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“Well, I’ve never done it with anybody.” He sounded almost angry. “I once snogged a girl at a disco at my old school. I got my hands down her bra. I felt her bust. Then I…”
“Oh my God, Alex. Please tell me you didn’t just use the wordbust. Did you undo her corset as well?”
He glared at me, his cheeks flaming. “Take the piss, why don’t you? This is the first time I’ve shared this with anybody—the least you could do is pretend to be understanding.”
I rearranged my features into, I hoped, a serious, empathic expression.
“Anyway, I was a nervous wreck; my hands were really clammy, and afterwards she told all her mates that I was crap and had a body odour problem. They told all my mates, and I haven’t done it since. That’s it, that’s the sum of my sexual experience.”
Empathy was not my strong suit. My guffaws of laughter earned me some serious tickling. Wedged on his lap with my head flush against the roof of the car, and the steering wheel digging into my back, I didn’t stand a chance of defending myself. The steamed-up interior and the rocking of the car would have had evening joggers jumping to all the wrong conclusions. Smothering his face in kisses appeared the only way to stop him.
“Saturday night, then?” he murmured breathlessly.
“Are you going to try and get your hands inside my bra so you can touch my bust? You need to know, I’m not that sort of girl.”
He laughed and pulled me down for a final kiss. Half an hour later, he’d driven me home, or rather, to the kerb outside Phil’s house, which he believed was home. I was in no hurry to disabuse him otherwise. The welcoming glow of a television screen peeked through a chink in the lounge curtains. On the driveway, Phil’s dad’s Renault estate stood neatly parked next to his mum’s Mini Metro. Domestic bliss.
“Looks like your parents are home,” Alex observed. If he was angling for an invite, it wasn’t forthcoming.
“Yeah. I’d ask you in, but my mum has her book club friends over on Mondays, so she’d prefer if I didn’t. Another night, yeah?”
I crossed my fingers and hoped Phil’s parents didn’t suddenly take it upon themselves to peer out of the window.
“Yeah, sure, totally understand. I hate it when my mum’s book club pitch up at our place. Six women, all cackling because they’ve had a couple of glasses of white wine. Bloody goes on for hours. My dad usually takes me to the driving range; we make ourselves scarce.”
Mollified, his eyes landed once more on my mouth, and he ran his tongue over his upper lip. If he’d been a girl, I’d have reached over for a final kiss—Simon used to snog his girlfriends for hours in the car outside the flat. The unfairness pissed me off, to be honest, but, whatever. I daresay worse things could happen. I settled for an asexual shoulder squeeze and a cheeky grin.
“See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya.”
NEAR WILD HEAVEN
(REM)
The middle classes were yet to devise a confusing, sophisticated name for shepherd’s pie. To make up for this appalling oversight they called the peas accompanying itpetits pois,as if, by magic, fancy foreign words would bestow taste and flavour to them. The only foodstuff capable of doing that was HP Sauce, disappointingly absent from the Valentine dining table and, I expected, the Valentine lifestyle and ethos.
I managed just fine without the HP, as Lizzie’s shepherd’s pie, with its crunchy cheesy-leek topping was to die for, and made even better because, if I stretched out a toe, I could reach Alex’s legs underneath the table. Every time he tried to join in the witty, intelligent conversation going on around him, I ran my socked foot up the inside of his calf and then watched him turn as red as tomato ketchup.
After dinner, we lounged around the sitting room, making small talk with call-me-Richard while Lizzie headed upstairs to prettify. I guessed Alex wasn’t a habitual holder of secrets from his parents as by this point, he’d turned practically mute. As if in answering his father’s guileless questions about what film we planned to watch, his libido might hijack his mouth and he’d accidentally blurt out the truth. That we would be too busy writhing around each other on the sofa to give two shits about what played out on the telly. That was my plan for how the evening would pan out, anyway.
“He’s not going to be much company tonight, Matt,” joked call-me-Richard, throwing his handsome son a fond look. “Go gentle with him, he must have taken a proper pounding on the rugby pitch this afternoon.”
At that moment, I found the vision of Lizzie bustling into the sitting room, checking her handbag, her lipstick, and her hair, doing all those things women had to complete before actually exiting the bloody house infinitely more fascinating than adding to the conversation around me. Otherwise, my teenage head would explode from immature pent-up sniggers.
“Ah, here she is,” sang call-me-Richard, turning to his wife. He gazed at her proudly. “The belle of the ball. Ready to tango?”
Clicking his fingers, he did a little hip shimmy across the sitting room towards his wife, scooping up the car keys along the way. Alex groaned and slunk down into the sofa but his mum was blushing like a new bride. With her pert upturned nose, swinging blonde ponytail and high heels, even my gay soul appreciated she was pretty as a picture. She reminded me of those drawings of the mother in the Peter and Jane books we read at primary school, always making a cake or a pot of tea, or arranging a picnic on the lawn. In a world where the sun always shone, dads went off to work each day, and mums stayed behind to cherish their kids. I should have hated Alex’s parents for the nauseating looks of sheer adoration that passed between them, but I didn’t—couldn’t, because they were so fucking nice. If Jabba the Hutt and my dad had ever exchanged that sort of fondness, it must have happened yonks before me and Simon ever came on the scene.
Finally, they were out of the fucking door, and as the sound of the powerful BMW engine faded into the distance, Alex leapt off the sofa to draw the curtains. Oooh, that was a promising sign.
“I know nobody can see inside the house from the road, but you never know.” He sounded almost apologetic. Yeah, we didn’t want to frighten the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Having arranged the curtains to his satisfaction, he moved towards the switch by the door and dimmed the overhead light.
“Very romantic,” I observed good-humouredly, as he tripped over the pair of trainers he’d discarded earlier.
“Not too dark?”
Bloody hell, he started to makemetwitchy as he went back to the light switch, turning the glow up a fraction. “Better.”
Chuckling, I closed my eyes and rested my head back into the comfortable sofa. Who cared how the evening unfolded? Whether I got a kiss out of it, a hand hold, a quick grope down below, or had to settle for an evening of Saturday night telly with a handsome, albeit antsy boy. I’d take it, because I was here, in the lap of luxury, with Alex Val—
