I took my hands out of my pocket, because now they were holding still. I reached one out in her direction, and she reached back and took hold of it. And we walked toward the bus stop that way.
A grown-up lady with a bag of groceries passed us on the sidewalk, coming toward us, and she smiled approvingly at our faces. And then at our linked hands. I took it to mean that we looked like a nice young couple. It made me think maybe we were, which opened up my thinking about the world quite a bit in that moment.
And then, of course, I got too honest.
“I’m glad you liked the movie,” I said, “because I was really worried about that.”
She stopped dead on the sidewalk, and her hand tugged at mine until I stopped, too.
“Why would you worry about a thing like that?” she asked.
And I thought, Oh great. I’ve gone and done it now. I let her look at the inside of something about me, and now it turns out it’s completely weird in there.
“I just wanted you to have a good time,” I said.
“That’s nice. But it’s not like you made the movie yourself or anything.”
“But I picked it out. I didn’t want you to think I had terrible taste in movies.”
“But you hadn’t seen it. If you’d seen it nine times and really wanted me to see it the tenth time with you, and I hated it, I might think you had bad taste in movies. Which isn’t the most terrible thing in the world, by the way. But you were just guessing. Anybody can guess wrong.”
“Hmm,” I said.
We started to walk again.
“I guess I worry too much,” I said.
“Well, at least you worry about nice things, like whether I’ll have a good time.”
Just for a minute I was filled with a great feeling. Like she wasn’t judging me and it really was okay to be myself around her. I think the only reason the feeling didn’t last longer is because we saw the bus coming. And we had to run.
I walked her up onto her front porch, and to her door. By then it was mostly dark out, but the porch light was on. It was glaring, and I found myself blinking because of it. Blinking too much.
“Well . . . ,” I said.
And she said, “Well . . . ,” in return.
She wasn’t going to let me off the hook on this. I was the one who had to find the perfect words to wrap this up.
“I sure had a nice time with you tonight,” I said.
“Me too,” she said.
She was standing close, and she had her face turned up toward mine in a way I could only think of as . . . well, I hated to think it was expectant, because then it would be on me to know what she was expecting. I’m not trying to suggest I had no idea at all. I wasn’t a total child, and I hadn’t just crawled out from under a rock. I knew what tended to happen at the end of dates. I just wasn’t sure enough that I was right about what she wanted.
It hit me that all through the date I’d let her make the first moves. She was the one who’d reached out and taken my hand. On the way out. On the bus. In the movie. Even on the way home, when I reached a hand out to her, I just reached it out. And waited.
There was just no getting around that for me. It was the only way I knew how to be. I had to be sure of what she wanted. I couldn’t be one of those boys who just took what he wanted from a girl. That was utterly foreign to me.
“I’d like to call you,” I said.
“You better.”
“And see you again.”
“I should hope so.”
“Well okay, then.”
“Well okay,” she said.
The moment was getting more awkward. It felt like she was driving me toward a kiss by steering the conversation down a dead-end street. But I still wasn’t sure enough.
To make matters worse, I had never kissed a girl before. And now that you know how much I worried about whether she’d like the film, you can imagine my horror over her possibly not liking the kiss.
“Well,” I said. “Good night.”
I turned to walk away.
Yes, I was really going to chicken out. It seemed the only way to get out of the situation and off her porch in one emotional piece.
“Hey!” she said.
I stopped. Turned back.
“Aren’t you even going to kiss me good night?”
So that took care of the first part of the equation. I was now sure of what she wanted.
I stepped in close, and she turned her face up in that expectant way. She had her eyes closed, so I closed mine. And I leaned in. And I just did it. Right or wrong, I had to try.
I pressed my lips lightly against hers and held them there. Maybe for the count of two.
Then I went to pull away.
But I didn’t get away.
She put her hand on the back of my head, and she kissed me. More deeply this time.
It wasn’t hard to know what to do, even though I was a total novice, because all I had to do was respond. Accept her lips with mine and do the same in return. I wondered how many boys she had kissed before. She seemed to know what she was doing.
Then I started liking the kissing. Really liking it, and not worrying about doing it wrong, because nothing that wonderful could be wrong. And then it was me kissing her again, but more firmly. Less hesitantly.
And then the
