So, that shit that they teach you about him making the first move? Fuck that. Turn around on the dance floor and catch both sides of his face in your palms. Brush back your hair behind your ears while sitting side-by-side in a sticky booth on South University and slide towards him. Accept your too expensive drink order from him and lean over the counter like you’re exchanging secrets. Walk towards the door like you aren’t coming back and then turn around and catch him. Press him to the wall, bite his lip, control his mouth with yours.

Kiss him after you’ve finished your second cup of coffee and your hair is messily falling out of its bun from last night and the salty aftertaste of coffee still stings your lips. Kiss him before your third glass of wine. Kiss him after you’ve finished writing your psych essay. Shut your Macbook, look up and see him with glasses perched on the halfway point of his nose, trying to read about synapses for his exam tomorrow. Kiss him before his exam. Kiss him after his exam.

Dot his collar bone with lip imprints, like when you were younger and broke into your mother’s makeup bag and put on the reddest of the lipstick, then took a sheet of paper to showcase your newest beauty statement. Like this, but gentle, invisible, for him only. Kiss everything but his lips. Touch his eyelashes, his earlobes, his right shoulder, his kneecaps, the freckle next to his belly-button, the scar on his chin.

Don’t kiss him after the movies, when you’re standing in a parking lot on a Tuesday night where there is not enough light to see his face. Don’t kiss him in the rain. Don’t kiss him because he’s expecting it, because it’s the end of the night and he drove you home so it’s the least you could do? Don’t kiss him because he pulled you away from the party and tells you that you look beautiful. Don’t kiss him when he calls you at 1:13am and asks you to come over, only to push you out of the bed at 9am the next day. Don’t kiss him him because of his tears running down his face and staining his neck.

Throw out your kisses to multiples or keep them in a box tucked on a high shelf in your childhood room. Kiss because you’re young, because you want to, because you can, because you love him, because you don’t.