And Then He Kissed Her

How to admit to herself what she wanted. And how to ask for it

She was a fallen woman now, she realized, but she felt no regret, no shame. Just an incredible, overpowering happiness that opened and blossomed inside her like a flower turning upward toward the sun. This was what she’d hoped for, coming here to night. It was the happiness of being alive, of feeling vibrant and beautiful. Yes, she was a fallen woman now. Emma began to laugh out loud. How wonderful.

Being good all the time was a bad bargain

She stared up into his face, and in the sudden silence, everything else in the world seemed to fade away into insignificance. Everything but him.

“Every time I become thoroughly exasperated with you, you manage to get around me somehow. Soften me up or say just the right thing or make me laugh.”

Aunt Lydia would have returned the books. Her father would have burned them. Emma kept them

He slid his hand to her cheek, and she gave a gasp of shock. “What are you doing?” she whispered.

He bent his head and paused with his lips an inch from hers. “Committing a serious breach of etiquette,” he murmured.

And then he kissed her.

The moment his mouth

When you listened to your heart instead of your instincts, what happened?”

“I got married.”

He shook his head and made a sound of tsk-tsk. “Such language from London’s greatest arbiter of proper decorum. What would people say?”

Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score; Then to that twenty, add a hundred more.

Robert Herrick, 1648