Читать книгу What If? - Shari Low - Страница 8

The holiday was booked for the end of June, a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday, and the day after I attended the mothership of all that was oppressive in society, St Mary the Blessed Virgin High School in Glasgow, for the last time.

Actually, school wasn’t that bad. Where else could you hang out with your mates all day, get free ciggies from the guys at lunchtime, and be involved in more daily drama than an episode of Neighbours? The only inconvenience was tolerating the punishments that were regularly meted out to me for answering back, not paying attention, and generally causing affray. But it was all innocent and done in the name of fun.

My favourite class was French, where my ‘disruptive’ behaviour pushed the highly strung Mr Distell too far and he made me sit behind a filing cabinet for a whole year. It was a great opportunity to catch up with lost sleep.

As for the work, much as I don’t want to appear conceited, I officially possess the memory of an elephant. Even when I was staring transfixed at John Potts’s thighs in biology, I could still remember every word the teacher uttered. Exams, therefore, were never a problem. Straight A student, straight zero work. Life was bliss.

I think that’s why I agreed to go on holiday. I wanted to prolong the last year with my school pals for as long as possible. We knew we would all go in different directions afterwards. Sarah Moore, my friend since we were in the womb and our mothers went to antenatal classes together, was going to Edinburgh University to study mathematics. Such a rational subject for a joyfully irrational person. Carol Sweeney, Glasgow’s answer to Kate Moss, was going to London to try to launch her modelling career. Jess Latham, Aberdeen University, reading politics. Politics! She said she chose it because it was sure to include lots of men and dinner parties. And Kate Wilkes, who had been butchering our coiffures for years, finally had a position as an apprentice hairdresser in a trendy Glasgow salon.

Me? I still wasn’t sure what to be when I grew up, so I’d applied for university just because it seemed like the right thing to do. I didn’t have the financial support to study in a different city, so I opted for Glasgow University and was accepted to study English literature. Did I really want to spend four years immersed in Keats, D.H. Lawrence and Shakespeare? I’d rather have my teeth pulled. No, I wanted to travel the world, meet interesting people and rich men who would buy me diamonds while encouraging my career as a kickass boss with a big heart and a philanthropic sideline. Years of reading Jackie Collins novels had clearly had an effect on my life aspirations. In reality, however, I was lacking the finances for an epic, global life adventure, so I applied for Uni and settled for a fortnight with my chums in the centre of the Costa Del Juvenile Delinquent, Benidorm. It was hardly St Lucia, but we were living off our parents. Or at least the other girls were. I’d saved every bloody penny for this holiday. For eighteen months, I’d spent every Saturday clearing tables and serving coffees to loud women in fur coats with diamonds the size of Gibraltar dripping from their fingers, in one of Glasgow’s more ‘upmarket’ department stores. I hated that job. It was bad enough that I had to work on Saturdays when everyone else was hanging out and shopping at Miss Selfridge, but to make matters worse I had to wear a brown A-line overall that made me look an overcooked sausage. Not that it mattered, as I was apparently invisible as I trundled round the tables clearing away the used crockery. That was the thing with the kind of unbearably obnoxious, aloof women who frequented the store, they didn’t acknowledge the presence of anyone who earned less than £100k per year. They would just carry on their conversations whilst I cleaned their tables, oblivious to the fact that I could hear every word they uttered.

‘Have you seen her breasts lately? I didn’t realise the porn star look was in this season.’

‘So I said to Jeremy, Monte Carlo is so passé, it’s St Barts this year and don’t even think about flying commercial.’

‘Of course I fake it, darling, otherwise we’d be at it all night and I do need my beauty sleep.’

They didn’t even stop for breath, never mind to say a courteous ‘Thank you’ for clearing away their debris. Yet perversely, although I detested them, I vowed that one day I’d be able to drape myself in jewels and pay five pounds for a sticky bun. I would watch the way they held their cigarettes, flicked their hair and talked in exaggerated whispers, always with the self-assurance that they were above reproach. Only one thing, I decided, gives that air of confidence – money. I was determined that one day I’d be sitting there in my Janet Regers, underneath my Dior, talking about my rich husband’s failure to achieve an erection. But until then, me and my sausage-shade uniform were working all the hours I could get to save up for a bit of fun in the Spanish sun.

We left for Benidorm at 10.15 p.m.. In order to thoroughly embarrass us, all our parents insisted on accompanying us to the airport. In my case it was just my mum, as my dad was in the middle of another deep debate with Jack Daniel’s. I’d heard them arguing while I was packing and was relieved when it finally went quiet because that meant he’d slumped into a bourbon induced coma. I learnt when I was young not to get in the middle of them. Instead, I found a way to lock their issues in a box in my mind and escape into books, boys and pals, all the while having the same thought: I. Will. Never. Be. Like. Them.

All that fighting and staying together even though they brought no joy to each other whatsoever? No thanks. How could two people who must have loved each other enough to take their vows end up like this? If that’s how marriage turned out, I’d pass, thanks. Yes, in hindsight, several engagements later, I can see the irony of that train of thought.

Anyway, back to my seventeen year old self.

By the time we got to the airport, my mum was in organisation mode, with an undertone of disapproval. ‘Now, have you got the number of the British Embassy in case you have any trouble? Wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Remember, don’t speak to any foreign men, they might misunderstand your intentions.’

I doubted it very much.

It took us an age to get rid of the menagerie of relatives. We finally managed it by convincing them that we should go straight through to the departure lounge, lest we get trodden on in the stampede of tourists rushing through security at the last minute. We stormed into the duty-free shopping area like it was a competitive trolley dash. There wasn’t a skirt longer than twelve inches or a heel under four, and we couldn’t walk right next to each other because our matching perms were teased, curled and sprayed to the size of beach balls. The only thing that varied was our hair colour. Sarah was a brunette, Kate was chestnut, I was light ash blonde (straight out of a box of dye from the chemist), Jess’s mane was fiery red and Carol was the one who put us all in the shade because aside from her natural dark tresses, she was 5’ 10” tall, and made Cindy Crawford look average. Right now, her perfect white teeth were glinting as she adopted the same gleeful expression as the rest of us. We were ecstatic. Two weeks of fun and freedom with not a responsible adult in sight.

We made straight for the ciggies and alcohol section of the duty-free. Five bottles of vodka, 1,600 Benson & Hedges, and five bars of Toblerone later, we settled down in the bar to await our departure to Alicante.

Sarah and I were doing our best rendition of Whitney’s ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’, when we were rudely interrupted.

‘Right,’ bellowed Jess, doing her best Margaret Thatcher impersonation. Not that we were fans. Thatcher had just been voted in for a third term and in our working-class area of the West of Scotland that result was about as popular as sexually transmitted warts. ‘If we’re going to get through the next two weeks without getting arrested or killing each other, we need to set some ground rules.’

The rest of us groaned in horror.

‘Jess,’ countered Sarah, ‘we just got rid of the wrinklies and now you’re going all maternal on us. Calm down and have another vodka.’

‘But we’ve got to have some rules,’ persisted Jess, ‘or we could end up spoiling the whole holiday.’

‘What are you on about?’ Kate interjected.

‘Well, for example, I think we should agree that no men are allowed back to the apartment.’

This was greeted with total silence, save for the clinking of ice cubes as we all felt a sudden need for a large slug of alcohol. It’s not that we were promiscuous. In fact, unbelievably for five seventeen year olds, not one of us had done the whole deed, but we weren’t angels in the penis department. I’d had the same boyfriend, Mark Barwick, on and off all the way through high school (we were currently very much off), and we’d crossed a few lines, but nothing that could risk pregnancy. I had no intention of going any further than that with some stranger in Benidorm, but the whole point of the holiday was to have some uninhibited, unconstrained-by-parental-sensibilities, memorable fun.

Carol spoke up. ‘I’m not sure I agree with Jess on that one, but I do think we should have some ground rules so that any dodgy stuff gets nipped in the bum.’

My pal was gorgeous, but she was hopeless with her sayings and regularly had us in stitches when they came out wrong, back to front, or upside down. Or upside backwards, as she would say.

I nearly fell off my chair. In all the years I had known Carol, she had never demonstrated any sign of having one responsible brain cell, never mind a whole grey matter of them.

She continued, ‘I propose the rules are as follows: a. We must snog at least one new man every night; b. We must go home only when we can no longer walk due to overindulgence in the falling-down juice, and; c. No full sex, blow jobs only. How does that sound?’

I don’t think the lady at the next table needed to hear all that, because she suddenly started to choke on her cuppa.

The rest of us dissolved into hysteria.

‘I’ve got another one,’ piped Kate when she regained her power of speech. ‘No cooking, tidying up or washing dishes of any kind.’

By this time, Jess was a mild shade of puce.

It was my turn. ‘And remember, girls, if you do get swept off your platforms by an exotic lover, reinforced condoms must be used at all times.’

The woman at the next table was now requiring resuscitation.

Jess mumbled, ‘Okay, okay, but no men in the apartment, please.’

We all nodded furiously, tears rolling down our cheeks.

‘Whatever you say, Jess, we’ll do our best,’ I reassured her. And I meant it. Kind of.

We arrived at the apartment in the middle of the night. This was a blessing, as due to fatigue and too much vodka, we didn’t register the full extent of the dump. Whoever had written in the brochure that it slept six, must have presumed that the six were highly intimate and would sleep on top of each other.

The main room contained an old sofa and two camp beds. Another three camp beds were behind a curtain in what was obviously a large cupboard in a previous life. In the kitchen, there was a one-ring cooker, a mini-fridge, a cracked sink and a colony of ants. As for the bathroom, let’s just say that I was hopeful that there would be showers at the pool and public toilets nearby.

But we didn’t care. We slumped on to our beds, fully clothed, and were sleeping within thirty seconds.

We woke the next morning to the sound of trains thundering over our heads, then we realised there were no trains and the noise was our hangovers systematically crushing our brain cells. God, it hurt. Ever sensible, Jess came to the rescue with paracetamols all round and we decided the only cure was a day at the beach.

In order to deny the ants time to nest on our body parts, we were out of the door in five minutes, looking like we’d slept under a bush.

We made our way to the beach and parked ourselves in the first available clearing.

‘Who needs Glasgow?’ Kate murmured happily, as she slapped on enough oil to lubricate a Ferrari.

We spent the rest of the day in a semi-conscious state, waking only when one of us yelled ‘Pec alert, pec alert’ as a gorgeous specimen of the male variety passed by.

It was all very civilised, like an episode of Wish You Were Here. Until later that evening…

Kate and I retreated to the balcony – in Glasgow it would have been called a window ledge – with two large drinks, to give the others space to get dressed. When they were done, we told them to go on ahead. ‘We’ll meet you in the Scotsman later,’ Kate yelled through the window, naming a pub that we’d passed earlier in the day. We were rubbish tourists. Travel to a completely different country, and head for a bar that was connected to the homeland we’d left less than twenty-four hours earlier. But in our defence, it was playing Simple Minds hits at full volume, and Jim Kerr’s dulcet tones were like some kind of sci-fi mind-warp that we were unable to resist.

Kate and I took an age getting ready. By the time we were done, we’d tried on twelve different outfits each, reapplied our make-up twice and experimented with more hairstyles than Madonna. We’d also consumed half a bottle of vodka and a gallon of fresh orange. It wouldn’t have mattered what we looked like, we were seeing double anyway.

We staggered to the Scotsman, stopping at every pub on the way there for a light refreshment. By the time we finally arrived, it was almost midnight. Carol and Sarah were in deep conversation with two of a gang of six lads from Edinburgh.

I glanced around. ‘Where’s Jess?’

‘She’s here somewhere’, replied Carol, gesticulating towards the crowded bar. ‘She must have gone to the loo.’

Within minutes, Kate and I had succumbed to the general revelry and loud music that blared from the speakers. I found myself dancing with a chiselled Dutchman called Henk. I eventually got bored with the repetitiveness of hip grinding to ‘Boom Boom Boom Let’s Go Back To My Room’, made the infamous toilet excuse and staggered off to round up the others.

I had to surgically remove Kate from a perma-bronzed Frenchman, before rounding up Carol (singing ‘Hey Big Spender’ on a bar stool), and then Sarah (slumped under a sink in the toilets). Where was Jess?

Panic set in briefly before total hysteria sobered me up immediately. We searched everywhere. At one point, we even conducted a desperate rummage in the huge bins outside, but she was nowhere to be seen.

We were getting frantic and maniacally scanning every man in sight to see if he showed any sign of being a homicidal, psychotic kidnapper. We thundered back to the apartment, searching every doorway and dingy alley on the way. All the while, I had a picture of my mother in my head, a knowing, smug look on her face saying, ‘I told you that you’d need the number of the British Embassy, dear.’

I fumbled for a key as I neared our door, only to be stopped in my tracks. What the hell was that racket? All I could hear was a resounding chorus of ‘Livin On A Prayer’, and it was coming from inside our apartment.

With still-shaking hands, I opened the door and was confronted by the most ludicrous sight. Three men in sombreros were singing at the top of their voices, another was playing an ancient guitar and yet another was fast asleep with a pyramid of beer cans on his belly and his socks hanging out of his ears. In the middle of this melee was Jess, red curls now expanded by the humidity to the size of a sun lounger, beer can in hand, shouting, ‘Girls, I was starting to get worried about you. Come in and meet the lads.’

I was struck dumb and rooted to the spot. I struggled to construct a sentence, but somehow nothing seemed to articulate the forty-seven different emotions that were coursing through my brain. Carol stepped in.

‘What the fuck is going on, Jess?’ Succinct, but it was better than I could manage.

Four men looked at us in anticipation. The sleeping beer holder never stirred.

‘I met them outside the Scotsman,’ she gushed, having the decency to look mildly ashamed. ‘They’re from Barnsley, and they’ve got nowhere to stay because they got kicked off their campsite. I felt sorry for them and brought them back here. I said they could stay with us. It’s okay, isn’t it?’ she pleaded.

I was still struggling to regain my power of speech.

Kate sighed loudly. ‘Sorry, Jess, but we’ve got rules in this apartment,’ she said forcibly. ‘No men allowed.’

Jess’s face had a look of sheer horror and she was just about to embark on her full Petrocelli mitigation speech when she noticed a smile flickering across Kate’s lips. Carol’s shoulders started to shake and within seconds we were collapsed in a cacophony of laughter and relief. We even woke up Sock Man.

We stayed up until dawn, drinking and exhausting our repertoire of chart hits from the previous decade. At 6 a.m., we concluded with a rousing rendition of ‘A Kind Of Magic’, before slumping to sleep where we sat. We’d already given up on the idea of allocating beds (ten people in a flat designed for two just doesn’t work) and decided that wherever we could clear a floor space, that’s where we would sleep. I can’t remember who, but at some point, someone butchered Paul Young’s hit and the song of the night became Wherever I Lay My Arse, That’s My Home.

The Barnsley guys, we surmised in our drunken state, were both harmless and entertaining. Dave was the guitar player, 5’8”, with a cute grin and a wicked line in jokes. Brian and Barry were brothers, who spoke in synchronisation – one brain with extra arms and legs. Ritchie was the heart-throb – tall, dark and devilishly handsome, with a body that had seen one or two dumb-bells in its time. And as for Sock Man, he didn’t so much as open his eyes all night so we decided that from then on he would officially be called, well, Sock Man.

The first three days were pretty much a repetition of the first, only with more participants. The guys assumed brotherly roles, getting us drinks at the beach and warding off any unwanted advances by claiming to be brothers/boyfriends/husbands depending on the situation. Carol, however, decided that she wanted to get intimate with Ritchie’s abdominals, so they alone embarked on a bit of incest, but that apart it was all very platonic. On day four, everything changed.

It started fairly inauspiciously with a long lazy day at the beach, lots of Ambre Solaire, and the odd game of beach volleyball between visits to the bar for cocktails. We returned to the apartment at six, to prepare for yet another night in Benidorm’s high spots. And when I say high spots, I mean anywhere that sold alcohol and had music that was louder than Concorde. We had developed a very efficient rota system for the bathroom. The boys would go first, and while they were showering, we would have a happy hour on the balcony. When they were done, they would clear out to the pub, leaving us to get ready and meet them later. All very civilised, if it were not for the inevitable clutter, water fights and general mayhem which inevitably ensued.

Unusually, I showered, dressed and made-up fairly quickly that night, having come to the conclusion that it was too hot to fart around and it wouldn’t matter if you had a face like a sunburned arse, in this town you were still guaranteed male attention.

By the time we reached the Scotsman, the guys were on a table singing ‘High Ho Silver Lining’, so we took the opportunity to steal their seats. A bad move as they proceeded to sit on our knees until cramp forced us to dump them unceremoniously on the floor.

At around eleven o’clock, I was feeling decidedly shaky on my stilettos when a tall blond guy walked in, followed by a dark-haired bloke. The blond shouted a greeting to Sarah. I vaguely remembered him as Graham, the guy that she’d been fraternising with the night before, after his great line in chat won over both Sarah and the approval of our self-appointed Barnsley bodyguards. He made his way over to our table, while his friend fought his way to the bar. Through the crowd, I could just make out the top of his head as he waited to be served.

Graham took up position on Sarah’s knees just as his mate turned round and started to make his way towards us. My heart stopped. Within seconds, I required oxygen. I was just about to search for a brown paper bag to hyperventilate into, when his eyes caught mine. They were so blue that, had this been in the nineties, I would have sworn they were coloured contact lenses, and they were framed with eyelashes that Max Factor would have killed for.

He was about twenty-one, had jet-black hair, dark skin and the jawline of an American soap actor. He was stunning. His eyes held mine while he covered what seemed like the mile and a half to our table. He put the drinks down, still staring. A smile crossed his lips, revealing teeth that I wanted to tap to make sure they were real. My heart thundered so loudly that I was sure it was drowning out the ridiculous ‘Shudupa Ya Face’, that was blaring from the speakers. He stared a bit longer, then slowly, in a soft Scottish accent said, ‘Are we leaving?’

My brain screamed, searching for a witty reply that would have the others clutching their sides, but my power of thought had deserted me.

‘Yes.’ Yes? Was that it? Was that all an educated, smart-mouthed female could come up with? My first encounter with love at first sight had rendered me witless.

He put his hand out and I took it, still lost in his gaze. I followed him outside, where he turned right and started walking, saying nothing. After about a hundred yards, he stopped, put his hands on my face and kissed me slowly. I felt my legs buckle underneath me. God, what was happening?

We kept walking, turning left, then right, until we were entering one of the big posh hotels on the seafront. We passed it every day on the way to the beach and it definitely wasn’t the kind of place that would have ten people to a suite, with a bloke in a sombrero playing guitar and a comatose drunk called Sock Man. We took the lift up to the sixth floor, then entered his room, where he turned and kissed me again. Only this time it didn’t stop.

He unbuttoned my top, dropping it to the floor, then slid my skirt over my hips to join it.

Meanwhile, my enthusiasm for the situation was made clear by the fact that I had somehow managed to remove his shirt and trousers. I should probably have stopped and considered whether I wanted to lose my virginity to a complete stranger, but it felt so good that nothing short of a tranquiliser dart could have stopped me. We tumbled onto the bed, kissing, groping. Before I knew what was happening, a condom appeared and then it was on and his naked body was pressed against mine.

‘Lift your hips,’ he whispered, nuzzling my ear.

What did he mean? How high? Somehow this just wasn’t the time to say, ‘Excuse me, but I haven’t done this before so do you think you could possibly draw me a diagram of the exact angle of elevation which you require?’ I knew I should have paid more attention in biology when they were giving ‘The Talk’. Or maybe rewound the steamy bits in 9 ½ Weeks.

I tilted my pelvis and he slid slowly and gradually inside. My body welcomed him eagerly. He continued to move out and in, sending glorious waves of ecstasy coursing to previously unstimulated areas of my anatomy, until eventually he came shuddering to a halt, just as a new feeling deep in my pelvic area caused an explosion I’d never felt before. So that was what all those orgasm articles in Cosmo were raving about then.

He collapsed beside me, then turned and touched my face.

‘You’re beautiful,’ he whispered.

I smiled. ‘Thank you,’ I gasped, breathless. I didn’t know what else to say. My mother had always taught me that if someone gave you a compliment you should smile and thank them. I don’t think she meant that to apply after a stranger had just been intimate with your tickly bits, but then I wasn’t sure of the rules of this new game. What exactly are you supposed to say after a guy has met you, said ‘Are we leaving,’ followed by ‘Lift your hips’ and your only utterance has been a feeble ‘Yes’?

I searched my brain for points of reference. I was sure this was when the guy rolled over and was snoring within ten seconds. Why then was his finger tracing the outline of my nipple? Now my stomach. Now my thighs. Good God, he wanted to do it again! Was this normal?

He pulled me on top of him and without thinking I was suddenly moving, using muscles I didn’t even know I possessed.

We made love twice more, once in the bath, and it was starting to get light when we fell asleep, me still with an inane grin on my face. So this was it. Virginity gone. After years of fumbling with my on-off ex, Mark Barwick, resisting the temptation to cross the last line, I’d had my first sexual experience with a man I couldn’t have picked out in a line up only a few hours ago. It should feel so wrong, and yet it just felt perfect.

The sun streaming in through the window woke me at ten o’clock. For a moment I didn’t know where I was, then I remembered. I started to get up when pain forced me to slump back down. My legs felt like they’d run a marathon. I stumbled to the bathroom, gathering my hastily discarded clothing as I went. I looked in the mirror. Big mistake. My face was red, my eyes looked like a road map and my hair had clearly exploded during the night. I couldn’t let him see me like this – the shock would scar him for life.

I dressed and did the best repair job possible before surreptitiously making for the door. I had just pulled it open when he sleepily mumbled, ‘Can I see you tonight?’

‘Sure,’ I replied without turning round, ‘I’ll be in the Scotsman.’

I staggered back to the apartment, praying that nobody would be awake. I quietly opened the door and was just about to breathe a sigh of relief when I saw a sea of expectant faces. The gang were indeed up and broke into a standing ovation.

Laughing, Kate gave me a drink.

‘What’s this?’ I stammered.

‘It’s a new cocktail we invented for you. It’s called an Invaded Vagina.’

Oh, the embarrassment. Was nothing private in this world?

‘But how did you know?’

Sarah butted in. ‘Graham here,’ she said, gesticulating to my night of passion’s friend, who was sitting in the corner, ‘went back to the hotel last night, but he heard you inside, so he hotfooted it over here with a full report.’

I was mortified. Ground open up now and swallow me please.

‘Well, aren’t you going to say anything?’ Jess asked.

I paused. ‘Graham,’ I said ashamedly, ‘what is your friend’s name?’

It was difficult to hear his reply over screams of amusement and mock outrage from the others. ‘Nick,’ he said, joining the laughter. ‘Nick Russo.’

That evening, unlike the night before, I took hours getting ready. Every outfit made me look too fat, too small, too flat chested. Every hairstyle made me look like my mum or my gran. So this was what happened then. You spent one night with a man and suddenly you morphed into an indecisive, neurotic nightmare. I kept waiting for the seeds of regret to set in, but they never did. I just couldn’t wait to see him again.

When we got to the pub, there was no sign of him. I was glad of the crowd and the noise because at least it stopped the girls’ endless interrogation about the night before.

It’s not that I didn’t want to tell them, I just couldn’t talk about something that I didn’t understand.

How should I act? Should I be coy, distant, friendly, forward? Where was the bloody rulebook? In the end, I settled for terrified and anxious.

All night I kept staring at the door. Eventually, at about ten o’clock, Graham entered. My heart leapt, then sank faster than a stone as I realised that he was alone.

‘Where’s Nick?’ I asked, scared of the answer.

He shrugged and there was something uneasy in his posture that sent my alarm bells straight to screech levels. ‘I don’t know, Carly, I’m not sure if he’s coming down tonight.’

The others looked uncomfortable now too, all the guys’ eyes immediately drawn to their feet. They must teach that in Men School – ‘When one of your fellow males is ceremoniously dumping a member of the female sex, you must immediately stare at the floor, or you’ll be stricken down by the Testosterone God.’

I couldn’t speak. I stood up, grabbed my bag and fled, not stopping for a second lest they saw the tears that were threatening to blind me.

After running for what seemed like miles, my brain locked in a mantra of ‘Bastard, Bastard, Bastard’, I found myself at the beach.

This had never happened to me before. Never had any guy let me down or upset me, never mind make me cry. I had always thought that I was indestructible.

I found an overturned dinghy on the sands and collapsed against it, facing out to sea. Why is it that at times of crisis I always see a vision of my mum lecturing me?

‘They’re only after one thing, you know.’

‘Never give in to sex because they’ll just cast you aside like yesterday’s newspaper afterwards.’

I felt like banging my head on the dinghy, just to get rid of the sound of her voice. A coma would definitely be preferable.

That was where he found me hours later, eyes swollen from crying, mascara ingrained into my cheeks, hair so flat that it resembled a balaclava.

I felt a movement beside me and he sat down, put his arms around me and squeezed tight. I stared at him in dumbstruck shock.

‘How did you find me?’

‘We were all looking for you, and Kate figured you’d be here. The others headed back to the bar when we spotted you. I promised the girls I’d bring you back later. Carol said if I didn’t, she’d remove my nuts.’

That made me smile, but I couldn’t get any words past the massive lump that had formed in my throat.

‘Why did you run off?’ he went on.

‘I thought I’d made a horrible mistake. I thought you weren’t coming,’ I spluttered through the tears that had started again.

‘Don’t be daft,’ he smiled. ‘I just fell asleep while I was getting ready. I was a bit late, that’s all.’

‘Oh.’ Conversational skills were on annual leave again.

‘But I do think we have to talk.’

Here it comes, I thought. The whole ‘holiday romance, it was just a bit of fun’ thing.

‘Why didn’t you tell me that you’d never had sex before?’

Hello again, mortification. My cheeks burned. ‘How did you find out?’ Was it that obvious? Oh, the indignity of it all.

‘Kate told me,’ he replied. ‘She was explaining why you did the hundred metre sprint when Graham appeared without me.’

Oh. Relief.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered honestly. ‘There didn’t seem to be the right moment.’

‘So why did you do it then?’ he persisted.

‘I don’t know that either. It just felt right.’

He laughed. Laughed! I was sitting there feeling like my heart had been shredded and he was laughing. He kissed the end of my nose, then drew me in close to him, dispelling my indignation in a heartbeat.

‘I think I’m going to like you, Carly Cooper. Now, come on, we’ve got some catching up to do.’

The rest of the holiday passed in uninterrupted bliss. The next morning, we went back to our apartment with all Graham’s clothes and swapped them for mine. Graham and Sarah were delighted – they were fast becoming a permanent feature.

Nick and I were the same. We woke up together, sunbathed together, went to the pub in the evening with the rest of the gang, but still never leaving each other’s side. And we laughed. We laughed about silly, stupid things. I had fallen sombrero over espadrilles, totally and completely in love. And so had he. It was amazing. His face lit up when he saw me, we talked constantly about everything on the planet and then he made long, gorgeous love to me every night.

If I’d stopped to think about it in any depth, I’d have acknowledged how lucky I felt. Nick Russo was the first guy I’d ever slept with and he was sweet and kind and funny, and showed no dickhead tendencies whatsoever.

The last night finally came. My stomach had been in knots all day and I was alternating between a longing to handcuff Nick to the bed and savour every moment, and wanting to curl up in a corner and cry.

We went out to dinner, for once without our merry band of friends.

‘We can’t let this end here, Cooper,’ he said as he held my hand so tightly that it felt as if he was dislocating my knuckles.

‘How can it not?’ I implored. ‘We live on opposite sides of the country, we can’t drive and we’re skint students.’

The truth was, I could probably make the trip to his home in St Andrews by bus and train, and he could travel to see me too. The distance wasn’t insurmountable, but geography and logistics weren’t the real issue here.

You see, I adored him. This had been the most perfect two weeks of my life, I had lost my virginity to the most amazing man and I could see the future. If we tried to continue this at home, it would get lost amongst protracted separations, late night phone calls and living in different towns. Even in my sun-damaged, alcohol-poisoned, euphoric state, I knew that we were much too young for this. Eventually, we would both meet other people and it would end horribly, with tears and tantrums, recriminations and regret. I didn’t want that. I wanted to remember this forever for what it was – the best episode in my life ever.

I tried to explain this and, eventually, his sad eyes told me that he got it.

‘Tell you what, Cooper, one day I’m going to come and find you. Then, we’ll get married and live in happily shagging bliss for the rest of our lives.’

‘You promise?’ I asked, smiling.

‘I promise,’ he replied, as he squeezed me tightly, then kissed me goodbye.

I never saw Nick Russo again.