Kiss the girl

You wanna kiss the girl
You've gotta kiss the girl
Go on and kiss the girl

Kiss the Girl, The Little Mermaid

Sometimes a second seems like forever.

As you bent your head, eyes locked on mine, giving me time to step back or turn my face slightly to offer my cheek…

I could step back.
I could avert my face.
I could smile and shake my head no.

I did none of the above. I waited. Big-eyed, you teased me later, apprehensive but determined.

I could have turned my face and your lips would have pecked a platonic kiss of affection and we'd have gone back to our bantering and fencing with words. Perhaps. That wasn't an option, not any longer, was it?

So I waited.

As your face came closer I saw more clearly, for the first time at such close quarters or in such detail, that gash in your left eyebrow, a small scar where no hair grew– a childhood accident perhaps. Was your mother beside herself with protective fear when it happened, I wondered, in a flash of sympathy with the past that had nothing to do with the intensity of the moment.

I noticed that your lips are full, well defined. I liked the way how your upper lip looked chiselled and the lower one fleshy and succulent. I wondered how our mouths would fit together, my own lower lip is full and the upper lip a slim cupid's bow(very Clara Bow, you said later).

So I waited.

In that moment that seemed to take forever, as your face came closer, so many thoughts skittered through my mind. Then your mouth descended on mine.

Bimba, bimbi, bimboshti, I muttered as I searched reference books for botanical names later, much later. You stretched luxuriously, laced your fingers behind your head and offered, bimbaadhari.

"Not a valid word, I tell you," I grumbled, " Dondapandu, forsooth." And you laughed.

Cheers!