“Poppy,” he said, “you’re so beautiful.”
That’s when the smooth skin of his palm met my cheek, pulling
my narrow face forward to meet his, only once. My world exploded in
electric red.
“Let’s just keep that between us,” he said when he pulled away; I
did.
When I got home that night I lay in bed for hours thinking about
him and tracing the outline of my lips, sure that I could finally perfect
the emerald eyes that burned in the back of my mind.
Only a few sessions after he first kissed me, he touched me in the
places that we were just beginning to learn more about in my health class.
While we kissed—the kisses were wetter now—his hand slowly
but deliberately made its way down my neck and past my shoulders to
rest on my size 34A breasts. It felt strange to me, almost wrong, and I
started when his fingers reached the soft tissue. He noticed.
“Is this too much for you?” he asked, and twelve-year-old me took
it as a challenge; perhaps that was the intention.
“No.”
He kept fondling me, making alien breathy noises and trailing
kisses down my neck. I was overwhelmed by the smell of his cologne as I
glanced at the painting behind us: an octopus in a blue-violet sea.
I felt almost relieved when my mom showed up an hour later. I
showered when I got home.
The next time I saw Dylan I told him I liked “just kissing” him.
I recited for hours in the mirror since my last lesson, but the words still
came out broken and small. My face heated when his mouth tightened
around the edges. It was the same face he made when he ripped a page of
his drawing pad down the middle, frustrated that he couldn’t get the ears
quite right in his own self-portrait.
“I see,” he said, answering after an eternity.
We didn’t talk much during the lessons following that. Only what
had to be said was said, and the hot cocoa breaks stopped despite the
bitter weather. I was working hard on a piece that I planned on entering
in the fair that year: a three-foot-by-five-foot painting of the mountain
view that I could see just outside the studio windows. More than a few
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