Maybe it’s the liquor or the moonlight or the aroma of the breath mint she nervously swallowed in the taxi, but Ben can’t stop thinking about kissing Penny. It’s a constant loop of kiss her, kiss her that seems to drown out everything else, only subsiding when he thinks about briefcases or taxes or the color beige or similarly uninteresting things.
But then Penny brushes a hair out of her eyes, and he starts thinking about kissing her all over again.
“So, uh –“
“Uh?”
“Uh huh.”
Penny laughs, stops, and bites her lip. Her eyes – ever so slightly – flick down to his lips, so fast that he thinks he probably imagined it. No one wants to kiss Ben. Ben wouldn’t even want to kiss Ben, even if Ben was gay.
He tries again. “So –“ but this time he can’t even get to the uh, because Penny is kissing him and ohmygod Penny is kissing him and, god, she kisses like it’s the first time and the last time all at once. Ben lets his fingers find her waist, her elbow, the curve of her ear, body parts that shouldn’t be sexy but actually are. Their lips are moving in perfect time – ‘like synchronized swimmers,’ he thinks, lamely, and immediately tries not to cringe – and she has her hands interlaced in his hair like maybe she wants them to become permanently tangled.
When they pull apart, finally, the first word out of Penny’s mouth is, “uh.”
YOU ARE READING
Osculation
Romance"As far as I can tell, there are two basic (kissing) rules: 1. Don't bite anything without permission. 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful, and should be used sparingly." In which Anna writes about a lot of people kissing.
