Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl

It’s fun to be the couple kissing on the subway. I don’t know if I’ve ever been that girl before, kissing and laughing with my arms around a man like we’re the only two real people standing in an insubstantial crowd.

Fourth date. Fourth good date, and I’m getting comfortable enough with him, with this, that I know there will be a fifth, and probably quite a few more. I like that feeling. I like how safe it feels when you’re spending time with someone who is enthusiastic about the fact they want to spend time with you.

I started out the night still nervous, still worried about touching him too much and moving too fast, but he made it easy. When we left the theater he put his arm around my waist. Later I reached out and held his hand.

Instead of running for the bus, I went entirely in the wrong direction to spend a little more time with him and told him it was worth it. I sat too close on the subway, my hand on his arm and his on my knee and told myself that if we do this again, meet in the city, I will drive across the river and take the train from there so that we can have that extra time together before he has to go on his way and I on mine.

He walked me to my last train and against all good judgment stepped into the car with me and kissed me like we were already in bed, naked, passionate, fucking. He left and I felt the strange rawness on my cheek, my lip, that I get when kissing a man late at night, too many hours after he’s shaved. The train doors closed and I sat eyes open and grinned. He makes me smile.

I am drunk on shmoop, and as I sit on the bus and write this post on my phone it beeps to tell me that he’s sent me an e-mail… because he is too.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s one of those eternal truths. Kissing is an experience that brings me great joy. Last night I went out on a second date with someone, and at the end of the evening we were standing out in the freezing cold air talking and kissing was all I could think about. He’d continued to grow on me, a lot, over the course of the evening, I’d been restraining myself from touching him for hours (we were not alone on the date and people were already making uncomfortable assumptions), he looked warm and approachable, and I thought to myself to hell with it and said to him “I’m going to kiss you now, if you don’t mind.”

Oh, but it pays to be bold. It’s always a good sign when I’m comfortable enough with someone to ask them for what I want, and he was warm indeed. Willing, too, and a very good kisser. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not really sure what makes a kiss good, but there are definitely certain things that make a kiss better. Laughing into each others mouths. Hands fisted in your hair or your clothing. Being pulled back again and again for just a little bit more.

The other day, a good friend said to me that I am the only person on the planet who would actually talk about the efficacy of a kiss. I’m relatively certain that is not in fact true. I’m sure there are other people who are equally geeky about their sexual experiences and sometimes efficacy is the only logical rating measure. There are times when the categories of “good kiss” and “bad kiss” simply do not apply. When that is the case, the only thing you can do is talk about whether or not the kiss fulfilled its intended purpose.

Which begs the question, what is the intended purpose of a kiss? Is it to express attraction? Establish connection? Create an atmosphere of romance? Arouse and titillate? Encourage a desire for more kissing or other sexual contact? I suppose that, depending on the kiss, it could be any or all of the above or even something else entirely.

I would not claim to be a connoisseur of kisses, but I love kissing. Kissing is, in fact, one of my favorite activities that two people can do with their clothes on. I am, I will even admit, a bit of a kissing whore. I will kiss anyone of whom I am fond and to whom I am even remotely attracted. I will, in certain circumstances, kiss them for hours at a time. As such, although I am not a trained smoochophile, I do know, from experience, what I do and do not like in a kiss. I feel comfortable saying to myself “I like kissing X. X is a good kisser.” or “I don’t like kissing Y. It really does nothing for me.”

So color me completely confused by the fact that the other night, on my second really wonderful date with the person who inspired this post, I found myself rather extraordinarily turned on by a kiss that would not normally have pushed my buttons in any way. It wasn’t a bad kiss, not by any means. It was a kiss that simply had nothing to do with any of my usual barometers of kissing. Still, it melted me, and when it was time for me to leave I didn’t want to go, so I kept requesting one more kiss. It was a very efficient way to delay departure*.

When I spoke to my friend later, to discuss how excited I was that I had gotten to kiss the person in question, she asked me if it was a good kiss, and I paused. I said, “I don’t know, but it was most certainly an effective kiss, if you can judge the efficacy of a kiss by it’s ability to induce physical arousal,” and then she started mocking me.

I stand by my assessment. I kissed a bunch of people the other weekend, all of whom were very good kissers, and it simply reinforced my existing judgement. It was a very effective kiss, and I can not form a simple binary judgement of quality. She who mocked me can kiss my ass

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*”This is making it much harder for me to let you leave,” he said. To which I did not respond, “Yay! I win at life!” My restraint was probably a good thing, since I think that, much to my disappointment, our third date may have been our last. The interest level seems to have waned. Alas! All I want is a nice, smart, funny partner who I don’t have to pretend to be someone else around and whose clothing I can rip off on a regular basis. I am a much happier human being when I am getting regular doses of affectionate contact. You wouldn’t think it would be quite this hard.