It was Day 3 of the Writers Soc trip to Amsterdam, and people were winding down after the wild parties that'd happened over the past few days.
I was hanging out in my friend Dami's room at the youth hostel, and we were discussing, rather typically, whether we thought there were ever any hot female writers in the literary canon.
"Emily Brontë was hot, but apart from her, they're all kind of... not very good-looking." I searched for the words to say it and winced as I insulted many of the intellectual pioneers of our gender in one fell swoop.
"J.K Rowling's hot." Dami replied, rubbing the last of some chipped nail polish off her toes.
"Literary canon, Dami. She's not in it."
"Oh, riiight," Dami paused thoughtfully. "Nope. They're all pretty unattractive from what I remember, then."
We both laughed.
There was a knock at the door, Dami yelled "Come in!", and the door opened. Three more young black girls, coursemates of Dami's, walked into the room.
To most of my white friends, we looked like one big black clique. To tell the truth, we were. We were from similar cultural backgrounds, me from Jamaica, Dami and two of her friends from Nigeria, and Effy from Trinidad. We shared a lot of similar interests, tastes in food, music, and family stories. Whenever I hung around them, I got a taste of being back home.
"Heeeeey," said Effy, plonking herself down on Dami's bed, next to us. Effy was the shortest out of us, standing at 5'2, but had gorgeous green eyes, that all the other girls loved to fuss about. Despite her size, she was very confident, even boisterous, and spoke about sex pretty much all the time.
Adebola sat on the edge of the bed after Effy. Ade was normal height, cute and somewhat curvy, but lacked the confidence Effy had. She was amazing at writing and had dreams of being a journalist. She was at the university newspaper meetings pretty much 24/7.
Jessica sat down on Dami's desk, furthest away from us, grinning as Dami segued her way from ranting about western writers to underrated black female writers. Dami was pretty engaging, and knew very well what she was talking about, as she did most of the time, but I wasn't listening.
Jessica was the hottest girl in our group by a mile. She was just on the taller side of the average height, slim but muscular, with beautifully toned and proportionate curves. Her eyes were slightly slanted but piercing and she had a long bushy weave that was always in perfect shape. She had a very imposing presence, she looked like a video vixen and most probably knew it. I had sized her up far too often on this trip, and I was sure she had noticed, but we were on two different sides of the group. I was Dami's friend, and she was Effy's. She made no effort to close that gap, but for some reason, I still thought we could get along on this trip. I figured after the first day she'd pip the fact that I was lesbian.
I think there's something about me that is intrinsically attracted to these slightly bitchy, off-limits girls. In a purely sexual way. I wanted her to say she disapproved of me while she let me into her bed and I showed her what being gay was like for a night. I thought about doing that a lot.
She even smiled at me sometimes, in a way that made me think, for a second, that maybe I could make that come true. But I also thought that maybe that was just her smile, and that thousands of boys have been fooled into the same trap by it too.
Something weird that happened a few days later, actually, was that I managed to get her alone for a few seconds. I had told her, Ade and Effy that I was lesbian when we were sat on the bed, and to my surprise they were all cool with it. I had felt a different vibe coming from Jessica since then.
The day when we were alone, it was late at night, Effy had gone out on the town with some other friends, and I was wandering the corridors of the hostel looking for a plug adapter for my laptop. I knocked on one of the rooms next to mine at random, and to my surprise, Jessica answered it. Her eyes looked a sleepy kind of sultry, and she smelled awesome. The corridor became insufferably hot.
"Yep?" She croaked, looking at me.
I avoided eye contact instinctively, I was sure Jessica didn't want me poring all over her.
"I need a plug adapter. My laptop's out of battery, and-"
"Yep." She went back into her room and rummaged around, emerging again with a converter plug.
I finally looked at her to take it, and when our eyes met I was sure I saw them dart around my face and land on my mouth. There was silence, and a confident smile began to crackle its way onto Jessica's face. I was so unsure of what to do with myself, turned on and terrified at the same time, that I sped off.
"Thanks!" I smiled sheepishly, waddling back to my room.
I masturbated thinking about her that night, and felt filthy. I was upset with myself for not seizing the opportunity and letting my confidence take over. But, there was still a good week of the trip left, I assured myself.
Over the week, as I got to know Dami's friends more and more, I learned to relax, and have more fun around them. They all said I was pretty funny, and I even managed to make Jessica smile more. I thought about how I would approach her every night, until the night before the last came, and I'd had enough.
Once again, Effy had gone out, but she had brought Dami and Ade with her. Jessica had gotten too high the night before, and was resting in her room. By that night, I figured she had gotten enough rest.
I knocked on her door. A short while after, she answered, and she looked even sleepier and sexier than the time before. This time I could smell her skin rather than her perfume, and it was making me furious.
