JUST ONE KISS


Just one kiss…but only thinking about it made her tremble like a leaf. Meanwhile, her mother tightened the silky ribbons of her corset so that the wedding dress would fit her waist like a glove. She was so beautiful that she looked unreal.

“My god,” her mother sighed with tears of joy in her eyes. “You look like an angel…”

Her sister frowned and walked out the room without a word. Her sister felt so horribly jealous of her, of her beauty, of her future husband´s wealth that was going to let them live without even having to work, of the bright and promising life that awaited them. If she only knew…

She began to cry in silence while her mother continued to fasten the dress bows to her waist. When all the guests saw her they would surely say that the bride looked like an angel, a swan, a goddess… But she could see the truth under the virginal white dress. Betrayal.

“I cried the day I married your father too,” her mother said to comfort her. “They say that to cry the day of your wedding brings luck”.

Luck? She felt like the most unlucky person in the whole world at the moment. Everything because of a kiss. Just one kiss…he had begged her. And he had unleashed something inside her that was already impossible to contain.

“If you love James even half as much as he loves you, you are going to be immensely happy”.

Yes, she thought, I do love James, I do love James, I do love James…Do I love James?
Then, why couldn’t she forget? Simply erase that instant from her thoughts. Just one kiss…

She wanted so much to have James´ cheerful eyes and his naughty kid smile in front of her, and even so she was unable to put from her mind that gaze, black and piercing like a dagger.

When they met there was not even a trace of the languid and quiet teenager that she knew. That severe, gloomy and pale man like the marble of a mausoleum had cried in her presence. His ice shell had cracked and he had poured the last drops of his soul. Just one kiss, he begged, just one.

She, who never had seen him shed a tear even in the worst moments of his life, first she resisted with all her heart and then she fought against any doubt. “Don’t ask that of me, I am not free.” But it was too late, she was poisoned, intoxicated. She drained the poison from his marble lips and he embraced her like nobody had ever embraced her, with a strength that didn’t seem human. Just one kiss… Can a single kiss erase the memory of all the others?

“Hurry up, dear” her mother urged her, giving the finishing touches to her hairstyle. “Your fiancée must already be waiting for you at the church.”

Her mother headed out, leaving her alone. She looked at her reflection in the dressing room mirror. She hadn’t even noticed that they had done her thick reddish hair in a cascade of curls and that she wore a tiara of white lilies round her forehead. Even with tearful, reddened eyes she certainly was a very beautiful girl.

She thought about James and herself, the perfect couple, the living image of happiness. How lucky that this mirror was not the mirror of Erised. She had the absolute certainty that it would have shown her a very different image at that moment: pale and subtle hands against her skin, ebony eyes, ice lips that would burn her and revive her from her own ashes like a phoenix. Just one kiss…

Life with James will be wonderful, she told herself, he will give me sons, a home, everything I always wanted. James is a good man, honest and brave. He always does what is right. Always? Her memories were overwhelmed by ferocious guffaws and merciless mockeries whispered with malice. By the most cruel insult.

Her eyes filled with tears again. How different things could have been if that insult had not left his lips… But there was no way to turn back time to undo the path that each one had chosen. And what could he offer her if she left this way to accompany him along his? Nothing that she had dreamt of for her future: light and stability. Only the burning of those lips that she had tasted just once but that she could not ever get rid off, even if she shed her skin like a snake. A single embrace, just one kiss…

In the distance, the bells of the church rung out cheerfully summoning guests to her wedding, although she had a feeling that she was going to her own funeral. She felt the wedding dress over her bones like a shroud. A lily came off her headdress and fell on the floor like a bad omen. She picked it up and put it under the neckline of her dress over the heart so she could feel its smooth, fresh touch, like his hands.

She watched her image in the mirror for the last time, wiping away the tears with the back of her hand and trying out a happy smile on herself. Nobody would notice it. All brides cry on their wedding day. She stood up and smoothed her dress so that not even a single crease could reveal that she was not the perfect bride that everyone expected. She took the gorgeous wedding bouquet of white lilies, that her mother had carefully left on a wet cloth so it would keep fresh, and left the house in which all her childhood had gone by. A shiny black limousine decorated with white ribbons was waiting for her, to take her to the church.

She was lucky not to look back, towards the corner of her street and the other that led all the way to Spinner’s End. If she had, who knows, maybe she never would have reached the church where James was waiting for her, all a bundle of nerves.

A tall thin man with black hair and a face of a deathly pallor watched her getting into the car, half concealed in the shadows of the alley. When the car door shut with a crack, the man buried his face in his hands, which were as pale as his face and as elegant as those of a musician.

She was wrong. Time can twist like a curl of hair. That scene had already happened before, many years ago. He was seeing her again like that day in the park, as someone irredeemably predestined to be happy, luminous and unattainable to him, he who could only aspire to observe her from the dark.

What he never came to learn was that, if she had directed her gaze to where he was and she had seen him standing there, maybe she would have dropped the wedding bouquet on the floor and run towards him to wipe away his tears and to break the darkness from which he had watched her all his life. Because while she was getting into the car that was to bring her to her new life, while she filled the central aisle of the church with rose petals until the altar where her perfect future husband was waiting for her, while she put the wedding ring on his finger and pronounced the vows and said “Yes, I do,” she only could think about the taste of his lips and the touch of his hands and that single kiss. Just one kiss…


THE END