Kiss-off

Jessie Primeaux

How we came to be an item was we were poor.

The local mall held a ‘Valentines Day Kiss-off’. The couple who kissed the longest got a Hyundai or the cash equivalent. We were friends and flatmates. We ate a lot of toast and not much else. So we said what the hey?

*

A face from those days appeared at my door today after a flourish of knocking. Another of my old flatmates. She was dressed for work. Smart. Tidy. She’d woken me. I knocked over my ashtray as I got up to see who it was. Picking up the ashes, I thought as I trudged to the door, would be like replacing the vowel with an asterisk in a swear word.

Sitting there, bare-chested, faded Levis on, she told me about my ex, the kiss-off girl.

*

A DJ from the local radio station read out the rules. I looked at my friend, the person I was to kiss for God’s knows how long, mirroring her apprehension. There were to be ten-minute breaks every hour. Lips must be touching at all other times. The couple who lasted the longest would win.

There was a blast from a hooter and we pressed together.

Her lips were full and warm.

*

The unscrupulous harpy, sitting immaculately opposite me, said how my ex was on her OE. Having a great f*ckin’ time of it. She soon shifted the conversation to me. Her questions were thinly veiled — she was never that subtle. The reason she’d come round was she was worried. About me. Was I drinking? Was I not eating properly? Drugs? Depression? Was I in a relationship? Did I have a job?

*

After the first hour we prized our lips apart. It felt good to be able to breath out of our mouths, to not be stuck in someone’s face.

After the second hour, being able to breathe out of my mouth became less of a relief.

Each time we resumed kissing, after catching our breath, eating lamingtons and drinking coffee from the catering table and rechapsticking our lips, the kissing became more… more like kissing.

In the third break she told me how I was a surprisingly good kisser. I wasn’t sure how to take that.

*

I told my ever-so-concerned, ever-so-together former flatmate that I would be okay. I’d be fine, if only I could find the fifty dollar note I had here yesterday, amongst the syringes, empty tequila bottles, sky blue and blood red tablets, so that I can pay the whore who comes to tell me I’ll get over this… Then she sucks me off, I tell her.

She throws this morning’s Dominion Post at my chest and walks out.

*

With each break less couples resumed for another hour. With every hour our kissing escalated. Pressing mouths with token movement became a friendly conversation of lips became kissing the way you kiss on second dates became an embrace where the lips were just another body part. At one point we kissed like in the movies, the type of kissing that’s overblown to illustrate the underlying passion of a relationship, but where the two lovers are just actors.

During each break, though, we became more and more coy. We didn’t speak. I tried but couldn’t. I was afraid what I was feeling was smoke and mirrors. Was I getting wound up in the façade? Were we just actors? But if so, why couldn’t she talk either?

*

“Ungrateful sh*t,” she probably muttered on her way to her broomstick.

But why should I be grateful? Thank you for letting me know I’ve sunk so low so as to be of concern. Ta for condescending to a level where I now know people do not expect me to be able to fend for myself. To keep my head above water. No, thank you for letting me know my smokescreen has cleared and the truth is out.

*

We kissed for twenty-three hours, almost a day. Each hour the kissing got more natural and each break mouth-breathing became less important, and talking and eye contact became impossible.

Our evolution was the opposite to the other couples’. The pashers now pressed lips. The lovers’ tongues were distant memories. For the real couples it wasn’t fun anymore. It degenerated to the point that going on wasn’t worth it. And so it came down to two couples, two kids who couldn’t have been much past high school age, and us.

*

Left alone again, I go back to my room, remove a jar of gherkins which had some how made it into my bed, and try to sleep.

*

After twenty-three hours, twenty minutes and change worth of kissing my friend to try and win some much needed cash, of making out we’re a couple and getting lost in our roles, she sneezed.

For second place we got a basket of items from the New World in the mall, a hundred dollars, and a relationship. A girlfriend-boyfriend thing.

*

Today I feel spent. Like I was a purse at birth, brimming with coins, but everyday another twenty cents is taken out, spent frivolously on jet planes. Lately, one and two dollar coins have been coming out. Bigger chucks, I get emptier and emptier.

Today I’m all out. The purse is bare.

And the truth is out.

*

How we came to break up was we were poor. The hundred bucks was long spent, the coffee drank, the malt biscuits scoffed, only the can of tuna remained — neither of us can stand the stuff. We daren’t give it away though — we’d earned that!

You cannot, however, sustain a relationship on freebies and crumbs of one big experience. Late night hushed conversations, trying to not wake you flatmates while you have sex, just doesn’t cut it. We only seemed to work if we were never apart.

Tensions, arguments, amicable break-up. You know how it is.

*

I can’t sleep. It’s not the daylight, I’m used to that. It’s the question: What do you do when you’re out? Out of energy, funds, friends, religions to shelter you while you doubt their doctrine, doctors who’ll stitch your cuts without calling social workers?

An empty purse.

I guess you give something of yourself when you kiss another person for twenty-three hours. And she spat it out. Sneezed actually. And there I am, sprayed across the floor.

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