Excerpt: The Fall, and Further Fall, of Miriam Bronski

"I won't do anything bad, okay?" he says, holding my hand. We sit down on the floor next to the bed on a little black & green hook rug and he puts a pillow behind me and is very close and it feels like heaven. Genesis is playing Follow You, Follow me. The music flutters around me. "I just want to kiss you all night," he says, putting his arms around me, “if that‘s okay.” And he does. He does. I hear his breathing, and his murmuring, and our lips smack a little now and then. He’s smells like nothing I’ve ever known, a mix of spice and smoke and some other delicious thing-- boy-smell. I have kissed guys, and even seen a guy naked before (brothers!) but this is not like those things, those other kisses by guys my age who were quick and scared and a little gross tasting-- this is like Cinderella getting the last shoe on, this is what Maggie feels when Ralph kisses her in that cemetery in The Thorn Birds, this is the feel of his mouth that I really like, moist and working it’s way all around mine and I want it there forever, tingles in all different parts of my body, feeling jumpy and calm at the same time. The tip of his tongue rubbing against my top lip for a second so gently. This is what kissing is supposed to be like. It smells good, it feels good, it even sounds good-- Alex tells me between kisses me how beautiful I am and how he first noticed me as a girl last summer when we all swam at Jake's pool party, and how he's just tried to ignore it because of our ages and everything, until he saw me drinking too much tonight and not liking it and wanted to kiss me right there, and how he almost did, but he can't because he works there sometimes cleaning up after the bands and the bartenders.
I pull away for a second when this news rattles through my brain. "You checked me out at Jake’s party?" If I had known I wouldn’t have been able to stand it; I wore the silliest looking bikini, with these red dots all over it. There was nobody there I even dreamed of liking, but I went because Reese made me so she wouldn’t be the only teenaged girl in a bunch of dumb older guys, her oldest brother’s friends, who are pretty ignorant. I didn’t begin to think about Alex being there, except to worry he might pull down our bathing suit bottoms under water like he did when we were younger once.
Now it’s completely changed. He is so adorable with his eyes closed and his light, soft wavy brown bangs falling over them. His face is sharp and triangular, like a cat's, and his bangs are way long. I just want to suck all the cuteness out through his mouth. I can't believe what I’m letting myself think about, I can't really believe he could ever like me, or think I’m cute after watching me puke myself, but here we are, his hands warm on my back through my thin, terrible old stripy nightgown; and he kisses me again and again, so gently but still pushing, pushing those lips as if they're trying to push into mine. I could dissolve. Parts of me sort of do.