“Go ahead, kiss her,” says Joe, my college roommate, pointing to the shy, small, cute girl sitting between us. For months, he has told me about his girlfriend, Molly Muller, from Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and she has come to our college for the weekend.
“Let me get this straight. You want me to kiss your girlfriend. Your steady girlfriend since high school. Really, Joe?”
“Yeah, she kisses kind of weird. I want you to kiss her and tell me if you think her kisses are strange.”
I shake my head. “Are you sure about this, Joe? I mean, you’re a really good friend, and it would be very difficult living together if this upsets you.”
“No, seriously. Kiss her and tell me if her kisses are…” He shrugs. “Different.”
I turn to Molly and ask, “Are you okay with this?”
The look in her eyes gives me the answer before she smiles and says, “Yes.”
I lean in and kiss her, thinking that it will be a friendly kiss on the lips, no passion. After all, Joe is sitting right next to us. But Molly surprises me. She pushes her soft, velvet–like, raspberry sorbet tongue into my mouth. There is desire beneath the demure exterior of Molly Muller. It’s as if she’s a superhero, a mild–mannered college student, until the situation demands she use her superpower. There is nothing weird about this kiss, except maybe that I am having a very exciting kiss with my roommate’s girlfriend right in front of him. Our eyes are open, and she doesn’t blink. She looks right into me, and her gaze says, I WANT MORE THAN POTTSVILLE!
“Okay, okay, that’s enough,” he says as I feel his hand pull my shoulder..
“Well? Does she kiss weird or what?”
My first reaction is to say that her kiss is really hot. But I’m no fool. “I don’t know. I think I need another one to be really sure.”
I lean towards Molly who moves in to me her mouth slightly open, tongue ready to strike again.
I feel Joe’s hand hard on my shoulder. “No, that’s all right. Tell me what you think.”
“I think you’re a lucky guy,” I say, looking at Molly. “I think she’s an excellent kisser.”
She smiles at me and gives me a look that says I’ve been dating this guy for two years, and I think I’m ready for something different, and that is definitely you.
But he’s my friend and my roommate, and I’ll be living with him for the rest of the year. Besides, how would I get to Pottsville? I don’t have a car. So, we eat pizza, drink Coke, and talk until it’s time for Joe to walk Molly back to where she’s staying. Joe and I don’t room together again the following year, and we lose contact. I never see Molly again.
Molly remains the ideal girl, forever 19, sandy wavy hair, golden complexion, her body untouched by the ravages of gravity. We never have an argument, an unkind word, a betrayal, or a slammed door.
Molly is probably a grandmother now who sees her grandchildren at Thanksgiving and Christmas, who bakes cookies, who sends her grandchildren cards on their birthdays, whose house has that particular smell that they don’t seem to have the words to describe, but they know it smells like grandma’s house. What they don’t know is that she once kissed a boy and made him wonder, What if?