“Is there a rash?” I demanded to know, before my friend started examining my lip in a bathroom cubicle. 30 minutes previously I had been chatting to a stranger on a couch, and now here I was, convinced he had taken half of my face with him when he went outside for a smoke. It felt like one of those animal attack programmes you watch at 2pm when you’re dying with the flu. He was the chimp – cute at times, but rather feisty. I was the victim – bloody scarred for life.
I would say it all started very romantically, but he was actually an arrogant arse from the get-go. There were no signs from the universe that this was meant to be, I was just three hours into mixing drinks. We got talking at the bar, moved the vibe to a nearby couch, and voila – instant regret. We made some of the awkward “Have we run out of small talk or are you about to kiss me?” eye contact for a few seconds, and then he kissed me. It all started out basic enough, until he moved to 5thgear in a 2nd gear zone. A few seconds later his tongue was old news as he started taking chunks out of my lips. It was an aggressive grab and pull motion as if he was picking homegrown vegetables. Twenty seconds of pain later, I did the “Aw, I need the bathroom, damn!” before legging it and sending a text to the group chat: “BATHROOM NOW!”
The girls gathered around me and we concluded that I had gone out looking like Kylie Jenner, but I was going to be leaving as a lipless Moaning Myrtle. I hid in the loo with my throbbing mouth for a while, avoiding him completely and working out an escape route. If he did that to those lips, the rest of me needed fragile tape wrapped around it. Sure, I had had some dodgy nights with questionable characters, but jaws was my limit.
I headed back out, my bottom lip feeling as highlighted as a Junior Cert history book. We made that awkward eye contact on the dancefloor again for a moment and within 0.3 seconds the girls had built the great wall of China around me. I will never ever say anyone is a bad kisser, I genuinley believe we all have different tastes, but my god were we eating at different restaurants…