This Happened to Me | Writing Challenge
The First (and Best) Kiss of My Life
Tales from the Church Lock-In…
It’s been a little while since I’ve written for Medium. The Fallen Sky’s announcement and introduction arrived last week, and a new literary erotica tale will be making its Medium debut next week. There hadn’t been much of a plan to write anything between getting the book ready to launch and readying the next story, but Keeley Schroder asked an intriguing question for her monthly writing prompt and The Sturg wrote a beautiful article about his first gay kiss. And, well, my first kiss is a little similar in some ways, and a very happy memory that’s worth sharing.
For context, my adolescence was filled with turmoil: the sexual abuse had started when I was twelve. Kissing, thankfully, had never been a part of that abuse. First kisses became the one piece of romance and sexuality that remained a fairy tale in my mind, that could still be innocent and pure. That’s something for which I’m immensely grateful — not to my abuser, since I’m sure he would have tried to take that too if he’d known, but to fate and circumstance that he didn’t. Years later, it became something I could give to someone I liked, and that moment was incredible.
We were at a church lock-in, and since that phrase sounds like something straight out of a slasher movie if you aren’t from the Bible Belt, it may require some explanation. Church lock-ins were sleepovers held by a church youth group. The doors were locked for the night (hence the name) and everybody watched movies together, played games, talked, and then slept in their sleeping bags in a single room, all with adult supervision. Supervised or not, it’s sort of amazing to me that there wasn’t a lot more fooling around. Or maybe there was, and I was just naive?
Anyway, I was in high school and attending a church lock-in, and that week another youth group from a sort of sister church in Vermont was visiting, so it was much more crowded than usual and with lots of people who didn’t know each other. The internet is forever so I won’t spill names, but there was a boy among them, tall, a bit lanky with shaggy wheat-colored hair and deep green eyes. Things started earlier that afternoon at the youth pastor and his wife’s house, which had a pool. “Sam” didn’t undress at all and while I didn’t go swimming and kept my shorts on, they were pretty tight shorts and I did have a bikini top. And I noticed him looking: not leering at me or anything, not making a point of it, but just glancing at me and then looking away when I looked back, being embarrassed about it.
It was scary. It was flattering. It was exciting. Walking over and starting a conversation with him was equal parts intrigue and sort of facing my fear and turning the tables back on him. We sat down on the sofa together and started talking, and we didn’t really stop talking for twelve hours.
We talked about Bram Stoker’s Dracula and whether the Francis Ford Coppola movie version of Mina Harker was an improvement on the novel. We talked about Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies and Tim Burton’s Batman movies and which ones were better. We talked about Lord Byron and My So-Called Life. We talked about my ballet lessons and his track team and how nobody at either of our schools really understood us.
Sunset came, the venue moved to the church proper, and we kept talking. We sat together and whispered jokes to each other about the movies we were all watching, and had to be shushed a few times. There was never a sense of either one of us making an effort: we would split up to check on friends or grab a drink or napkin and then find ourselves back together, magnetically drawn. None of it was explicitly romantic, but every word had us looking deep into each other’s eyes, as if searching them.
Well, one moment was romantic. Sort of.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he’d suddenly asked out of the blue.
“Me?” I repeated, startled. “Oh, no. Definitely not.”
“That’s a shame. You should.”
“Why should I have a boyfriend?”
“Because you’re beautiful and, well, you deserve one… that was stupid.”
“It’s sweet,” I laughed. “Thank you. So, do you have a girlfriend?”
Bedtime came, well after midnight, and Sam asked me to meet him again later in an empty study room. I crept into the hall, up the steps and through the door, and we exchanged some very breathless and nervous hi’s, as if we were meeting each other all over again. We looked into each other’s eyes, he asked me to close my eyes and I did, and I felt him lean closer.
And then he pulled back. I opened my eyes again with a puzzled frown.
“This is my first kiss,” he whispered.
Oh. It was my first kiss too, but he was older and, frankly, the hottest guy in a room with dozens of boys to choose from, and that possibility hadn’t occurred to me. On the other hand, Speed Racer and Daria aren’t exactly the tools of a sophisticated Casanova. But they were my kind of weird. I told him it was okay and repeated his “close your eyes.” And we kissed.
Statistically speaking, it should have been awkward. We were young, geeky, and it was our first kiss apiece. Those are all the ingredients of colliding teeth and too much tongue and other first-kiss horror stories.
It wasn’t any of those things. It was incredible.
We kissed for maybe ten seconds, exploring the warmth of each other’s mouths with soft brushes of our lips, his fingers touching my cheek and my hands on his shoulders. The kiss ended, we looked at each other for a moment without a word — and then it just exploded, a renewed kiss that found my arms wrapping above his shoulders and his arms around my waist and our bodies pressed tight together as we fell away into a kiss that became the whole world, a kiss that rose and fell and lasted forever.
When I think back to that kiss, I don’t remember the Bible study room with its bookshelves and wooden chairs and red carpet: it’s just an iridescent white space and the two of us. There was no attempt at a French kiss, although we could feel each other’s tongues when our lips melded together, and there didn’t need to be: just the warm silky feeling, the pressure of our lips slipping and parting around one another, the heat of our shared breath and our hearts pounding together between us, was everything. I heard myself moaning into his mouth, and felt his fingers tangling through the length of my hair. He wrapped his arms around me and I stood on my tiptoes to press closer, and nothing else in the world existed.
Did it last a minute? Five minutes, ten? I have no idea. It only ended when someone flicked the lights on and off very quickly — we’d been caught. Whoever it was left as quickly as they came, and they only kept the door open a crack, but that perfect kiss broke into embarrassed laughter and deep blushes. I presume our interloper was a chaperone who didn’t want to confront us but wanted to break it up before things got too hot and heavy. Well, they were right to be worried: I would have done anything with him. The splotchy wetness in my underwear, noticed only later as I was climbing into my sleeping bag, served as a confession of how ready I’d been.
The first word I managed was a shaky “wow.” He asked how was it with just as shaky a voice. I whispered “amazing,” we smiled into each other’s eyes, then scrambled downstairs with innocently averted glances.
Well, the adults were onto us now. We were kept very busy and separate from each other the next morning, amid the giggles and whispers of both our groups (oddly enough, I rather liked being the subject of those giggles and whispers). Before we parted ways, however, we exchanged addresses with promises to write to each other. And, for a few letters, at least, we did indeed write one another. But there wasn’t really any future for us, and the letters soon came slower and slower until they’d stopped.
Had we met just a few years later it would’ve been the dawn of social media and we probably would’ve had MySpace pages to follow. But it was the twilight of the handwritten letter, so that was that. I still have the letters and photos that we exchanged packed away in a closet shoebox.
If we’d gotten to know each other beyond those twelve hours, we almost certainly would’ve stumbled upon each other’s quirks and annoying habits, and the magic would have faded. But that never happened, and we instead had a single perfect day that was like a fairy tale come true.
Thank you for reading. And thank you, Sam, wherever you are now.
Thank you so much for reading this article, and I’d love to hear your thoughts! Be sure to follow if you’d like to keep up with the weekly erotica stories, and you can find all the currently released titles on my website, on Smashwords, or on Amazon.
Want unlimited access to all my stories, along with thousands of other authors? Just click the referral link to subscribe to Medium for $5 a month and help support its writers!
