Casual Intimacy & Physical Touch As A Love Letter Between Friends

At fourteen, I befriended a lesbian — her name was Emma, and she was older, wearing her sexuality more comfortably and close to the skin. At her best friend’s birthday party, after Homecoming, I crawled into bed with her. This was not my first time sleeping next to a girl, but it was the first time I did anything about it. My attraction to women, at this stage, was still a loose and indefinable thing. Occasionally I would catch it in my hand and study it, turning it this way and that under the light before releasing it back into the wilds of my subconscious, among all the other things I couldn’t name yet.

That night, curled up against Emma’s back, I pressed my mouth to the skin of her neck, just below the hairline. I kissed her there once, twice, three times. My arm wrapped around her, her hand softly cupping mine. She shifted to look back at me and smiled. I grinned helplessly back, finally feeling the giddy nausea my friends always claimed they felt in the company of boys.

Emma’s smile was a rejection, albeit a very gentle one. She did not kiss me back. We never fell into a whirlwind romance. Not every teenager will experience some grand high school love story, and that’s okay.

After Emma I realized that, while there were certain types of intimacy and affection I could exchange…