She traded it all for a silver kiss.
She’d tried to resist, but in the end she just couldn’t.
Jimmy was 12, a big 6th grader. Jimmy got kisses every day, and she’d never had one at all. He’d seen her looking at him for weeks.
Finally, he’d approached her after school, startling her by jumping out from behind a weeping willow as she walked home along the river.
“I’ll give you a kiss if you take off your clothes,” he smiled.
She hesitated. Mama would never allow it, she’d be so mad. But she wanted that kiss more than anything.
Finally, after thinking about it for a full 5 minutes, she slipped out of her worn shoes and torn socks, shimmied out of her hand-me-down dress and tossed them at Jimmy’s feet. Standing there in her slip, she extended her hand and waited for her kiss.
“All of it,” he stated, as he looked her up and down.
“I can’t,” she cried, “Why isn’t this good enough?”
“All of it,” he repeated, “or no kiss.”
Reluctantly, she pulled the slip over her head and tossed it at Jimmy’s feet too.
“All of it.”
Oh no. She’d come so close, she just couldn’t let the kiss go now. She was practically naked anyway, and she could just taste that sweet kiss. Her panties joined the pile. She stood by the river, feeling as vulnerable as she was naked.
Jimmy laughed as he scooped up her clothes and turned to walk away.
“Hey, what about my kiss?!!” She yelled frantically. “A deal’s a deal!”
“Oh yeah, here you go Fido!” he mocked, tossing a handful of Hershey’s kisses to the ground.
No longer aware of her nakedness, she scrambled towards the kisses and gathered them from the ground.
Six whole kisses.
She sat down on a smooth boulder, peeled the foil wrapper off of one and popped it into her mouth. The kiss felt huge in her mouth, and she nearly passed out from the sweet nirvana, the rich chocolatey taste permeating her every fiber. Saliva welled up and leaked out. She wiped it off, smearing milk chocolate across her face. The next one, she savored, taking teeny tiny bites such that most of the chocolate ended up on her fingers. Licking it off, she decided to eat the others the first way.
Oh yeah, Mama was going to be mad. They didn’t have much money, certainly not enough to replace her clothes.
But she no longer cared.
Her first kisses were so sweet, and nothing could take that away.
___
I’m hanging out with my favorite fiction and poetry peeps. This week, we had to refer to the photo in some way and start with “She traded it all for a silver kiss.” Come join us at the yeah write speakeasy!
