You see, it didn’t have to be in the dark, after all. It could start in the light.
They kissed in the lit kitchen first, because that’s where they’d come modestly, just to talk, to sip some small, late tea together.
The kitchen can in its way be the place for kisses. It is the heart of a home. (Even of a cramped fourth-floor apartment.) The kitchen is, after all, the place of heat and eating; the place of treats for the palate; the place a person comes to first thing in the morning, to read, and wake up, and taste the day.
It was the night they tasted. And each other. Starting slow, and slowly faster, their mouths met: first polite and refined; then affectionate, curious; and finally, as their tongues wandered and hungered, their mouths became wide and their desires wider, and they began to find each other with an urgency that brought to mind the word devouring.
They kissed like that, through clothes and shudderings, in a light bright enough to capture the startled lust on each other’s faces, to watch each other grow mussed and wild, and finally to see, clearly, that they were going to have to go somewhere else, away from the kitchen, where their skins could touch.
Pages for You, 2001
It is a risk, writing a novel about love, a story of sexual discovery. I never imagined myself to be the kind of author who would write such a tale. I was not that brave.
