Church Kiss

Novel Excerpt

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Joshua was born on Christmas Eve.

How sexy is that?

This is the first Christmas Eve in years he doesn’t have Ali with him at church. I almost bailed all three years they were dating, once I discovered he planned to bring her along.

But I didn’t bail. I suffered through it.

Three years of her standing in my place. Next to him. On his birthday. In his crisp, church-worthy outfit. His rich, honey voice soaring over the organ. His face illuminated by candlelight. His lips curving sensuously around the lyrics of Silent Night.

And yes, every Christmas Eve produces an oeuvre of fantasies unmatched in their eroticism. The things I’ve done to Joshua at 3:00 AM on Christmas morning have definitely earned me a special place in hell.

We arrive in the lobby at the same time. Joshua takes my coat and hangs it up for me. Then we give each other an appreciative once over while our parents make holiday pleasantries.

“You look really nice,” he says, running his hand down the front of his shirt to flatten any potential wrinkles.

“You too.”

Understatement of the century. He looks like a mini Michelangelo’s David, if David was dressed in trim black dress pants and a dark green, button-down shirt that made his woodland nymph eyes jump out of his perfectly chiseled face.

I’m counting the buttons on his shirt and inventing new ways to undo them.

“I finally get to sit next to you this year,” he says warmly. He puts his hand on my lower back and leads me into the line that’s forming at the Sanctuary door.

I undo the last button with my teeth.

“Do you want to sit downstairs or in the balcony?”

“Your choice, birthday boy.”

He smiles. “Let’s go upstairs. It’ll be less crowded.”

Yes. Fewer people to offend when we start going at it.

The winding stairs up to the balcony are crazy loud. They squeak like they’re about to buckle even though Joshua and I have much lighter footsteps than the average person.

The air on the second floor is stifling. It doesn’t matter what time of year it is. The balcony is always hot.

Too hot for that green, button-down shirt if you ask me.

I’m a little discouraged to see a large family sitting in the front row with about nine kids in various states of unrest. But the last two rows are empty, and Joshua has chosen a seat as far away from the rest of the world as possible. There’s a dimly lit sconce over his head, and he looks like an angel being haloed by its amber glow.

“Wanna play ass roulette?” he asks, handing me a hymnal as I sit next to him.

It’s not as sexy as it sounds. Ass roulette is a game we invented when we were kids, and we discovered the word ass appears a handful of times in hymns and scripture. The game is, we try to be the first to find the word and put our finger on it. So, it’s not roulette at all.

Just a quest for ass.

“Don’t you think we’ve outgrown ass roulette?” I ask, skimming through the Christmas hymns for the ass references I already know.

“I don’t want to live in a world where we’ve outgrown ass roulette, Dot.”

I laugh and start skimming more competitively. “ASS!” I say, shoving the hymnal in his face with my finger pressed to the word.

“Mommy, that lady said ‘ass’,” a tiny voice tattles on me. Not that it needed to tattle. I said it really loud.

I mouth the word ‘sorry’ to the woman glaring at me, covering her infant’s ears.

“That lady doesn’t know how to behave in church,” she says smugly to her tattletale.

Joshua is barely containing his laughter next to me. “Jesus, I can’t take you anywhere.”

The organ announces the first hymn, and he stands up, creating a gust of air between us that smells like Irish Spring soap and Jergens body lotion.

So, he’s clean.

And… moisturized.

My heart is already racing in anticipation of hearing him sing. Forget journalism. Joshua should be on American Idol. I feel like one of those girls that gets pulled on stage and sung too by her favorite pop star, and she can’t stop crying out of sheer happiness and pent-up sexual frustration as he croons all over her quivering form.

He elbows me when he realizes I’m staring at his mouth and not singing along. I turn my eyes down to my hymnal. I’m still opened to the ass page.

He reaches over and takes my hymnal away, setting it back in the shelf behind the pew in front of us. Then he hands me his, but he does it so by the end of the exchange we’re holding it together. My hand over the spine and his hand over mine. Our shoulders are touching, and his voice is vibrating against my chest. I let his hand steady me because I feel like I’m going to tip over.

I manage to sing through the third verse of O’ Come all ye faithful without passing out. Then we’re able to sit back down.

He sits a little closer to me this time, the full length of our legs pressed together.

How the hell am I’m going to get through this entire service without putting my hand on this thigh? It’s right there. It would be wrong not to touch it. Right?

Oh God.

What would Jesus do?

Three hymns and two scripture readings later and I’m suffocating. He smells so amazing I just want to unwrap him and let his beautifully freckled skin breathe, like a bottle of…

I don’t drink wine. Which one is best served after it breathes?

Is it Red?

“Okay, let’s go,” he whispers.

“Wait, what?” I clumsily put my hymnal away as he presses his hands into my shoulders, pushing me down the length of the pew toward the door.

“Just move fast, so we get downstairs before the song ends.”

One of the kids in the front row is leering at me. “Bad Lady,” her eyes say.

“Shit. I forgot my phone.”

“Leave it.”

“I can’t,” I argue. “It’s my phone.”

“Fine, hurry up,” he says, shoving me back down the pew.

I bash my thigh into the armrest and then hobble down to collect my phone.

Joshua is frantically waving me toward the stairs. I have no idea what he’s getting me into, but my insides are squirming with hide-and-seek butterflies. I reach the doorway and follow him down the winding staircase.

We’re halfway down when the music stops, leaving the echo of organ and voices hanging in the air.

He throws his arm out and catches me across the chest. “Sorry,” he giggles.

I’m not.

We stand there, frozen, waiting for the next part of the service to cover our remaining footsteps. A low, mumbling voice starts up and Joshua rolls his eyes. “It’s the sermon,” he says. “Okay. We need to go slow the rest of the way. One step at a time.”

I took hold of his arm when it landed on my boobs, so we’re taking the first step together.

We lower our feet down onto the stair and cringe. The creaking sound that comes out of it could wake up a den of hibernating bears.

“Shit,” he laughs. “Okay, let’s try one more.”

We do. This time the stair groans so loudly, one of the antsy kids upstairs says, “Mommy, was that a ghost?”

I bury my face in Joshua’s shoulder to keep from laughing.

“Okay, fuck it,” he whispers against my hair, sending a pleasant shiver down the back of my neck. “Let’s just go all the way.”

If that’s not the king of double entendres, I don’t know what is.

We inhale together and barrel down the remaining third of the stairwell, holding our breath until we’re at the bottom. He pulls me through the side door that leads to the church basement, and I keep in lock step with him down the carpeted stairs. He glances back up to make sure we aren’t being followed. Then he ducks into the dark rehearsal room and drags me in after him.

We stand inside the doorway, catching our breath and stifling our laughter, even though we’re far enough away that no one upstairs can hear us.

He leaves my side and fumbles around in the dark, bumping into something and swearing under his breath.

He clicks on a table lamp and the room is cast in a rosy, orange glow.

I’m glad he chose the table lamp and not the fluorescents on the ceiling. They would have been easier to turn on given that the switch is outside the room. But evidently, Joshua is going for ambiance.

And I’m very okay with that.

He stands in the center of the room and jerks his head toward the long wall of closed closet doors. “Confessional?” He grins mischievously.

My heartbeat kicks into overdrive.

Confessional isn’t what it sounds like. We’re not Catholic, so confessing our sins isn’t something we ever had to do at church. But once in a while, Joshua and I would hold a “Confessional” in the style of reality TV. Where we’d venture into a small space and speak our truth and get things off our chests and in all other ways reveal our secrets to each other.

It's been ages since we had one. Ages since we did anything like this. Together.

Just the two of us.

“I’m game,” I say, applying a vise to my inner most secrets so they don’t get any stupid ideas about coming out. “Want me to raid the kitchen for some stale communion bread first?”

“Ugh, no thanks,” he grimaces. He opens a closet door at the far end of the room and waves me inside with a goofy flourish. “After you.”

Before I even set foot in the closet, I’m smacked in the senses with nostalgia. The moth balls. The dusty satin choir robes infused with Secret and Old Spice deodorant. The ancient, expired hymnals and broken candles stuffed in worn-out, cardboard boxes.

I search the floor for stray mouse traps and then push a few robes out of the way and sit with my back against the wall. He comes in after me, and parks himself on the other side of the wall of robes. We’re about a foot apart, but we can’t see each other. This is all part of the experience. He closes the closet door and we’re encased in semi darkness, broken up only by the thin bars of light pouring through the shutter style doors.

It’s quiet except for the occasional creaking of some church goer shifting in their seat upstairs. Joshua takes a deep breath and laughs softly. “It smells exactly the same,” he says.

“I know.”

“Good thing we stopped growing in middle school or we wouldn’t even fit in here.”

“We didn’t stop growing in middle school,” I say. “I didn’t even get boobs until ninth grade.”

“Good point,” he says. “My equipment has also seen some… advancement since then.”

I snort laugh and bonk my head on the wall behind me.

“Are you okay?” He giggles.

“Yes.”

Quiet again.

“I love this,” he says softly.

My chest tightens up and I want to say, “me too”, but the words won’t form.

“Would you ever want to be thirteen again?” he asks.

“My gut says no. It kind of sucked.”

“Yeah,” he says. “If I went back, it wouldn’t be about being thirteen as much as it would be about… getting a do-over. Of the years after that.”

I turn my head, forgetting I can’t see him because of the robe partition.

“Why would you want a do-over?”

He’s silent for so long, I almost shove the robes aside to make sure he didn’t fall asleep.

“I have to tell you something,” he says finally.

My stomach drops and my body tenses up with worry.

“What is it?”

He takes a breath. And when he speaks, he sounds far away. “I had sex with Ali.”

I exhale more air than I realized I was holding in my lungs and then laugh a little at how not surprised I am by this announcement.

“Yeah,” I say. “I knew that already.”

“But you never heard it from me,” he says. “And I feel… bad about that.”

“Okay,” I say, staring at the orange, glowing slats in the door until they start to burn into my retinas. “Is that all you wanted to say?”

He makes a frustrated sound in his throat. “No. Of course, that’s not all I wanted to say. I feel like shit about it. I feel like shit that I didn’t talk to you about it. That I didn’t talk to you at all when I started seeing Ali. It’s weird to have a girl friend and a girlfriend at the same time. Or at least… I thought it was. But I still needed you. I wanted to talk to you about it. Before it even happened the first time, because it was a big deal. And because of what I said to you… the last time we were in here.”

I swallow over a sour taste in my mouth and close my eyes to view the orange lines on the back of my eyelids.

“Do you mean what you said about waiting? Until you were married?”

“Yes. That.”

“A lot of people say that when they’re kids, Joshua. I wasn’t expecting you to keep that promise to yourself.”

“It wasn’t just a promise to myself,” he says sadly. “It was a promise to you, too.”

The organ swells to life and the ceiling starts creaking under small feet upstairs. The kids are staging the nativity. Joshua and I played Mary and Joseph in fifth grade. I remember how happy it made me to pretend he was my husband for a night. I was less concerned back then about how adventurously he went about getting me pretend pregnant.

I know he’s waiting for me to respond. But what the hell am I supposed to say to that? Does he want me to forgive him for having a libido and wanting to have sex with his long-term girlfriend? Who am I? His friend or his priest?

“She wants to talk.”

“Ali?”

“Yeah. She wants to try to work through things. Maybe… get back together.”

I try to keep my voice steady. But my hands are trembling.

“Is that…” I breathe over a stubborn knot in my chest. “…what you want?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I used to know. I used to know exactly what I wanted. I could see it… right in front of me. And it scared me how sure I was about it. Because how could I be that sure? I didn’t know how things would work out or even if they’d work out. And not knowing what was going to happen was too scary. So, I told myself to let it go. And now… I don’t know what I want anymore.”

The organ starts playing Away in a Manger. I close my eyes and try to read his thoughts. Anything to shut off my own.

“Hey,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“What do you want for Christmas?”

“A hippopotamus.”

“Aw,” he laughs. “Damn it. I’m fresh out of hippopotamuses. Hippopotami? What the hell is the plural of hippopotamus?”

“I have no idea,” I say distantly. “But I really only want the one…”

His arm sweeps across the row of robes, pushing them behind him, closing the gap between us, and putting his dimly lit perfection in front of my eyes again. He sits alongside me, his warm shoulder flush with mine.

“Would you settle for a kiss?”

A thousand tiny explosions go off inside my torso.

“Um…”

“Haven’t you been thinking about it?” he asks, daring to meet my eyes while I’m processing this.

HAVE I BEEN THINKING ABOUT IT???!!!

“Maybe.” I somehow manage to sound pleasantly coy instead of sex starved.

“Well then,” he asks with an elfish grin. “Can I kiss you a Merry Christmas?”

YES! Jesus GOD YES!!

“Okay.”

“Awesome.” He reaches into his back pocket. “Let me set the mood first.”

He pulls out his phone and brings up a live feed of a candle burning.

Like instantly.

“Uh… did you plan this ahead of time?” I ask, watching him intently.

“Do you mean have I been thinking about it all day?” He blushes under the faux candlelight. “Yes.”

My insides are a whirl of nerves and impulses.

He’s been thinking about kissing me?

All day?

“Okay, now face me,” he says, turning his body and crossing his legs in front of him. The posture makes him seem younger. Like the boy I used to eat stale communion bread with and talk to about what puberty felt like.

Back when the idea of kissing him was all my mind needed to stay awake.

“Are we kissing or holding a séance?” I tease.

“Hang on,” he says. “We’re not kissing. We’re going to kiss. Singular. One kiss. And it’s going to be a church kiss. Because Baby Jesus is watching.” He’s almost laughing as he says this, so I don’t know how committed he is to following these absurd guidelines.

“What makes it a church kiss?” I ask.

“No tongues. And hold my hands, so they don’t… wander.”

I’m laughing now. He’s being so damn cute. It’s tugging viciously at my heart. Not my… everything else. I’ve been fantasizing about undressing him all night and now that we’re here, alone in this closet, seconds from putting our lips together for the first time, all I can think about is how long I’ve been waiting for just this.

And nothing more.

I slide my hands into his and enjoy a fizzy tingle in my fingers. He squeezes gently and the tingle spreads up my arms and across my chest.

The deafening crunch of two hundred people standing up in unison over our heads breaks our connection. I glance up at the ceiling as the organ begins Silent Night.

The melodic hum of joined voices trickles down over us like an audible mist.

My eyes return to find Joshua’s waiting, wide and flashing green under the flickering light of his phone.

His fingertips graze my wrists, and the fizzy tingle in my chest melts into slow burning ache.

“Ready?” he asks.

He licks his lips. But not in a sensual way.

In a ‘this might make the kiss feel nicer’ way.

I lick mine, too.

“Yes.”

He takes in a breath and lets it out over a nervous laugh.

“Okay. Here we go.”

He makes me wait another five seconds before he leans slowly into the electrified space between us.

I decide to meet him halfway.

It’s the easiest decision I’ve ever made in my life.

Photo by Cesar La Rosa on Unsplash

This story is brought to you by The Romantic.