First Times: What My First and Second Kisses Taught Me

Continuing the theme of First Times, Popcorn.dating's resident writer, Abi Brown shares how her first (and second) kisses taught her some vital lessons.
 

I’m thirteen years old, I’m skipping Double Maths, and I’m watching a wedding procession going to Greenwich Palace from the Chapel. There’s a tear in my eye as I look at the bride, laughing. I’ve always been a hopeless sap.

Down by the river, I see another spectator. He’s gorgeous, and I sigh. Nobody who looks like that, I know, could ever be interested in me. This conviction is why I am so receptive when a few minutes later he starts chatting me up.

His name is Sadiq, and he’s recently arrived from India to take his Masters degree in Civil Engineering. He’s twenty-three, he tells me. “Same age as me!”, I say. “I’m just about to graduate from English Literature at Goldsmiths.” I do the maths in my head and see my error. “I took a couple of gap years”, I add.

He and I text each other frequently, and two weeks later, we meet up back at that same spot. We walk, we talk; I buy myself a pint in a pub for the first time and am delighted to be served with no questions asked. 

Half an hour later, tipsy and nervous, I’m sat next to him against a tree in Greenwich Park that I will be able to identify always. “This is it”, I think to myself. “This is my First Kiss.” I reflect, for a moment, that I’m about to have that first kiss while all done up in black lipstick and fishnet sleeves, with a man ten years my senior. I’m pleased: that’s just the sort of person I want to be. 

So we kiss.

I'm instantly let down. It’s slimy, it’s sloppy, and it involves far too much tongue. I’m saddened to discover that this kissing thing clearly isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s too much like making out with a washing machine, and after a minute or two I just want him to get off me. 
 

I break off, smile and pull away to light a cigarette. Or, at least, I try to: Sadiq leans in and carries on, and then there’s a hand in my top grabbing at my chest with sharp, painful fingers. I push him away, trying to make a joke of it, and find his hands encroaching the hemline of my suddenly-too-short skirt. Eventually, I fake a phone call to a friend and conjure a fictitious but unbreakable appointment. 

For months afterwards I can’t watch sex scenes on TV: my skin crawls, and something in me screams GET OFF HER. Ten, fifteen years later I'll be able to handle situations like this with aplomb, but for now, all I can do is internalise the knowledge that, no matter what I thought before, I wasn’t ready.

***************

I’m fourteen years old, I’m with friends in the bedroom of someone whose parents have gone out, and I’m deliriously drunk on cheap vodka and own-brand diet cola. We’re in a band together, the four of us, which means that the three of them are in a band and I have managed to edge my way in by sheer force of will despite the fact that I can’t play an instrument.

I’m on the bed, and I’m up close to one of the girls, so close, too close. The vodka has swept me up, and suddenly - cautiously - I say “...Have you ever...?” and just like in a film she finishes my sentence. “Kissed a girl?” - and that’s that. Our lips meet. I am overwhelmed by desire for her; I want my hands on her, want her hands on me. I realise that this is what I thought it would be like the last time, with Sadiq.

Our hostess’s older brother is catcalling us, and we suddenly realise everyone’s staring at us both. She gets up to go to the bathroom, and I follow her, pull her in and lock the door behind us. I push in, eager - almost desperate - to pick up where we left off.

She pushes me away. There’s a second, just a second, where I want to kiss her again so much that I don’t care whether she wants to kiss me or not. 

I try to press us against the wall. “Stop it”, she says, and my mind offers me an image: Sadiq’s hands at the hem of my skirt and fumbling with the fishnet underneath my top. This is what he must have felt at that moment, and I realise.

I apologise, and soon after that, I leave the party. We stay friends, but we never talk about that night again. It still horrifies me to think how easy it was to toss that coin.