The heat gets to you after a while—it gets to everyone. Day after day, flushed and overheated, half-naked. There is something about the sweating summer streets that can turn a person’s thoughts toward the gutter. Finally, all that lust combusts into kissing. It’s an inevitability of summer, like ice cream.
Indoors, kissing leads somewhere—sex, babies, a fling, a marriage—or to something you’ll regret in the morning. Outdoors, on the street on a balmy night, draped over a car, or sitting on a stoop, or pressed up against a brownstone, no such rules apply. Making out on the street is a charmed circle, an end in itself, a private universe of lips.
You’re lost in plain sight, lost in the big city—that’s the fabled anonymity of New York—until someone comes by and says, “Get a room!”
They’re just jealous.