Now he met Kristin’s eyes for a second as she leaned against the closet door like someone about to be shot, but then he glanced down at his shoes. It wasn’t her eyes, as sad as they were, that caused him to look away. It was her face: it was so drained of color, it was as if she had the flu. It was the tears he saw running down her cheeks. It was the fact that she didn’t want him to touch her. He noticed that he was still wearing his black wingtips; he couldn’t recall the last time he had been wearing his wingtips on a Saturday morning. Probably never.
He had kissed the girl. Of course he had. He had kissed her a couple of times, and he suspected that if the night hadn’t ended so disastrously badly, he might never have forgotten their first kiss. She had taken him to the den, away from the party because he was the best man and was going to get something special—something different from the lap dance he had received on the living room couch—and she had sat him down in the easy chair there. She had switched off the light, but the door was open and he could see the side of her face in the light from the hallway. They could still hear the music from the living room. She stepped from her thong so she was naked and climbed into his lap. He was aware—blissfully, if he was honest with himself, blissfully—of the way she was rubbing herself against him, which made the moment seem not merely consensual, but mutual; it was as if she wanted him, too. But he was focused as well on the half smile on her face when he looked up at her, and the way her lids had grown a little heavy with pleasure. Or, perhaps, with feigned pleasure. Still, it sure as hell seemed like she was in the zone with him. And then she locked those dark eyes on his and kept bringing her mouth within a millimeter of his, bobbing her lips beside his and shielding them from the whole world, it seemed, with her hair. She was brushing her cheek against him over and over, as if she were a cat marking him with the side of her face. He could feel her breath on him (peppermint), and it was warm. He never planned to kiss her. He certainly wouldn’t have initiated a kiss. After all, he was married. Happily married. He had a beautiful wife. But she seemed as into it as he was when she brought her face down to him again, so wanton and desirous; he could feel her yearning, too. No stripper was this good an actress, he told himself. And so this time when she was teasing him with her half-open mouth, he arched his back and met her. Their lips touched and it was…electric. He felt her tongue against his; he felt her fingers on the sides of his face and her breasts against his collarbone.
“You’re shaking,” she’d whispered into his ear a moment later.
“It’s fine,” he had whispered back.
They would kiss again before going upstairs, and they would kiss again on the stairs themselves. Each kiss had left him breathless, the air abruptly gone from his lungs. Had his first kiss with Kristin been like this? Of course it had. It had. It had just been such a long time ago.
But then again, had it really been that…hot? Their first kiss had been a few yards from the corner of Fourteenth and Fifth, after he had taken her to dinner for the second time, the kiss just beyond the sight of the doorman for her building. She had not invited him upstairs, both because it was only their second date and because she was one of three young schoolteachers in a two-bedroom sublet. She shared a bedroom with one of the other women. The kiss had been clumsy and brief; neither had been sure when he bent to kiss her on the lips whether their mouths should be open or closed. In the end, the kiss had been a little of both, an awkward hybrid. He remembered walking to the subway a little afraid that she would think he was a bad kisser. They’d never talked about that kiss or laughed about it; he wished, in hindsight, that at some point they had. But then again, maybe not. A few nights later he took her to a Radiohead concert, and they had kissed there. And that kiss had been rock concert hot. They were on their feet amid the noise and the bass, and their kissing grew into the most beautiful, wrenching torment imaginable, and suddenly she was grinding against the thigh of his blue jeans and his hands were under her shirt. Even now whenever either of them pulled some Radiohead vinyl off the shelf, it was a prelude to sex—an aural aphrodisiac, the strawberries of sound.
He took a deep breath and looked up from his shoes at his wife, and he lied. “We kissed once,” he said, “sort of. Before I knew what was happening she had kissed me. I pushed her away. It felt wrong and she smelled of cigarettes. It was all too…too intimate. I was a little disgusted.”
She seemed to think about this, and slowly her body hunched over, her arms now wrapped around her chest—not in defiance, but as if she were ensconced in a straitjacket. She was still crying.
“That’s the truth?” she asked.
“That’s the truth. Absolutely.”
She wiped her eyes, and he went to her. He tried again to wrap an arm around her shoulders, and this time she let him. Her body relaxed into his. He noted that she was wearing some pretty sultry pantyhose, and his mind reeled at the idea that he could even think about having sex with her right now.