I can still taste it; his midnight indulgence of an evil that would linger on me forever.

A person I’d never met before, but he was not one I would soon forget.

The way he looked at me, studying my face, I felt like a foreign object; a beauty he had not yet experienced.

As we walked down the beach, a silence settled over us. Only the crashing of waves on the shore and a stray conversation from a balcony reached my ears.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that this boy was different, different in a way that didn’t quite make sense to me. Maybe it was the way he walked with a slight swagger in his step that seemed to scream confidence. Or maybe it was the way he stole glances at me out of the corner of his eyes when he thought I wasn’t looking. Whatever it was, something about him was contrastive to what I was used to.

The night was the blackest of blacks, such a pure shade of obsidian that I couldn’t tell where the water met the sky. I felt as though I could reach out and touch the somber curtain that had fallen over the rest of the world.

I looked over at him as he took a drag. Something that I had once found repulsive now intrigued me to the point that I could feel it on my own mouth.

Tossing the burning ember to the side he motioned for me to follow him onto the pier. Our shoes had been left quite a ways back down the beach, and the chilled metal floor paneling took my breath away as we walked to the end.

When we reached our destination, he turned to study me again. This time making me a bit uneasy with the anticipation of what would follow.

His eyes met mine and there was a beautiful pause in both of our movements. A beautiful moment in which the world stopped spinning and there was only us existing there on the end of the pier in the middle of the night.
He brought his face closer to my own and began to close his russet brown eyes. And it was in that moment that I was to taste his midnight evil. The sweet bitterness of feeling this strangers lips on my own.
But this kiss was not like so many others before him; no, this one I knew was not only a first kiss, but a last kiss as well. A delicate embrace that at any moment I knew could send me hurtling over the edge into the oblivion known as love.
I mumbled a soft “goodnight” before ending the caress between two that was laced with his midnight cigarette.