I\u2019d never kissed a man before. Ne\u2019er before a man had I kiss\u2019ed.<\/p>\n
His room was decorated with handwritten postcards.<\/p>\n
\u201cSing a song and enjoy every word.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSavour the tastes of apples and cookies and mushrooms and pies.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSpend twenty minutes every day learning something new and five minutes the next day remembering what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFind the good in every sexual experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019d seen him in a bar, teaching a friend how to tie a tie. He was very patient, very reassuring. Then some other people in the bar asked him to teach them how to tie ties too. Soon he was teaching everyone. When all the ties were tied, he came to me and said, \u201cHow about you?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you, but I\u2019m okay. I don\u2019t wear formal wear.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d love to see you not wearing formal wear,\u201d he said. Then he laughed loudly at his own boldness. And I laughed too. He was very disarming.<\/p>\n
He took me back to his. Said we didn\u2019t have to do anything I didn\u2019t want to do. Asked if I wanted to kiss.<\/p>\n
And after he kissed me, he shouted, \u201cCaprese salad!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cExcuse-moi?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCaprese salad!\u201d he shouted again. He didn\u2019t explain why.<\/p>\n
Every time he kissed me that night, he shouted a different foodstuff. \u201cStrawberry cheesecake!\u201d \u201cBeef lok lok!\u201d \u201cBlack Sesame Froyo!\u201d<\/p>\n
It was the first time I\u2019d ever kissed a man\u2013maybe that\u2019s just what men do when they kiss other men. I told a friend about it afterwards, and they were as baffled as I was.<\/p>\n
I decided to go out and find another man to kiss, see if they did the same thing. The man I met this time was a gardener, I found him in an allotment on a sunny day. When the other men on the allotment took their shirts off because it was so hot, he left his on. I respected him for that. His apartment didn\u2019t have motivational messages on the walls. Maybe he knew other ways to be happy. When we kissed, he didn\u2019t shout a meal out, and I kind of missed it. So I shouted one instead. \u201cPotato dauphinoise!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI beg your pardon?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPotato dauphinoise!\u201d I shouted again. I didn\u2019t explain why. He got it immediately. We kissed some more, and took it in turns to shout food. \u201cMango chutney!\u201d \u201cOreo mugcake!\u201d \u201cOsso bucco!\u201d<\/p>\n
I heard from friends in the following months that more men were shouting foods after kissing, to the point it was strange to kiss a man and not shout food. If you kissed a man and he didn\u2019t shout food and you didn\u2019t shout food, it felt terribly itchy.<\/p>\n
Then there was a newspaper report about it, and shortly after the straights started doing it too, and by then it was kind of tired already. I stopped doing it.<\/p>\n
Instead, every time I ate food, I thought about a kiss. Eat a nice meal, think of a nice kiss, it\u2019s all nice. Try it yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was strange to kiss a man and not shout food.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19152,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-christopher-james"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18400"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19154,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18400\/revisions\/19154"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}