First Kiss
When I finally kissed her, I tasted my own blood.
It wasn’t fresh. I could taste the grit of sugar from an overly sweet blackberry bramble. I could taste grease from this morning’s breakfast. I could taste sour fear. But I couldn’t taste her.
It didn’t make me want to stop. She was enthusiastic and sloppy, her tongue tracing the outline of my lips before searching the inside of my mouth. I’ve had people kiss me harder. I’ve had others knock my teeth with their teeth, or bite my lip too hard, and I bled then, but it didn’t feel like this.
I want to lose myself in her frenetic embrace, in this dark room with blasting music and closed eyes, until I am totally consumed by the feeling of her mouth, her skin, her scent. But all I taste is my own blood.
“You’re so fucking hot,” she murmurs against my cheek. She’s pressed all the way against me—fitting her knee between my legs, pushing her breasts against mine, breathing against my sweaty neck—and I am slick all over. I don’t just want to touch her—I want to consume her, I want to grind our bones together until there's nothing left of either of us. She’s kissing me like she feels the same.
My heart must be pumping, but I don’t feel it over the bass of the music. When I was a kid, I’d sit with my bloody noses and swallow any hot blood I could feel welling in my sinus. My teachers told me not to, but I couldn’t help it. It was comforting, and it started the bad habit of doing things adults told me not to.
She must have noticed by now? That it’s not just sweat, not just saliva, that rusted metal taste, running out of my mouth now, out of her mouth now too. I’m swallowing as much as I can, but she’s letting it ooze from between her lips, my bloody spit beginning to pool in the well of her chest. Her tongue slowly glides and presses along my teeth, pushing, like she’s looking for something loose. She works my gums until my teeth itch. They feel too tight in my mouth. I squirm in her arms, wheezing as blood leaks out of my nose, covering her dark lips with mealy, viscous warmth. I’m lightheaded, but I’m so close, I’m so close I can feel it and I just need her to push a little further, find that one spot and she finds does, it’s an incisor it’s too tight and relief is right around the bend just please please please
She presses her tongue on that one spot, her knee on the other, and I moan. Really, I gurgle. Back and forth, her tongue tries to loosen it. Agonizingly slow, tantalizingly slow, it’s uprooting, pushing against the sweet torn flesh of my mouth like grave dirt. I’m on the edge of it, and then- the sound of suction. A wave of relief takes me, and I come, splattering gore as I cry out. In the final moment, I flick my tongue and shoot the tooth right into the back of her throat. She closes her mouth in surprise.
She pulls back, and we look at each other in the post-kiss clarity. The club is dark, but the reek is impossible to ignore. She’s disgusting, covered in blood and slime. She smells like rotten pennies. But then, she smiles at me, jaw clenched tight, her teeth clean and shiny in comparison to the rest of her. She licks her lips and opens her mouth. My tooth, my bloody incisor, sat right in the center of her tongue.
I hold her gaze, hoping she decides to keep me inside her for a long time. Finally, she swallows.
© 2022 Nadia Shammas
About the Author
Nadia Shammas is a queer Palestinian-American author and game developer from Brooklyn, now living in Toronto, Canada. She’s best known for her speculative work in comics and prose, primarily Squire, a YA Middle Eastern fantasy graphic novel co-created with Sara Alfageeh. Nadia particularly loves working with body horror, hauntings, and the uncanny. When not writing, she attempts to win the love of her cats, Lilith and Dash.