Draft Friday, September 3, 2021 5:23 PM

dinesh651

Lovers Drink.....


When girl and Eva kiss at midnight on New Year's Eve just to prove how absurd the Legend Of The Kiss Of Eternal Love is, they're in for a life changing experience.
girl. A famous sports enthusiast who takes thrill seeking to the limit. He's a sex lover who loves no-strings-attached relationships but not a player, and he's not willing to let any woman sway him from his badboy image. Until he meets Eva West, a complete stranger, at a New Year's Eve masquerade party. When she tells him about the Legend Of The Kiss Of Eternal Love which is suppose to make two complete strangers who kiss at midnight on New Year's day to love each other forever, he decides to kiss her to prove how absurd the legend is.


I was 21, he was 35. That's the first thing. He was divorced—a long-ago starter marriage—and he'd slept with a beautiful married woman I vaguely knew, the wife in one of those perfect-seeming families. I was speechless when, in a moment of juicy indiscretion, he confided this. Just one of those things where we were talking, I was asking him questions, and he confessed.


And yet, he—I'll call him 'N.'—wanted me. How was that possible? He played sax and piano and basketball (all well), was lanky and broad shouldered, drove a pickup. Smoked the occasional cigarette that—I'm sorry, but—made his mouth taste grown-up and a little dirty in a way I loved, the opposite of the spearmint gum/Diet Coke thing that had defined my past few college years. I'd known him forever; he was an acquaintance since childhood—we'd once played tennis on opposite doubles teams, and there was something in the way he'd watched me over the net (tan and strong in my little white skirt, I see now) that was not quite…appropriate. It was in his eyes—piercing blue, slitty, aimed directly at mine. I told myself I was hallucinating.


A few years later, he called me at work. He was in town; did I want to grab a drink? I thought, Whoa. I said, 'Sure, why not?' I was flattered and nervous.


We had a beer, and I saw that he was nervous too, which shocked me, then amused me, then calmed me. Might I, somehow, have the upper hand here? We walked to my apartment. I was living with 'S.,' my college flame, a sweet, gentle boy with strong arms and velvety skin. S. and I laughed and read books and watched Thirtysomething and ate scrambled eggs and killed mice, but I cried with him sometimes because I didn't want to hurt him. I was young, I had a dream job in my dream city, and I had miles to go before I thought about tying myself to anyone, anything.


S. was at work. N. and I sat on the couch, and he pulled out a joint. We looked at each other, and someone touched someone's hand, and a current shot back and forth, and N. asked if he could kiss me. He asked! I didn't even know what to say. I probably just laughed and leaned in, and he took it from there. It was hot, I don't mind saying. He could kiss. And I said, 'Let's get out of here.'


We went to his truck, the light of day fading fast, the glittery blue of a New York evening moving in to wrap us in its cool mystery. He drove around awhile, then parked somewhere quiet. There was low, throaty music, Etta or Ella, and I wore a short skirt, and his hands were experienced and smooth, the hands of a piano player, a basketball player, a divorcé, a '60s rebel, a guy who'd fucked another man's beautiful wife. A man 14 years older. The fogged windows closed us in, and though we didn't do much more than kiss, I grew up in that car that evening. And that was the beginning.


What I learned in our months together was this: I had power. The power of youth, of independence, of being a woman at the beginning of something with nowhere to go but up. Of being with a guy who wanted me more than I wanted him. I'd been the one in charge in relationships before, but this was different. He called me a starlet, and so I became one: Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, minus the cigarette holder. In turn, he took me places, introduced me to things: Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons;' collegiate Gothic architecture; how to get my own pleasure in a way I hadn't before, pleasure beyond just the rush of pleasing him. I didn't love him (though I liked him); I didn't love his body (though I loved parts of it); I was a little embarrassed, frankly, with the too-casual way he dressed, his lack of city cool. But he taught me that I was young (but not too young anymore) and desirable, and that these two things were a potent combination—a kind of currency that was mine to wield.

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