Reblog for Darkly Wood week ..First Kiss

My first kiss was pretty rubbish.  I was fairly young to be fair and it goes without saying inexperienced, but even so by any standard it was gank. In fairness I had practiced my kissing face and head tilt in the mirror many times in preparation for the moment … and I won’t admit to any more, but still…  ooof!

In my first book ‘Darkly Wood’ the main character Daisy, has to meet the challenge of her first kiss in the most extraordinary circumstances.   I can lean on life experience when writing about most things but when it came to first kiss – I couldn’t let Daisy suffer the let down that I had to endure.

But in my case, it’s not that she wasn’t a lovely girl and I’m quite confident that she has had better kisses since then too,( I certainly hope so for her sake ) but it was just not something you’d want to repeat.  What I do remember was a lot of sweating and anticipation.  When the moment finally came there was a lot of head movement and panic about where the nose went and then it sort of happened.

Now tip number one should have been keep it simple. It was after all, the first kiss and lips pursed or closed with just a little pressure might have been the way to go.  Na- ah… not this Gombeen!  She closed her eyes first, which gave me the chance to see what was going on with her mouth. Much to my horror it was open.  She looked like a paralysed goldfish.   Not having a shagging clue how to proceed, I copied the pose and our open mouths met.

I closed my eyes and our taught open mouths collided and … well they kind of just stayed in the one position for ages. Now don’t get me wrong, I was an innocent, as was the young lady in question so there were no tongues.  It was bizarre.  Neither of us knew what to do next, how long we should stay in that position or indeed how to disengage.

After a bit, panic began to set in and I tried to remember movie kisses in order to gain some inspiration.  It didn’t help.  This was unlike any movie kiss I had ever seen.  Eventually I decided to open my eyes, to see if I could get a sense of what she was doing.  When I did, I saw that she was staring at me – wide-eyed as though she had just seen a dead person.  It scared the living bejesus out of me and as luck would have it, the fright made me pull back away from her, thus ending what should have been a wonderfully sweet memory in a moment of terror.

I think that kiss haunted me for a long time, because I was afraid to kiss another girl for ages…But looking back over the many years that passed, I think in a way it actually did help me when I came to write about Daisy’s first kiss in Darkly Wood.  Certainly I’ve kissed and been kissed since those early days and I have learned the value of excitement and anticipation, as well as the importance of love and affection when it comes to kissing.

I wanted Daisy’s kiss to have all of those elements that I’ve learned to appreciate and I chose to save her from the pitfalls of my first kiss experience.  Instead I decided to endow her kiss with what I feel now when I kiss the woman I love.  There is nothing like a first kiss but you know… I much prefer my last one.  How about you?