Thesis Writing 7

People’s faces look different when you kiss them – softer, maybe.  I like kissing.  I like the feeling of the warm, stubbled skin of the back of man’s neck against the palm of my hand.  I like how hands can think for themselves.  I like men who have slept with a lot of women because they’ve learned how to use their hands. They’ve lost their timidity.  Or maybe they never had much in the first place and that’s how they came to sleep with so many women.  I like the sides of men.  I like the natural way my hands slip under a man’s shirt when we’re kissing, the way they rest on the smooth skin that covers thick muscle that could take a punch – or a woman. 

I was sitting on a barstool, staring into my gin and tonic that I didn’t really feel like drinking, ignoring the man sitting to my right who kept trying to talk to me.  He reeked of strong, smoky scotch and the smell of him was making me sick.  Suddenly I felt lips on mine.  I felt my head clasped by the strong grip of wide hands.  The kiss was so smooth, it had slipped into my mouth before I knew what was happening and before I could decide if I liked it.  I opened my eyes and saw the face of the Irish bartender, though at first I didn’t recognize him.  He had been nothing special to look at when I had ordered my drink thirty minutes earlier.  Now he was soft and somewhat lovely – or his kiss was.  Or maybe I had softened. 

“I’m saving you,” he said to me in a thick Irish accent, still holding my head between his hands, nodding discreetly towards the eager man on my right.  The bartender kissed me again.  I wanted to tell him that I didn’t need his help.  I was good at being alone and I was certainly sober enough to know how to extricate myself from a drunk guy at a bar who was hitting on me.  I liked to consider myself wise to most of the moves and lines men use to pick up women.  I also liked to consider myself more skilled in the art of pick-up and seduction than most men.  I figured that, “I’m saving you,” was probably a pretty handy line for an Irish bartender to through out time and again to catch a sad, single woman at his bar, but I felt that because I was aware of this, it didn’t count if I played along and allowed myself to be caught.  And it was the first kiss I’d had since the hard breakup with the man I had loved.  I gave myself up to it, letting my brain turn to viscous matter as all of me slid into the kiss and the low lighting of the bar and the pleasant strangeness of it all.