It Sounded Better in My Head - Nina Kenwood Page 0,30

I wasn’t going to move it because the next move either needed to be something more (actively holding hands) or something less (moving my hand away entirely). I didn’t want to be the instigator of either of these actions. I wanted to leave my hand right there and see what happened. I was holding the door open for Zach to walk through it.

Zach didn’t walk through it.

He got up to get a glass of water, and when he came back, he didn’t put his hands under the pillow again, and I didn’t either.

That was it. For thirty-seven minutes our hands had touched, and we lay in silence thinking about what to do next, and we chose nothing.

Lucy came back from her trip changed. She had met someone. A friend of the family, who she hadn’t seen in years. She was staying next door to him in Perth. Her parents were busy and distracted, and Lucy and this boy—Travis—spent all their time together. Travis taught Lucy how to surf, and he had three dogs, called Alvin, Theodore and Simon, and he rode everywhere on his bike. And his skin tasted salty, and he was a good kisser, and Travis and Lucy had sex.

Travis and Lucy had sex.

I have never felt as panicked as I did when Lucy told me this. Here I was, grappling with the hand-touching incident, and she had met a whole new person and his three cute dogs, and had kissed this person, and learned to surf, and then had sex with this person. She had sex. She didn’t even think to call me and discuss it before she did it. She’d just done it.

We were almost equals when she left, and now she was so far ahead of me.

‘Oh, my god.’

‘I know.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘I know.’

‘Was it…? What was it like?’

‘Some parts were a bit boring, other parts were quite good.’ She made it sound like the latest Marvel movie or something.

Which parts were good? I wanted to scream. Tell me which parts, tell me what to do. Stop, stop, stop, and wait for me to catch up.

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘I know.’

I was ashamed of how unhappy I felt (a recurring theme, as it turns out, when it comes to Lucy’s love-life). But I could feel Lucy slipping away from me. First it was sex with a surfer, then it would be wild parties, and dating terrible boys with cool haircuts, and then we would drift apart and finish high school and she’d become a high-powered lawyer, and I would do who knows what (even in imaginary scenarios I have no direction) and we’d never talk again. Lucy was my safe place, my favourite person, and she was smashing that safety to bits. I wanted to physically grip her arm.

‘You look weird,’ Lucy had said to me.

‘I feel weird.’ I had become used to letting Lucy see me and know me, so it was hard to hide myself from her.

‘Why?’

‘Well, I feel like…’ I wasn’t sure how to put it. ‘I feel like you are so far ahead of me in life.’

‘Well, one of us had to have sex first.’

‘And there was never any doubt it would be you,’ I said, probably with a touch too much self-pity.

‘Are you kidding? Have you met my parents?’

‘How come they trusted Travis?’

‘They didn’t, by the end, but it was too late then.’

We lay together on my bed and I calmed down a little. Lucy chattered on, and things started to feel more normal again. She wasn’t a different person. She just had a great story to tell. Everything would be okay.

Everything would stay the same.

It didn’t though.

Zach took the news about Lucy and Travis better than I did. He seemed unaffected and cheerful about it at first. I thought that was nice. It was refreshing, because I was worried Zach would be jealous if Lucy or I got a boyfriend (and I am sure we would have been jealous if he got a girlfriend). Hell, I was jealous of Lucy and Travis. But it was also somewhere around this time that I noticed the vibe between Lucy and Zach change. Maybe the Travis story was a jolt to Zach, and he was scared of losing his chance with Lucy. Maybe it made him look at her in a different way. Maybe he was thinking about the almost-something that might have happened between him and me, and he realised Lucy was who he wanted. Or maybe they just fell in love,