The Kissing Games
BY FEATURED WRITER: Tammy Delatorre
Yael Peleg Zeelim, His soul is bound to her soul, embroidery on found paper, 13 x 21 cm, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
THE KISSING GAMES
TAMMY DELATORRE / JAN 2021 / ISSUE 4
She calls him late one night, a stranger who slid his number across a bar.
“Of course, I remember you,” he says. “Red dress. Mojito Mondays.”
“That’s right. But you, I don’t recall your face.” Although who could forget the wide jaw and stubble, the protruding lower lip she had wanted to suck. “I could come over. You could remind me.” She leans back in her chair and peeks down the hall, making sure everyone has gone home for the day.
“Sure. I think I have some rum.”
She hears shuffling in the background, as if he’s readying for her arrival. She winds and unwinds the cord of the desk phone around her finger. “I’m trying to think of the word for it…”
“For what?" He sounds miffed that she’s changed the subject.
“For the way I feel tonight. Like horny is to sex, except this word’s for kissing—perhaps it's tonguey or lippy or chapsticky.” Her voice deepens, "I wish someone would lend me his lips so I could get a kiss fix. It could be long and hard, passionate and wet.” And this is part of her ploy, dropping in “hard” and “wet,” knowing he’ll be putty. Or maybe it’s just to see if she can still conjure passion. She kisses the back of her hand and considers the drive home to her husband on the couch watching the evening news, two sons holed up in their rooms. She makes little moaning noises into the receiver. The stranger scolds, she’s faking.
She moans more loudly, an orgasm of moans that echo down the dark corridor.
"Girl, you're crazy,” he sighs, "I like it."
Being called “girl” reminds her of when she was ten, her parents pitched a tent in the backyard for a sleepover. She and her cousins must have felt "kissy" that night because Josette, the oldest at twelve, gave them a lesson in French kissing, said it was like sucking the breath out of someone, so they sucked hard on the insides of their wrists, sucked until they bruised. Later when her mother asked what the marks were, she smiled. “Just a game we girls play.”
But that game required nothing, just a dream of where a kiss could lead, without the risk: a passionless marriage, the stalemate of lips that touch in greeting after a long day’s work, the kind of kiss she’ll give her husband when she gets home. She turns her wrist and tongues her own dry flesh, then remembers she wants to get home to say goodnight to the boys before their bedroom lights go out. She shoulders her bag and promises to call the stranger back to make plans for the weekend. She hangs up, considers the slip of paper with his number on it, flicks it in the direction of the wastebasket—maybe she misses, maybe it lands on the floor. She’s almost certain the cleaning crew is scheduled to come that night.
Tammy Delatorre was named a 2020-2021 Steinbeck Fellow. She has received other literary awards, including the Payton Prize, Slippery Elm Prose Prize, CutBank’s Montana Prize for Nonfiction, and Columbia Journal Fall Contest. Her writing has also appeared in Los Angeles Review, Zone 3, Hobart Online, The Rumpus, and Vice. She earned her MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles.
Yael Peleg Zeelim was born in Israel in 1980. She earned her MFA from Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel and B. Des from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel. She is curious about most of the things.