It started out with a kiss. How did it end up like this? It was only a kiss.

It was only a kiss.

We had met back in the summer of 2005 at a party held by a mutual friend. There was a barbecue and it was populated by people of the age somewhere between university and marriage. The floating masses, those who still were in the mindset of a student but knew they should be further ahead.

In our heads, as children, we sometimes imagine we will be married and settled by this age. My parents married and had my older sister when they were nineteen. I guess I assumed the same would be true for me, although, as I’d aged, I’d thought children would never happen for me. I didn’t want them. I was happy being young, free and single.

She brushed past me, chestnut hair cascading down her back, the most beautiful girl I’d ever met. My mates, believing me to have no chance with her, bet me fifty quid that I couldn’t pull her by the end of the night, doubling the prize if I slept with her. I took them up on their offer and followed the girl inside.

We talked. She had the most beautiful name, the longest eyelashes, the cutest nose, the silkiest voice. I moved in for the kiss and she accepted, one long-nailed hand in my blonde hair, the other still clutching her vodka and coke.

It was only a kiss.

We slept together that night and, for the first time, I didn’t fuck, I didn’t screw and I didn’t even have sex. We made love. It was incredibly romantic but I could never tell the guys. I thought that that was it. She left in the morning and I didn’t see her again. At least, not for a couple of months.

And now, I lay in bed, with her dozing quietly beside me, and my son jumping up and down on the end of the bed as I try to read the paper, I wonder where the time went. What happened? I never wanted children. I never wanted to be married before the age of thirty. I knew deep down that I was yet to even fall in love. I’d never loved her. I’d stayed with her because she was pregnant, because it was the right thing to do.

It started out with a kiss. How did it end up like this? It was only a kiss.

It was only a kiss.