Kiss

By Mona LaVigne

6*25*02

I watched the neon light flashing, methodical in strict illumination. People walking by, going home to their swank Union Square walk-ups, passing under the brilliant sign, not noticing. How could they miss it? How could they take such a nifty little “one-two-three-four-blinkblinkblink” thing for granted? I certainly couldn’t. Sitting on the cool park bench, Jonah’s hand on my knee, all I could see was that blinking neon light.

“Didja mean what you said?” Jonah whispered, his lips grazing my ear.

(three-four-blinkblinkblink)

I turned to face him.

Jonah, Jonah. Six-years Jonah. Musician Jonah. Smoking Weed In The Park On A Sunday Afternoon Jonah. Over the last four years I had been wondering “Where? What? How?” about him and now we were reunited, sitting on a bench under a rain-filled tree.

I stared at his lips, the same lips at which I had stared for the last time nearly five years ago, wondering the same thing as I was now. Will he? Does he sense that I don’t have the balls to do it? Now that I’ve told him what I had be too scared to tell him for the last six years (over dinner, no less, in a restaurant safe haven), now that it was out in the open, would he finally do it? “I’m totally in love with you and I want to fuck the shit out of you.” What did it mean to him, my confession? I had expended my guts for the evening, and now maybe it was his turn to take a risk. The blinking neon light twitched in my peripheral vision (one-two-three) and Jonah’s question hung thick in the air. Nose to nose, his hot breath on my chin, his moist lips glistening the faint orange-yellow-blue reflection of the flashing neon, I lifted my eyes to his.

“Yes. I meant every word.”

And like every perfect mid-afternoon masturbation fantasy I’d ever had, Jonah’s fingertips slid over my jaw, his thumbs grazing past my eyes, his hands curling behind my ears, and brought his mouth to mine.

When the first kiss is second nature, you know you’re in trouble.

When you’ve been dreaming and writing a kiss forever, there’s always a pretty good chance that it’s not going to live up to your expectations. In fact, you might almost surmise that it won’t so you won’t be let down. Well, how the fuck do you deal when it goes so much better than you had ever imagined? Then it’s all blown! When Jonah kissed me, I could feel my insides dissolving -- a smallpox-ian smooch.

Jonah’s best feature is his laugh. I ended the kiss almost reluctantly, just so he would smile and laugh, which he did, and my head started to spin. He rested his forehead against mine, and in typical female fashion, I said,

“You kiss really well.”

“Really?” he replied, “I always thought I was a bad kisser.”

I shook my head. “Nope. You kiss like me.”

As if to test the theory, he tipped his chin toward me and slipped his tongue into my mouth. Silenced, I could not say what I really wanted to say, and instead the words trickled out from the corner of my mouth in a vibration. The tree above us shook and the wet came down like a new storm.

Mona LaVigne is a former adult film star from Montreal, Canada.