About a Girl by Lindsey Kelk Page B

breaking my heart. ‘Just until we’ve worked this all out.’
    ‘Hmm, that’s one idea.’ I edged ever so slightly away. ‘But actually, 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