way. Truth, or dare!’ Andy shouted. ‘Truth-truth-truth-truth …’
Ben chewed his lip. I was seized by a powerful desire to not hear his score sheet. I wasn’t bothered, as such, but his lady killing was something very separate from our friendship. I suspected he’d politely failed to notice Caroline’s crush because she was too close to me for comfort. If they were all itemised, these encounters, with a bunch of names, I’d be strangely compelled to go round putting faces and sketchy biographical detail to them, like a repentant hit man revisiting the stories of his victims.
‘This isn’t fair …’ Ben was struggling to be heard among the jeers and the catcalls ‘… on the people I’d be talking about, is it?’
People. There it was, the plural that signified a vast hinterland of conquests. The Drambuie sat uneasy in my gut.
‘Fuck’s sake. We’re not asking for a blow-by-blow – haha,’ Patrick said. ‘No need to be coy. If you’re a good hunter, you hang a stag’s head on your wall.’
‘I’ll start you off, there was Noisy Louise in the first week …’ Andy said, with a cackle. I gripped my chair harder, knuckles whitening.
Ben flicked a beer mat across the table. ‘No. I’m not doing any of this bullshit.’
‘Oh, don’t make us punish you,’ Andy said. ‘You don’t want to discover the punishment but it does involve being upside down in that bin without your clothes.’
There were a lot of them, and Ben’s fight club numbered only me. I started to feel genuinely worried for him. I didn’t want the extent of my protectiveness to be revealed. I was bothered enough that it had been revealed to me. As an only child, I’d never had a sibling to look after in the playground, but I guessed this was how it might feel if someone threatened them. Quite primal.
‘Do the dare,’ I nudged Ben in the ribs, acting casual, ‘I don’t care.’
‘Don’t you?’ he said, looking vaguely horrified. OK, my feelings were definitely hurt. I was offering him a spade and he was reacting it as if it was digging his grave, rather than an escape tunnel?
‘Ahahhha!’ Andy whooped and the table-banging recommenced.
‘Ben, who gives a shit, really?’ I hissed. ‘It’s only a kiss, we know it doesn’t matter. If you can face it …’
I nodded in encouragement as he stared at me, weighed things up.
He leant down, swiftly, and gave me a closed-mouth, firm kiss on the lips that lasted only seconds. Despite its brevity, I responded, kissing him back with a bit more passion, lips slightly apart. (After all that, didn’t want him to think I was a rubbish kisser.)
He pulled back a small distance, as if he was going to stop. Then he unexpectedly moved forward and kissed me again, something more like a proper kiss, open mouths, tips of the tongues touching. I felt his hand on the side of my midriff as he steadied himself.
He tasted of alcohol with the tang of salt, and oh God, completely unexpectedly, I dissolved like a teaspoon of sugar in a mug of hot tea. While my brain stayed fairly on-message, my body rebelled. It was as if it registered superior genetic material and issued immediate instructions to my nerve endings to have thirteen of this person’s babies and sod whether I liked his CD collection. In seconds, I crossed the line where I didn’t know if my willingness to collaborate to a respectable standard was authentic passion. Ah. Life lesson. This is why you don’t kiss friends for dares.
Ben broke away again abruptly, making no eye contact at all. We quickly started assembling tequila slammers to stay busy and take the taste of each other away, while everyone clapped. So, I thought, regrouping: the problem wasn’t a bad kiss, it was a good kiss. Perhaps even a spectacular one. I couldn’t deny there was some kind of technical physical chemistry thing there, even if I didn’t fancy Ben. I felt like I needed to go sit in an ice bath.
I also knew I’d committed my first crime against Rhys, the sort he’d sternly warned me about when I left Sheffield. Is a kiss still a kiss when it’s a functional, enforced kiss, to save someone from a naked violent prank? Surely I was only as guilty as women who get captured by the villain and forced to wear a bikini/evening gown until the hero arrives to save the day …? I mean, Han Solo never gave Leia any crap – it was gratitude for being defrosted and no blame attached. Leaving aside the point about who exactly was Mr Solo in my scenario.
‘Good effort,’ Andy said, determined to keep stirring. ‘You two ever thought about it?’
‘I know you find this hard to comprehend, but we’re friends,’ Ben said, scathingly. ‘Like kissing a sister. Dare done.’
‘Ooh, ouch,’ Andy said, glancing to me for a reaction. Yep, it had hit its mark. Hard. I hid the twinge with a cowboy swig from my shot glass.
Under the table, to my surprise, I felt Ben grasp for my free hand and squeeze it, supportively. I tried to calculate precisely what had passed between us, in my impaired state. I knew I was vibrating like a tuning fork.
As the evening came to a messy close, Ben walked me the few yards to my block of halls. We were both finding an awful lot of neutral conversation topics quite fascinating, speech overlapping, with no silences allowed to develop.
‘Hey, I’m so sorry about what happened with that bunch of idiots,’ he said, in parting. ‘I should’ve bailed as soon as the game started. Blame the booze. And sorry, for, you know. What I said.’
‘No problem!’ I said, desperate for him not to repeat or expand on it, adding a hearty: ‘Night!’
Apparently Ben had suffered that experience, but I only knew that for the period our mouths were connected, I hadn’t. The long summer break had arrived just in time.
21
‘I didn’t want to admit to the extent of my ignorance in company,’ Caroline says, in the taxi home, while I try to quell car sickness by concentrating on the troll figure in Man City strip dangling from the rear view mirror. The seats are covered in de-stress wooden massage beads, presumably to compensate for the effect of the driving. ‘But I’m guessing the Natalie Shale interview is a big deal then?’
‘It’d be great to get it. You remember the case?’
‘Only that it wasn’t very nice, really.’
‘An armed robbery at a security depot, the guard got thumped with the butt of a gun and lost an eye. The case against Lucas Shale was mostly circumstantial. No one on the press benches thought he’d done it, anyway. He’d been straight for twenty years, gorgeous wife, cute little twin daughters, and everyone thought her evidence that they were at home that night would get him off. The feeling at the time was that the police were under pressure to find someone fast because it was so violent.’
‘Why didn’t she talk before?’
‘I suppose she’s had no reason to, till the appeal. Other than money, and it doesn’t look like she’s bothered. That’s the thing, I see a lot of people in court and both of them came across really well.’
‘Well, I’m pleased for you. Nice to have something to take your mind off … everything else.’
‘Yes,’ I say, thinking it won’t be the case on my mind as I go to sleep tonight.
‘And Simon’s single? Good job, good-looking, smart …’ Caroline ticks them off on her fingers.
A pause.
‘You’re not serious?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because,’ I splutter, as if she’s announced the world’s run by a coalition of lizards in a bunker, ‘for one thing, he’s not my type.’
‘Talk of “types” should probably