I kissed you then, then once again
You said you would come and dance with me
Dance with me across the sea
And we can feel the motion of a thousand dreams

Doctor! Doctor! ~ Thompson Twins

💀💀💀


Friday - September 19th

The first time I kissed May, was one of the top three most shockingly profound moments of my entire life. It was the first worst kiss I have ever enjoyed. If only I knew then what I know now ...I would never do it that way again. Or maybe not? But of course, it had to happen the way it did, because some things are just meant to be the way they are. 

Friday afternoon and classes are all canceled after lunch in honor of the first official "Big Game" of the season against Lincoln Heights High. In my short stay in Hell, I have learned to my vast irritation that Hell High just loves their pep rallies to death. Or as May likes to keep calling them..."Peep" rallies. On average we have at least two of these idiotic pep rallies things a week. One on Friday afternoon to get all the flocking falcons nice and frothed up for Friday Night Lights. Then another one on Monday morning to celebrate our victory last Friday.  

I have also learned that there is a third secret rally called the Virgin Sacrifice every Saturday night after a loss. Where they sacrifice a cheerleader to appease the angry Gridiron Gods. Or if they win in overtime by a field goal, to be safe just in case? Because in San Fall football is Gods Game, and everyone just loves Gods Game to death. It's a thing.

So my next big perk of being a male escort? May does not do peep rallies, because they give her migraines. So with no more classes for the day, and April off praying to the Gods for victory. Or practicing her spirit splits with the rest of the coven for their big halftime peep show finale. So for all intents and purposes, May and I are pretty much free for the entire day, for our first almost all-day date.

We decide to take a day away from it all. Take our regularly scheduled lunch show on the road, to hist the Hillside Park behind the school. So long as I am escorting her, the Sleestak Queen has even given her tacit permission to go to the Park to get away from all the noise. While I like kicking it with May anyway, I have to admit, all in all, I think I am getting the way better end of the deal out of this whole male escort thing.  

So along with all the other undesirables, the Hillside park becomes our peep rally refuge. We wander up into the forested paths towards the overhand picnic bench shelter that has become our new cool after school spot. With all the time in the world to kill on our hands, we forgo eating and elect instead to wraith walk up through the sparse woods to listen to the windsongs.  Which of course when the first serious storm of the year begins to roll over the distant hills and down into the valley.  

When I spot the first wave of darkened clouds looming in the distance, they look angry and full of heavy rage. I have an uneasy feeling the fates of the day have turned against our picnic plans. The thunderstorm rolls down into the high hills above us, just looking for some sleepy little town to drown. The first few droplets are sporadic warnings to beware the coming fury of the storm rolling over us. When the first big drop hits my neck, then rolls freezing down my spine like a shiver. So I know that this storm is full of heavy water from way above.  

As the rain starts falling, May lets me guide her quickly back down the steep trail towards out spot. We reach cover under the corrugated roof of the shelter just before the storm unleashes its rage and wrath. May in her usual exuberance is enjoying the storm show immensely, laughing along with the distant rolling thunder. As the sky above us opens up, the storm starts a slow steady shower down upon us. She indulges herself, by reaching out into the showers to touch the rain repeatedly, then using the wet to spike up her pixie cut. I honestly don't think I have ever witnessed anyone so thoroughly enjoy a raging rainstorm as much as this girl.

"The thunder doesn't bother you?" I inquire inquisitively. 

"Oh, the distant rolling thunder thing? Not at all." She shakes her smile. "Now the sudden thunderclap overhead out of nowhere? Yeah, that scares the crap out of me. But not today." She laughs and reaches for more water, and her strange smile is a mystery to me.  

"Tell me about the raindrops." May finally intones.

"Only if you tell me all the sounds you hear," I reply in kind and we begin to play the new game.

A couple of yesterday's back, after school in the park, May taught me the game that she and April played as little children called "Light and Dark".  What Dark hears Light must find and describe, what Light sees Dark must locate the sound and describe. Obviously, May plays the Dark side of this game like an old expert.

So sitting on top of the bench out of the wet, I look out through the framed portal and out over the sloping park below. Then start describing everything I can to the other part of me. When the storm intensifies, from a slow steady shower to a heavy deluge, the game quickly becomes a futile exercise. Any efforts to describe the pouring water as anything other than a thundering waterfall of raging rain is long gone. Because this storm is one of those that just pours water from the high sky above. As if the storm gods themselves have been saving up all summer to ruin our one day away.  

As the torrential rains dump down all around us, there is no way I am taking May anywhere in this downpour. The trail down the way is already muddy and way too slick to try to walk. So we are riding this one out right where we are for the duration. Thoughts of being trapped up high on the mud-sliding hillside and having to rescue May, by heroically sliding down the trails surfer style with her on my back. While awesome in theory, that lacks a certain sense of an avoidable tragic ending.   

When I point this out to May, all I receive in return is her smirking retort. "Sounds pretty much like the definition of that death by misadventure thing you seem to speak so highly of." 

"Oh yeah, I'm thinking that noise has better luck next time written all over it." I sigh almost wistfully watching the storm clouds crash down waves of water on the town below. 

As the silence slips between us, May unexpectedly wraps both her arms around my dangling arm, and leans her head down into my shoulder. It's an odd moment for me to try to interpret this sudden intimacy on her part. We've touched many times before, while slow danced the wraith walk together through the park. Handing her something during lunch, or when she reaches out to steady herself to rise. We've touched a hundred times a hundred probably, but all those were "normal" touching touches, never intimately like this touch. Her wrapping both her arms around mine feels different now somehow ...like an invasion of my former fortress of zen solitude. 

"I like this moment." She sighs soulfully and closes her eyes.

"It's a good one to like." I cautiously agree.

"So there's something I've been meaning to ask you for a while." May nudges closer, and I can hear the hesitation in her voice. "So what's the deal with that thing you said ...about we can only being friends until Christmas?"

"Ah..." ...shit.

"I'm not trying to be pushy, even though I am totally being pushy." She smirks slyly. "But what did you mean by that, exactly?"

"Naw, it's cool." I shrug my captive shoulder and put the smile in my voice to explain the Insanistani, in all their mad glory. "The truth is, that I'll probably only be here until Christmas, and then it's back to the reality of my so-called life at home."

"Oh..."  She intones the sacred Om once more. The one that resonates through my mind, and makes me want to explain things to her. But its too hard to find the right lies to explain the Insanistani story. So I opt for a half-truth that maybe we can both learn to live with.

"My mother Donna Momma, emphasis on the Donna and a lot less on the Momma, is sorta seriously screwed up," I admit to her a truth. "So sometimes when the mood takes her, she likes to do some seriously stupid stuff. Then share those screw-ups with everyone she can."  I snort in the local custom. "Donna Momma is a very sharing person like that."

"So the nice judge down at the courthouse decided she needed a take a little vacay in between benders to get her head straight. In what we like to call, another stab at rehab. So in the current, she is just killing off some time in between her last drink and her next." When May doesn't seem to react to this, I push onward.

"So if Donna Momma can make it through her program intact, we're back to what passes for normal by New Year's Eve. At least that's the way it looks right now? But trust me when I tell you, no one is holding their breath for that to happen." I shake my head slowly so that she can feel the movement. 

"Cause Donna Momma has a long history of not going along with other people's programs." I decide on a truth we can both live with for the moment. "I like to think of her as a free spirit. Because she most defiantly loves her happy hour, with lots of free spirits down at the old neighborhood bar."

"Oh?" May sighs slowly parsing her way through that wreckage. "Okay, I think I get the Christmas friend thing now." 

"Sorry May, maybe I should have been clearer about my friendship shelf life? Not that I'm going to stop being your friend when I leave, but the whole leaving thing in general." I almost say we can still Skype, and talk'n'text on the phone, but somehow I don't think that will be enough in the current. 

"No, it's okay. I get it now." She sighs. "And I'm so sorry about your mother."

"That's cool of you to say, May. But no need for the sorries, cause with Donna Momma it just kind of is what it is." I shrug off the sympathy like I always have with everyone else that's tried to push it on me. "But for what it's worth she has her reasons. Not great reasons mind you, but they're hers and she seems to like them a lot."

"O'..."  That one sacred sound she intones, that somehow only she can make seem so profound.  

Ever so slowly one of her hands reaches up and feels down the old sweatshirt I am wearing. She clenches the loose material, winding it up slowly in her small fist. This slow touch sends another new shiver up my spine, that first alerts me to the pending physicality. Then her cold nose burrows into the side of my throat.

"It's okay...Dare?" I feel my name in her breath.

"Mmmm?" My voice is tight in my throat, through the sudden strident strangulation. 

"So I've been thinking through this whole, we can only be friends until Christmas thing? And it occurs to me what if... I..." She whispers her sorrowful susurrus sigh into the side of my neck where it scorches the skin.  "What if I want you not to be my friend anymore?"

"Ah huh?" I sit like a stone and wait for fate to intervene.

"What if I want you to not ...not be my friend?" Her breath is burning into my ear now. "Because I want to ruin what could be a beautiful friendship with my petty selfishness? Because I want to be selfish?" She sighs with her eyes. "Because I selfishly want this memory to keep for my own? Of you and me ...just ...like ...this ...to be something more than before?"

At that moment the storm gods choose to slow the rain enough that our sudden silence becomes a deafening roar in my ears. I know if I turn to answer this confusion, I am right into her face, nose to nose, breath to breath, lips to lips. But if I was to turn away? The rejection of her sudden affection is somehow a rejection of her as a girl. So I am trapped in-between moments, so I sit frozen not moving a muscle, and await the outcome of my fate.

"I am...wanton." She breathes into me.  

The moment I start to reply her lips are on mine, pushing into my breath. Time stops the moment my lips stick with hers, and I hold my breath under the weight of her sudden affection. Her face shifts slightly to the side and her longing tongue pushes past my lips into my mouth. I can feel the ridges on her tongue scraping against my teeth. As she desperately searches for something that isn't there anymore ...my soul. Her breath flows through my parted lips into my mouth, over my resistance and down into me, to seer me to the bone. I feel more vulnerable than I have ever felt, trapped, pressed down. And I am slowly blacking out...

Her longing tongue lolls back drawing me in, as she crashes her lips ever harder into mine, until our teeth actually clack together like lightning. Which causes her to rear back, her silver sparks slices my upper lip a sliver on the way past, as she pulls away from me.  

"Ouch?" She heaves huskily, her hand goes right to her lips in shock. Whether it was the electrical spark or my complete incompetence, or the shock and awe of the moment is readily apparent on her face. 

"I'm so sorry..."  I immediately start apologizing, because obviously I completely just screwed this moment up.  

"No, I'm sorry." She cuts me off quickly. "I mean, I'm not sorry for the kiss. I've never really kissed anyone before ...but I'm pretty sure that wasn't supposed to work that way?"

"Me neither." I lamely try to cover. "And don't be sorry, it's me...not you."

"Oh? I thought because..." May tilts her head back. "Wait, never? As in you never kissed anyone before either?"

"Naw not, never." I affirm my absolute ineptitude.

"Oh so...ohhhh?" She finally drones in the understanding that I am sofa king broken, that I can't take even the slightest of kindnesses without inflicting damage. 

"Okay, so that just happened." May shifts slightly away, but is still firmly clenching onto my sweatshirt. I want so badly to bolt away from the awkwardly uncomfortable intimacy that now feels forced, and way beyond my touching tolerance. 

"So you really weren't kidding about the whole never been with a girl thing at all, were you?" She frowns down at me.

"No," I affirm her judgment.

"Oh...kay." May intones slowly, having clearly reached a nexus. "So then we are going to do that again. But slowly this time?"

"Maybe we should just ..." I start to say something stupid.

"No, Darren." She cuts me off quickly before my stupidity kills the moment. "We have to do that again, but better. Because if we leave things like this? It's going to be 'a thing', and I need not to have this thing as our thing. Cause this may be my last chance for a first kiss ...and not whatever that was. So this time we go slower please, and no biting, only lips sticking stuff from here on out. And maybe later ...try some tongue stuff. Okay?"

"Maybe..." The unwanted hesitation in my voice must be like razors to her pride. I can feel the first of the shivers attach themselves to my spine. I know at this moment the true meaning of self-loathing. For now, I hate myself a lot more than I ever did before, and that in itself is an accomplishment of epic proportions.   

"Shhhh...just look at me Dare." She pushes her nightshades up into her electric hair. 

May opens her eyes wide into me, drawing me right into her eclipsing eyes. Her zooming eyes growing ever closer, until I fall into the abyss and sink into the depths of her darkness. My dark goddess breathes open her lips over mine ever so slightly, her whisper of a kiss runs along my bottom lip.

"I like you, Darren. I think from the very first time this summer, I felt an odd connection. A spooky strange scary connection to be sure. But even back on that day, I knew something about you ...and me ...and possibility?" She slowly drifts down into me and gently crashes her lips into mine. 

And that second kiss was like kissing lighting. 

For that crashing kiss was the one that melted her into me and changed everything. Her very breath seared through my mouth, pouring her light down my throat into my scarred soul.  Lightning licked through my veins ripping me asunder and awakened parts of my long-dead heart with a start. Down into a scarred soul that I did not know even existed until just that moment.

That One Kiss was the longest kisses of my life, seemingly to last into an eternity. The first worst kiss, then"That One Kiss"  ...and the next kiss that merged with the seventy-seven that followed. As time itself seemed to slip away and lose itself as she breathed herself into me, burning away so much of who I had become.

I can barely remember anything but flashes through those wanton hours in the rain after I began kissing Maybe back. I think at some point during the eternal kiss, May rolled herself around me and onto my lap, where her legs straddled around my waist. I can remember being amazed at how small and winsome light she felt against my chest. How her heart thrummed like a hummingbird up through the veins in her neck, as I tasted her skin.   

When after she had finally kissing herself out on my burning lips, May lowered her head down on my shoulder. Where she eventually did rest her weary head, and pushed herself into me for my warmth. She finally sighed, heaving deeply in my skin for what seemed forever. Her orison breath burning against the side of my neck began to wash away primal wounds, that had long hardened into lovely scars. 

The rains came in, and the rains went out, just like her breath as she rested against my chest. The hours slipped by as the storm finally slowed to a steady shower of manageable drops. I began to notice things about her that hadn't been there before ...or I just hadn't noticed. For one, her myriad of scars came into sharp focus. The small scar scrawled across the bridge of her delicate nose, and the perfect crescent moon waning scar just off the right side of her chin. And all the rest of the lovely cruciform scars that life has worked on her face, began to appear like stars in the night sky burning bright.

There is a fixed moment in time when someone becomes truly beautiful to you. The precise instant where someone transcends right in front of your eyes ...into your dreams and nightmares. That moment when you truly see someone and instead of just looking at them, and you get a glimpse at the totality of their beauty. And you are soundly smitten ...which oddly originates from the word smite, and basically means cracking someone's skull so hard it splits asunder.

The love-at-first-sight crowd will never have this moment, because they are fixated from the start. But for the rest of us, there is a precise moment in time in which you're struck by the fact that your opposite is no longer just merely cute or doable ...but transcends into truly beautiful. That transcendental transformation can happen in a myriad of moments in a multitude of ways, but the end result is almost always the same. You now exist with a pang of pain in your heart, where their absence from your presence is almost too much to bear.

It could be the moment they smiled at you, right before slipping in a puddle and going face-first into the pavement. Or when your hand snaked out to save them from that nasty fall, and they held on to you for dear life? Or something so simple as they remembered your birthday when everyone else forgot? Or they said something stupid sweet to you on a bad day like... "you are way too beautiful to be sad". Or you were surfing in a particularly bad storm, and just before you rammed headfirst into the rock that almost kills you? Then theirs is the last smiling face that flashes before your eyes. For me, it was That One Kiss in the rain that changed everything and made me change into who was to become after that day.

When I finally emerged back into the current against my will, my newfound reality began to take hold. I had a moment of absolute clarity so profound that it still haunts me to this day. That what May risked on me, in that first terrible kiss was no small thing ...it was everything. For she had seen in me what others could not, my dark shattered soul ...and risked all of herself in my chaos. 

What I had always accepted as an improbable impossibility for me. Someone I could trust completely with myself, was just one kiss away from a reality. So now I must trust in her completely, and allow her to rebuild me into her dark vision of what I could be. Instead of what I was, that broken boy that she had discovered that day in the rain. That in order for me to be deserving of her heart's gambit? I had to become something that I had never been able to be, not since I was a child before my father died. A completely unfamiliar state...called happy?    

Nothing that came after that day in the rain has ever compared to the raw power of that very first-second kiss in the rain. Not until I saw May in the moonlight ...but even by then, the damage was already done.