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 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 know.’ I snatched up his pants and threw them in his face. M&S cotton boxers, definitely bought by his mother. ‘Because I don’t have enough casual sex to know whether or not it turns me into a crazy girl.’
‘Can you not shout?’ he mumbled, pulling the boxers off his face. ‘Your mum is going to hear.’
‘And we wouldn’t want that, would