2008 - The Bearded Tit by Prefers to remain anonymous, Rory McGrath

inadvertent knee-rubbings.
    Then there were the ‘goodbyes’ at the bus stop when she went home to her parents each night. I didn’t know what status to give the goodbye pecks on the cheek. It was physical contact but there was too much that was everyday about it. Even people who just met for the first time seemed to depart with a peck on the cheek. Or one on each cheek. That was becoming quite widespread, more often than not provoking a shriek of, ‘Oooh, going continental, are we?’
    Obviously, with JJ, I went continental to double the contact and the time spent kissing her. I was also trying to move mouth-wards with the cheek-pecks.
    At first JJ compensated for this by turning her head to the right if I was kissing her left cheek and vice versa, meaning that her mouth was well out of my reach. But as the weeks passed, I noticed that our cheek-pecks were becoming very nearly lip-pecks as JJ did less head-turning to avoid my mouth.
    After about a month, the arm round the shoulder had been accepted. As always this starts with a yawn and a stretch of both arms and the one behind the shoulders of the girl you’re with stays there, eventually flopping innocently on her shoulder.
    The ‘arms round JJ’s waist’ were also accepted as being normal and non-threatening. Clearly the issue now was how firmly I squeezed her. Pressure was being subtly increased on every occasion until one day in a lunchtime pub I squeezed a bit too hard while she was drinking a Coke, which she had to spit out along with some partially digested cheese sandwich.
    ‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’
    ‘It’s alright; you just took me a bit by surprise.’
    ‘I just felt like squeezing you.’
    ‘Ah, that’s nice. I wasn’t expecting it. No harm done,’ she said kindly, as she wiped the lump of regurgitate off her blouse.
    The resting-of-hand-on-knee had pleasingly moved on as far as squeezing-inner-thigh. I’d worked my way up from resting-hand-on-knee to resting-hand-on-just-above-knee to resting-hand-on-top-of-thigh to dangling-hand-on-inner-thigh and one day, in the basement gloom of the Henecky Tavern, I made my move and put my hand on her upper inner thigh and squeezed it.
    ‘I’ll get another round in,’ I said straight away and got up and went to the bar; part of my plan was not to hang around for an embarrassing rebuttal or awkward silence. This seemed to work; when I got back with the drinks she did the same to me and I was in heaven.
    Our physical intimacy lurched suddenly forward one pre-bus-stop evening drink when we were talking about physical peculiarities.
    You know the sort of thing: the sinister implications of being left-handed; curly hair versus straight hair and the shape of follicles; does the size of the gap between your two front teeth mean anything; does not being able to whistle mean you’re homosexual; does not being able to whistle while holding up a chair by one leg mean you’re homosexual; is it possible to touch your left elbow with your left hand; is the length of your forearm between wrist and elbow exactly the same as your shoe size?
    I suddenly had an idea.
    ‘What about tongue length, then?’ I asked her.
    ‘What about tongue length?’
    ‘Can you touch the end of your nose with your tongue?’
    ‘Let’s see,’ she said, and closing her eyes tight she stuck her tongue out as far as it would go and curled it back and upwards towards her nose. She couldn’t touch the end of her nose with her tongue but it was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.
    ‘Oh shame; very close, though.’
    She pulled a joke sad face. ‘Can you do it?’
    ‘Easily,’ I said, and leant over and touched the end of her nose with my tongue.
    She laughed a lot.
    And I did.
    My day was made.
    But the silver lining had a black cloud around it in the shape of Carl Kramer.
    ‘You’re in a ludicrously good mood for someone in a doomed love affair,’ he grumbled later over a pint.
    ‘Yes, I touched the end of JJ’s nose with my tongue