About a Girl by Lindsey Kelk

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