kissykiss

Donny is a cruelkind kisser. He does that spiral move, that one where your tongue chases his in a merry ring-around-the-rosy, but everyone does that. It’s mandatory. The kissing police would stop you and take your license if you didn’t throw that in at least once.

So it’s not that move, it’s not that dizzy-making spiraling circularity.

It’s something else.

The worst kisser I ever had was this guy in Freshman year of college. He took me to a John Cougar Mellancamp concert. We heard the little ditty about Jack and Diane and then he planted a big drippy kiss on my lips. He prised my mouth open with his jaws, and he jammed his tongue as far in my mouth as it would go, which, actually, was amphibian far. He could have caught flies halfway across the University gymnasium from what my mouth could tell.

Having planted his tongue like a colonizer's flag in my mouth, he used his tongue's tip to bat my epiglottis  a few times, like my epiglottis were a tetherball and his tongue a fist, and then he withdrew.

What was that? I asked and rubbed the back of my hand across my mouth.

“A kiss,” he answered.  “It’s how they do it in France.”

A person’s kiss tells much. The worst sex I’ve had in recent memory, and there are some truly egregious experiences vying for that missionary position, was with this guy who kissed with his teeth. It was as if he was bobbing for apples and my mouth was a lovely, juicy, red and recalcitrant Fuji. Of course, he also touched me as if his parents had raised him with oven mitts. As if he had been hugged  only while both parties were dressed in dog-attack suits. He was truly remarkably bad in bed, from stem to stern, nip to tip, kiss to suck to fuck and back again.

(Although the women I've kissed, with the exception of the voracious starf*ckette, kissed as raspberries would kiss if raspberries had lips. Or perhaps that's just how I want to remember it.)

I’ve said previously that I knew from kiss #1 with my most recent live-in boyfriend, Ernie, that he and I were mismatched. I knew from the very first time his soft lips timidly met  mine, the first time he tentatively parted my mouth with his flabby tongue, the first time that his mouth sealed with mine like he was drowning and I was wearing the red bathing suit, I knew from that first moment that our relationship was doomed. That I carried on is pretty much a testament to the swelling black tide of loneliness I felt at the time.

I’ve said too that the one thing, the one small thing, like Catherine and the arch of Pippin’s foot, that I noticed about Donny, the one thing on our first date that I noticed as he was prattling on about pouring foundations and the intricacies of I-beam, the one thing that made me swoon slightly was this: when Donny pauses wryly, he points his tongue in a little perfect triangle out of his mouth.

It was that: that small, perfect, pink triangle. That and the fact that he has swelling full, cruel lips. His lips promise perversity.

They don’t lie.

When Donny kisses me, he does the obligatory tongue-swirling dance (it’s in the kissing contract). And suddenly he sucks my tongue hard into his mouth. Hard and demandingly he sucks, and I can feel the blood rushing to its tip; I can feel my tongue straining at its solid roots in my mouth, like a plant refusing to be pulled up from its bed.

He takes my tongue between his teeth and he bites it delicately and soundly, as he would use his teeth to bisect a piece of sashimi.

His teeth scrape along the sides of my tongue, they nip at my lips, they catch my lower lip and pull it out and away suggestively, drawing my lip taut between our mouths.

He probes and prods my mouth with his tongue, searching out the tender bits, tasting, it feels, the difference nearer my teeth, nearer the roof of my mouth, nearer and farther, savoring.

He grazes my mouth with his lips, traces them with his tongue and suddenly presses the full weight of his desire on me with his mouth, as if with enough pressure our skulls will mesh and meld and given enough time and pressure they would become a singular glittering gem.

Donny kisses deeply. I am water and he is thirsty. I am air and he is out of breath. I am food, and he is hungry. Cliché is inescapable.

(And I melt like butter, like chocolate, like ice. I pool and puddle and drip.)

I might not, if I were blindfolded, recognize my lover’s cock. And blindfolded, I might not, if perhaps eucalyptus were rubbed below my nose, recognize his body under my mouth. Deprived of sight, I might not recognize that peculiar pattern of moles and birthmarks, of ribcage and sternum, of shoulder scar and chest hair, of hip hollows and leg length that is my boyfriend’s body. I might not even recognize his face under the knowing touch of my fingers. But were he to put his mouth on mine, even for a moment, whether blinded, bound, sensory deprived, wrapped in a cocoon of gauze or tulle or Saran wrap, I would know it was he.

I would know it with my mouth. He’s in his kiss.

Comments

[roper]

It's in his kiss? I feel a song coming on...

[PS]

That was lovely. You've made me pine for my kiss, my love.

Not hard to do, mind you, but done beautifully.

[alwaysarousedgirl]

You made me pine too.

And recall that the first time I kissed my husband, I also knew it was no good.

Love you.

[figleaf]

I don't remember my first orgasm, or really even my first orgasm during intercourse (it didn't happen the first time) but I'll remember my first kiss even after I've forgotten I have toes.

It there was no chasing round and round, no biting, no lashing. It was under some mistletoe in a fancy house I'd never been in before and never chanced to go into again, and we pressed our lips together in a perfect, instinctive seal with no air in our mouths, and with gentle suction we pressed our tongues against each other's and pressed and slid and glided across, moving across each other instead of past. Each of us reached for the other's head and pulled the other trying to snug ourselves closer so our mouths could snuggle tighter. And when we broke the kiss our lips and tongues clung together till the last moment and then parted quietly, moistly, and very, very warmly. And we both looked at each other and I think I said can we do that again? And one of the other kids said something about "it's so-and-so's turn" and two others took our place under the mistletoe... and the next day she returned to whatever city she'd come visiting from, and I returned home, and we've neither seen nor spoken to each other since, any more than we'd seen or spoken before.

But I'll always remember that kiss, and think fondly of other lovers who've kissed that way, and wonder why more don't. There are other ways to kiss, you know, and Donnie's sounds lovely (I wonder how you kiss him back!) but that first kiss, and all the others I've had like it, remains the gold standard for me.

Thanks for helping me revive that lovely memory for me, CG.

figleaf

[Suse]

I remember both my first kisses. I count them differently, first kiss with a girl, first kiss with a guy. They were both so different. What I found amusing was that even though the girl had had no experiance she was a better first kisser than the guy, who felt as if his lips were drawn too taut across his face, and then as if he didn't know what to do with them. He of course had had several girl friends.

I have found that I enjoy a bit of lower lip biting.

[Shay]

Do you find that you prefer a certain side when you kiss?

With a couple of lovers, I've found that I favour having my head at a certain angle and if I am kissed from the other side I am hopeless and unco-ordinated (but sometimes that's kinda fun too)!

Hmm I wonder what that says about me in relationships...

[Libre_ami]

A kiss is the best and most sure fire way to know when your lover has been wandering the kiss will change ....

[miss brunette]

I stumbled across your entry & I was baffled at having written about the same sort of awful kiss style at the start of the March. The tongue in the mouth take-over is the kiss of death! Crazy thing, I know we haven't been kissing the same guy!