Do Butterflies Kiss Too?
by Lucy Hister
Summer sweat is a sticky kind of sweet. The heat that summer brings is rude and unforgiving to those pools of shadow that appear under your armpits and kneecaps. Muscles melt into slime and words run into other words like marbles rolling around in your mouth.
In a sort of attempt to pretend as if the heat isn’t like living in the never-ending pant of a smelly dog, some people like to cool off by the beachside. Others hide in the nooks and corners of any ice cream shop they can find, praying for snow to their cones of cookie dough or pistachio gelato. But I never really cared for the one- thousand-and-one ways that chocolate was arranged into ice cream flavours. And although he never admitted it, I don’t think he knew how to swim very well, so the beach was never our first choice.
In the swelter and stick, we turned to the cornfields for salvation. If not right in the corn fields, then on the edge of them, just close enough to be embraced by their cool breath of shade. Even on days when it wasn’t especially hot, I would still go and meet him to hide from my parents and my sister, who had all recently become experts on the subject of arguing.
Each morning as the smell of coffee pried my eyelids open and the inevitable shriek pierced through the walls of the bathroom claiming one of us “pigs” stole the hair dryer again, I’d hear his knock on the front door and know it was time to sneak away. We shuffled with hunched shoulders through the back garden and out of earshot from the bustle of my cottage to sit at the edge of something equal parts as tempting as it was unexplored. He carried the picnic blanket and I snatched up the best of the mediocre pillows and the peanut butter and crackers which lasted us for most of the day. If the peanut butter became boring or too much like tar stuck to the roof of our mouths, I’d suggest marmalade, thinking I sounded sophisticated. Without fail he would tease me, but in the end the marmalade always joined us, usually serving as a weight to hold the corner of the blanket down in case it felt like flying away.
Surrounding the plot of summer homes was a boundless expanse of field, green and golden and just as calming as it was frightening. The crop was taller than we were and reached so far beyond what the eye could see that we never even saw the cottages on the other side of the field. Buzzing with so much life and strength, at times I thought that in many ways, the corn field had more spirit than I did.
What was most appealing, however, was that my mother, father and sister didn’t have any interest in coming within even a foot of the field. There was something about the luxury of this new-found concept of privacy that made us feel like we could do anything. This meant, also, that whatever happened by the cornfield had an unspoken secrecy to it—a pact of confidentiality that bonded us together and made us do things that beyond the cornfield we might’ve never done.
We sat on the gingham blanket that my mother would have described as having “character”, her word for old and ratty. Old or not, it was our safe circle. Within its parameters, nothing was defined. A touch didn’t have to be justified, or ruined by words trying to explain something that needed no explanation.
“Do you know what a butterfly kiss is?”
I looked up to see his eyes, not meeting mine, but looking right into the space where my eyebrows parted. A sheen of maroon washed over his cheeks, but it was hard to tell if it was from embarrassment or sunburn.
I laughed, knowing damn well that whatever I said, I wasn’t going to admit to only finding out the true definition of french-kissing from a TV program just a few short weekends ago. The girls at school—myself included—often bragged with a false sense of confidence that we knew someone who had been kissed, or in particularly daring moments, that we had been doing the kissing ourselves. But underneath the thumb pointing, puffed-out chests, and stuck-up noses, it was quite obvious from the accompanying nail bite or scolding red cheeks, that none of us knew anything at all.
“Yeah, I know.”
He stared with deep concentration into the ground, as if it were somehow the most amazing ground he’d ever seen. Sucking his teeth, he spoke in the familiar mumble of a not-very-well-considered thought.
“Can I give you one then?”
“Sure. I guess.”
As the sun undressed itself, the sky couldn’t help but blush, casting a deep pinky-red across the clouds. The clouds, hurt from the burn of red, let out a quick exhale. The breeze reached my arms, making the hair stand on end. I closed my eyes tight until I saw flickers of red and puckered my lips so squeezed together that I could feel my teeth leave marks on the inside of my mouth. I waited for the moment, but after ten seconds of holding the strained position, realized that it wasn’t going to come.
“Uhm, what are you doing?”
I opened my eyes to the sight of two big, wide-open, chestnut-coloured orbs half an inch away from my face. He moved his eyes closer and he batted his eyelashes up and down, up and down across my sunburnt cheek.
When he moved away, I laughed—at first because I thought he was such an amateur, not knowing how to kiss like an adult—and after a while, because he was laughing, too. A cascade of laughing seemed to shy the squirrels away, and shut the wind up.
All around us was corn, standing tall and looming over us, but not in a scary way. It was almost maternal, just watching. Waiting.