We went to an expensive private girls' school in Sydney – you know, one of those 'proper' religious schools - and by the time Jody and I... (Jody was my best friend), anyway, by the time we finished our final year, we had convinced each other that we really needed a major adventure. So basically, we told our parents we were leaving home. We figured if we didn't tell them, they'd probably get the police looking for us.
Jody and I decided we would up stumps and head as far from Sydney as we could go without leaving the country. So, within days of school ending, we found ourselves in a share house with some other kids in the suburbs of Perth, on the other side of the continent.
Unlike Jody, I was pretty innocent at that stage, and you could say that my time in Western Australia proved to be a bit of a sexual awakening. For a start, within a week of arriving, I had lost my virginity to the lead singer of a rock band. They were playing at the local pub where Jody and I had gone to get pissed in celebration of our escape. The guy couldn't sing a note but he sure looked the part. He deflowered me on a lounge later that same night, while Jody fucked the brains out of the lead guitarist on the floor in the same room. Never saw them again. But that's a story for another time.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I suppose we sort of got in with the wrong crowd. We were both on the dole and did a bit of cash-in-hand bar work, to pay for drinks and ecstasy at the dance clubs we started going to. Most of the time, though, the party drugs and booze came for free – the clubs and parties we went to were full of guys who were keen to get to know these two cute young party girls from Sydney a bit better.
I ended up having a string of bad relationships with good-looking arseholes, some of whom I thought I really loved at the time. One of them tried to talk me into fucking his friends for money. Can you believe that? And Jody and I stopped being close after I caught her blowing a guy I was with in a club toilet-cubicle at three in the morning. Bitch. That's ecstasy for you.
Throughout this whole time, though, there was one guy who I came to count as a real friend. His name was Tim, and he shared the house we lived in for the whole year I was over there. He wasn't terribly good looking, sort of ordinary looking, and quite short for a guy - only slightly taller than me (I'm about five-five). He was a bit overweight, too – not fat, just not exactly fit, if you know what I mean. He was also the same age as me – just eighteen - which made him seem really young. The guys I was seeing were all a few years older than me.
I knew he liked me though, from the moment we moved in. I kind of made him nervous, and he went red when I caught him looking at me sometimes, like if I was running to my room from the shower in just a towel.
But whenever I was down – and that was quite often, given the bastards I was hanging around with – he was always there for me, making me cups of tea, and agreeing how unworthy so-and-so was of my affection. After Jody and I stopped being friends, Tim became my best buddy and confident.
Once, after I had drunk myself into a sobbing, vomiting stupor over some bad boy at a party, he managed to get me home, cleaned me up, and put me to bed, without any judgement or attempted hanky-panky. You've got to love a guy like that.
Despite Tim's friendship, after a year in Perth I had had enough, and decided it was time to go home to Sydney.
Jody didn't give a rat's arse, but Tim was devastated at the news. We both knew it was likely we would never meet again. I had no intention of ever going back to that hole, and Tim was locked into his life as a student at Curtin University.
I really wanted to give him a present for being such a good friend, but I'd already had to borrow money from my parents for the ticket home. In the end, I asked him if there was anything I could do to thank him.
He looked a bit startled, and his face went red. That hadn't happened for a while.
"Well..." he said.
"What?"
"I'd really like to..."
"Like to what?" I repeated. He looked at his feet.
"...to kiss you. You know... properly...."
I know I should have seen this coming but honestly, if you knew Tim, you would have been surprised, too.
"Just...kiss me?" I asked.
"To start with..." He raised his eyes to mine, and the way he looked at me then, pleading, apologetic, fearful, it almost made my heart melt.
It took me a beat to decide. Why the fuck not, I thought. Given the number of undeserving pricks that I'd given the pleasure of my body, having sex with a nice guy, a friend, might be a good experience. It certainly wouldn't make a difference in the greater scheme of things, and it was something special I could offer him, as a gift.
'"Alright then, that might be nice. But not now, OK?" My flight was the day after next, and I knew the house would be empty tomorrow night. Jody always stayed at her boyfriend's on Friday nights.
"Why don't I make you a romantic dinner tomorrow night – just the two of us - and we'll see what comes up?" I was being deliberately cheeky, but I couldn't help it.
Tim's face was the colour of beetroot, and although his lips moved no sound came out. I kissed him on the cheek and went to my room to continue packing, leaving him standing there.
I'm sure it wasn't food that was on Tim's mind when he headed off to uni the next morning, but by the time he got home at about eight, I had made a nice spag-bol which we ate, with some cheapish wine, by candlelight. We were both a bit nervous, and there wasn't much talking during the meal. Occasionally our eyes would meet and we would smile and giggle at the thought of what lay ahead.
I wanted to look pretty for him without coming across as a total slut, and so had worn a simple sleeveless silk blouse and long muslin skirt over my best white lace bra and panties. I had chosen white because I knew it would show off my nice summer tan. I'd put on a bit of eyeliner to bring out my big blue eyes, and had brushed my long, black hair out, so that it was shiny and kind of tumbled over my shoulders. From memory, I think I was wearing Tea Rose perfume, a fair bit of it, because boys seemed to particularly like it in those days. In retrospect, I might have seemed a bit hippy-ish, but I felt really pretty and, for me, that was important at the time.
I had already lit a few big candles around the living room – I wasn't going to be taking them back to Sydney - and had moved the coffee table off the big sheepskin rug in the middle of the floor. After the meal, we grabbed our wine and headed in there, leaving the dishes on the table. Neither of us was thinking about the washing up.