He leaned his forehead against mine and repeated himself in a whisper.
‘Tess?’
Words were my thing. Words were my actual job. I used them every day, manipulated them, moulded them, made them dance around in circles, but at that moment there wasn’t a word in the world that would help me. And so instead of trying to say something funny or clever, I took a deep breath and kissed him. For a moment, I couldn’t tell who was more shocked. Neither of us moved – we just sat there, frozen, Tess pressed against Charlie. My cold, vodka-burned lips against his cold, vodka-burned lips.
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.
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
