French Kiss

by Sarra Manning

  Dylan shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘That’s partly true,’ he finally admitted.

  ‘So, you think it’s OK for us to be friends and for me to snog you and then what’s going to happen when you meet one of these older girls? You still get to be friends with me but you stop kissing me and have sex with her instead. And that’s not supposed to hurt me?’ I finished with an angry intake of breath.

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it like that,’ Dylan said. ‘There doesn’t seem to be an easy answer, does there? Whatever I do, it will end up being the wrong thing.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I protested, without actually thinking about where I was going with all this. ‘Look, I’m not prepared to be second best. I’m giving you an ultimatum, we either start seeing each other properly or we stop being friends. I want everything or nothing.’

  I think I shocked Dylan as much as I shocked myself. He took a long gulp of his beer and then looked at the ceiling as if he’d find the answer up there. It felt like the walls were closing in around me as I waited for him to respond. It could only have been a few seconds that passed, but they felt like hours.

  Then Dylan scraped his chair back and stood up. This is it, I thought, he’s going to walk out and we’re not even going to be friends any more. I could feel this great, big sob welling up inside me but Dylan wasn’t walking away, he was sitting down next to me and the next thing I knew, he was cupping the back of my head and kissing me really gently on the mouth, as if he was frightened that I’d break in half.

  He started kissing a little path across my face until he reached my ear. ‘OK, I’ll go out with you,’ he said softly.

  I suppose when I’d thought about it, I always imagined that there’d be a loud clap of thunder and that lots of angels playing harps would suddenly descend from the heavens once Dylan finally said the words. Finally gave in and saw sense. Finally got beaten down by my tears and my tantrums and my utter rightness in the face of his utter wrongness. But, y’know, not so much.

  I half-turned and hugged him and then he kissed me lightly on the lips again.

  ‘Happy Birthday, Edie,’ he drawled and he kissed me again. Greedy kisses, like he’d missed me.

  Then we got kicked out of the café by the proprietor who was scandalised by our public display of affection. Dylan took hold of my hand and we ran down the street laughing.

  As we neared the hotel, Dylan started kissing me again, his hands in my hair. I couldn’t believe that I’d been stupid enough to think I could have walked away from Dylan and the feel of his mouth on mine. I pulled away.

  ‘What made you make up your mind?’ I wanted to know.

  Dylan stroked a hand down the side of my face. ‘I couldn’t walk away from you,’ he said. ‘And I s’pose I realised that we’re practically going out anyway, so, y’know, we should make it official. Anyway,’ he added with a wicked glint in his eye. ‘It’s not like I had to worry about the competition any more.’

  ‘What competition?’

  ‘Josh,’ Dylan reminded me. ‘I thought about how angry I was when you started going out with him. Like, how could he ever appreciate you like I do?’

  I gave a little grimace. ‘I’d forgotten about Josh,’ I said ruefully.

  Dylan smiled smugly. ‘Good.’

  When we got back to the hotel, we found Simon sprawled unconscious in one of the chairs in the lobby.

  ‘Is he all right?’ I asked one of the art boys who was sitting next to him.

  He and Dylan laughed. ‘Well, he won’t be in the morning,’ Dylan said. ‘Once he passes out, it’s impossible to wake him up, he’s going to feel like crap tomorrow.’

  ‘Up for some more drinking?’ the art boy asked Dylan. ‘Andy’s having a party in his room. Y’know, last night an’ all.’

  I’d forgotten that we were going home tomorrow. Dylan looked at me and shook his head.

  ‘Nah, Edie’s tired.’

  I was about to tell him that I wasn’t that tired – I couldn’t have felt more awake if I’d tried – but Dylan shot me a warning look.

  ‘Art student parties are horrible,’ Dylan laughed as we began the trek up the stairs. ‘Someone would’ve probably puked on your dress.’

  When we got to my door, it was a bit awkward. I didn’t know if Dylan wanted to come in or if he wanted to go to the party or what?

  ‘Have you got your key?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a long story,’ I sighed. ‘Mia’s got both keys but I think she’ll let me in.’

  I banged on the door. No reply. I banged a bit louder.

  Dylan folded his arms and settled himself against the wall like he was in for a long wait. ‘Maybe she’s gone to the party.’

  ‘Hmmm, maybe,’ I agreed.

  ‘So… D’you wanna come into my room?’ he husked.

  God, I’d forgotten about Dylan’s sultry way with an arched eyebrow for at least half an hour. I looked at him and just about came undone.

  ‘All right.’

  He straightened up from the wall and walked across the corridor.

  ‘You coming then?’

  Dylan was holding the door open for me. The few steps towards the open door seemed to take forever, but then I was in his room.

  ‘It’s very tidy,’ I commented brightly and tried to remember that it was just four walls and a floor and a ceiling. ‘I thought boys were dead messy.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘I’m an art boy,’ joked Dylan. ‘I hate mess.’

  ‘You’re forgetting that I’ve seen the inside of your car,’ I reminded him. ‘It looks like a tramp died in it.’

  ‘Are you going to sit down?’ Dylan asked me. I was standing in the middle of the room, twitching because I felt so nervous. I perched on the end of the nearest bed and smiled uneasily.

  ‘Relax, Edie,’ Dylan smiled. ‘Take your coat off, I’m not going to eat you.’

  I shrugged my coat off and wriggled up the bed so I could rest a pillow behind my back.

  Dylan came and sat next to me.

  ‘Well, this is cosy,’ he said.

  I didn’t really know what to say. There were a million thoughts racing through my head. Like, Dylan was my boyfriend now. And I was on my own in a hotel room with him and he was being dead… smoochy with me.

  ‘Oh, don’t go all shy on me,’ he groaned.

  ‘Well, stop looking at me like that.’

  ‘Like what?’ he murmured, giving me one of his most smouldering stares.

  ‘Like that!’

  Our eyes met and I knew that we were going to start kissing in precisely three seconds… one, two, three.

  Dylan’s mouth came down hard on mine. One of his hands cupped my chin while the other crept round my waist, turning me towards him. He nipped at my bottom lip with his teeth before sliding his tongue into my mouth. It felt so right, I didn’t want it to ever stop but my boots were really pinching me. I tickled Dylan under his arm.

  ‘What?’ he said, laughing softly.

  ‘My boots are hurting,’ I whispered. ‘I have to take them off.’

  When you’re in the middle of a serious kissing thing, everything you say sounds really intimate, even mundane stuff about footwear.

  I unzipped my boots and kicked them off and reached for Dylan again but this time I ended up lying flat on the bed with him half-lying on top of me. I could feel his ribs digging into me but I didn’t mind, especially when he started nibbling on my neck and stroking along my collar-bone with his fingertips.

  ‘We’re just going to kiss, right,’ I reminded him softly. I didn’t want to kill the mood but I was worried that things might get out of hand unless I set some boundaries while I was still capable of rational thought.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ rasped Dylan. ‘There are thousands of things that I want to do that involve just kissing you.’

  ‘I love kissing you,’ I said dreamily.

  ‘I love kissing you too,’ said Dylan, smiling. ‘And I love these little freckles on you
r shoulder. I think I’m going to kiss every one.’

  It was true. Dylan could make kissing the most exciting activity in the world. He kissed my shoulders and then stroked all the hair back from my face, before planting little butterfly kisses on my forehead and my eyebrows and my eyelids before reaching my mouth again. And when he kissed my mouth, it wasn’t like those kisses you tell your friends about where you joke about boys trying to slip you a bit of tongue; it was as if he was touching my soul.

  Eventually we had to come up for air. It was getting cold and while Dylan went to get me a glass of water, I rubbed my arms and tried not to shiver. Magic dresses are all very well but they’re not very warm. When he came back, Dylan climbed onto the bed and pulled the covers around us. He curled himself against my back, put his arms around me and kissed the back of my neck.

  ‘Do you think Shona or Mia are back?’ I asked.

  Dylan groaned. ‘Oh, don’t go yet. I never get you to myself.’ I could feel him laughing.

  I reached behind and poked him. ‘What are you laughing about?’

  He kissed the back of my neck again. ‘I don’t know why I held out so long,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘I think you’re going to be the most perfect girlfriend in the world.’

  Hearing him call me his girlfriend made it suddenly seem real. Like, I’d achieved the impossible. After all these months and all the kisses that didn’t lead anywhere and all the times we’d argued, I was in Dylan’s arms and it was for keeps. Hopefully.

  ‘Call me your girlfriend again,’ I demanded.

  ‘Edie’s my girlfriend. My girlfriend’s called Edie,’ Dylan chanted, laughing again. ‘See that girl over there with the really wicked eyebrows, that’s my girlfriend, Edie.’

  Dylan was running his fingers along my arm and it made me shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the cold and when he started gently biting my earlobe, I began to tremble.

  ‘Calm down,’ he said softly. ‘I’m not going to seduce you or anything.’

  ‘It’s the anything I’m worried about,’ I mumbled. ‘Dylan? You don’t mind about, like, me not wanting to, y’know, do it?’

  Dylan paused mid-nibble. ‘Well, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to,’ he confessed. ‘But I want to make you happy and if you’re not comfortable about having sex, then it’s cool with me. Plus if you can’t actually say it, then you’re probably not ready to do it.’

  ‘I’m so not,’ I told him. ‘Y’know, it’s a really big thing. It’s like the biggest thing in the world and there’s all these things I don’t know about you. And I haven’t been round to your house and we haven’t even been on a proper date and I’m not saying that once we do, I’ll have sex with you, I’m just saying…’

  ‘Shush,’ breathed Dylan. ‘It’s all right. If you want to have sex some time in the future, that’s fine with me and if you don’t, that’s fine with me too.’

  Of course, I couldn’t just let it drop. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Edie, it’s been hard enough just getting together with you,’ Dylan insisted. ‘I’m not going to drop you just because you don’t want to have sex with me. I don’t think I could handle the trauma.’

  I pinched his arm lightly. ‘Huh! How can you say it was hard getting together with me when I had to force you to go out with me?’ I demanded, but I put my hands over his hands, which were still clasped around my waist so he’d know that I wasn’t mad at him.

  I could feel that low rumble of laughter against my back again. ‘I was just playing hard to get!’

  ‘Oh, that’s what it was,’ I said. ‘So have you slept with loads of girls?’

  ‘Edie?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shut up and give me a kiss.’

  We had another long bout of kissing before I got out of bed.

  ‘Look, why don’t you spend the night in here?’ Dylan said. ‘You could sleep in one of the other beds.’

  ‘But what about Paul and Simon?’ I pointed out.

  ‘Simon will stay where he is until morning and for all you know Paul could be tucked up with Shona in your room,’ Dylan protested.

  ‘What with Mia in there too?’ I said incredulously.

  Dylan shrugged. ‘She’s probably crashed out at the party.’

  ‘Under some willing art boy,’ I said snidely, before I could stop myself.

  Dylan just rolled his eyes as I put my coat on ’cause it was freezing, picked up my boots and headed for the door.

  ‘Sweet dreams, girlfriend.’

  One minute later, I was knocking on his door again. Dylan opened it, and raised his eyebrows at me.

  ‘I thought you might be back,’ he remarked.

  ‘There’s still no answer,’ I explained. ‘Can I sleep in here then?’

  Dylan stretched, his black shirt rising up to show several inches of lean stomach. I looked away but he didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Yeah, ’course you can,’ he said.

  I shrugged my coat off again and let it land on the floor while I hurriedly jumped back into the bed I’d just got out of.

  ‘Jeez, Edie,’ Dylan complained half seriously, picking up my coat and putting it on the door hook. ‘What did your last slave die of?’

  ‘Hard work!’ I said. ‘You tired?’

  ‘Not really,’ Dylan shook his head. ‘Are you?’

  ‘A little bit,’ I admitted, snuggling under the covers again. Dylan lay down on the bed beside me but didn’t make any effort to get under the blankets with me. He started undoing the little twisty knots I’d put my hair in earlier and combed the tangles out with his fingers.

  I love having my hair stroked. It makes me feel like a little kid again. Dylan was talking to me but I didn’t really pay any attention to what he was saying, I could feel my eyelids getting heavier and I rubbed my head against his hand.

  ‘Did you have a good birthday?’ Dylan suddenly asked.

  ‘It was the best,’ I replied sleepily. ‘Weird but good.’

  ‘Bit like you then,’ he murmured. ‘Weird but good.’ He put his arms round me but I moaned in protest.

  ‘Don’t stop stroking my hair! I’m nearly asleep,’ I said drowsily.

  ‘Oh God, I can see you’re going to be demanding,’ was the last thing I heard Dylan say before I fell asleep.

  Tuesday morning

  I couldn’t quite work out what woke me up. It might have been the weight of Dylan’s arm curled against my waist, or just the fact that Dylan was lying next to me. I opened one eye, he was still lying on top of the blankets, his mouth slightly open and his chest rising and falling as he took deep, even breaths.

  A pale, bleached-out kind of sunlight was leaking through the gap in the curtains and when I craned my neck to look at the clock on Dylan’s bedside table it was six o’clock. I burrowed deeper under the covers and was just about to go back to sleep when a terrible thought occurred to me. Well, actually several terrible thoughts occurred to me. I sat bolt upright in bed.

  ‘OH MY GOD!’ I shrieked.

  Dylan woke up with a start, then gave another start when he realised that I was there.

  ‘I must have fallen asleep,’ he said sleepily, pointing out the obvious. ‘I was going to crash on Simon’s bed.’

  ‘Never mind that,’ I whimpered. ‘We’re meant to be leaving in an hour. To go home! Everyone will have sussed out that I didn’t sleep in my room…’ I tailed off and looked across the room. The other two beds were empty. Dylan followed my gaze and then slumped back on the pillow and groaned.

  I staggered out of the bed and hunted for my boots. Even though I was in the middle of a potentially catastrophic emergency, I hoped that I didn’t look too skanky. My dress was all crumpled and I was sure my hair was going in all directions.

  Dylan padded over to the door, opened it and peered out cautiously.

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be anyone about,’ he called softly over his shoulder. ‘I think the coast is clear.’

  I grabbed my coat off the
hook and was just about to leave when Dylan pulled me back.

  ‘What?’ I enquired sleepily. I just couldn’t get my brain into gear.

  Dylan rested his hands on my shoulders. ‘You’re really not a morning person, are you?’ he chuckled. ‘Come here.’

  I was going to protest that I hadn’t cleaned my teeth, but then Dylan was giving me a good morning kiss and I stopped thinking.