-{The following is an extrapolation of a story mentioned on an exchange with Phi. The story takes place fourteen or fifteen years ago. Good lord, I’m old. When did that happen?}-

My first kiss was not in a particularly ideal situation. First, she was drunk. Not just drunk, she was thrashed. The girl I really loved* at the time was in the next room, sleeping on the floor by the couch wherein laid the guy that she thought that she loved and whose baby she thought that she might be carrying. The first girl I ever kissed had to kiss me something like fifteen times before I finally returned it.

Her name was Delsie Brown, and I met her a few months before. Until I met her I was unaware that she existed. Her sister Velva lived on the other side of town. We had a common friend in a guy named Matt Jones, a would-be hippie who was rapidly introducing me to a world with which I was utterly unfamiliar. I didn’t know that Delsie existed.

Things with Velva were an immediate bust. Her acerbic nature didn’t come with an ironic or cynical smile like I had hoped but rather with a bothered and grumpy demeanor that I found extremely off-putting. Delsie was very smiley and pleasant, though. That was most of what I took away from that initial meeting.

I still became good friends with Velva and through her kept in touch with Delsie, but on the whole didn’t think much about her until I heard from the winds that she might be interested in me. I was flattered but at that point still crazy about Tracey. She and I talked about it and she understood.

Tracey kept slipping further and further from my grasp and Delsie watched on. I wasn’t sure if she was watching on sympathetically or as a predator waiting to pounce. At a party she could see how distant Tracey and I had become and with the help of large amounts of vodka, she finally moved in.

She was fiercely flirtatious. It startled by already unstable mind. Finally, there came a point where I’d had enough. I’d had it with Tracey and the ones that came before her and everyone that was keeping me on the sidelines. Here was someone that wanted me. Someone nice and cute and pleasant. Someone that I would surely fall in love with once I could expel Tracey from my mind. So I kissed her back. My friend Charlie and his then-girlfriend’s eyes whopped open. They were the only audience we had.

The alcohol got the better of Delsie and she started becoming very tired. Some friends helped her to bed (the party was at her house). She kept calling out to me to “warm her up” because she was cold. It got embarassing after a while, but by that point she was far too plastered for me to do anything with her. The alcohol that smoothed off the edges earlier had worked its way through her entire system, sinking her.

We weren’t in a relationship. I never pretended otherwise. She gently nudged for one, but for the most part was willing to leave well enough alone. Things seemed to go better that way. I kept waiting to start liking her, but it never really happened. She was waiting, too, but unlike me I think that she was sure that it was coming. There was no reason for it not to.

We finally reached the point where we had done everything that we could do without actually having sex**. If the relationship were to progress, either we’d need to have sex or we’d actually need to declare that it was, in fact, a relationship. As you can imagine, I was reticent on the second point. But I was also reticent on the first.

Though she kept telling me to, I kept “forgetting” to buy some condoms. Part of me was embarassed at the prospect of going to a store and buying some, but a bigger part of me saw that as a safety hatch. Just like our not being in a relationship meant that I wasn’t obligated to stick by her, the fact that I kept not bringing protection meant that nothing permanent could happen. She was adament about that.

Then, unexpectedly, she caved. She said that she didn’t care about the condom. I was a virgin, after all, and she had without my knowledge started taking the pill in preparation for this moment with me.

Inside and outside of that room, I was in such a bad place at the time that I held nothing sacred and a big part of me wanted to lose my virginity in such a depraved manner as with a girl that I’d increasingly cared less about but who was falling more and more in love with me. It would have been all too fitting given everything. What was I waiting for. Love? What a damn joke.

I don’t know exactly what happened, but it was like a soft whisper in my ear simply said “No.” I don’t know what possessed me to listen to it, but I did.

I wish I could say that I put my clothes back on, left her room, and never did anything sensual with her again. Instead, there was a tailing off. There were only a couple more instances of physicality. We had nowhere to go. She was losing hope.

One time when we were together in a situation that wasn’t really compromising but it was obvious what we were doing, a friend of mine named Buck walked in on us. A little while later, he let slip how lucky he thought I was that Delsie and I had that kind of special relationship. I started getting the impression that it may not have been an entirely idle comment. I think my bringing it up with Delsie was the last straw for her. She knew that by that point I was trying to get rid of her.

When she and Buck got together, I thought that it was a happy ending for everyone but me, the one that didn’t really deserve a happy ending. Turned out that the hurt was only just beginning for Delsie, and I was left with something else to feel guilty about.

* - “Love” is such a relative concept, but there are four people over my life that I feel I can accurately say that I “loved”. She was the first.

** - At least that’s what I thought at the time. I’ve since learned different.