PHOEBE
Turned out I did not look sexy in scrubs.
They were enormous on me and smelt like toilet cleaner. But it was kind of awesome. Like being in a club wearing an invisibility cloak. Usually I spend all night checking out how much the humidity is making my hair frizz in the mirrors, but I just didn’t care this time. And, collectively, it made us all go mental.
At one point, I took a running jump and launched myself into Josh. He was dressed as a fireman and had literally not left the dance floor since we’d arrived. He managed to catch me but the force sent us both crashing into the speaker.
‘Bennet, you are crazy tonight,’ he shouted at me.
‘It’s always there,’ I yelled. ‘It just pops out into the world every so often.’
The song changed, and he closed his eyes and started to do such exaggerated ravey hand moves that people had to step back to give him space.
I felt someone’s arms around my waist and a kiss on my cheek. ‘Ed is here,’ Frankie yelled in my ear. ‘Like, here. Not here. But near. Near here. In the club. I feel sick.’
‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’
‘No, sick with love. I just need to dance. Dance it out.’ She kissed me again. Even Negin and Becky were going for it. Becky had let a boy dressed as a policeman carry her to the DJ booth to request a song and Negin was introducing some of her Medicine mates to the quidditch lot.
Luke waved his stethoscope at me from across the room, where he was talking to Ed and Arthur. I’d become sort of addicted to him. I liked being alone so I could think about him uninterrupted. I liked re-reading his messages and smiling to myself and thinking again and again about things he had said or moments that had passed between us. I had become one of those people. I had become obsessed with memory and had started collecting stuff. Serviettes from cafes we had been to and notes he had written me in the library after we had been told to shut up. It had been less than a week, but I was in it so deep. I missed him as soon as he left. I wanted him to message me straight away. But in the club it was perfect. Like we both knew the other one was there, and that we would go home together, so we could just relax and have fun until then. Every so often we would catch eyes across the dance floor and it felt amazing. Like he was addicted to me, too.
Negin squeezed through the crowd and mouthed: ‘Do you want a drink?’
We walked over to the bar. ‘Is it weird being sober when everyone else is pissed?’ I asked her.
She smiled. ‘The most annoying thing is that everyone constantly repeats themselves.’
I nodded. ‘Is it weird being sober when everyone else is pissed?’
She rolled her eyes, and waved the barman over. ‘Phoebs, I just heard something . . . A girl on my course told me this thing about the football team.’ She looked down like she was debating how to say whatever it was she wanted to say. ‘She said they do this gross thing. They take pictures of girls they’ve . . .’ She made a face. ‘Anyway, they take pictures of them asleep and then rate them on the group chat.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s totally fine, I’ve heard this whole thing already. Honestly, it’s totally not true. You can tell her she doesn’t have to worry. It’s just a stupid rumour someone made up.’
Negin smiled weakly. ‘Are you sure? She sounded really upset about it.’
‘Honestly, Negin, one hundred per cent. Someone asked Luke about it at Bowl-Cut’s gig. He said it’s bullshit. And he is, like, their star player, so he would know, right?’
Negin picked up her bottle of water and handed me my gin and tonic. She took a breath and almost said something else.
‘Thank you for worrying, though,’ I shouted. I almost added that I had been worried about Will when I’d heard about it. But I didn’t.
At just gone midnight I said goodbye to the girls and me and Luke left.
We bought chips and walked home slowly and then sneaked back into D Block and made tea.
In my room, we lay next to each other, staring at the ceiling.
‘I wonder who has slept in this room before,’ I said. ‘These halls were built sixty years ago. So at least sixty people have laid in this exact same place, staring at the ceiling.’
I pulled a bit of the duvet back and climbed underneath. He did the same. I reached over and switched the lamp off. And then wondered what he was thinking about me doing it. It was a sign that I knew he was staying.
He lifted his arm up. ‘Tuck in.’
Neither of us had talked about when we were going to have sex. He had slept in my bed for the past few nights, and we had done stuff, but not gone all the way. But this didn’t feel like the past few nights.
We just lay there, saying random things until we both fell asleep. When I woke up we were detangled. It was still dark outside, and condensation was trickling down the window. Luke put an arm over me and pulled me closer to him. I wriggled round. We were facing each other. He leant a tiny bit further in and opened his eyes and then closed them again and we were kissing. We kissed for ages, and then, bit by bit, we were both undressed.
I kissed him on the stomach, and then wondered if I should go down on him. I get so nervous about blow jobs. It’s like this thing that you can be bad at. You can’t really be bad at someone putting their willy inside you. Unless it won’t go in. But as long as that happens, it’s sort of deemed a success. Flora gave a blow job to a boy in Majorca and he fell asleep while she was doing it, so she was obviously messing it up somehow.
I kissed him again and then did it. Just for a few seconds. Long enough to say I had done it but not long enough to mess it up in any way. Unless only doing it for a few seconds was messing it up. He made a noise as if he liked it. And then he threw the duvet back and cold air hit me and I shivered a bit.
‘Have you got a condom?’ I whispered. And then it hit me: the complete, total, bonkers surrealness of me, naked, asking Luke Taylor, naked, if he had a condom. I had to physically strain to stop from laughing. Or grabbing my phone to text Flora.
I tried to look at the ceiling politely while he put it on and then wondered if I should pat him on the back or something to keep some kind of connection going.
He turned around and kissed me. And then he pulled back a bit. In movies people just put it in easily. Like it’s not complicated to get it in the right place. Like it will just happen automatically without some kind of mapwork. I held it and put it in me a tiny bit.
And then he was inside me. And it actually felt good. Really good. The surrealness resurfaced and I giggled by accident.
‘Are you laughing at me?’ he said, smiling. ‘This is not the moment you really want a girl to start laughing uncontrollably.’
None of it felt awkward. I wouldn’t say I totally lost myself in the moment. I still wondered about what I looked like and if I should be doing some porn star thing I have no idea how to do. But it was the closest I had ever felt to being myself while having sex.
Afterwards, I needed to wee, but the toilets felt so far away. ‘Erm, Phoebe?’ Luke sat up suddenly. I was too tired to open my eyes and look at him.
‘Hmmmm?’
He paused. ‘Where’s the condom?’