What I did on my summer break (as I should have written it)

Today there's some sort of share-your-first-kiss-story-and-humiliate-yourself party going on with various friends and they have all been pleading with me to share. I have resisted so far but, ok I am feeling brave so.... my most awkward kissing moment of all time. ALL. TIME. (Not just MY all time, everyone in the world's all time.)

I was thirteen and it wasn't really my first kiss, but all the previous ones (all two of them) were super-brief pecks on the mouth that were fun but not exactly thrilling. And so, with mostly virgin lips, I entered the summer before year 9. I went to the local village summer fair thing with two friends. It was a yummy hot, summer day. We met up with some boys from another school who we had pretended to flirt with at Ionians discos. I'll call them Greg, Paul and Joe - because those were their names. We paired off, naturally, and wandered into the trees at the park nearby. I was with Greg, who, by the way, was really goodlooking.

My two friends were old pros at kissing, so things progressed quickly under their respective trees, but Greg and I had to warm up a little... mostly because I was terrified. We sat there talking about nothing for a long time and eventually the elephant under the tree - the fact that we weren't kissing - got too big to ignore.

"Why won't you kiss me?" he finally demanded.

I giggled and thought about killing myself. (No, you wouldn't think those two things can happen simultaneously, but it's because you don't have my multi-tasking skills.) I sucked it up and tried to be brave. "I WILL kiss you," I announced. We looked at each other for another minute or so. He was clearly getting agitated. Finally I leaned in and kissed his cheek, and he (of course) turned his head and caught me. So then our lips were touching, which HEY! Is kissing!

Unfortunately, being the inexperienced kisser that I was, I thought that was all that needed to happen (obviously, I hadn't watched enough TV). I continued to just kind of sit there motionless, my lips pressed tightly together and against his, as the minutes ticked by... and by... and by. I was getting bored, which should have been an indicator to me that things weren't really going right. If any passersby had wandered along during this 20-minutes-plus kiss, they'd have been hard-pressed to tell whether we were live bodies or just kissing sculptures.
FINALLY, after several loooooong kisses, it was over. I went home.The next day, I cheerfully announced that I'd had my first real kiss. And that it was amazing. And that I loved him.

Greg and I went out several times after that and even attempted to revisit the kissing a couple more times, but he eventually gave up (I give him props for sticking it out as long as he did). He ended things with the classic line,

"If you put money into a chocolate machine and no chocolate came out, would you keep putting money in?"

And we went our separate ways.