After a few Jamaican Snow Globes, celebrating London Cocktail Week with my schoolfriends, we had reverted to giggling teenagers, swapping stories about our First Kisses, each anecdote told in minute hilarious detail.
Each one of us had lost our lip virginity with members of the same local boys’ school group we hung out with, age 14-17, in the park or at parent-free houses, with cigarettes and cheap cider we had acquired through older siblings or petty theft. Though we spent a good portion of our formative sexual years with these boys, we had since lost contact and had no excuse, like a school reunion, to ever see them again.
Thinking this a shame, considering the wealth of hysterical memories we shared, I was given the duty to track down Joe, my first kiss, and arrange ‘some sort of reunion’. It fell to me as Joe’s family and mine used to holiday together, but I hadn’t seen him in years and would still look like a knob getting in touch, out of the blue. But I was drunk, so I agreed.
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Facebook established that little Joe, who pinged my first bra strap and voluntarily ate rabbit poo from my garden to impress me, was ALL grown up – gorgeous and working for a money city finance company thing.
I bit the bullet and sent him this:
‘JOE! Long time buddy! What are you up to these days? We have both been in London for far too long not to have caught up! Free for a pint anytime soon? xx’ – casual, matey and not embarrassing should he not reply.
He replied later that afternoon with:
‘Mads! Great to hear from you! It’s been forever. Yeah I’m free Tuesday. Let’s grab a drink somewhere central? xx’ – enthusiastic! This was easier than I had expected.
When Tuesday arrived, I found myself getting oddly nervous and stressing about what to wear, not least because the girls were going to town on WhatsApp as if I was actually going to meet my very own Freddie Prinze Jr, rather than a semi-boyfriend with whom I never really graduated past boob-squeezing.
Neither Joe nor I were the most attractive of 14 year olds. I was obsessed with Terry Pratchett and wore a permanent frizz halo, while Joe bided time awaiting his growth spurt by picking his consta-wedgie. In short, we were both as unlikely to find anyone to kiss us unless we were the only age representatives of our respective genders in the same 50-mile radius.
So when that happened, on a family holiday in Portugal, I had my first ‘proper kiss’. We were sitting alone by the pool one evening playing endless games of ‘Would you Rather’ when Joe popped the question:
‘Would you rather kiss Mr Morris or me?’
Mr Morris being the greasy DT teacher with a comb-over and sweat patches, Joe had cleverly put the odds in his guaranteed favour. My stomach dropped into my socks and within a nanosecond his face was suctioning my own. My entire body coursed with adrenaline yet was completely paralysed.
Joe left no cavity of my mouth unexplored. He rapidly alternated lip and tongue movements, while trying to unclasp my bra with one clammy hand (the ultimate test of manhood, back in the day). His finishing touch was to lick from one shoulder, across my collar bone, to the other, in one fell swoop. Then he smiled and told me that my saliva-drenched face, looked like a tomato.
Sixteen years later, standing outside the pub, I was wondering if he still did that tongue move, when he came round the corner and stunned me slightly with a huge, very un-British hug. He bought the drinks and manouevred the conversation fluidly, clear of awkward silences, eventually leading me to tell him the actual reason behind my getting in touch. He found this hilarious.
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‘That’s a brilliant idea. A reunion for the Park crew who macked off in the bushes near the see-saw. We should make posters.’
We reminisced about our ‘crew’, games of spin the bottle, ‘seven minutes in heaven’ and antics in the local Odeon to the closing credits of Armageddon. How all the girls wore vanilla Impulse and boys sported cement-gelled curtains. We remembered the times when contracting glandular fever meant you were winning at the opposite sex. And then he actually brought it up:
‘And, of course, there was that time in Portugal...’
‘Yes, in fact, I was just remembering that little tongue swoop thing you did. Where did you learn that?’
He admitted that his cousin had given him the long-lick tip and confirmed he’d since abandoned the technique. I confessed I had lip-synced to Sixpence None the Richer’s Kiss Me seven times in the mirror before bed that night.
At the end of the night we parted ways in high spirits, back to the homes of our respective partners, with plans to make our little reunion happen before Christmas. It may happen, it may not, but I was glad to have seen Joe and I was glad he remembered our poolside pull – that the memory was a shared one.
I walked to the tube nostalgic for the time when an arm graze gave you whole-body tingles and full sex was an awe-inspiring, somewhat surreal concept. I guess we can’t replicate that same excitement of the unknown, but we can remember it.
I think we all treasure our very first kiss, in all its awkward glory, not only because it was a moment of sexual awakening, but because it happened before our lives started to get complicated. A time when everything was straightforward and easy – which everyone needs to remind themselves of now and again.
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Follow Madeleine on Twitter @MissMadeleineK
Picture: Carl Iwasaki
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.