The Coss

Their kiss was anything but cinematic. His mouth didn’t devour hers and she didn’t surrender. Their teeth clacked.

They were old enough to do better. Robert was almost 60 and Jill had just turned 57. Each had been married – Robert with Deborah till her death from cancer, and Jill twice.

Robert and Jill had considered each other, that way, ten years ago after Deborah died. Jill had been single for eight years when she and Robert were introduced. They had one date – lunch and a walk on a fair Sunday – she thought him too fussy and he found her too loud. But they shared some interests and each of them needed to get out more. They became friends. They hiked, dined, even traveled together, but they never touched. He had a few other platonic friends and she enjoyed a couple of passable boyfriends, but each had spent a mostly solitary decade.

Something shifted in the last year. An esophageal spasm mimicked a heart attack in Robert and, once aware of his heart, he was besieged by it. It seemed it might be worth the embarrassment, to love.

On Jill the attack wasn’t medical as much as temporal. She had too little stamina for the dating scene any more. She wasn’t attracted to Robert, but she was starting to think their friendship could try it and fail and adjust to that failure easier than it could survive them declining to try.

So that evening, after a fine meal and a good opera, after Robert pulled his car to her curb and Jill leaned her head back, looking left to him, he tipped his chin right and made his mouth touch hers.

His lips were tight at first and it was when he loosened them that their teeth met. He smelled or tasted, so close Jill couldn’t distinguish, of the figs he ate for dessert. Her breath added some pesto from her entree, underscored by her after-dinner coffee. Then their exhalations mixed.

That should have made it better but they were still off. He pressed just when she wanted gentle and slow. Then he pulled away and came back softer, but she had adjusted backward for the expected pressure, they barely touched, and then both overcorrected and clacked again. Jill’s lower lip was mashed between their teeth.

She couldn’t help it; she winced away. He reacted as if he’d been slapped. Their shift from curious interest to dread was the only thing mutual about the moment.

“This is ridiculous,” she thought, not about the kissing but about her inability to correct it. She knew she should have been able to take his sparsely bearded cheeks in her palms and kiss him correctly, but she hesitated and lost the moment. What should have felt natural became awkward; she wanted Robert to take the lead.

But he had never been the initiator. Deborah had been his only lover, and from the beginning she indicated when they did what. This night, this awful kiss, was the first time Robert had moved forward on his own, and the feedback had not been positive. He still looked chilly. Wary. Self-protective.

“Shit,” he thought. “And I’m supposed to be so articulate.”

Just then Jill was thinking the same about herself.

The moment passed, and at least six more, till bridging it seemed impossible.