The Kissing List Read Free Page A

more subdued shade of fuck-you red. She sniffed the mini-quiches in her napkinned hand. “I eat animal by-products now,” she said, “but crusts are dangereux.”
    As Todd fed his bride, a lawyer named Rhadika, a nibble of cake and then kissed her—long, long, long—I didn’t feel the stirring of anything, or at least not much. Right then, I wished Vita might magically appear in a funky dress she’d thrifted and her grandma’s rhinestones, take me aside, and whisper about how it was weird to see an old flame do it. “Poor Sylvie,” she’d say “Not that Todd was the one, but it still feels icky.” I could protest that it was no big deal, maybe convincing myself in the process that it wasn’t. I’d lost track of Vita after she graduated. It made me sad. If she’d been there, I probably would have kissed her, too.
    Just then, the DJ called all the single ladies to the dance floor for the bouquet toss, and in that brief lull of scraping chairs and quiet groans and damp-palmed excitement, someone yelled, “Not me,” and I turned to see Maureen careen out of the room.
    The usher said, “That girl is a piece of work.”
    I smiled at him. Kissing was easier than talking, and the usher kissed fairly well, loose lipped, not too wet. We exchanged e-mail addresses, but I knew we wouldn’t stay in touch, even though he was tall and handsome, a guy’s guy whose family had made its fortune in trailer parks. Later that night, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, in the apartment I shared with two nice men who were always offering to set me up with their nice eligible friends, and asked myself: “Is this one for the couch or the cosmetics counter, darling? Do you need your head shrunk or your face scrubbed? Electroshock or electrolysis?”
    T he evening when I thought this spell finally broke was much like the evening when Dixon kissed Anna or Anna kissed Dixon (and who knew what else!), the evening I kissed Todd and Maureen kissed us both, offering a blessing she regretted the next day. That is to say, Anna and I were drunk.
    By now, though, we had grown up enough that it only required three beers to make us silly. “If it still matters to you, I think we should talk about it,” she said gravely, bringing up the ancient history that drew us into permanent intimacy.
    I watched her fiddle with her pearls. That was one of the things that had irked me at the time, the fact that Dixon had kissed someone who wore pearls, but I now half-wished that I was the kind of woman who could pull them off. They gave Anna a certain sheen. I slid my nail under the label of my bottle of beer, considering what I wanted to say. Anna leaned toward me.
    “You weren’t there. Let me explain what happened.”
    I had a moment to decide whether I wanted to hear or not, whether I wanted to find out who kissed who, or who kissed whom. Would the truth set me free? I giggled at the thought.
    Anna was leaning in, and I leaned in—maybe I was on the verge of whispering, “Yeah, tell me what happened,” but instead my lips found hers. This way, that way, and then this way again. It felt dangerous and familiar. A murmur of conversation drifted downstairs as the host and her friend got ready for bed, and Anna’s eyes rose, lines etching her forehead. I could tell she was considering the likelihood of someone appearing at the top of the staircase and catching us, but I didn’t care.
    “Am I scandalizing you?” I asked, before pulling her back to me. This delighted me, the thought of unnerving Anna, of derailing a conversation that she’d surely control if we used our lips and tongues for making words. Her mind was just as sexy as Dixon’s, and she was much, much nicer. She kissed me back, and we kept kissing, pressed together on another woman’s sofa, and after a long while, during a brief flash of drunken clarity, when I asked whether she was freaked out, hoping I might freak her out simply by asking, she laughed and said, “Oh, Sylvie,