She remembered a time when kissing him had been easy.
They had dated for three years before spending four more apart, in a long-distance relationship. There had been making out, playful sex, the feeling that wanting each other did not need much explaining. During the years apart, he became a Christian. Later, they married.
She had known what it felt like to kiss the man who was now her husband. That was what made the unfamiliarity so strange.
After they married, they had sex. She initiated making out, and something about the kiss felt wrong to her. She could not quite name it. He seemed uncomfortable, as though he did not really want that part.
She brought it up afterwards. His explanation was that it was ticklish.
Such a small word for something she had been turning over in her mind.
She even asked about her breath. That was not the reason he gave. She wondered about his new beliefs, too, although she did not know whether they had anything to do with it. She did not object to his faith. She was trying to understand what had happened to something they used to enjoy together.
Making out more or less disappeared.
The other kisses did not. In fact, he kissed her more often than she kissed him. That detail sat awkwardly beside everything she missed. It would have been simpler to say he never kissed her, but it would not have been true.
He did kiss her. She no longer felt the same way kissing him back.
Sex had become infrequent as well. Still, when she described what she longed for, she kept coming back to the making out. She missed feeling wanted in that particular way. She missed the connection she remembered, and she could feel the absence changing her own attraction to him.
They had not found a solution. She had more or less accepted that he did not like it now, although acceptance had not made the old kisses less easy to remember.
There were still kisses in the marriage.
She missed the ones she used to want to keep going.
