If you live to be a hundred, you will never believe me. Not that you will live to be a hundred – you smoke, and yours is the body type most likely to suffer heart attacks, though I pray to the God you don’t believe in to protect you from all anxiety – but however long you live, you will never believe me. And I know that.
But again I will tell you, almost as proudly as I did that day in your office:
The first time you kissed me, I was not scared.
Sometimes I wonder whether you can remember it, our first kiss – my first kiss, the one you felt guilty for – and, if you can remember, whether you ever do. Do you? I skipped into your office, happy just to talk to you, happy to give you hugs, wishing that I’d ever been kissed before so I could work up the guts to kiss you though I was content enough for now just to be yours.
To kiss you! I wanted it so badly. But it never occurred to me, as we stood there with my forehead bumping your glasses as we bent our heads together, that I was about to. We’d stood that way so many times since our second date. At first it had sent thrills along my spine, he’s going to kiss me! But then you didn’t; we just hugged, or you kissed my forehead (which was almost exhilarating enough), and so I stopped expecting anything. That day in your office, I did not think, He’s going to kiss me!
I only thought, I wish I had the guts to kiss him.
But that day, in your office, the last place on earth it should’ve happened, you took my face in your hands and kissed my lips.
Understand that I’m not reprimanding you. You reprimanded yourself enough, I know: I wish it hadn’t been here, you told me as we texted about it that afternoon, but I just couldn’t wait anymore.
And to me, it deserves no reproach. Had we been somewhere more romantic, less forbidden, I might’ve expected it – and in all honesty, it was the nonexpectance that saved me from anxiety. In the moment you first kissed me, I was too surprised to be nervous. And when you kissed me again, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to kiss you back.
Then, you must remember, I told you, in a voice filled with the pride of a five-year-old rather than a teenager, I wasn’t even scared!
Liar, you said, and pulled me in to kiss me again.
Realistically I knew, even then, that it wasn’t going to last. Keeping our secret put a strain on both of us, the thought always present at the back of our minds: If anyone finds out, we could get fired. And while we said the age difference didn’t bother us, it is the reason you felt guilty for having stolen my first kiss. The reason I would never meet anyone on your end. I have never believed they even knew about me: The eighteen-year-old girl is merely the victim, the helpless hopeless romantic hanging on the words of an older man; the man in his thirties is a cradle-robber at best, at worst a creep.
But I overlooked it, then. Now, when we have both, I think, moved on, when we have separated – left work for reasons that, in the end, had nothing to do with a forbidden romance – it’s easier to look back on things and accept them for what they were. What they are. Now, when I think of you and wonder where you are, I only hope I sometimes made you as happy as you made me.
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