About a Girl by Lindsey Kelk Page A

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