Love Me: The Manoir

My First (Doesn't Count) Kiss

New Year's Eve 2017. There were nine of us without New Year's Plans, and somehow we had ended up grouped together in the basement of my best friend's house with a few bottles of wine, pretending like we weren't all wishing that we were at some bigger party. But I was happy just to have New Year plans for once.

Five girls to four boys, and two were already in a relationship at the time. I had given up desperately pining for a kiss at these events any more – there was no point. I felt like I was destined to go through my sixth form life without having been kissed as well, only to move onto uni which would definitely be my chance to shine – it had to be, didn't it?

The evening was a collection of stilted moments and a lot of wine drinking, as well as someone breaking the pool table and a bunch of sixteen year olds trying to fix it with bobby pins. I watched, as the evening progress, a lanky, blonde-haired boy try and flirt subtly with my friend and I was almost certain that they would get together.

However, when 12 had been and gone, I turned to my left to see her kissing another one of the boys. The lanky boy – let's call him Franklin – turned to me and gestured that we went into the room connected to the dance floor. The music was still thumping so I missed the first time he asked, but sure enough he said more loudly 'do you want to make out?'

My heart was thumping as I nodded okay, knowing that this was a moment I had been waiting for my whole existence. I couldn't tell you if the kiss was bad or good, simply because my brain went into overdrive and I don't remember it. But it had happened.

I suddenly felt a wave of embarrassment go through me, and I ran upstairs where one of my friends was waiting to hear all about it.

"What if I was really shit?" I panicked in the kitchen, pacing back and forth, "What if he thought it was a really shit kiss?"

I hadn't anticipated my first kiss to be like this. To be one that I regretted. As I went back down to the basement, I forced myself to sit next to Franklin and make awkward small talk. Eventually, he leant back against the wall and offered me a big spoon while we watched TV at 3am.

"You know, I thought I was going to get with your friend," the boy said to me something along these lines, and it then clicked.

I was his second option. The one he went to because he wanted to get with just someone. And yet I didn't seem to think this was a huge deal, in fact it was only until a year later that I realised how much of a shit move it was on his behalf.

"Maybe we could do that?" he said, gesturing to a couple who were making out next to us, but I shook my head.

I had already had my first kiss now, and it was nothing but bland. I didn't need to kiss again.

In the days following I messaged him a bit, and I was beginning to convince myself that I could potentially like him. We spoke about sex a lot, and porn. I liked the fact that this made him think I was different to most girls, I thought perhaps he'd see me in a different light.

And yet, in the end he chose my friend over me. They had begun to talk after the party, and they actually liked each other. They spoke about normal things, he didn't divert all of their conversations to ones about sex. I learnt a valuable lesson from this experience – don't talk to potential flirtations about sex.

It was a new rule I was having with myself. While I wish it had been born out of my own realisation that I have far more intelligent and amazing things that people would be dying to hear, it was in fact due to the acknowledgement that boys seemed to fancy girls who were coy. Who didn't offer their body up on a plate for anyone to take a bite.