Scratch on the Moon, Like a Familiar Smile
Chloe kissed with her nose. It's the clearest memory she had from their first kiss.
When Beca was young and before she had ever kissed anyone, she imagined the act of kissing to be one in which she would never willingly partake. Faces squished, lips smashed, eyes squeezed shut. How could that be enjoyable? She would wallow in total confusion while watching a makeout scene in a movie, thinking I never want to kiss anyone if it looks like that.
At five years old, Beca had a friend named Nick who constantly tried kissing her cheek. She told him no, that she didn't want his lips near her face. He was persistent though and would not quit until he kissed her. He then moved on to attempts at kissing her on the lips and that's when Beca told her mom what was going on.
"If you really don't like it, stay away from him, sweetie."
And so Beca strayed, feeling weird that she had to sit next to him during circle time since their last names both began with M.
At seven, she had a friend named Johnny who asked her to be his Valentine. He offered her a box of sweet tarts and a tweety bird card. Johnny never tried to kiss her. Beca was glad.
At thirteen was when Beca had her "real first kiss." There was this boy named Alex who was 'really cute'. Every girl she knew thought so, Beca figured he must have been attractive. They sat next to one another in English class and never grew past acquaintances. If Beca looks back upon the kiss she cannot understand how it happened.
She would prefer to scratch those memories. Beca may as well have never kissed anyone besides Chloe.
Their first kiss was in Beca's apartment. Sitting next to one another at the table, having just finished up a pizza. They were facing each other, legs brushing, Chloe's hand going from Beca's thighs to her own, a paradigm beginning. It's not wonderous or groundbreaking and there's no hint of impending fireworks. It was fast and chaste and too forceful almost as if they were two teenage girls wanting to practice kissing.
It takes weeks to kiss again, but it feels right and real and decidedly there was no plan to stop.
It was mid-May. The allergy season was in full swing. Sneezes and sniffles filled the air.
Every Spring, Beca suffered from the absolute worst allergies. She was cursed with weak sinuses, narrow navel passages which seemed to hate her about ten percent more every year, and an absolute penchant for forgetting to start taking her physician prescribed allergy pills the first of February, rather than the first of May.
Supposedly, taking allergy pills months before allergy season lessens one's chances of getting hit hard once Spring rolls around. Beca had never tried it, so she was in no place to knock it (she totally rejected the notion though, and for no real reason other than she didn't care to admit she forgot another year in a row).
It was mid-May and Beca was unable to function because there was too much pollen floating around. She was confined to her bedroom, crumpled tissues scattered around her bed, under her pillows, probably floating around in her t-shirt as well as piled up on her nightstand. She had taken the day off work because she could barely open her eyes, the pressure above her eyebrows so nauseatingly intense.
All she could do was take the medicine and wait for it to kick in…
...And use the speak and text feature on her phone so she could ask her lovely girlfriend for some food, preferably a bowl of ramen from the corner store, if that's not too much to ask, please.
When Chloe arrived, food in hand and a new box of tissues under her arm, Beca pried her eyes open though her head was pounding. She managed an "I love you" when Chloe offered a kiss, noses squished, lips chapped.
They cuddled close and dozed off and watched a movie or two, ate bowls of pork ramen for dinner, cherry popsicles for dessert, and kissed, and kissed, and kissed.
One in the morning never felt like a positive until Chloe was curled under the covers of Beca's queen-sized bed, arms tangled around the other woman.
Beca simply couldn't picture one in the morning in a negative light anymore, not when she had experienced so many euphoric an hour past midnights.
And even though her eyes had begun to hurt from the sinus pressure, closing them and possibly falling asleep and missing out on feeling the heat of Chloe's body, of Chloe curling into her over and over again, felt like the wrong thing to do.
It could have been her allergy medicine induced haze that sent her into thinking about sex. She didn't feel aroused at all, she didn't feel anything actually, seeing as it felt like half of her body was numb and asleep.
Alone in her apartment, after weeks of not feeling well off and on, unsure if Chloe was able to come over that night and feeling down about it, she thought about when she and Chloe had sex for the first time and how they said they wouldn't and that they would wait because waiting sounded right. It didn't feel right, but it sounded like what two responsible young adults should practice.
The morning after they first had sex, Beca couldn't get the sound of Chloe out of her mind. The minute she woke up, with Chloe curled beside her, light threatening the sleep in her eyes, the noises Chloe had made looped. She shuddered so harshly, Beca can't decide if that's simply the way Chloe sounded when she came or if Beca was doing something utterly right. She didn't want to flatter herself.
It had taken a while (and even still, she had issues with feeling predatory) to feel comfortable sexualizing Chloe. At first, she barely could tell Chloe she thought she looked hot without white-hot guilt washing over her. It felt gross, dirty, to say that. Chloe was a person who was more than for Beca to look at. It was hard to genuinely understand that Chloe wanted Beca to see her, to stare at her, and think she's hot, or that Chloe liked to know that Beca desired her, wanted to fuck her, thought about her at night when she couldn't sleep.
When she thought about Chloe, she felt calm. There was this ease that came with loving her. Love had felt foreign, something not for her, before Chloe. With time, Beca understood that she was loved, that she could love and be loved, and that Chloe's love, above all, was healing.