She was younger than me, by two years, but that didn't matter. She also said she had a boyfriend. That should have mattered too, but it didn't. The first time that I kissed her was the night I held her hair back while she threw up after we'd all been out drinking. That should also have mattered, but in some strange way it didn't, because she was cute and fun.
We were both thrown into the deep end, living in the same sprawling student house, her in her freshman year and me in my final, in a third tier university in a forgotten part of the country that the promise of life had leached out of, leaving behind tumbledown dockyards and the marching stacks of chemical works alongside the bank of a river that was almost too wide to see across, an endless roiling landscape of dirty brown water under the wind.
Where we lived was one of a hundred identical places that lined the long avenues on the perimeter of the campus, each house its own microcosm of young adults, finally free of home, kicking back, sampling that rarefied air, the first taste of freedom. I was the house senior, which put me in charge, but that was hopeless. Even from the very first week, it was clear that there was no order to be brought to the bedlam, as the occupants of our specific den of iniquity brought back bodies to fuck or cones to smoke or little tabs they'd got from a guy who knew a guy who knew some serious face in the estates that ringed around us, hemming us in like a moat.
I navigated a path through the chaos, picking battles, playing loose with the house rules, making it up as I went along. We never got a smashed window, so I guess I was doing something right.
The second week in, we were all gathered together with beer and vodka in the lounge room, crammed onto the battered couches that had seen a decade-worth of fools like us, drinking and watching videos. She was sitting on a chair, and she put her legs up on my lap, laughing along to whatever the movie was that we were watching as I stroked her shins.
After the movie finished, she yawned and went up to bed, leaving me to get the ribbing. I thought it had been discreet, my hand on her thigh through her leggings while we all watched the screen in the dark, the feeling of her firm body beneath my fingers, unresisting. But, they'd all seen it, and I got the broadside. I denied everything, pointing out that she was a freshman, that she had a boyfriend, that I was going to be sitting down here and watching the next video we'd selected and not following her up to bed.
I didn't go to her bed that night. I held my resolve. She was in my bed the next night, though, despite all my words to the contrary. She stayed that night, just sleeping, then she stayed the next morning and we made love. She stayed in my bed for five years.
It changed the dynamic of the house, picking at the seams, exposing unexpected jealousies. She was good looking, with an easy smile and a carefree attitude, happy to build a little bubble with me, moving her bed upstairs so we could push them together and have a vast expanse to romp around on for the entirety of Saturday morning which we heard the rest of the house moving around outside the door. It was my first proper relationship, both of us diving headfirst into it and fitting together like long-lost puzzle pieces, taking turns cooking and cleaning up, going shopping, doing the laundry, then spending our nights wrapped together in a world of our own.
That was the year I finally seemed to get all my shit together, pulling up out of a nose-dive with my grades to finish on top, opening up opportunities to stay on after graduation and study postgrad. I took the opportunity, and even though we had a pittance between us, we managed to secure a place on the main road, just the two of us now, our first actual home together, while I made ends meet as a teaching assistant part time, taking the courses that that I'd been a student in only a few years before. We had nothing; we had everything we needed. After years of drifting, of not knowing what my life was going to be: here, at last, I'd started.
Postgrad was hard, but in different ways, trying to keep up with the evolution of a brand-new field of study long enough to put a thesis together without it already being superseded as the frontiers advanced past it. Her degree was coming to a close too, hitting her final year. Money was still tight, but we made do: the rent was cheap and the city we lived in seemed specifically designed to house people on subsistence living. I took a part time lecturing post to try and get us a little more, since her meagre university grant was almost meaningless.
The Sunday before my first lecture, sitting in our little lounge with all my slides prepared and a steadily growing feeling of dread, she took pity on me.
"All prepped?" she asked.
I nodded, morosely, shuffling my pieces of paper together on the little table. She stood in the doorway, in jeans and a top, her unruly tresses of auburn hair pulled back into a ponytail. She smiled sweetly at me.
"You'll be great," she said.
I didn't share her optimism. I stashed my notes in my bag, but I couldn't settle. All I could think about was fronting up to a hundred faces at ten o'clock the next morning.
"What's on your mind?" she asked me.
"Oh, just the existential terror of getting up in front of a horde of first years with a questionable motivation for being there."
"How bad could it go?"
"You seem to forget, I was one of those first years. I know how bad. I was right there. That lecture theatre might as well be a colosseum."
"What's going to take your mind off it?"
"Aside from at least four pints?"
"Yeah, not good for your first day. Aside from that?"
"I dunno," I confessed. "Maybe a reconnaissance? Check out the lay of the land, before the enemy arrives?"
"Sure."
I frowned at her. "What?"
"Sure. Let's go. You've got a key, right?"
"Yeah, but..."
"So, let's go in there. You can stand at the front, see how it feels. I can sit in the seats."
"And heckle."
"Like I'd even know what to heckle about. I'd have to resort to, I dunno, calling you a poo-poo face."
She grinned, and her cheeks dimpled.
"A poo-poo face? Is that as good as you've got?"
"For now. I might think up something more cutting when we're in there. What do you think? Good idea?"
