This is a love story about a girl.
Someone I thought stupid at first. Based on her appearance, that’s all. The wide-eyed look, big mouth. Lips red as a fire-engine. She looked like she’d believe anything.
Her name was Anna. I was with her for five days. We were junior leaders on a wilderness course, so we bunked together in a hostel: me on top because she didn’t mind either way. A dozen kids slept in the dorm next door. I liked most of them.
I liked Anna, too, soon enough. We sat side-by-side at the camp cook-out on the first night, the fire blistering my knees, ashes spiralling into an inky stratosphere. An older leader, across from us, played song after song on his acoustic guitar, encouraging us with exaggerated nods, as if he was a protest singer cueing his backing group.
I said to Anna, ‘I’d love to stick his fucking guitar where he couldn’t tune it for six months.’
Anna asked if I had a boyfriend.
*
‘Do you love him, though?’
Anna asked this the next night.
I was lying on my sleeping bag in my T-shirt. Reading. We’d led a trek that day, but it was tough to sleep; too humid. Even at ten at night midsummer sunshine sneaked through the curtains, though rain slapped the window pane. Up here you often get this: rain and sun in the same breath.
Anna was cleaning her teeth at the corner sink. One of the kids could have drawn her there: her features seemed exaggerated. She had long eyelashes and five freckles around her nose. She was almost as lean as a stick figure; as pale as the paper you’d draw one on. Her hair was long and naturally red, though that night, damp from a shower, you’d have thought it black. Anyway, you wanted to watch her, or I did. She was like a cartoon.
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Your boyfriend.’
‘That’s personal.’
She came over. Her face was about level with mine on my pillow. She had olive eyes. Her vest, which almost matched their colour, didn’t reach the waistband of her panties. She pulled her toothbrush out of her mouth.
‘That means you don’t.’
‘You an expert?’
Anna shrugged and turned to the window. ‘Do you like rainbows? I bet there’s one outside right now.’
*
Anna and I scaled the hostel roof that evening. She led me up back stairs to a tiny attic space, where she unlatched a pivot window and edged out onto a shallow-pitched roof. I wanted to raise the alarm; warn everyone about a crazy person in her underwear.
I said, ‘You’ve done this before.’
‘There was lightning last night. You were asleep. But it was no good alone.’
She took my hand and led me up. My toes squeezed the moss on the slates to stop me slipping. When we reached the apex we sat.
‘Look,’ Anna said, pointing. To the north-west, a mile distant, a rainbow curved over a road.
‘Wow,’ I said. I wasn’t being sarcastic. I’d never seen one so bright.
‘Which is your favourite colour?’
I couldn’t think. Felt as though I had all night to decide. Everything around was as static as a photograph: the rainbow, the greens of the trees, the spread of daisies in the field below, the foxglove rising by the hostel door, the dark string of road that had brought us here.
Even Anna was still. ‘Remember this,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Rainbows don’t last. And every one is different.’
*
We were still on the roof an hour later, in the twilight. I didn’t want to go back yet. I said the stars would look incredible.
Anna was hugging herself. Her legs were goosefleshed; thousands of tiny bumps flawlessly organised. It’s amazing how skin works.
I said, ‘Next time, we’ll dress properly.’
Anna said, ‘Why don’t we share a secret while we wait? Something nobody knows. We’ll keep it safe forever for each other.’
I told her that last year I shoplifted two cans of cider from a shop, and that I also stole some profiteroles, and I don’t even like them.
Anna stretched her legs and squinted at me. ‘My secret is that as soon as I saw you yesterday, I wanted to kiss you.’
I held my nails up to examine them as though she’d said something mundane. I sneaked a glance at her: she was looking ahead, biting the corner of her mouth.
It was so quiet I could hear my heartbeat. After a while I thought maybe a joke would take the edge off things. I knew a good one about penguins, but I couldn’t remember the punchline.
*
Back in our room, I climbed onto my bunk and got into my sleeping bag. It smelled of wet stones.
Anna leaned back against the sink. She pulled her vest over her head and dropped it on the floor. In the gloom, her body was reduced to shadows curving under each breast, pencil dots for nipples. She looked across at me.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Can I come into your sleeping bag for a minute?’
I said I didn’t know. Yet I began working down the zip. It took ages: it was a shitty sleeping bag, and I was embarrassed by it.
‘Just to talk,’ I said.
Anna climbed the ladder. I shivered as she slid in.
She said, ‘You’re hot.’ In the circumstances, I wasn’t sure how to respond.
I kept my back to the wall, but my toenails scratched her ankles.
She looked at me and said, ‘Life’s too short.’
‘Why me, though?’
‘You want a list?’
Before I could say yes, she lifted my chin with her finger and kissed me. It was hard to describe the kiss, other than straight after, I thought I should have pressed back, or opened my mouth at least.
I sensed disappointment: Anna looked at me the way someone would look at you if you’d put shelving up unevenly. She touched her forehead to mine and rested it there, while she wriggled about below. I asked what she was doing. She said she was taking her pants off.
She kissed me again. I opened my mouth this time and shut my eyes. The kiss was gentle. Anna didn’t fit her mouth over mine; she aimed at my upper lip and dragged her tongue across my teeth like a wave.
Kissing does something to me. That time too. I disintegrated into atoms. I became passive, letting her tongue explore. My arms slackened. Her tongue was as hot as oil and I began to kiss back – at first automatically, then because it felt good. In a few moments, my tongue was spading so deeply inside her mouth it would only have been satisfied by reaching her throat. My breath hissed out of my nose onto her cheek.
Anna’s hand crawled under my T-shirt to my breast. I slapped my hand down on hers. We broke our kiss. She asked if I was okay. I said this was weird.
‘Relax,’ she said. Her fingertip touched my nipple. It felt raw and intimate. My hold on her hand weakened.
She kept toying with me until I raised my arms to let her pull my T-shirt off.
‘Should take my pants off too?’ I asked, like there was etiquette involved.
‘Leave them on.’ Anna’s lips were brushing against mine. ‘Let me feel you through them.’
She pushed my shoulder against the headboard and the reading light above us highlighted one breast. Anna covered it with her mouth. Her tongue churned. I watched my nipple respond between glimpses of her glistening tongue. She tucked her hair behind her ear; probably so I could see better.
Her hand drifted to the waistband of my panties. She began to rub in a circle – vague at first, more definite on each rotation, her fingers pressing.
I couldn’t think of much. My legs began to sprawl. Her hand swirled; the circle widened. My underwear was stretched one way then the other. It staggered and slid over my inner thighs, cool and damp. Anna’s hand was half on the material, half on my skin. I was embarrassed by little sucking noises.
We kissed again, but it was different now. Our tongues now lolled beyond our mouths, like those of exhausted dogs in a heatwave. Our nipples briefly touched, which set off another set of sublime ringing around my body.
Anna drew back. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Her head disappeared. I only realised where she’d gone when I felt a dull pressure in the centre of my panties, right on top of my clit. Her tongue.
It came to me then: the punchline to my penguin joke. I willed myself to tell it, at least to myself, for my own sanity. But the words that came out didn’t make sense. Vowels, one after the other.
Anna scraped my panties aside, and her tongue twirled directly onto my clit. My legs buckled the way cardboard does when you stand on it. My fingers were glued to her hair, spreading it like a petticoat. My lungs must have been the size of strawberries. I said I was too hot, too hot. Everything was suffocating, a fever yet to burst.
When I came, I was not ready. I began to giggle in a way that sounded more like sobbing. My eyes were closed and I swear I saw a hundred colours. I was slick with sweat. Anna came back up and kissed me. I stared at her.
*
I did not know where to start with Anna. Her body was complicated. Wherever I touched her it drew a breath or gasp in a different register. I spent too long kissing every freckle, but it gave me time to think. I moved to her ear and settled my tongue in it.
I lifted her arm, and she flinched when I licked from her wrist to her elbow. I carried on to her armpit. It tasted of deodorant, sharp and bitter. It did not stop me.
I trailed my tongue across, down. Her nipples were no longer dots. They were waxy and firm as crayons. I pursed my lips over one and drew my mouth away until the nipple escaped with a sharp pop. I caught it again in my teeth. I put two fingers to her other nipple.
Anna was breathing through her mouth. Her skin had mottled into patches of pink and white. My mouth travelled over the ripple of her ribcage, and I tongued her belly button. I slowed again. I lifted my head and stroked her thigh, marking time. She opened her legs and looked at me.
‘Go on,’ she said.
I curved my hand between Anna’s legs. Her flesh was wetter and spongier than I’d expected. I rubbed stiffly with the pads of three fingers and her body seemed to give way. One finger slipped inside her, then a second. I flicked my wrist back and forth. Anna’s face was screwed up into an expression of concentration.
Her legs splayed; sinews stretched into bone. She began to twitch. She grabbed my wrist so I couldn’t move it. When she came, her free hand went to her mouth. She made a noise that sounded like a bicycle braking in the rain.
We talked after a bit. Anna’s skin was cool and damp; I liked the freedom to stroke it. She played with the sleeping bag’s zip and said she wanted this week to be unforgettable for everyone. I said it kind of already was.
*
I’d primed myself to feel awful when I woke. But I didn’t. This tells you what you need to know about me.
I was numb, though. It felt as though there was a stranger in this bed and it was me. Anna was still sleeping, crowded into me on her back. I hunched on my elbow and peeled back a corner of the sleeping bag. Her body was so white I had the same trepidation about it that I feel before walking on fresh snow. Don’t spoil it for others.
I rested my head in the bowl of her tummy. Between her legs a tuft of pubes rose as though tugged, gold around the edges; towards the centre an oxidised red.
My head edged towards it. She smelled faintly sour; a spice you wanted to recall the name of.
I moved down, on hands and knees, over her vulva. She was alive with intricacy. A thousand hairs, spinning off in all directions, surrounded a sharp, dark valley. I put my nose to it, and ran the tip of my tongue down from the top of the cleft. It wasn’t distasteful. A complicated fold flowered into existence. I licked back up, strongly.
Anna stirred.
‘I remembered my favourite colour,’ I said, my voice croaky and unfamiliar. ‘It’s red.’
Anna drew up one leg and let it fall to the side. I went between her thighs, scooping them wider, and licked again – the gem of her shining clitoris was unavoidable. She pulled her legs back and then grabbed my ears. Each movement of my tongue was exaggerated by her bucking and by little muscular tremors. They did not last long. As she gripped my hair with one hand, the other was already biting her finger to stop that strange squeaking noise she made when she came.
*
Anna said funny things that week. I should have kept a diary the way she did. She was religious about it. I never asked what she was writing, or why. I just watched, and made sure my good side was towards her.
I kept two mementoes. The first was a photo. Anna disliked photos – said they distort memories. But guitar guy took one in front of the hostel, and emailed it. The picture shows Anna behind me, arms around me. It looks like she’s whispering a secret into my ear. I printed it out and stuck it on my fridge.
The second was a brochure of kids’ activities: rock-climbing, kayaking, gorge scrambling. I don’t recall these. But I remember Anna’s crazy version of hide-and-seek. Late-night storytelling. Races to see who could wash dishes fastest. Anna asking me if I thought the kids would appreciate this one day. One of them saying Anna was so pretty. I locked myself in the toilets for an hour.
Sometimes I am less rational than I ought to be.
*
I zipped our sleeping bags together and laid them on the floor. It was a bit of work, and I was sweating by the end of it.
‘I can fold them over in the morning and know one will know,’ I said.
‘Don’t be ashamed of us,’ Anna said. She put her arms around me and said she wanted to fuck. I laughed because no one had said it that way before. I said the door wasn’t locked.
She pulled me down and bit my neck, hard enough to leave a mark. Our clothes went everywhere.
Anna did a thing with her tongue, on my nipples and on my pussy: a couple of short licks, then damping down with the pad of her tongue. It drove me mad; you never knew which one would be next.
I ended up on my knees. Anna kept biting and licking my backside. She was saying things about it, indefinite, erotic things. I arched my back, and she slithered to my bumhole. She curled her tongue there.
It was so intimate and so thrilling that as soon as I came, I was miserable.
‘I’m not ashamed,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know who I am anymore.’
Anna stroked my arm. ‘Don’t think about it. I’m more fucked up than anybody.’
*
We were getting ready side-by-side at the sink. My hair was in a French braid. I borrowed her lipstick to turn my lips as red as hers.
We watched each other through the mirror on the wall.
I said, ‘Don’t look at my ears.’
Anna laughed. She had ugly bruises on both her arms, above the elbow.
‘Where did you get those?’ I asked.
She smiled at the mirror. ‘That was you. You grip so hard.’
She looked down at them. ‘I like them. Souvenirs.’
On our last night, we climbed the roof again. Fully clothed this time; Anna wore her walking boots.
I laid a blanket on a square of flat roof. We undressed ourselves. Anna hopped as she wiggled her shorts and her panties over her boots. I pictured us married, undressing this way, but slower. I tried to imagine not being aroused by her body any more, and it seemed irrational. I unbuttoned quickly, but Anna was on the blanket before I was. Bookended by her red hair and black boots, her body was pale and almost perfect. Its only disfiguration was a thin line across her abdomen, the indentation left by her waistband. A breeze sometimes caught her hair.
‘I want to savour tonight,’ she said. She looked grave. Her legs lazed open.
I crawled up and kissed her and didn’t stop. I kept moving above her until I was squatting over her face. She flicked her tongue up and licked along my pussy; kept finding the right spot. I pushed lower, rubbed over her nose. I was so close so quickly.
All that came out of my mouth was yes, yes, yes.
We rolled to the side. She bit my neck and my jaw. I wanted her to leave a trace. She opened my mouth with her finger and drooled on my tongue. I swallowed.
We worked each other’s knees apart, organised our limbs until we were two scissors dancing. Anna was clawing me. Her boots kept catching my shins, and I wanted that too. Wanted to be bruised like her. We twisted until we could kiss. I was so close, but it took me ages to come because I started thinking: is this the end of the story? How can I be happy and sad at the same time?
*
We rested against the slope of the roof to watch the sky, powdered with stars. I turned and pressed my face to Anna’s until our noses were pressed together like boxers at a weigh-in.
I said, ‘Sometimes I wonder –’
‘If your behaviour is normal?’
I laughed. ‘Yeah. That as well.’
‘Me too. I’m weird. I’ve never been in love.’
‘Never loved anyone?’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘Who then?’ I knew Anna wouldn’t say me. But I needed a name so I could research them on Google.
She said, ‘My brother, for example.’
I laughed before I realised she wasn’t joking.
She rolled away. ‘Don’t. I know it’s silly.’
‘I’m sure he’s loveable.’ I swallowed.
‘He was. One of his friends stole a car. He was a passenger. Or they think he was. He was fourteen. He was my twin.’
‘God,’ I said.
‘One minute you’re here and then: snap.’
‘That must have been awful.’
Anna sighed. ‘Some good things came from it. Seize the moment, you know.’
She’d taken my hand and was drawing her thumbnail back and forth over my palm. ‘You know what I don’t like? People telling me to treasure memories of him. They’ve no idea how horrible it is. To be responsible for memories crumbling.’
‘You need to stop and share them with someone.’
She turned. ‘I knew you’d understand. You’ll be there if I call one day?’
‘Sure,’ I said. I tried to sound casual.
*
This was a while ago, of course. Things move on. We change.
I no longer have a boyfriend. It didn’t happen straight away; I never told him about Anna; I’m a coward. But it was amicable, as they say after expensive divorce cases. We still speak to each other.
Life’s too short.
But I do have a girlfriend. It took a while. It was a thing to get used to.
A few days ago, we went to my parents’ for the weekend. Our first visit as a couple. A big moment. I had no idea if they’d cleaned up the spare room. Nothing had been said. I was so nervous that I left sweat patches on the steering wheel whenever I took my hands off it. I had to blow on my fingers. I was sure we’d crash, which would be kind of ironic.
A mile from their house, along a suburban road, I pulled in and braked. ‘Look!’ I said. We got out.
A rainbow floated behind a bungalow. A beautiful thing. We watched it until it died.
Neither of us spoke until we were back in the car and driving along, and I said my favourite colour was red. She’d told me that ages ago, back at the start. But she needs to be reminded. It’s one of the cute, fucked-up things I like about her.
