kiss, to feel what it was like, to learn how to do it on each other rather than on your crushes or future boyfriends.
The first time you used your tongues was a little while after that, in her bedroom, at night. You both were under the comforters, but it went no further than feeling the layout of each other’s teeth with your tongues.
Your first thought was how you didn’t like the taste of her. But her face was soft and her hands were too, and she was easy to hold, and so a part of you thought this was how it might feel to kiss a boy, and then it was nice.
The first time you took off your clothes was in her bedroom over winter break in eighth grade. It was just your shirts, and she was still wearing a training bra and you felt a sense of pride at the fact that you had graduated to cups before she did. It was a stupid pride, but then, most pride is.
The second time was a year later, both of you with your pajama bottoms and underwear tangled around your ankles. You were terrified. You fumbled more than you usually did, and you held her in your hands—she’s always been smaller than you—and you realized something dangerous. It fuelled an arrogance in you and suddenly from then onwards, you took what you wanted more than you gave. You climbed on top of her like a lord and took pleasure in the fact that you could look down on her, even when you were no better than she was.
The only time you fell in love was in your last three years of high school, with someone entirely different. They were taller than you and rode a skateboard and could throw a javelin farther than all the boys on the track and field team. They drove their mom’s old black car, and sometimes when you both skipped class (because that’s all you did), you’d ride down the highway and they’d steer with their knees, hands above their head, and look at you with a playful grin. No one else existed for you.
You dreamt up your future with them on a bench behind the school, creating band names and picking places to live. You wrote songs with them, and thought your voice sounded perfect together when you sang, but one day, you discovered that a song you wrote together, a song you wrote for them, was a song they wrote for someone else, and you came crashing down from the foliage into the unyielding ground. And so you fled to where you could pretend to be above.
The first time you regretted being selfish was after the fact. You rolled off of her small body one night and stared up at the ceiling, and wished she was larger, wished she had hands that could eclipse yours, and a habit of driving recklessly for your amusement. It was stupid, you felt stupid and betrayed in the most nonsensical way, and, with all of your pride turned sour from heartbreak, you turned on your side and stared at the face you’d known all your life, and broke.
The next time you went over to her house for a sleepover, she snuck her hands under the covers and ran them down your leg while a show played on her laptop. You grabbed her wrists and placed them in her lap without looking at her and continued to watch like nothing happened. She did the same.