My First Kiss

“This was a nice night.” May sat in the passenger seat, feeling her body relax as the car’s headlights illuminated her neighborhood sign.

“Thanks for finally coming out with me,” Jake said. “I feel like I’ve asked you out every day for months. Every day since you started Jamison.”

“My mom thinks it’d be good for me to get out of the house.”

Jake stopped the car in front of her house and twisted toward her, smiling.

May looked into his dark eyes, her heart fluttering in her throat.

“You’re beautiful.” He grazed his hand down her arm.

A dirty room filled May’s mind, smoke and dust danced in beams of sunlight that peppered down from the tin roof above her. A figure moved in the shadows and she flinched away.

Beautiful girl, the shadowed man said.

May yanked her arm away from Jake.

“Whoa,” he said. “May, are you okay? I didn’t mean—”

“No.” Her chest heaved, and tears dripped from her cheeks. “I just…” She glanced at him. “I never—”

“Oh wait.” He smiled and leaned forward again. “May, is this your first?”

“What?”

“Your first kiss. It is, isn’t it? Don’t be nervous.” He reached out and cupped her cheek, pulling her to him.

Tin walls surrounded her mind. Dirt caked her bare backside. Buzzing filled her ears and she felt the flies and their tiny legs creep over her face and neck. Another prick stabbed her forearm and she floated, hovering above herself. A rough hand clenched her cheek, its fingers wrapping around the back of her head, pulling her back down.

May’s hand shot up, batting Jake’s hand from her face. Her other hand rose to wrap itself around the back of his head, twisting in his hair. She screeched, spittle spraying from her open mouth. She saw the man. The shadow-man with the needle.  She bashed his head into the steering wheel.  

“What the fuck?”

May flinched back, the shack and man dissolving. Jake’s forehead dripped as he stared at her, his mouth agape.  

May spun around to the door, opened it, and flung herself from the car, racing to her house.

“May, stop!”

She did.

“What the fuck was that?”

She turned to Jake, who stood beside his car, his arms stretched wide.

A light switched on from her house, casting the lawn in yellow light.

“Baby, are you okay?”

Her mother’s voice bolstered her courage and she stepped toward Jake.  

“Not my first kiss,” she said watching his face. “I was taken when I was seven.”

May heard her mother step into the yard and turned. “Mom, stop. I can do this. He deserves to know.”

She turned to the bleeding boy in the street.

“My first kiss was in a tin shack, attached to a dozen other shacks, where I was kept drugged and…until the military raid.”  

A sob resounded from behind her but May watched Jake who’d collapsed against his car.

“I’ve had hundreds of kisses,” she whispered.  

 

By L.L. Asher

From: United States