Twenty-One Night Stand ✓

5 / it's all relative

The sun rose before Maddie. In the light of day, the room was a mess. Clothes lay strewn across the floor, underwear discarded like litter amidst the garment heap. A crack of light crept through the gap between her curtains, spreading throughout the room and highlighting the dips and curves of two bodies tangled in one duvet, the contrast of Maddie's skin against Peter's pale tone. Peter, on his back, let out soft snores every couple of breaths, while Maddie slept silently on her side with her knees pulled up to her chest.

It was the rumble of an engine too close to home that eventually roused Maddie from the deepest sleep she'd had for a long time, bringing her back into the land of the living. She opened her eyes but her vision was obscured, her face pressed into the warm side of the pillow that she had wrapped her arms around. The first couple of seconds of consciousness were seconds of blissful peace, until she saw the mess of clothes on her floor and the night lurched back to her like the drop of a rollercoaster. Beside her, Peter snuffled and rolled over so that his nose touched the back of her neck and she almost jumped out of her skin at the unexpected contact.

So that had really happened. Her dream had not been a dream so much as a recollection of the night she had spent with him, and he was still there as though the bed was his own. She rolled onto her back and stared at the swirls of paint in the ceiling, trying to get her head around what had happened. The pact was fulfilled. Peter had taken her virginity, or she had given it to him: whatever it was, it was gone, and a whisper of elation simmered in her chest.

"Hello? Maddie?"

Maddie stirred at the sound of her father's voice, suddenly aware of her nudity, not to mention the very naked Peter beside her. Pushing the duvet aside, she pulled on something to wear and slipped out of the room. She heard her father downstairs and jogged down to join him: if she didn't respond, she knew he would come looking and she wasn't sure he would appreciate what he would find in her room.

"Hey, Dad," she said, smoothing down her hair and trying to persuade her shorts to cover a little more skin.

"Ah, there you are," Jung-min said. "I was just about to come looking for you." He stood behind the kitchen counter, unpacking two reusable shopping bags. "Whose car's in the drive? Where's yours?"

"It's Peter's," Maddie said, not one to lie to her father. "We went out last night and he drove me back. Mine's in town."

"Oh, ok," Jung-min said, and then he frowned. "Is Peter here?"

"He's upstairs. I should head back up, actually," she said, backing towards the door. Never mind the fact that she was twenty-one, or that Peter had spent more nights at her house than she could remember, she couldn't help but feel like she had broken some kind of rule by having him in her bed.

"Ok," said her father with a smile as he arranged his groceries into piles of refrigerated and non-refrigerated. Taking a banana from the bowl of fruit that was kept religiously stocked, she crept back into her bedroom and the creak of the door did nothing to rouse Peter. He always had been a deep sleeper and if his snores were anything to go by then he was out for the count. Maddie lay back down and crossed her hands over her stomach, staring at a diffeent patch of ceiling to the one that usually greeted her. Somehow, Peter had ended up with her side of the bed and he was snoring all over her pillow.

Everything was different. That was all Maddie could think as she stared down at herself. With just one night, everything had changed. No longer was Peter just her best friend from secondary school: best friends didn't sleep together. When they did, things tended to fall apart and a lump rose in Maddie's throat at the thought that she could have just made a huge mistake. Although Peter hadn't been as huge a part of her life recently as he once had, she didn't want to just throw away the pieces she was left with: she wanted to put them back together in a haphazard jigsaw of their life, along with the pieces she had found last night.