“And before you try to out-poor me, Rob, my parents were missionaries and I spent most of my childhood living in Kenyan slums that would make your public housing complex look like Cheam.”
She angled her body away from me, and we both silently sipped our drinks.
“Sorry again. I didn’t mean it like that, I really didn’t,” I said.
Anna sighed and nervously fiddled with the menu. Then she smiled and looked at me again. “Sorry, I probably overreacted a little. Evidently you’re not the only one to have a chip on your shoulder.”
That night we kissed as soon as we closed the bedroom door. After a few breathless minutes, Anna stopped and I thought she was having second thoughts. But then she started to undress, as if she was alone in her own room, and I watched her and I didn’t think she minded me watching her: the angular bones of her hips, her neat little breasts, her pale delicate arms. When she was naked, she folded her clothes and left them in a tidy pile on my desk.
Since I had been a teenager, sex had always been an exercise in caution. A gradual testing of the waters, a constant expectation that my probing hands would be quickly brushed away. Anna was nothing like that. She was hungry and uninhibited, so unlike the prim and proper way she carried herself. Her desire was single-minded—a quality then, not really knowing women, I found curiously masculine. We stayed awake until the early hours, shuttered behind hastily drawn curtains, our bodies wet with each other, until finally we slept.
* * *
I waited for her out on the court, feeling a little uncomfortable in my West Ham United football shirt and Umbro shorts. The court smelled of rubber and fresh sweat. I wanted to impress on her that I was sporty, that I didn’t just spend my time in front of my computer. So we agreed to a game of squash, which Anna said she had played once or twice at school.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she came out onto the court. In her flappy men’s shorts and regular blouse, she looked like a 1920s tennis star.
“What?” she said.
“What, what?” I said, stifling a laugh.
“Well, your clothes aren’t exactly regulation either. With your football jersey.”
“I didn’t say anything,” I protested, smirking and looking away from her.
“Right. Shall we play then?” she said, awkwardly holding her racket with two hands.
We started warming up, slowly hitting the ball back and forth. Except Anna wasn’t really hitting the ball, but flailing, struggling to connect even when she was serving.
“I’m not so good without my glasses,” Anna said, as she scooped the ball up toward the ceiling.
We carried on like that for a while, not having anything that would resemble a game.
“Okay, I admit it. I lied,” Anna said, after she missed the ball yet again while attempting to serve.
“You lied?”
“I’ve actually never played squash.”
“Oh,” I said, once again stifling a laugh.
“I asked Lola and she said it was easy. She said that anyone could do it. Apparently not.”
I wished then I could have taken a picture of her on that squash court. She looked so beautiful, her dark flannel shorts accentuating her pale legs, her dimpled cheeks flushed with exercise.
“Have you really only played a few times?” Anna asked.
“I don’t know, four or five. At school.”
Anna was quiet, bit her lip. “Well, the truth is, I hate sports.”
“I thought you wanted to play?” I said, putting my arm around her cold shoulders.
“Not really. I thought you wanted to,” she said, gently tapping her racket against her leg. “I only did it because, well, I didn’t want you to think that I was sedentary.”
I smiled when she said that. Sedentary. It was a very Anna word. After another five minutes of pretending, we gave up and went outside.
It was sweltering in the sun. We sat on a small wall that overlooked an enclosed field hockey turf. Children, mostly infants and a few older teenagers, were running around at some kind of sports camp.
We had both decided that we would stay the summer in Cambridge, living off the rest of our student loans. Anna said she wanted to do all the touristy Cambridge things she had never done because she had been working so hard to get her first-class honors. So we went punting and walked around some of the colleges and spent an afternoon in the Fitzwilliam Museum and a morning in the botanical gardens. Much of the time we just spent in bed.
As the summer went on, our friends gradually left. They went off traveling: backpacking in Australia, a camper van across South America. While I felt a pang of regret when they left, a sense that I was missing out on something, Anna and I were both agreed that traveling wasn’t for us. We hadn’t gone to Cambridge just to piss it all away “finding ourselves” somewhere in the Andes. Besides, I had my maps to think about, the software I was writing, the company I wanted to start.
The real reason, though, was that we didn’t want to be apart. We were inseparable, like love-struck teens whose parents and friends can see are headed for a fall. Whenever we tried to spend just one night alone in our own rooms, we were miserable and antsy. We broke, usually within an hour. There was a line in an old Blur song that we both liked: collapsed in love. And that was what had happened. We collapsed in love.
People thought Anna was closed, a cold fish, but she wasn’t like that with me. One evening, without probing, she told me about her life in Kenya and her missionary parents. In these careful, considered sentences, she talked about her father, his affairs, his estrangement from the church. She talked about her mother: how she would not accept her father’s wrongdoing; how she channeled her love into her good works.
It was like a flood, an