Fifteen years earlier
Your house was empty; your friends were all at the party.
We were alone, luxuriously so, and I knew, as my heartbeat ripped through me, what would happen next.
‘This is the bottle I was talking about,’ you said, flashing the label at me.
Puligny-Montrachet, lyrical-sounding words I’d never heard before.
You poured two glasses and said, ‘Shall we take them to my room? In case the others come back?’
It didn’t feel like a seduction scene, sitting next to you on your double bed, not even when you took my glass from my hand and set it down on the floor.
When you undressed me, piece by piece, both of us looking into the mirror, my body started shaking even before you’d touched me.
You carried me back to the bed and laid me down, your mouth moving dangerously slowly across my body; you took off your own clothes, still kissing me, and then there was only the feeling of you finally naked in my arms. There was something I needed to say but it was too late, too late, and though I didn’t mean to, I tensed and cried out as you pushed inside me.
You froze instantly.
‘God, Catherine, why didn’t you tell me?
’
We stayed there, completely still, just looking at each other.
Neither of us had any words.
‘Don’t stop,’ I whispered eventually, and I began to move against you very slowly, and soon the pain shifted into something more bearable, better than that, and all the time you gazed down at me with an expression I can still recall exactly, a look of utmost intensity, a seriousness that made me burn.
I began to move faster, pulling you into me, grabbing your hips and urging you to keep going, keep going until this newly delicious, dragging, pulling sensation reached some kind of conclusion.
‘You should have said something,’ you told me afterwards, as I lay in your arms, waiting for my heartbeat to slow down.
‘I meant to. I was going to, then, I don’t know, we got carried away.
’
‘You can say that again. But why now? Why me? What about Sam?’
I could have told you what you had already said to me.
That I found you beautiful, overwhelmingly so, that all I wanted right now was to press my body against yours and start all over again.
But I was careful back then never to bolster your over-bolstered ego, conscious of all those girls waiting to drop like flies, never wanting to be one of them.
Always wanting to be different.
Instead I told you about an afternoon with my mother a few days before I’d started at university.
‘I’ve made an appointment for the doctor,’ she told me as we sat together in the September sun of our little London garden.
‘I thought it might be an idea to sort out some contraception before you get to Bristol. Maybe you’d like to go on the pill?
’
We looked at each other and laughed.
I could talk about anything with my mother, sex or the lack of it or, more to the point, my complete lack of interest in it.
‘I haven’t got a boyfriend.
Why on earth would I do that?
’
She shrugged. ‘It’s meant to be good parenting these days to put your daughter on the pill.
Forward planning, disaster management, something like that?
’
I didn’t tell her what I now told you.
That I was beginning to doubt there would ever be anyone I liked enough to pop a daily pill for; that I’d always thought someone would arrive in my life one day and I would just know, finally, this was it.
‘I think I was waiting for you.’