The first time you kissed me,
you asked: “Is this what love’s supposed to taste like?”
I giggled and bit “yes” into your bottom lip,
even though I had no idea.
I was only fifteen,
trying to pass for twenty,
with a baby face that you couldn’t possibly
have been fooled by.
Still,
when I told you my real age,
you went quiet and stood in the corner for long enough
that I felt like I had grown into someone
you could undress without guilt.
“We can’t do this,” you said, your hands in my hair.
In reply, I left a purple bruise on your neck
in the shape of “I know.”
At school, my friends ask me if the best part about
loving you is knowing someone who can buy me alcohol.
I tell them that all of your kisses taste like wine,
so I have no need for it.
When I relay this story to you in the parking lot,
you laugh and let me take a gulp of you,
big enough that I’m drunk for the night.
No, the best part about loving you
is that you showed me parts of my body
that I didn’t even know existed.
The best part about loving you is that
you took me home to meet your mother,
even though she thought I was
an illegitimate child that you’d hid from her.
The best part about loving you is that
I never want to stop,
even though each time I feel my raw cheeks
after kissing your beard-covered mouth
on the playground,
I know I should.
Your 30th birthday fell on the same day as my 15th.
When I went shopping for your gift,
I stood in the men’s section
for hours after my mother dropped me off,
staring at the things you were supposed to want.
I saw no place for my baby fat amongst
pressed slacks and shirts.
The sales lady asked me if I was lost,
checked her calendar and said: father’s day is in three months, hun.
I wanted to scream that age was just a number,
that I was old enough to know better
but could not imagine knowing a love any better than you.
I wondered on which of my birthdays I would be told
I was now capable of understanding love.
If wondered if you would be able to find anything
close to it in the “young adult’s” section.
"You always looked good in red," I said,
as I straightened the tie I’d decided on.
But I wanted you to look good in me,
to not appear like a monster holding me down in bed.
I did not want my friends to think our love was “dirty”
or for teachers to study me because they had “heard the rumors.”
When I convinced myself that the amount I felt for you
was too much to be disputed,
I got sloppy and
forgot to delete your texts.
“I love you?”
“My tongue still tastes you?!”
“I can’t feel without you beside me??!”,
my mom screamed as I lay crying.
The last time I saw you,
you were tense in your seat,
separated from me our lawyers and
my mother’s protective arm.
“Confess your guilt”, your lawyer urged.
“No one will give you any sympathy.”
But on the stand you looked at me and said:
she was half my age,
but I have no regrets in making her half of me.
