gone to sleep,’ he says, laughing.
It’s all a joke to him. It’s all easy to him. He kisses so many girls in so many beds, he doesn’t need to over-analyse the situation.
I roll onto my side, and I hear him sigh and roll onto his side, so we have our backs to each other. I play mindlessly on my phone for a while, and then a message pops onto my screen.
It’s from Alex.
— Turn over
I turn over, and he’s looking at me.
‘I don’t like that you’re mad at me,’ he says.
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘That’s a new feeling,’ he says.
‘You’ve never had someone mad at you before?’ If he truly believes that, he’s in for a shock.
‘No, it’s a new feeling that I care that you are mad at me. You specifically.’
‘Oh.’
‘I should have walked over to you at the beach today.’
‘So why didn’t you?’
‘I’m not very good at this kind of thing,’ he says.
I nod as if I know what he means, but really I’m thinking, what kind of thing, exactly, are we talking about here? Are we talking about dating, or romantic feelings, or liking someone, or talking to someone the day after you kiss them, or dealing with someone else’s insecurities, or just social interactions in general?
‘Me neither,’ I say, which no matter which thing we’re talking about, is bound to be true and probably an understatement.
‘I’m sorry about today,’ he says.
He reaches over and takes my hand, interlaces our fingers, and cradles our joined hands against his chest. Then with his other hand, he traces his fingers up and down my arm. It feels so nice that I make an involuntary murmuring noise.
It had never occurred to me before tonight, before this very moment, that there could be tenderness like this when you are with someone. I’d always thought about kissing, and everything that comes after kissing. I thought about passion, and ripping off clothes, and sweeping everything off a desk or a table so you could go for it on a horizontal surface. Or negotiation, of testing boundaries and seeing how far the other person was comfortable in going.
But I never thought about how nice it would be to just have someone touch you softly and gently. I guess I never thought a boy would want to. I thought it was sexy stuff or nothing.
Alex spends a long time gently tracing his fingertips up and down my arms, and it feels as nice as anything I’ve ever felt before.
17
What Have You Done?
‘Get up, boys,’ Mariella shouts and bangs on the door.
Boys, I think, groggy, not comprehending. Why is she calling Lucy and me boys? The times we have both stayed over together in the past, she never wakes us up like this. She gently taps the door. She says things like, ‘Don’t want to waste the day, darlings,’ and ‘I’m making pancakes especially for you both,’ and ‘The shower is free and there’s still some hot water left.’
The door bangs again. Alex groans.
I sit bolt upright and kick him.
‘Shit,’ I hiss.
‘What?’ He speaks at normal volume, and I kick him again.
‘I forgot to change beds last night.’
He opens his eyes, blinks a few times, looks at me.
‘It’s fine,’ he says, ‘You can go now. She’s gone upstairs I think.’
‘Which means I’ll run straight into her when I go upstairs.’
‘Pretend you are coming out of the bathroom.’
‘What if she just passed the bathroom and saw it was empty?’
‘You’re overthinking this.’
‘I’m not—’
I stop talking, because there are footsteps coming back down the hallway. I flop back onto the bed and pull the doona over my head. I try to make myself as flat as possible.
The door swings open.
‘I said, get up, boys. You’re on breakfast duty this morning.’ Mariella likes to appoint tasks to her sons in a very military way. She has a chore wheel at their house, and she spins it each week to assign tasks for each son. Zach complained after he got the bathroom four weeks in a row and the integrity of the chore wheel was called into question.
In my house, there is no chore wheel. Dad does most of the cleaning during the week, and Mum and I usually clean together on Saturday mornings while listening to a podcast or our official Saturday Morning Cleaning playlist on Spotify. (Both of us have to approve a song before it can be added to the list, and we have to both agree to skip a song before it can be skipped.) In my worst, most