In Hollywood sex, they always have an incredible first time. Even though the two characters don’t know each other’s bodies and what each other likes yet. The women can always orgasm through penetration, and don’t need foreplay before they’re ready to be…mounted. Their underwear is always matching, their bras always easy to remove. They don’t seem insecure about their bodies – never covering themselves with as much of the duvet as possible so the dude can’t see their cellulite or floppy belly. Or just because it’s freezing cold.
Whereas the guys never lose their erections and never have a problem getting it up in the first place. The couple always orgasm at exactly the same time…because…yeah, that soooo happens. And…actually…I really don’t want Mr Simmons to read this, maybe I’ll leave this bit out.
Mum was in an unexpectedly good mood. She’d cooked a stir-fry again. She’d bought in hardcore amounts of ice cream, and she’d managed to ask me about my day, my UCAS form, and not mentioned Dad or the house once. We snuggled up on the sofa with the duvet that she’d dragged down from upstairs. She even picked a less naff romance movie for us to watch – Before Sunrise. It was set over one night in Vienna, where a young American guy gets talking to a French girl on the train and they spend the whole night wandering the streets together just talking and getting to know each other. I was actually pretty captivated. It was all going fine until…
“Your dad and I stayed up all night in Rome after he proposed,” Mum said, emptily.
“I remember you saying.”
“We were so young, Audrey. It was so…” She trailed off, leaving a silence that I had no idea how to fill.
But she didn’t cry and she didn’t get out the gin. She just curled into a ball and continued to watch the rest of the movie, and I think maybe that was worse. The not-drama-ing. The hollow way she stared at the movie like it could’ve been anything. In the last scene, where the American guy has to get on a train and they promise to meet again in the next six months, she snorted. A small one, that was all. But it said so much that I almost cried. Mum didn’t snort at romantic endings to films. That was my job. She simpered.
“You okay?” I reached out to rub her back but she jolted away, sitting abruptly upright and getting to her feet.
“I’m fine. Tired though. I might go to bed.”
I looked at my phone; it wasn’t even eleven yet. Harry and LouLou still had an hour of work before filming started.
“Okay, sleep well.”
“Night.” She dragged her duvet behind her, like she was a toddler with a comfort blanket. I didn’t hear her go to the bathroom to brush her teeth or anything. Just the click of her bedroom door.
I sat staring at the menu screen of the DVD, the music playing on a loop over and over. Then I got out my phone.
Audrey: I’m worried about Mum.
He wrote right back, even though it was a Saturday night.
Dougie: What’s she doing?
Audrey: Nothing. She’s just…I don’t know… She’s not drunk tho. That’s good I guess.
Dougie: I guess. Pls keep an eye on her tho.
Audrey: I will x
I faffed about in the silent house for a long time before bed. My body clock was all messed up from working so many late nights. I read back through my personal statement. Even with all Mr Simmons’s help, my enthusiasm for Media Studies didn’t quite ring true. But it was something, I guessed. I then read back through my notes for my project, trying to keep myself busy so I didn’t think about Harry and Rosie. It was midnight now. Somewhere, in a wood not too far away, they’d be rolling around in the leaves, him biting her face, which is almost like kissing if you think about it. The girls had a group message going, competing over who could take the ugliest selfies. It distracted me for a while but at half midnight I made myself go to bed, just for something to do.
I was woken by pebbles at my window.
“Huh?”
I sat up in bed, still in my clothes, my head fuzzy from sleep. Another flecking of noise at my windowpane. I reached over and turned on my bedside light, the brightness scorching as my eyes struggled to adjust. I pulled out my phone. It was gone 2 a.m. And I had three messages.
Harry: AUDREY – I’M SO COLD. I’M COMING OVER TO LET YOU WARM ME UP.
Harry: YES I MEAN THAT IN A SEXUAL WAY.
Harry: I’M OUTSIDE.
I shook my head, still feeling dreamlike and out-of-it from being woken. I twisted to open my curtains. Peering out, there he was. Harry, standing under the orange street light, wobbling slightly from being drunk or stoned or whatever he was. He must’ve seen me in the window, because he got to one knee, and shouted, “OH, AUDREY, AUDREY – WHEREFORE ART THOU, AUDREY? DENY MY SOMETHING AND REFUSE MY WHATEVER IT IS, BUT PLEASE LET ME IN BECAUSE I’M DYING FOR A PISS.”
I opened my window, letting the freezing air stream in. “Shut up! You’re going to wake up the whole road.”
His teeth shone orange. I could see the crinkle of his eyes from the second floor. “AUDREY!” Even though he was clearly wasted, his pure childlike enthusiasm at seeing me made me feel all sorts of brilliant.
“If I let you in, do you promise to be quiet?”
He put his hands around his mouth to make a megaphone. “I PROMISE.”
I shook my head and went to close the window.
“NO! Whoops, I mean, no.” He lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper. “I’ll be quiet, I promise. I just wanted to see you.”
I checked on Mum and was surprised to hear her still softly snoring, somehow sleeping through Harry’s yells. I smiled as I pulled on my old spotty dressing gown and went downstairs to open the front door. He was leaning against the wall like James Dean. A really wasted James Dean.
When he saw me he started singing the lyrics to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” really, really loudly.
“Harry, shh! You’ll wake Mum.”
He swayed in, his eyes red, and engulfed me in a hug. He stank – of the sweetness of alcohol and smoke. Then he started kissing my neck, his hands pawing at my body.
“Harry, I swear. Can we at least get through the door? Why are you so wasted?”
He kicked off his shoes, shrugging his coat onto the floor.
“I’ll get you a glass of water.”
“Yes! Water, water would be amazing!”
I left him where he was and went to the kitchen, figuring out how I felt about his sudden arrival. Touched, that he’d thought to come here, I guessed. Especially if he’d spent the evening with Rosie. Pissed off – that he’d woken me, worried he’d wake Mum. When I returned with a pint glass he wasn’t anywhere to be found downstairs. But he’d left a trail of Rizla papers leading up the stairs. I sighed, smiled and followed them, picking them up after him.
Harry was in my bed. No top on. Both hands behind his head. Grinning. I stopped in the doorway and tried not to drop the glass.
“Hello, Audrey,” he said, in a suave film-star voice.
My stomach did ten million things at once – squirmed, clenched, melted. “You’d better have your trousers on in there.”
His smile grew wider. “Why don’t you come over and find out?”
I dallied on the threshold, looking at Mum’s closed door, wondering if she was stirring from the noise. Freaking out about getting into bed. Not knowing what I felt, why he was doing this. Though I assumed alcohol and weed had something to do with it. I closed the door, put the glass on my bedside table and climbed into my cramped single bed with him, still encased in my fluffy, unsexy dressing gown.
Harry didn’t have any pants on.
He moved to kiss me straight away, his mouth tasting of cigarettes, digging under my dressing gown. I kissed him back but…but…I didn’t know how I felt. I pulled away.
“Why are you so wasted?”
He answered between kisses on my neck. “Rosie. Made. Me. Do. A. Bong. Said. I. Was. Getting. Soft.”
I rolled my eyes and pushed him off. “So you’re high?”
He looked down mischievously. “I’m both high and unsoft.” And he went to kiss my neck again. But I twisted away. Annoyed at him, at Rosie. “Harry, I’m not going to have sex with you tonight.”
It was the first time I’d even said the word “sex” out loud to him. He stopped kissing my neck, but kept his mouth there. “I know.”
“So why are you…?” I didn’t know what else to say.
He sighed into me, his hot breath tickling my hair, then propped himself up on his elbows. His eyes were so red there was no white left in them. “Why aren’t we having sex, Audrey?”
There it was, falling out of his mouth. The issue I’d been skirting around for two months. That I’d naively hoped he wouldn’t mention. That we wouldn’t need to tackle. That would get magically resolved somehow. Also, that I really hoped he wouldn’t try and solve like…this.
“Why are you bringing this up now?”
Deflection. Which, I reckoned I had a right to. Considering he’d put himself naked, in my bed, at 2 a.m., off his face, as a way of fixing this.
He shook his head. “Argh. You’re pissed off now, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Ergh.” He rolled over onto his stomach, his whole face in the pillow. “I knew you’d be pissed off.”
“What’s going on?” I asked Harry’s back, feeling my tummy tighten, not wanting to hear his answer.
But he was mumbling an apology. “Sorry, I’m an idiot. I shouldn’t have just turned up here. Sorry, it seemed like a good idea. It was something Rosie said…”
The knot in my tummy doubled, the adrenaline of anger surging through me, waking me up. “You spoke to Rosie?! About this? What did she say?” My voice was so sharp it could’ve carved diamonds. Into daggers. To stab Rosie with. And Harry. I mean, how could he?
He turned over and looked me in the eye. “She just asked if we’d slept together yet. And then, well, she was surprised that we hadn’t.”
I wanted to kill her. I wanted to actually be a zombie bride so I could rip out her brain with my teeth and then spit it back into her eyes.
Harry sensed me stiffen. “Hey, don’t get mad at her. She was just asking…as a friend, you know?”
I didn’t reply. I just turned and grabbed the water, shoved it at him. “You said you were thirsty?”
He pushed the glass away. “Audrey, come on. Don’t be like this. It wasn’t like that…it…”
I interrupted him, my voice a whisper but with a lot of venom in it. “You spoke to another girl about our sex life? One you know doesn’t like me? One you had a thing with? And now you want to talk about sex? Now? While you’re off your face? Naked? Here uninvited? In the middle of the night?”
“I thought it would be romantic.”
“Harry, I can feel your fucking erection sticking into my thigh.”
And, at that, he burst out laughing. Proper laughing. A high-pitched hee-haw, like someone had stamped on a donkey. His face was bright red. “You’re right!” he managed to get out. “This isn’t very romantic, is it?”
I shook my head, dazed from his laughter. “No, it’s not. It’s also totally unfair of you.”
He was giggling too hard to listen though. I was brimming with anger and insecurity and just confusion but I let him laugh himself out, the bed rocking – not in the way he’d planned – as he eventually calmed himself down.
“Will you put your boxers on?” I asked. Feeling like I was on the verge of A Big Talk, and really not wanting to do that with…that lurking underneath my duvet.
Harry saluted and wiggled back into his pants, still letting out the odd small grunt of laughter, while I hit him with my pillow and said “Shh”.
I looked at Harry. Harry looked at me. “This isn’t going at all how I planned,” he said.
I raised both eyebrows. “I don’t think you had a plan really, did you?”
“No,” he admitted. “Just urges.”
“Are you in any fit state to talk about this sensibly?”
He sniggered again. “No, not really.”
I hit him with my pillow again. “Harry!”
He put his hands up in defence. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Honestly, I’m sorry…I am…wasted. Just a bit, it will pass. I wanna talk though, but can I wee? And also, I found a new film about love that isn’t totally awful! Can I show you?”
Is it possible to have emotional whiplash? I had no idea what was going on, but Harry was digging out his phone. Then he was up saying, “Man, I really need a wee,” and running out of my bedroom in just his boxers. I winced as he set off at least three creaky floorboards but heard no stirring from Mum’s room. So I flopped back down on the bed, feeling rising panic and rage and other emotions.
Fuck fucking Rosie.
Fuck fucking Harry for listening to Rosie and then thinking that turning up twatted was the best way to deal with this.
Fuck fucking me for being so messed up about what happened with Milo that I wasn’t able to talk about, well…everything with Harry.
He came back, looking a little less of a mess. And a lot more sorry. “I feel like I should make some sort of grand apology before I’m allowed back into bed, but it’s freezing and I’m only wearing my pants,” he said.
“And whose fault is that?”
“I’m sorry.”
I sighed and lifted up the duvet to let him back in. “Oww, Harry! Your feet are like ice!”
He deliberately ignored me and pushed them on my legs to warm them up further and I let out a small shriek, before covering my mouth with my hand. With us just messing around, the pressure lifted, my body unravelled from being able to touch so much of his skin – to feel his bareness in bed next to me. All my senses jumped to attention, my skin suddenly longing to be touched – though the thought had terrified me only minutes before. Harry meanwhile seemed to have forgotten entirely about the sex thing and was pulling up a YouTube clip on his phone.
“This one is going to break you, Winters.”
He’d started his own counter-project recently in retaliation to my Media coursework. Harry said I’d get too cynical if I only focused on the bad bits of love stories, so he kept trying to find examples to show me “true” love as he called it. It had started with Cinema Paradiso, morphed into The Way We Were and now…
“Who’s Marina Abramovic´?” I asked, peering over his shoulder.
“Just wait for it, wait for it.”
He hit full-screen and play on his phone and pulled me down so I was lying with my head on his cold chest. It was a documentary called The Artist Is Present. I’d started to learn that, with Harry, you just had to go with it. And so, at 2.30 a.m., I kept my head where it was and watched the film. It was about this artist called Marina who created incredible conceptual feminist performance art. She travelled around Europe together with her artist boyfriend, Ulay, in a clapped-out van. But they started to fall apart. For their final project together, they each travelled to opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and spent months walking towards the middle, where they embraced for one last time. That’s how they broke up. With that one hug they’d marched hundreds of miles for.
“Wait for it,” Harry kept saying, my head bobbing on his chest as he did.
I moved into the warmth of his body and kept watching, captivated. Years later, Marina started a performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where members of the public could share a minute of silence with her. She would sit with a table between them, and both would look at each other in total quietness.
“It’s coming,” Harry said. “Get your tissues out, Auds.”
Because on opening night, Ulay, her ex, turned up to sit in front of her.
Oh God…Marina’s face, when she looks up and sees him there. The shock, the sadness. Ulay blows out his breath, all like, Look where we are, and tears spring instantly to her eyes. You can see her visibly fighting her emotions as they sit in front of each other, not sharing a word, but sharing a lifetime of what-ifs. Tears were already leaking down my own face when Marina bent forward and stretched both hands out onto the table. Ulay took them and they held eye contact, both of them silently weeping. Then, she lets go, he stands up and he walks off. Just like that. You see Marina struggle to get a hold of herself before she lowers her head, recovers, and then looks up and waits patiently for the next person.
I was a wreck when the music faded out. I buried my face into Harry’s collarbone, wetting it with snot and tears, my shoulder blades jolting with sobs I hadn’t expected. He laughed quietly, seeming so much more sober now, stroking my hair. Weaving his hand all the way through it, untangling it gently with his fingers.
“Did you like it?” he asked.
“I am broken.”
He laughed again. “I told you! I will not let you become a cynic, Audrey. You are too young. I will keep finding examples of love to keep you going.”
I raised my head and looked into his face. “Like turning up on my doorstep in the middle of the night and then removing all your clothes?”
“I mean, Audrey, I can’t believe you turned me down.”
We both laughed, the noise dislodging any discomfort. Almost. Because then Harry looked hugely serious and said, “Why haven’t we had sex, Audrey? I mean, I don’t mind… Well…‘mind’ isn’t the right word. I guess…argh… I mean, I’m happy to wait, even though, I mean, look at you, it’s hard to wait.”
I turned purple.
“But, it would be nice to know why I’m waiting. I mean, you won’t come to my flat, and I know why. And sometimes when we…do stuff…you’re fine, and other times you stiffen up and I feel like the world’s worst guy and…argh…I’m going to stop talking now.”
My heart was beating so hard I was surprised it wasn’t causing Jurassic Park-style vibrations in the glass of water on the bedside table. He had asked. Should I answer?
He saw me hesitate, open my mouth. “There’s something. Tell me, Audrey.”
“I…” I closed my eyes slowly. He was still staring at me when I opened them again.
“Please.”
Oh God, did I? Did I? I mean, he was my boyfriend. I guess you’re supposed to be able to talk to them but I was so mortified. “Something happened with Milo,” I garbled out, like it was a plaster to rip off. “He didn’t just break up with me and go out with that other girl. He…well…we had sex…well I think we had sex…but it didn’t really…er… work…and then he dumped me and went out with that girl.”
Harry didn’t look away. That was the first good sign. “You think you had sex?”
I squirmed, literally. My body was wiggling around under the duvet like a tortured worm. “I’m not sure if it counted. It…it hurt. He didn’t, like, get to…” I coughed. “Finish or anything.”
Harry shoved his hands through his hair, digesting it. He didn’t reply for a long time. I could almost see the cogs in his brain whirring. Would he think I was damaged goods? Would this make me unsexy?
Eventually he just said, “It shouldn’t hurt, you know that, right? Even if you’re a virgin, it doesn’t have to hurt.”
I dared myself to look up at him. “And you know that, how?”
He stared straight back. “Do you want to know?”
“Actually I don’t.”
He smiled then. “Wise girl.” He sighed. “So, you’re scared I’m going to hurt you?”
I nodded, blushing. “Yeah, I guess. Emotionally and…well, physically.”
He shook his head a little. “You know Milo is an arseweasel, right? You shouldn’t think I’m like him. I told you I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“You say that…”
“I’m glad you told me. Everything makes sense now.” He started laughing.
“It’s not funny!”
He shook his head. “No, it’s not that. I just wish I’d known all this, before…earlier. You must’ve been scared witless. I really am sorry, Audrey. I thought, in my drunken state, that it would move things along, you know?”
“Well, I guess it has,” I said, allowing myself to relax. I’d told him and the universe hadn’t imploded. He hadn’t looked at me with disgust or sorrow. He’d just absorbed it. That was the moment I fell totally in love with him. The moment the feeling bubbled to the surface, shouting so loud that I was surprised he couldn’t hear it.
We started kissing. Just like that. Announcing the end of the conversation with no real solution. But things were out there now, flying out of Pandora’s box – though I’m sure the Greek gods didn’t give a shit about Audrey Winters’s virginity – and they’d dissolved in the air like throat pastilles. Harry’s kisses were tender and sleepy and not-pushing-me-into-anything. I kissed him back lazily, the lateness of the night catching up on me, lulling me to sleep. Soon we broke apart, my head back on his chest, half-chatting to each other through a tide of tiredness.
“I really did like that documentary,” I said.
He kissed the top of my head. “Good, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. I mean, that’s what love is, isn’t it? Moments like that. Not chasing someone through the airport.”
I felt his smile. “Or holding a boombox outside their house.”
“Or sending them a message in a bottle.”
“Or standing on their doorstep with some handwritten signs.”
We shared them back and forth, our voices getting sleepier and sleepier. And, just as I reached unconsciousness, I had a thought. This, right now, was one of those moments. Me sharing the Milo thing and us talking about it. Him not judging it. Not judging me. Accepting it. Taking it on. Working our way through the misunderstanding and the ill-timing and the bad behaviour and the pressure to do what you think you should do rather than what you feel ready for.
And, as sleep flowed through my limbs, making them heavy one by one, Harry must’ve thought the same thing. Because as I rolled over, my back spooned up against his front, he murmured, “I think I’m falling in love with you, Audrey Winters.”