In preparation for Valentine’s Day, I’ll be treating you (my truly lovely M.O.O.S.E. readers) to a brave re-telling to what began a very dry sex life.

Now before you grab your barf bags, know this: It all started with my first kiss, with my first girlfriend, down the street from my house.

And I was absolutely terrified.

-Miracle of miracles, I was an awkward 16-year-old with a cute girlfriend. It took two weeks to sum up the courage to ask her out. Now that she was mine, I was too terrified to kiss her. It was a post-puberty Catch 22 of the most awful kind!

Movies taught me everything I knew about kissing. They taught me that 1) ugly people never kiss 2) kissing leads to sex and 3) kissing rocks. Then Coca-Cola somehow related kissing to sucking down an icy Coca-Cola.

Then the girlfriend called after school hysterical. While she was blubbering about family, school, life, ect., I was thinking about the night, and about the sweet kiss that was mine for the taking.

Imagine a hunter, waiting in the reeds for a duck to float by. I was the hunter. She was the duck – my sweet duck – for me to plant a smooch.

The sky was dark – the moon cast shadows on the cracked sidewalks of my street. We walked together, side-by-side with our hands in our pockets.

About a block and a half away from my house, I stopped. She stopped. Here we go, Casey! THE TIME IS NOW!

I titled my head, leaned over, glanced at her pretty face and planted a quick one with my eyes open. They never closed.

It was the shortest kiss in the history of kisses. I was standing in front of my neighbor’s house, scared, happy, elated and locked in the longest second of my life.

My kiss was nothing like the kisses in the movies. There was no sex, we were not super models, and it didn’t taste like Coca-Cola.

It tasted like love. It tasted like affection. It tasted like the passion that can only be felt at 16, alive and on top of the world.

We said goodbye. I walked back to my house, and said hello to the beginning of my sexual career.

It slapped me in the face.

Happy Valentine’s Day.