Authors note

3- Kelly

I had always been one to struggle with my negative emotions, they seem to weigh down on me and I let them escalate, burning inside me and pulling me down, holding back mum tongue so I can't speak. That night I rushed up to my room and flung myself onto my bed, my head spinning with  questions that demanded answers and buzzing with words I could not say. I almost cried, or screamed, or both. "Are you ok?" My roommate Kelly asked, in a tone which told me that she knew I wasn't, even if stated otherwise. I gave her a grunt of negativity. 

"Do you want to talk about it?" 

A similar grunt led her to move towards the "cabinet of forbidden joys" as I had christened it. "What d'you fancy, beer or splif?" 

Back then, times were hard for me, I was an uptight, lonely teenager, Kelly was the first to recognise that I just needed to loosen up a little sometimes. I was stubborn, the roll ups and the beer were the only two things that would ever get me to lose a little of my tension whenever I was in a bad mood. 

On that night, the thought of beer made me sick, to think that was what led to the end of my first real taste of mutual affection. So I accepted the drugs and lit up on kelly's zippo. It was at times like this that I became an open book. That was how Kelly had gotten to know about all my deepest emotions, and how I'd gotten to know about hers, these  the kinds of things you would never dare let show on the surface. 

Over the course of the next two nights, I told her how I'd felt about James and what had happened between us. She told me that I'd find someone else who'd make me feel that way. 

I knew he wasn't the whole world to me, I knew there had to be someone else out there whom I would love, though I could not believe that anyone could ever love me back the same way he had. 

Kelly proved me wrong, she pulled me gently closer by the open side of my plaid shirt and she kissed me. We were crazy high, and probably drunk as well, this point, but something about this felt right. We felt a kind of mutual respect for one another that made me let go of everything and anything negative I had ever felt. 

Kelly had that deep look in her eyes that whispered to me "just let go" so I did...

Her body, her eyes seemed to tempt me in ways I'd never been tempted before, she tasted sweeter than anything I had ever eaten. Kissing her was nothing like my first kiss, or even like kissing James, it seemed as if every part of us fitted perfectly together, her hands, my hands, our bodies intertwined in a fast heat I'd never felt before. 

I woke the next morning with her hand in mine, she rolled over and looked at me all dreamy-eyed, and we stayed that way for a while for a while. This was all new to me, as we had moved so swiftly last night, and now we were moving so slowly. James had been very gentle with me, never heated or high, I had hardly taken in the time between breaths, but with Kelly, the silence in the aftermath  meant everything. Here we were, speechless, admiring each other's soft glow in the dawn light. 

When I got up that morning, my first thought of what to do was to deny that the night had ever happened, a hypothesis which I realised was pointless once I saw the way that Kelly watched me dress and leave for my first class of the day. Kelly was wise for her age, and knew that, since this was the first time I'd ever spent the night with a girl, it would be difficult for me to accept in the morning. So she gave me the courtesy of waiting intil the afternoon, when I had returned from my final lesson of the day, by which time she'd expected me to have brought my thoughts to order, to bring it up in conversation. 

To my surprise, I did, in fact I'd had my thoughts in order since ten o clock that morning, I was sitting in Film Studies, when I realised that night had been perfect, and I knew Kelly well enough to know that she was not the sort of girl who'd want a full blown relationship at this current moment, I didn't want one either, I wasn't ready, and it would only cause more stress in the long run. I told her this in our room during the two hours I had for lunch on a Friday, and got the first time, I talked about my feelings without aid from the "forbidden joys cabinet".