‘Are you serious?’
‘I’m on for it if you are.’
‘Does it have to be India? Couldn’t we do Australia?’
‘I’m not wasting my money on that. It’s India or nothing.’
I thought for less than one second, a vision popping into my head of a spartan hotel room with a marble floor, a ceiling fan, and Liz and me fucking like bunny rabbits on a huge double bed.
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Shake on it.’
We shook on it.
Just touching her hand like that turned me on. Liz and I were going abroad together for the whole summer. Sharing hotel rooms. There was no way, given the circumstances, that I could possibly fail to shag her.
She gripped my hand, and gave me one of her stares. ‘As mates,’ she said. ‘It’s only going to work if that’s absolutely clear.’
‘Fine. As mates,’ I said, leaning forward to give her a peck on the cheek.
Liz’s dad agreed to pay for her ticket, on condition that he met me first. I was duly invited to her parents’ house for dinner, along with my mum and dad. This turned out to be one of the most stagnant social occasions I had ever attended. If an alien had landed in the room, he would have thought that human beings communicate by clanking cutlery together. Still, I seemed to fulfil whatever criteria he had in mind, and he gave her the money.
Liz and I started spending whole days together, poring over maps, flipping through guidebooks, and gradually planning a route. We would fly to Delhi, head north to the Himalayas, do a little loop into Rajasthan, then head south to Bombay, Goa, and right down to Kerala at the very bottom. After that we’d go back up the other side from Madras to Calcutta, across to Varanasi, north to Kathmandu, then back to Delhi to fly home. The middle of the country is apparently really boring – just loads of people growing food and getting hot, so doing a loop around the edge was the best route to avoid missing anything.
A lot of these planning sessions went on late into the night, and I occasionally slept at her place. This was a cramped student house which she shared with three other girls from her course, and there was no spare bedroom, so I had to sleep on a few cushions on her floor. There was something deeply erotic about this. Lying there chatting, after we’d switched the lights out, felt almost like pillow talk. A serenely post-coital atmosphere hung in the air, only marginally spoilt by the fact that I usually had a screaming hard-on.
Once, we’d already been pillow-talking for some time, when she told me that she had a stiff neck.
‘Would you like a massage?’ I said.
‘Are you any good?’
‘All right,’ I said, meaning, ‘Never done one before in my life, but I’ll give it a go.’
She turned round to lie on her front, and I climbed up to her bed, pushed aside her duvet, and started squeezing the back of her neck.
At first she lay there giving me all the reasons why she had a stiff neck that day, and telling me how James was an excellent masseur. She went on and on about him, so I switched off and stopped listening. As I gradually figured out how to do it, I noticed that her speech slowed down, and the gaps between her sentences got longer and longer, until the gaps were winning.
Then she started making these noises. I don’t think I can actually call them moans. That would be overstating things. They didn’t quite qualify as moans, and they weren’t exactly sighs – they were kind of hums- plus-a-bit.
Soon I wasn’t just doing her neck; I was doing her shoulders and the top of her back. Then I started catching my fingers in the neck of her T-shirt – trying to give the impression that it was getting in the way and making a real massage impossible.
It was an odd scene, really. There I was, dressed only in a pair of boxer shorts, sitting astride her, massaging her back, while she hummed-plus-a-bit, and every few minutes told me what good mates we were, and how much she loved James.
I began to inch her T-shirt upwards until it was gathered around her armpits. Under cover of doing an upper-arm, forearm and hand massage, I straightened her arms out above her head. Then, in a gentle swoop, the T-shirt came over her head, down her arms, and on to the floor.
Whoosh!
I smoothed her hair back in place, and looked at her back.
Her long, sweeping, elegant, gorgeous back.
Now, without the T-shirt in the way, I could sweep, slide and rub in long, easy, unimpeded movements.
She stopped talking, and the hums-plus-a-bit turned into moans.
At the side of her back, I could feel the bulge of her tits. They were right there, uncovered, pressed into the sheet. And I was right there with them.
After a while, I moved down and started on her legs. On the way past, I noticed that all she was wearing was a pair of men’s boxer shorts.
Now she was definitely moaning. Up and down I went, over her whole body, my hands subtly slipping into the pant area on the way past. One of these little explorations flipped over the elastic on her boxer shorts, revealing, of all things, a name-tag. In the half-light bleeding through the curtains from a street lamp, I could just make out the words. ‘JAMES IRVING’, it said.
I snapped the elastic back into place.
Gradually, I started focusing my attention on her thighs, then on the inside of her thighs, then on the top of the inside of her thighs. In a series of tiny adjustments, her legs parted, accommodating my hand.
Slowly, her hips rose a fraction from the mattress. I followed the invitation, and found my fingers in the hot, wet gusset of James’s boxer shorts. After this, I just held firm and watched. I hardly needed to move. Her hips rocked back and forwards over my hand, gradually faster and harder, until she made this funny squeaky noise, had a little shudder, then pushed my hand away, rolled over and fell asleep.
Instead of going back to my bed, I curled up behind her and tried to doze off, with my erection pressed firmly into her bum.
In the morning I was the first to wake up, so I crawled to my bed and woke up again there, in order to do my bit for the illusion that nothing had happened. Having done that, I went downstairs, made two breakfasts, and took them back to the bedroom. I balanced the tray on Liz’s clock-radio, and got into bed with her. She was still half asleep, but had somehow conveniently put her T-shirt on.
Together we chomped through our cereal and toast like two good mates who just happened to be having a companionable breakfast on the same mattress. Neither of us mentioned what had happened, even though with every mouthful I took, I noticed a thrillingly salty odour on my fingers.
Later that week, Liz and I bought our tickets. We would leave immediately after the end of her term, and return almost three months later, just in time for me to start university.
After a while, sleep-overs with massage became a regular occurrence. The massage technique gradually developed until it involved both of us stripping down to our pants and rubbing different bits of our bodies together.
Since Liz never raised the topic of our burgeoning sexual relationship in conversation, I decided to play along with her and let us continue with the illusion that we were two good mates who just happened to have a fondness
