The Sweetest Touch

The sweetest touch I ever felt was with my first love. We were lying on her bed, only a week before we would share our first kiss. We were studying social psychology. We had been studying for a couple of hours. For a couple of weeks, I had been falling for her, and I thought that maybe, she for me. Her boyfriend was in the apartment next door playing Nintendo.

That night, as we were just studying, we started out sitting on opposite sides of the bed. Slowly, we moved closer and closer, until we were lying side-by-side, a foot’s width of just-studying space in between us. Our books lay next to each other, as we called out various vocabulary terms and asked one another what were the three tenets of such and such theorem. Our hands were inches away. Her boyfriend was next door.

Topics moved away from psychology, and we were soon discussing our lives - our deepest secrets that we never thought we’d share. Without either of us mentioning it, our hands drew nearer, until we locked pinkies. Our pinkies snugly interlaced, we chatted on for another few minutes, casting occasional sly, smirking glances, until her boyfriend busted in the downstairs apartment door.

We jumped back into our just-studying roles. Her boyfriend arrived upstairs and delivered a play-by-play break down to let us know who had won and lost in Nintendo that night. One week later, she and I would be at my house studying social psychology.