About a Girl

  And then he kissed me back.

  It was slow at first and I wasn’t quite sure it was happening but I was too scared to pull away. And then I felt the slightest movement against my face, the tickle of warm breath on my wet lips. For ten years I had wondered what it would feel like to kiss Charlie Wilder on the mouth, and now I knew. It felt spectacular. The arm around my shoulders tightened and his other hand crept up to my face, cradling my cheek in his palm while our lips became better acquainted. I wrapped my arms around his back and ignored the little voice in my head that was shouting, ‘And now we’ll never, ever let go!’ As well as the vodka, I could taste the beer on his breath. I hated beer but I didn’t care. I was kissing Charlie Wilder and Charlie Wilder was kissing me.

  ‘Wait.’ Unable to stop myself, I pulled away with a pained expression. ‘You’re not kissing me because I’m sad, are you?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied, his voice broken and just short of breath enough to make my heart pound.

  ‘And you’re not kissing me because you’ve been drinking?’ I just could not stop myself from asking these ridiculous questions. Who gave a shit if he was kissing me because he’d been drinking? I hated myself so much sometimes.

  ‘Maybe? A little bit,’ he admitted, leaning back in for another kiss. ‘Can you stop overthinking this now, please?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, pressing a smile against his lips. ‘Have you met me?’

  The teenagers across the way started whooping at us approximately four seconds into the second kiss, and although the sun setting across the mill pond was as close as my village ever came to beautiful and romantic, they were very, very off-putting.

  ‘Back to yours?’ Charlie asked. I took a deep breath and held it in for a moment. He wasn’t just suggesting we go home, he was suggesting we Go Home Together. ‘Tess?’

  ‘Where else are we going to go?’ I asked lightly, pretending I wasn’t absolutely bricking myself. I hadn’t had sex in almost two years, and while we were being entirely honest, it had not been a good experience. This wasn’t just a casual shag after a rubbish party to check I still knew how to do it. This was Charlie. I was going to have sex with Charlie.

  ‘There’s always the back seat of my car.’

  I pulled away to look at him, not sure whether he was joking or not. Nor sure whether I wanted him to be joking or not.

  ‘But while I know that would continue the dodgy teenage theme of the evening, I think I’d rather take you to bed,’ he said, his voice was all low and rough. I’d never heard it like that before. ‘If it’s not too weird?’

  It was weird. This whole thing was weird. I was sitting on a bench wearing a gold sequinned miniskirt, kissing a boy I’d been dreaming about kissing ever since the first night I’d lain on my plastic-covered mattress in my hall of residence. I should have said it could wait. I should have said no, we couldn’t sneak into my parents’ house and have sex on my bottom bunk. But where was the fun in that? Besides, I’d had a third of a half-bottle of own-brand vodka and Charlie Wilder wanted to have sex with me. I was eighteen again. Whatever happened next, I blamed the sequins.

  ‘It’s not weird at all,’ I said, practically jumping off the bench and dragging him down the street. ‘Let’s go.’

  And just like that, we were together.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The next morning, I woke up wrapped in the same pale blue duvet cover I’d left behind when I’d moved to uni and a pair of arms that were brand new. Too scared to move, I tried to keep my breathing slow and even. I was in bed with Charlie. I was in bed with Charlie and neither of us was wearing any clothes. And the reason we weren’t wearing any clothes was because for the last twelve hours we had been at it.

  I closed my eyes on my childhood room, my exam certificates hanging on the walls, my favourite photos lining the shelves, and tried to commit as much of the night to memory as possible. It was hard to keep the events straight, not because I’d been drunk but because I was suffering from a distinct case of what Amy always referred to as Boink Brain. Nothing fogged up your memory like a good shag. I was completely overloaded with happiness, and, given how long it was since I’d last had sex, every part of me was aching. Happily, like everyone said, it was just like riding a bike. A really, really fun bike. I remembered sneaking into the dark, empty house, checking for my parents and then kissing in the kitchen, fumbling with buttons and zips, taking far too long to get up the stairs, eventually finding my room. It was strange to know someone so well, to know everything about them, and then find yourself in a situation where you knew nothing. I had never seen Charlie naked. I had no idea what to expect in the trouser department. I had no idea how it would be.

  More than once, Amy had tried to counsel me out of my Charlie crush by telling me that he was too nice to be any good in bed, that it would be like shagging my brother. As it was, I didn’t have a brother, but if that was how incest went down, I could see why it was so popular in the Deep South. Amy had been wrong. The sex was wonderful. Beautiful. It was like film sex, all deep and meaningful and very, very nice. I pressed my hand into Charlie’s, smiling lazily as his fingers instinctively curled around mine. Mine. He was mine.

  ‘Hey.’

  I felt him rather than heard him, his words tickling my ear.

  ‘So.’ He snuggled up closer to me and I silently congratulated myself on having bothered to shave my legs the day before. ‘That happened.’

  ‘That did happen,’ I replied, too nervous to turn round and face him. Naked in the dark was one thing. Naked the next day with slept-in make-up and morning breath? Quite another. ‘Couple of times, actually.’

  We lay quietly and I was glad he couldn’t see my smile. I looked like the cat that had got all of the canaries and quite possibly a parrot. I’d only been awake for a couple of minutes, but already it was like I’d woken in a whole new world. A new fantastic point of view. Aladdin and his magic carpet could piss off. I didn’t have a job and I lived with a psycho, but it didn’t matter. I had Charlie. My best friend, and now my ? well, whatever he was, he was the best at something else too.

  With a quick kiss to my shoulder, he rolled away, leaving my back cold and bereft. Since he was stuck on the wall side of a single lower bunk bed, there wasn’t really anywhere for him to go. Awkward.

  ‘Amy is going to laugh and laugh,’ he said after a moment. ‘And then laugh.’

  I pulled the covers up over my boobs, ran a finger under each eye to minimize any mascara fall-out and rolled over to look at my conquest.

  ‘She is?’ I tried to sound as innocent as possible. ‘You think?’

  ‘Oh God, yeah.’ Charlie did not look changed. There was no beatific glow about his face. He was not gazing at me with a love so powerful it dared not speak its name. He was pretty much just laughing. Ha ha ha. ‘We will never hear the end of it. I feel like she’s been expecting this for ever.’

  ‘You do? She has?’

  In his defence, I had a lot more evidence to draw on than Charlie did. For the past ten years, Amy had watched me pine and swoon and sulk and had routinely slapped me around the back of the head whenever I’d so much as mentioned the elephant in the room that was Me and Charlie. Or ‘Chess’ as I may or may not have named us. In public, when it was the three of us, it was different. She did make fun of us. She mocked our in-jokes and routinely told us to get a room whenever we indulged in some platonic snuggling. From Charlie’s perspective, Amy had been scoffing at this non-relationship for ever. He had no idea that she was counselling me behind closed doors. He had no idea how I was feeling. Which meant there was a chance he didn’t feel the same. Gulp. Puke. Gulp.

  Raking a hand through his beautifully fucked-up hair, Charlie shrugged and yawned.

  ‘Maybe we just, you know, don’t tell her,’ he said, looking so terribly casual as he went about breaking my heart. ‘Just until we’ve worked this all out.’

  ‘Hmm, that’s one idea.’ I edged ever so slightly away. ‘But actua
lly, it would really help if you could clear something up for me. What is “this”?’

  There. My life was complete. I had made air quotes in bed with Charlie Wilder. Amy would actually have had a stroke if she could have seen what had just happened.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, easy as anything.

  A very big part of me just wanted to nod, smile and shut up. I had Charlie in my bed. We had spent a good part of the night making love – not shagging but definitely, one hundred percent gazing into each other’s eyes, holding hands, Barry White in the background making love, with an emphasis on the ‘lurve’. That part of me did not like to make waves and was fairly certain that if I just lay there quietly, he would remember he had a penis, that he had put it in me fairly recently and would possibly put it in me again. Everyone knew that was the path to true love. But there was another very tiny part of me that really didn’t like the sound of this ‘I don’t know’ and ‘Maybe we shouldn’t tell your best friend in the entire world that we boned.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  It just came out. Honestly, I had no control over it.

  ‘I’m not trying to be a dickhead, Tess.’ Charlie sat up, hit his head on the top bunk and promptly lay back down. ‘I’m not pretending it didn’t happen, but we need to be realistic about this. We’ve been mates for years. We can’t just shag once and go back to being friends like nothing happened. That’ll just get weird.’

  ‘I didn’t say I wanted to,’ I said, trying to keep my voice down, but since I was me, it was hard. ‘I don’t want to pretend it never happened.’

  ‘Good. Because it was amazing.’ He reached over to stroke my arm and gave me a silly half-smile that I half recognized. ‘We just need to work it all out and I’d rather do that without Amy getting involved. She’ll be marching us down the aisle and getting ordained online or something.’

  Wedding jokes. He was making wedding jokes. How to send a girl from bad pukey sick feeling in her stomach to good pukey sick feeling in her stomach in one easy step. And, little did he know, Amy was already ordained online. Handy.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ I threw in a light laugh and a toss of the head for good measure, sort of a cross between a total sex goddess and a smallish pony. ‘I get it.’

  ‘It’s just tricky, the whole friends with benefits thing,’ he said with a smile, combing his fingers through my hair. Or at least he tried to comb his fingers through my hair. Long curly hair plus an all-night sex session equals many, many tangles. ‘It never seems to work, and you’re my best mate. I don’t want you to get hurt in this.’

  Ohhh.

  It was amazing how much damage you could do with so few words. Friends with benefits. Best mate. And thank goodness he didn’t want me to get hurt. THANK GOODNESS.

  ‘I think I need a shower,’ I said, grabbing a towel off the radiator and holding it against myself as I clambered out of bed. ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Wait, you’re not pissed off, are you?’

  I span on my heel and stared down at the man in my bed. Tall, cute and, as it turned out, a bloody good shag. And weirdly, it felt like that was all I knew about him.

  ‘Why did we, you know …’ I started, not sure where I was going. ‘Last night. Why did you have sex with me?’

  ‘Because you kissed me.’ Charlie was doing a much better job of keeping his voice down than I was and looked as though he would really like me to try harder.

  ‘And if I hadn’t kissed you, we would never have …’ I just couldn’t bring myself to say it again.

  ‘I don’t know, because you did.’ He was talking to me, but his eyes were definitely scanning the room for his boxers. ‘Is this just regular post-sex crazy girl behaviour or what?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’ I snatched up his pants and threw them in his face. M&S cotton boxers, definitely bought by his mother. ‘Because I don’t have enough casual sex to know whether or not it turns me into a crazy girl.’

  ‘Can you not shout?’ he mumbled, pulling the boxers off his face. ‘Your mum is going to hear.’

  ‘And we wouldn’t want that, would we?’ I bellowed. Not shouting, bellowing. ‘We wouldn’t want anyone to know that I forced myself on you.’

  ‘Bloody hell, can you calm down?’ Charlie hissed, shuffling out of the bed and trying to put his giant hands on my shoulders. ‘What is wrong with you? All I said was I didn’t want to tell Amy that we slept together until we’d had time to work out what was going on. What’s not OK about that?’

  ‘Everything,’ I replied. I would not cry. I would not cry. I would not cry.

  I didn’t want a shower any more. I just wanted to leave. Shaking his hands off my shoulders, I pulled on my knickers, my skinny jeans and a baggy black jumper Amy had the foresight to include in my packing. While crying.

  ‘Don’t, please.’ His voice had changed from confused and angry to confused, angry and a little bit scared. ‘Just sit down and talk to me.’

  ‘I don’t want to sit down,’ I said, my eyes burning bright red. ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to work out what’s going on. I already know what’s going on. You’re a wanker.’

  ‘Why am I a wanker?’ Charlie asked, incredulous, as I grabbed my handbag and checked for all the essentials. It felt like it would really ruin the moment if I had to manhandle myself into my massive bra, so I picked it up and threw it in my handbag instead. ‘What have I done that you didn’t want me to do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said as I curled my hair around itself and fastened it in a topknot. ‘I did want to kiss you and I did want to sleep with you but I do not want to be your fuck-buddy, Charlie.’

  There wasn’t a lot of point pretending I wasn’t crying now, and so I turned to face him, tears streaming, nose running, the whole ugly crying extravaganza.

  ‘I have been in love with you for so long, and I had no idea how not to be. I didn’t think actually sleeping with you would be the way to sort it out, but apparently it was. So thanks.’

  Before I could launch into legitimate sobs, I opened the bedroom door, slammed it shut behind me and ran downstairs. Mum and Brian were drinking Sunday morning coffee in the kitchen in complete silence.

  ‘I think me and you need to have a talk, young lady,’ Mum said, cool as a cucumber.

  ‘I do not agree,’ I replied, slipping my feet into my Primark ballet pumps. ‘Brian, can you please run me to the station?’

  ‘Course I can, love,’ he said, coffee on the table, car keys appearing from his jeans pocket. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Don’t you dare walk out of this house, madam.’ Mum sounded shocked. It was fair. It was, after all, the first time in my entire life that I’d answered her back or not done as I was told. Fairly impressive at twenty-eight. ‘You sit down at this table and tell me what exactly is going on with you or you don’t come back to this house ever again.’

  ‘I’ll leave my keys with Brian then,’ I shouted as I passed through the front door. Probably a bit rash. I probably wasn’t thinking entirely straight. Or walking straight just yet.

  ‘Oh dear God, it’s drugs, isn’t it? I knew it. All those late nights in the office, never having any money, fired for “no reason”. What is it? Heroin? Are you doing the heroin?’ She was shouting just loud enough for the neighbours to have that on Facebook in the next ten minutes.

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ I replied as calm as you like. ‘I’m doing all of the heroin. Track marks up and down my arms, can’t get enough of the stuff. It’s aces.’

  Marching towards the door, all I wanted was to be out of that house.

  ‘Tess Sigourney Brookes, you come back here this instant.’ My mum did not sound amused.

  I didn’t turn round. I didn’t reply. I just got in the car.

  ‘Sorry to be a pain in the arse, Brian.’ I gave my lovely stepdad an apologetic smile as I buckled my seatbelt. ‘Just not having a very good week.’

  ‘Happens to the best of us, love,’ he said as he started the engine and backed out of
the driveway. ‘Happens to the best of us.’

  When I finally arrived back home, the flat was gloriously empty. The battery was flat on my phone and I’d left the charger at my mum’s, so there was very little to do but have a bath, wash away every trace of Charlie Wilder and collapse on the settee with a big bag of Wotsits. Or four big bags of Wotsits.

  A week ago, I’d been prepping for my first day in my big new job. Seven days on, I had no job, I had no prospects, I’d shagged Charlie, I’d fallen out with Charlie, and I was relatively certain my mum had a bit of a bag on with me. I had excelled myself. An entire decade’s worth of drama in one week.

  ‘Sometimes things need shaking up,’ I’d told the rubber duck in the bath. ‘You’ve got to test the limits sometimes.’

  He didn’t reply. He was getting a real attitude.

  I was deep into my third episode of Come Dine With Me when I heard someone hammering on the front door.

  ‘Yay, Vanessa,’ I whispered, pulling my stripy blanket up under my chin.

  ‘Tess, are you in there?’

  Not Vanessa. Charlie.

  It was too late to run into my room and hide under the bed, so I did the next best thing I could think of. Pull the blanket over my head and shout, ‘No.’

  But when I pulled the blanket down over my eyes, I saw a tall, creased-looking boy in the corner of my living room. All six feet three inches looking sad and stooped. My ovaries wanted to leap out of my body and never let him go.

  ‘Your mum gave me your spare key.’ He held it up before tossing it to me. ‘I didn’t think you’d let me in.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have,’ I replied, wishing I was wearing anything other than a giant Eeyore sleep shirt and a scrunchie. ‘So you can go now.’