How many kisses in a lifetime—dare we tell? There are so many kinds: dutiful kisses, stolen kisses, desperate kisses. The chef’s kiss that signals perfection. The homesick traveler’s fervent kiss of the ground. Who thought up the first kiss—was it accidental? Kissing, it turns out, is a learned behavior, nowhere near as universal as it seems to those of us who do it.
Fairly soon, this kissing thing became complicated. A kiss can signal betrayal; it can herald death. But it can also break a spell, revive a princess, and transform a frog into her prince. We crave those seconds when our lips find a home on someone else’s body and the separateness slips away. Yet we find the implications and the contagion terrifying. Is it any wonder we alternate between chasing kisses and evading them?
Culturally, kisses mean little now. The raciest kiss is demure compared to all that is permitted, without shame, between strangers. Yet the kiss is more personal than any of those acrobatics. A kiss comes from our face, the display window of the self. It originates in the mouth, where we take in the world. It must be sincere: a kiss given as a lie, to please or deceive, does damage.
A real kiss has integrity. Which is why, while sex workers allow many liberties to be taken, they seldom kiss their clients. A kiss feels more intimate than the deepest recesses of the body, taken over by spasms that drive toward their own completion. Sex fills a need, thus can be transactional and impersonal. A kiss has no agenda, save to create a connection.
The raciest kiss is demure compared to all that is permitted, without shame, between strangers. Yet the kiss is more personal than any of those acrobatics.
The brilliance of the game Kill Fuck Marry is that, forced to choose among three horrific contenders, people will decide to marry, say, Adolph Hitler—because they cannot bring themselves to kiss him. The marriage will be in name only, they explain eagerly. A kiss offers no such loophole.
When a single friend has met someone new, I ask eagerly, “Did you kiss yet? Was it good?”
The question is not as shallow as it sounds.
“When it’s right you can’t say who is kissing whom.”
—Gregory Orr
In 1902, as he inks the first draft of The Art of Kissing, Will Rossiter quotes a dictionary definition: “a salute made by touching with the lips pressed closely together and suddenly parting them.” Is that right? I think I usually start slightly parted. Early in our marriage, I snapped at my husband for puckering up to give me a casual hello kiss: “I am not your great-aunt!”
Rossiter offers a lovely set of instructions:
Take her right hand in yours and draw her gently to you; pass your left hand over her right shoulder, diagonally down across her back, under her left arm; press her to your bosom, at the same time she will throw her head back and you have nothing to do but lean a little forward and press your lips to hers, and then the thing is done. Don’t make a noise over it as if you were firing off shooting crackers, or pounce upon it like a hungry hawk upon an innocent dove, but gently fold the damsel in your arms without smashing her standing collar or spoiling her curls, and by a sweet pressure upon her mouth, revel in the blissfulness of your situation without smacking your lips on it as you would over a glass of beer.
Smacking should always be discouraged. Rossiter also has a few tips based on mouth size: “If she has a regular rose-bud mouth, why, take it all in and throw your whole soul into one kiss, but if her mouth has the appearance of a landscape cut in two by a waterless river, then the safest plan is to take in the corners and byways, and sort of divide your kiss into sections.”
Sex fills a need, thus can be transactional and impersonal. A kiss has no agenda, save to create a connection.
For a shy first kiss, he suggests that you “touch your lips gently to her forehead. She will take this as an exhibition of profound respect. That position gained, working the way down to the lips is as natural and easy as the course of a log sliding down the wood flume of a lumber company.”
Rossiter quotes “a country damsel” describing her first kiss as “a sensation of fighting for her breath in a hot-house full of violets”; he quotes a “western man” saying, “When you feel the pegs drawn right through the soles of your feet, from your boots, that’s kissing, that is.” A neuroscientist might say their experience was identical; all that changes are our analogies.
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“What is there in a Kiss? Millions upon millions of souls have been made happy, while more millions have been cursed and led into misery and ruin by kissing. It is the lure of old Satan, the shame of Judas—the perpetual ‘Flu.’”
—Ruth Van Saun
When we kiss, the world drops away. We are warm lips and darting tongues, soft cheeks or stubble, arched necks, wrapped arms, tingling pressure, tenderness and hunger. We drown in a good kiss, suffocate and come up gasping for air and do not care, because such a kiss insists that we are loved and wanted. Our breath intermingles. For the time it takes a cloud to pass the sun, our souls join.
When we kiss, saliva and mucus slide between our mouths. In each milliliter of saliva squirm one hundred million bacteria, give or take. Kiss for ten seconds, and we transfer eighty million microbes. Among them might lurk respiratory viruses, herpes simplex, the Epstein-Barr virus, strep throat, syphilis, or tuberculosis.
In the early, panicked days of AIDS, a friend reached for me and I froze, terrified to kiss him goodbye. He sensed the recoil and shrugged, said he had only meant to hug me. I went home miserable. Nobody knew, yet, how this thing traveled. In the time before facts, a kiss looked like suicide.
With COVID-19, we had more accurate reasons to fear a kiss. But after more than a year of abstinence, there were reports of rising depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. Not to blame all that on a few missing smackeroos, but if a kiss can turn away wrath, it can turn away sorrow or worry as well.
Kisses, then, are a paradox, rife with germs yet good for us. That extra saliva also acts as a mini carwash, sluicing bacteria off the teeth and deterring plaque. It leaves a little DNA behind (useful for date-rape forensics). Male saliva leaves a little testosterone, jacking up the erotic charge. Kisses dance for all our senses, letting us taste each other, hear the soft rustle of hair and fabric, see pores and freckles, smell garlic or cologne, and feel, through the thinnest layer of skin on our bodies, the friction that is exciting an unusually dense, hypersensitive array of neurons.
The brain, meanwhile, is flooded with dopamine, a huge reward. Oxytocin gushes forth—kissing a grown-up is almost as good as rocking a sleeping infant. Cortisol, the stress hormone, drains away. And kissing cancels anxiety, locking us into the present moment. For once, nobody wants to check their phone.
An extra-passionate kiss burns two calories a minute, double your metabolic rate, and lowers cholesterol. A gymnastic French kiss exercises all the muscles of your face. You can kiss a bonobo to be sure; deep French kisses are their standard greeting. A bird’s kiss, on the other hand, is just a beak tap. Turtles rub noses. Elephants swing their trunks into each other’s mouths.
How did this craziness begin? For humans, some scientists believe it started with mouth-to-mouth regurgitation of food. We are well past the necessity—but have not outgrown the craving.
“The world is born when two people kiss.”
—Octavio Paz
Peter Pan definitely has not grown up. When Wendy offers him a kiss, he holds out his hand to take it.
“Surely you know what a kiss is?” she asks.
“I shall know when you give it to me,” he replies. To save him from embarrassment, she places a thimble in his hand—thimbles symbolizing protection from the pain of being pricked. He then returns her kiss by giving her an acorn button that will later save her life, protecting her from an arrow.
In a dark corner of the bar, a couple are kissing as though it will save their lives. Kissing hungrily, continuously, oblivious to the rest of us, as though drugged out of their minds by the quest for each other’s lips.
An extra-passionate kiss burns two calories a minute, double your metabolic rate, and lowers cholesterol. A gymnastic French kiss exercises all the muscles of your face.
Little kids decide that babies come from kissing. And they sort of do. Smelling a potential mate and tasting their saliva can yield information people are not even aware they are processing. And once they make their choice and pair up, there is a correlation between how often they kiss and how satisfied they feel with their relationship. Separated, they may miss kisses even more than they miss sex.
My husband is out of town as I write this, and I do miss his kisses. I try to imagine us using the remote kissing device recently invented in China. Cheap and easy, it hooks up to a cell phone and uses sensors to relay the pressure and movement from the caller’s mouth. I would bend close to its silicone lips and feel Andrew’s intention in their rubbery, fake tremble.
The lips are marketed as easing the loneliness of a long-distance relationship. But somehow I cannot imagine touching them and feeling what Chloe felt, kissed by Daphnis: “My pulse is beating fast, my heart throbs, it is as if I were about to suffocate, yet nevertheless, I want to have another kiss.”
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“First kiss does the trick. The propitious moment. Something inside them goes pop.”
—James Joyce
That horrid first kiss. Straight to French, and how could a tongue be so thick? What was I supposed to do with the thing, sitting inert an inch into my mouth? An alien presence, even less welcome than the pink plastic retainer I would pop in at bedtime, after I got safely inside the door and could scrub the sticky dried saliva off my lips. Meanwhile, there it was inside me, as dense and rough-textured as a clam. Was I meant to lick it? Gag on it? He pushed it deeper, but I was too naïve to grasp the analogy—or desire what it imitated.
The Rev. Sidney Smith, a wit and an Anglican cleric, would have been disappointed in both of us. A woman’s kiss, he ventured, should be “administered with a warmth and energy; let there be soul in it. If she closes her eyes and sighs immediately after it the effect is greater. She should be careful not to slobber a kiss but give it as a humming-bird runs his bill into a honeysuckle, deep but delicate.”
How did this craziness begin? For humans, some scientists believe it started with mouth-to-mouth regurgitation of food. We are well past the necessity—but have not outgrown the craving.
How I envy anyone whose first kiss was that dreamy. They have a kiss they can remember on their deathbed. My earliest kisses came from unredeemed frogs, their warts cold against my mouth. But as soon as I found myself kissing someone I wanted to kiss, the mystery unfolded. We answered Hemingway’s “Where do the noses go?” easily, both managing to tilt our heads to the right (as 80 percent of humans do instinctively). The twisting of tongues became delightful. I decided, as had seventeenth-century playwright Ben Jonson, that I would like to die kissing.
“Simmer down and pucker up.”
—Arctic Monkeys
In the Roman Catholic liturgy, what was originally the Kiss of Peace has cooled into a handshake or a quick hug. Were kisses too sexual? Too unsanitary? I remember watching my-uncle-the-Jesuit (we were never allowed to forget his higher calling) bend his six-four frame to reverently kiss the altar. If God lives inside us, I thought, then surely we should treat one another at least as reverently as we treat marble?
Instead, the Church continued to fuss about that ancient kiss. In 2014, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Inquisition) ordered the faithful to be less joyful with their wishes of peace. None of these wide happy smiles, no more leaving your pew to greet someone across the aisle, no more priests leaving the altar to mingle with the layfolk. Enthusiasm of this sort was a distraction from the Eucharist.
Enthusiastic kisses do tend to unnerve bystanders.
In his Epigrams, Martial groaned about social life in ancient Rome: “Every neighbor, every hairy-faced farmer presses on you with a strongly scented kiss. Here the weaver assails you, there the fuller and the cobbler, who has just been kissing leather; here the owner of the filthy beard.”
Nor was Lucretius impressed: compared to eating, kissing seemed “a grotesque and vain effort at such incorporation. The striving, interlaced bodies and the joining of mouths, the furious mixture of saliva and the biting of lips, all this is as futile as it is indecorous.”
Morality crusaders in 1896 agreed. After watching the first romantic kiss on screen—for eighteen long, silent seconds—they pronounced it “absolutely disgusting.”
Quora is full of people worried that there is something wrong with them because they do not like kissing their partner, and the internet is full of lessons in how to kiss, as though it were an especially tricky DIY project. By insisting that the majority’s norms be enforced, we make the simple complicated.
An eight-year-old once told psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, “I hate it when people kiss, their mouths get muddled up.” In The Kiss, Brancusi muddles entire bodies, merging the abstracted man and woman into a single piece of stone. We long to be muddled together—a sweet reprieve from separateness—yet we fear losing our separate identity. Pulling back from a thorough, passionate, breathless kiss, we swipe at our lips, tug at our shirt, pull our matter-of-fact self back into place.
Some people do not want to be kissed at all; the touch feels invasive, uncontrollable, dangerous. As a child, I had an uncle who always insisted, with a loud boozy cackle, that I kiss him on the lips. I recoiled, tilted my head away, shy and unused to anyone’s lips on mine. I came from a family of cheek- and forehead-kissers; lips were for dreamy boyfriends, years in the future.
Little kids decide that babies come from kissing. And they sort of do. Smelling a potential mate and tasting their saliva can yield information people are not even aware they are processing.
Sometimes, despite all my evasive maneuvers, he got his kiss. A few seconds of ick; harmless, I suppose. But what if I had been abused by someone in the past? Or raped? What if I had a form of autism, and that contact jolted my senses like a scream or a slap? What if I were phobic about germs and sure he had just sickened me?
It is a significant part of the human tragedy that desire and repulsion are parceled out so differently. What one craves disgusts the other. Can love coexist with such dissimilar needs? A seventeen-year-old boy told Phillips, “You can’t really love someone that you don’t love kissing.” Which seems unfair. What about all the accidents of fate—breath, salivary output, height, angles? I want to think romance capable of transcending idiosyncrasy. But could I have fallen in love and not yearned to be kissed?
Kisses are so universal, we candied them. Yet Quora.com is full of people worried that there is something wrong with them because they do not like kissing their partner, and the internet is full of lessons in how to kiss, as though it were an especially tricky DIY project. By insisting that the majority’s norms be enforced, we make the simple complicated.
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“Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul.”
—Marilyn Monroe
Too often, kisses are currency. We kiss up, kiss ass, kiss babies to get elected, kiss the pope’s ring. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev kissed East German leader Erich Honecker on the lips to demonstrate the unity of their countries. Celebrities auction off their kisses: Kate Moss kissed Sharon Stone for $53K and Jemima Kahn for $120K; George Clooney sold a kiss for $350K.
Auctions are our version of the kissing booth. Our kissing games swipe right. But travel back in time and imagine yourself blushing as you wait your turn for Spin the Bottle or Post Office or Seven Minutes in Heaven. Who will you kiss? Who will kiss you? Will you swoon or scrub your lips? There were all sorts of words for kissing—bussing, smacking, smooching, pecking, snogging, canoodling—back when it was a sought-after delight and not just an incidental step on a fast route to bed. Travel back a little further, and you are standing at an Irish kissing festival, watching men gleefully kiss every woman in sight. Poets are pronouncing kisses “the balm of love,” “Cupid’s seal,” “the first and last of joys,” “the nectar of Venus,” “the pledge of bliss,” “the stamp of love.”
Now imagine yourself Erasmus in 1497, amazed to arrive in England and find people kissing hello and goodbye. “Wherever you move there is nothing but kisses—and if you had but once tasted them! how soft they are! how fragrant! on my honor you would not wish to reside here for ten years only, but for life!”
Erasmus knew how to appreciate a kiss. So did Gustav Klimt: he and his lover may well have been the models for The Kiss, in which two people kneel in a field of wildflowers, dressed in gold robes, the man cradling the woman’s face, her arms wrapped around his neck, her face tranquil, her eyes closed in sensuous bliss. Compare that to the pop art painting by Roy Lichtenstein, Kiss II, which was done half a century later on this side of the Atlantic. These lovers take the same position, but they are drawn in bold comic-book lines and primary colors. Gilded romance has become an aggressive drama.
Still, we have never vulgarized kissing, as we have so many other gestures of desire. “Suck face” is as slangy as it gets, and while tacky, the term is reasonably accurate. The sucking is a foretaste, if you will, of oral sex, while the presence of a tongue mimics—you already know this. Nobody contradicted Freud when he called kissing “a softened hint at the sexual act.”
Today’s sex need not be secret. The unfortunate corollary is that our kisses are less momentous and less thrilling. Given how intimate the act is, this loss of import seems a shame.
“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.”
—Ingrid Bermann
I kiss our dog’s cheeks, the top of his nose, the fuzz on the top of his head. I ought to apologize. Kissing is not his way; poodles do not pucker. Still, he knows this is my way of demonstrating affection, and therefore tolerates it so patiently, I can convince myself he likes it.
That is important, because if kissing is anything, it is reciprocal. Try kissing yourself, even just the back of your hand. It feels goofy and utterly unsatisfying, stripped of all significance. Kissing oneself is as pointless as tickling oneself. Unless you are kissing a teddy bear or a baby, you will be, you must be, kissed back. “In kissing do you render or receive?” asks Shakespeare’s Cressida, and the answer is both. Lips meet as though pulled by magnets, a force so mutual and powerful that “rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we sank and never found the strength to rise up again.”
That observation is Ann Patchett’s, which makes me wonder if she grew up Catholic. We Catholic girls could kiss for hours. Kissing was not the first leg of the journey; it was the destination. We steamed up car windows and rolled off sofas and snuck kisses in stairwells and never ever wanted to stop. Because the frustration was never ever eased.
After I met my future husband, I showed up at a grad school seminar with such a bad razor burn that a clear fluid seeped from the reddened skin of my cheeks, shellacking my face as it dried. Still blissed, I shrugged off my classmates’ smirks. By then, I was no longer chaste and devout; Andrew had been the one determined to take our relationship slowly, build a friendship before sex distracted us. Regretting previous flings, he had waited a solid month to kiss me. I almost dumped him, sure he must be gay. By the time he explained his reasons, though, we were friends, relaxed and honest with each other, and that first kiss was mind-blowing.
Kisses you have to wait for usually are.
By the time Niles and Daphne kissed on Frasier, the world was ready to applaud. Same with Scully and Mulder on The X-Files. Scarlett and Rhett. Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in Notorious, whose kiss, one of the longest in film history, lasts three solid minutes.
In the famous, fraught kiss on the beach in From Here to Eternity, Deborah Kerr has finally met a man not like all the rest. How does she explain this to him? “Nobody ever kissed me the way you do.”
I love any movie scene in which the two people cannot stop kissing, so they try to strip off their clothes with their lips still glued together. Somehow the men I was with always managed an orderly disrobing, but those scenes are how it feels: locked together by desire.
• • •
Too many kisses are throwaways, pecks devoid of feeling or tokens of intimacy dulled by repetition. And the air kiss! Who invented that travesty? When Europeans kiss side to side, their cheeks touch, and the kiss is repeated two, three, even four times, leaving a sense of completion. Here, pretentious society types dart near each other’s ears and say mwah, mwah.
We might learn from the French, whose President Emmanuel Macron melted a little ice from Melania Trump’s hand by kissing it in greeting. French symphony conductor Stéphane Denève dizzies women young and old by kissing their hands. Why would such a simple, platonic gesture carry such a charge? It conjures a more romantic era, I suppose, and it conveys a certain deference, a respect no longer automatically accorded. Or maybe the magic comes from the feel of a stranger’s lips pressed against your skin—a touch you would never otherwise feel from this person?
In the famous, fraught kiss on the beach in From Here to Eternity, Deborah Kerr has finally met a man not like all the rest. How does she explain this to him? “Nobody ever kissed me the way you do.”
The Kama Sutra directs us to the places for more intimate kissing: the forehead, the eyes, the cheeks, the throat, the breasts, the lips, and the interior of the mouth. It describes the turned kiss (gently turning the other’s face upward), the pressed kiss (the lower lip pressed with much force), the clasping kiss, which encloses both the lover’s lips between one’s own (and is only to be taken from a man who has no mustache), and the “fighting of the tongue.” Anticipating western psychology, the Sutra calls a kiss bestowed upon a child, a picture, or a figure in the presence of one’s lover a “transferred kiss.”
Yet actors did not kiss onscreen in Bollywood until the 1990s, and in 2006, couples were beaten by police for necking in public.
Kissing is enculturated with all possible contradictions.
“The kiss between the mucous membrane of the lips of two people is held in high esteem among many nations, in spite of the fact that the parts of body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract.”
—Sigmund Freud
In 1897, anthropologist Paul d’Enjoy noted that the Chinese seemed horrified by Western mouth-to-mouth kissing, perceiving it as a kind of cannibalism.
In parts of Sudan, the mouth is thought of as the portal to the soul, and a kiss is to be feared, lest it steal one’s spirit.
After assuming that the romantic, sexual kiss came close to being universal, anthropologists found out it was present in a minority (only 46 percent) of the 168 cultures they sampled.
So where is it pervasive? “The more socially complex the culture, the higher frequency of romantic-sexual kissing.” Maybe because mate selection is up to us, and we have to sleuth out compatibility?
Kissing is learned, not instinctive, says anthropologist Vaughn Bryant. References to people touching with their lips did not appear until 1500 BCE, in Sanskrit, in the Vedic scriptures. Even then, there were more references to people rubbing noses, and kissing was described as inhaling each other’s soul. Not until the epic Mahābhārata do we find consistent references to lip kissing.
After assuming that the romantic, sexual kiss came close to being universal, anthropologists found out it was present in a minority (only 46 percent) of the 168 cultures they sampled.
Noses do make more sense. As it is, they get in the way. Also, they would not need to be brushed or minted to appeal. But I try to imagine sex without kissing and come up empty. Maybe those other cultures kissed and just felt too bashful to write it down?
I will cover my lips with a pandemic mask and see if I can adapt. What a difficult custom to unlearn.
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“Ah why refuse the blameless bliss? Can danger lurk within a kiss?”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In the middle of Times Square, a sailor bends a nurse backward and kisses her soundly, celebrating the end of World War II. A Life photographer captures the moment, but not their names. The nurse comes forward after the magazine publishes the photo—as do eleven men, all claiming to be the sailor who smooched her. Finally, in 2007, a forensic expert watches the kiss restaged and identifies the correct man.
What interests me is not who these two people were but how the rest of the world itched to know who they were. That kiss was instantly iconic. It spelled exuberance and shared relief. It said the world was safe again.
Chekhov’s “The Kiss” kindles a different kind of hope. After the shy, bespectacled officer was surprised by an accidental kiss, “an intense groundless joy took possession of him.” He began to dream of a life married to this unknown woman, as though the very possibility of a kiss can remake us and transform our future.
When the spell wore off, though, and he could no longer feel the peppermint tingle her lips left on his flesh, he gave up on ever seeing her again. You feel the weight settle back on his shoulders, the chill return to his blood. You wonder if he will ever be kissed again.
This is what I fear about growing old. You stop getting kissed. Much of the world never gets kissed, though. Prisoners. Monks. People who are ill. Anyone who is not in a relationship. The rest of the world looks past this loneliness.
A kiss can be an act of charity.
Once, after winning a bet, a friend announced that I owed him a kiss. Laughing, I agreed. We were both married, but one kiss? What harm could it do? This was as close as I ever intended to get to cheating. The prospect of The Kiss took on an illicit glow. Where would we kiss? The occasion required a degree of privacy, but not too much privacy. I would wear good perfume; I would avoid garlic like a vampire. I had not properly kissed anyone but my husband in twenty years.
Much of the world never gets kissed, though. Prisoners. Monks. People who are ill. Anyone who is not in a relationship. The rest of the world looks past this loneliness.
I was ready, eager even. And then I panicked. What was I doing? Both of us scheming for this kiss was giving it way too much importance, and suddenly I felt shy, nervous, even squeamish. It did feel unfaithful, which was ludicrous. Could a kiss somehow weaken me, change me, alter my affections? Would it make us self-conscious with each other and smash our easy rapport?
My stumbling explanation explained nothing, because I still did not understand my own reluctance. He brushed it off, giving me just enough grief about it to normalize our friendship again.
Three years later, he was dead—suddenly, tragically. And a refusal that once seemed prudent looked priggish and stingy.
“That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.”
—George Eliot
When my mother died, I kissed her forehead. Her skin was cool, the wrinkles smoothed by death’s hand, but not yet cold and clammy. It was still soon enough for death to seem like a trance, not a dull fixity, and I had an eerie flash of fantasy: what if the kiss woke her?
It did not. In my grief, I began kissing her stuff. A tomboy, but an elegant one, she kept her minimal possessions immaculate. As I sorted clothes to give away—and later, whenever I encountered something I had saved—I brought the glove or silk scarf or cashmere sweater to my lips. The kissing was instinctive, almost furtive. I breathed in her Shalimar, touched what she had touched, felt her in a way my fingertips could not. I was pressing my lips, bright with nerve endings, against her whole life.
Those kisses felt worshipful. Now that I no longer had to rebel or bristle or draw boundaries, I was free to venerate her. I thought of a medieval Madonna statue, its colorful painted wood softened by the centuries, its folded hands and creased robe blurred by millions of eager mouths. What a heavenly way to end, worn away by kisses.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
