Kissie Kiss

Sure there was kissie kiss. But he didn’t like her style. “Rough edges,” he said, although he never used the term. He tai­lored his feed­back — it was sharp as light­ning and burned just as much.

Consider his cri­tique of her colour sense. They were off to a party, his intro­duc­tion to her social set — one of those firsts that leave many on edge as they yearn for approval yet real­ize oth­ers might judge them neg­a­tively. Would have thought he’d be quak­ing in his boots. Turned out she was.

Her boots were green rub­ber. Moss green. A vari­ety of moss that might appear lime to some, char­treuse to oth­ers, Zen green to those who read designer paint labels at hard­ware stores. She paired those boots with a linen pantsuit the colour of cop­per. And there she was, set to ven­ture out in moss boots and wrin­kled cop­per linen. She loved the com­bi­na­tion, to which he said, “Are you jok­ing? You’ve got to be kid­ding. You’re kid­ding, right?”

Should have kicked him, but she didn’t.

Then there were the coat lapels. He had an issue with the size of them. I’m refer­ring to the lapels on the full-length double-breasted wool coat she bought from the Burlington Coat Factory on Atlantic Avenue in New York City while vis­it­ing him from across the Canada — U.S. bor­der on the other side of the con­ti­nent. It was the colour of cin­na­mon. Made her feel like a rank-and-file New Yorker, espe­cially when she wore it with those moss rub­ber boots she’d pur­chased on that same visit from a dis­count footwear store on some street in mid­town Manhattan.

The day after her coat pur­chase they met at a diner on East 55^th for his lunch break. She hadn’t con­sid­ered the size of the lapels until she entered the diner and sat down at the table in front of him. He fixed his gaze on her coat, then fur­rowed his brow before lift­ing it — an appar­ent attempt to enlarge his eye­balls just enough to accom­mo­date the full lapels in the range of his vision. Then he said to her, “Guess they weren’t short on mate­r­ial when they made those things.”

She wanted to punch him, but didn’t.

Mustn’t for­get their trip to Montauk — the east­ern­most stop on Long Island where the wind sends a chill down the spine in December. They’d planned a roman­tic excur­sion, but she didn’t stay long enough for the romance to blos­som. The issue was her glasses — her handmade-in-France marine-blue frames with Japanese spe­cialty high-density lenses. Moments after their arrival — about two hun­dred feet from the train sta­tion — he turned and said to her, “Did you bring your con­tacts? Your con­tact lenses?”

She eye­balled him with a straight face for five and a half long sec­onds, then said, “Why?”

“Because I like you bet­ter in your con­tacts,” he said.