Prologue

I remember my first kiss with a boy. I was fourteen years old, dressed in khaki and surrounded by a circle of onlookers who watched us with wide eyes. We’d found a secret patch for our game. The moonlight shone soft on the grass and metallic on the roof of the ammunition hut that shielded us. I still had mud on my boots from the morning exercise, which had dragged us from our beds at four. My hands were rough from dismantling a rifle down to its vital organs. My uniform made me feel dull, its camouflage blending away my individuality, and I surreptitiously pulled my hair free from its band, letting it flow around my shoulders.

If we’d had a bottle, we might have spun it; instead, the bossiest member of the group played Eros-compere. She paired us off, clicking the stopwatch on her watch. She pointed at me; she pointed at Stefan. She demanded ten seconds of contact.

Stefan was a beautiful Black boy with an afro. Before this evening, I’d barely spoken to him. Now I hesitated. Was this the right setting for my first kiss – no chaise longue, no fancy Cadillac with leather seats? A first kiss had a butterfly life, could not be repeated once lost, and wouldn’t it be better to wait for the perfect setting? He was stepping closer, pupils bright, leaning in—

Many of the romantic books and films I’d read had promised a kiss as neat punctuation: the full stop on a date, played out against the poetic backdrop of a glorious sky. There was the rapturous kiss inA Room With A View, where Lucy’s repressed Victorian nature unravelled in a field in Italy, a terrace bathed in light and beauty, abundant in violets that beat against her dress in ‘blue waves’ as George ‘stepped quickly forward and kissed her’. The punctuation of that kiss is like a dash, its illicit nature made more delicious by its abrupt end when Miss Bartlett enters the scene, dressed in brown like a theatrical killjoy, calling sharply for Lucy. Then there wasLes Liaisons Dangereuses, where the French word for kiss,baiser, is rarely used, where the embraces described have the feel of ellipses, made even more seductive through what is implied rather than what is said. AndSweet Valley High, the trashy high school series about two identical twins (of course, they are distinguishable by morals: one a good girl, one bad), where kisses only took place between characters who were obscenely beautiful, kisses as cartoonish as an emoji.

All these had layered my desire and made it idealistic. Because I went to a girls’ school, boys were elusive. They were like wild animals we saw through cage bars, glimpsed on buses, street corners, wondered how to tempt and excite. That was why I had joined the teen Army Cadets despite being a member of Greenpeace. I had no interest in learning how to fire an L98 rifle, or dragging myself through an assault course, or forcing my hair under an itchy beret. That morning we had been taken into the woods and forced to lie down for several hours, guns idle between our hands as the cold seared into us, and our sergeant advised us to piss through our trousers into the mud if we got desperate. I had saved precious Saturday-job money to endure this torture, but it had felt worthwhile when, on one previous camp, I hadnearly been kissed. His lips had awkwardly missed my mouth and landed on the edge of my lips before