Page 13 of Untangled
Kiss in your car (nothing further!)
“Front seat or back?” Daniel asks as we stand in the garage next to his gray Lexus. It felt like the sexier choice than my SUV, which is littered with Cheerio dust, though that would’ve given us more room. Although, maybe less room is a win, in this instance.
“Considering it says ‘nothing further,’ I think the front seat is fine,” I reply. I walk around to the passenger side and open the door to slide in. In years’ past, it would’ve bothered me that Daniel didn’t come around to open the door for me. Today, I’m just happy to get out of the cold air of the garage.
Daniel hops in, opens the garage and turns on the engine. I bring my hands in front of the vents to warm them, and he places the baby monitor on the dash.
“It’ll get warmer in a minute,” he says.
In a minute, we’re supposed to be kissing.
“So how do you want to do this?” I ask. We’ve obviously kissed in a car before—that can’t-get-enough, please-just-one-more-kiss frantic style of making out you do in the dating stage before you get dropped at your door. We’ve never made out inthiscar, though. The previous experiences were in Daniel’s 2005 Saturn, which smelled like stale french fries and had a cassette player adapter that we’d connect to a classic iPod via the headphone jack. It’s been a minute.
“We know how to kiss, Molls,” he replies, turning his trunk to face me. “This isn’t hard.” With that, he reaches over, pushes a piece of stray hair behind my ear, and cradles my jaw in his hand. I lean into his palm, the way his thumb brushes over my cheek. One, two, three times. It’s a familiar comfort. It sets my spirit at ease.
Without much thought, I shift toward him and press my lips to his. They’re soft, more pillowy than any man has a right to have. Women pay good money for the sort of volume he has naturally. Almost immediately, we slip into a routine we choreographed a decade ago. Muscle memory pulls hisbottom lip between mine, and my tongue seeks his in quick succession. An occasional nibble, a lingering suck, Daniel’s hand tangled in my hair behind my ear. I couldn’t write the steps in order, but that’s okay. We know the dance by heart.
The console between us is an awkward divider, but we kiss anyway, until we reach the point where we’d normally move on to bigger and better and harder and wetter things. But tonight, we’re in the car, with a “nothing more” rule. Do we just keep kissing?
“You’re still the best kisser I’ve ever had. You know that, right?” he asks, after pulling away.
“Considering you haven’t kissed anyone new since you first told me, I’d hope so.” The words tumble out on a laugh. “You are also an excellent kisser. I wouldn’t have married you otherwise,” I joke, and I’m tickled to see a hint of pink appear on Daniel’s cheeks. It makes him look younger. Boyish.
“So, did we complete the task, or do you think we’re supposed to kiss longer?” he asks.
“I think that’s the wrong question.”
“Do you?” He tilts his head, trying to project confusion he doesn’t actually feel.
“Yeah, I think the real question is, do wewantto kiss longer?”
“If the alternative is going back inside and rotting our brains about the state of the world, I think kissing is a better idea,” he says.
I have to agree. Plus there’s something intriguing about finding out what happens after the music stops, so to speak. Are there more moves yet to be learned?
“What if you come over here?” he says, and there’s a vulnerability in the ask.
The wheels in my head turn. “You want me to sit in your lap?”
“Sit, straddle, whatever.”
I briefly consider climbing over the center console before an image stops me, one with my legs swinging over and hitting Daniel in the head and having to scoot my butt across the cold leather. I decide to get out and come around instead. This time, he leans over and opens the door for me. Next, he finds the button on the side of the leather seat that moves the chair as far from the steering wheel as it will go and presses it until it stops.
“Want some music?” he asks.
“Sure,” I reply. He cues up something a little jazzy, a little sexy.
I duck under the car’s frame and bring one knee to the side of his thigh before pulling up the other. Hear me say this: straddling a man in the front seat of his car is more difficult at thirty-two than it is at twenty-five. I swear I heard my knees creak just now.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty comfortable,” he says, and it’s too easy to ruffle up his hair with my hand and roll my eyes. It’s an inside joke, one he made when Icomplained about my wedding shoes rubbing a blister on my heels, and the Cervidil opening my cervix when I was in labor, and long before that, the way the springs in my parent’s sofa bed dug into my back when trying to sleep. As an outsider, the comment seems flippant, taunting even. But inside the relationship—and this car—it’s a nod to our shared history.
“Shut up,” I reply.
“Why don’t you shut me up?”
This playful needling as foreplay is Daniel Hayes’s specialty. It’s never failed to work on me.
“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” I reply.
