I kissed a girl…. again… and I liked it

The last weeks have been subsumed with tasks both domestic, drudgerous and delightful, having spent Easter at our new Devonshire cottage, entertaining both friends and family, as well as readying the property for the summer rental market. Two weeks away was bookended by a fierce work schedule and frenzied desire to lose ten pounds in time for a friend’s wedding at Babington House where swimsuits will be de rigeur. It’s a far cry from when I honeymooned there with Tom, a slip of a girl – and a new mother too – it’s galling not to fit in things I wore shortly after giving birth, but there we are.

 

With all this activity – and having returned home to a break-in in which, thankfully nothing much of any real value – my laptop full of stories and photos, for example  –  was stolen – save for a crowbar rent in my House of Hackney wallpaper, and a watch that’s never been great at keeping time – I was in need of a good night out.  So when my one-time work colleague Elke contacted me to go for a drink, I leaped on her suggestion to meet at our mutual colleague’s leaving do – despite misgivings about who I might see there. But, hoping to swap stories of our respective vacations – mine spent chasing children down sand dunes and getting sunburned in unseasonal British heat; slapping whitewash on exterior walls, hiring a housekeeper and falling out – quite bitterly – with my sister – 

– hers spent in a colonial outpost drinking mojitos and soaking off layers of work hard, play hard stress from a job that knows no boundaries –  it felt worth it to nurture the one relationship I salvaged from the wreckage of my last post’s humiliation and anger- and, for whom, since she moved in up the road from me, I’ve developed a warm affection.

Still, it took a fair bit of gumption to walk into the hired pub room of my ex-local to the curiosity, awkward glances or friendly exclamations from many of my old colleagues, all in one room. It wasn’t as if I knew most of them well, having worked there for only a year before being sent on my way – through lack of a role than any particular wrongdoing, shy a tired typo or two, of my own. So I was relieved when I saw Elke’s face: catlike, nordic, tanned from her holiday and sporting clear braces since last we met which gave her face a cheeky, teenage air – far more attractive than when I had a mouthful of metal and the closest I’d got to kissing anyone was a poster of Jonathan Brandis.

But in order to get over my own awkwardness and lack of practice of going out, I drank far more than I should. Certainly, in my youth, I’ve been known to default to lipstick lesbos after more than a few drinks. I had an affair, at uni with a girl who looked like Botticelli’s Venus, over whose breasts I could never decide if what I felt was lust or envy, and a relationship that could be equally tempestuous. My friendship, at journalism school, with two girls who channeled Gwen Stefani and Liv Tyler respectively and who both outshone me as my bridesmaids often tipped over, in full knowledge of my husband-to-be, into a little more than flirting. But it was never much more than that. The icky intricacies of a woman’s body, for all I may have poured over them in private, were too visceral to be well acquainted with on a personal basis- for all, back then, I was see them in full glory on a professional basis every night of the week. I had no fear of them particularly. I just wasn’t all that turned on in the flesh.

One of the reasons I’ve been quieter of late is because I know this blog is read by friends and family – not to mention, on occasion work colleagues whose agendas haven’t always been kind. And I also know that it’s a bad habit of mine to reveal too much. And so if this is a sort of ‘coming out’, if one can do such a thing if one is essentially straight – then so be it.

The thing is, most of the time, I’m fairly content with a fairly trad female role. When Reprobate Kate came to stay in Devon, it was she, we joked, who was the butch in our temporary and fictitious relationship while Tom was back in town.  Kate was far more comfortable, as a single mum by choice, to take on the more traditionally male roles: cooking and the BBQ, building a fire, for instance. But after a week of feminine friction, I never was I so glad to see my man back again, feeling – quite literally –  uncomfortable in the driving seat while he was away.  Tom’s strengths have always compensated for my failings and vice versa – although I spent far more time of my two weeks away in overalls painting walls than he, while he attended to the niceties of furniture construction and water metre administration. We make a great team – often on rather old-fashioned gender lines, though he’s always been a better cook than me.  Ava’s best friend, a direct child of Indian extraction, remarked, recently, when Tom mentioned to her mother in a discussion about cooking that he’d just made a Channa dahl – that she thought women were supposed to do all the work, which says much for our own attempt at balance. Tom carries more than his fair share of slack. It’s just there are some things I’m genuinely better at than him and vice-versa. And that means, I hope, that we’ll never split up.

One thing he’s much better on than me is jealousy. I felt the green eyed monster rear up while he was away and he went for work drinks for his company PA’s birthday. I take issue at him getting personal texts from his ‘work wife’ even though she is also a good friend of mine – they go away on trips together and I still get the hump on his return, despite his assurances that business means business and nothing more.

But Tom doesn’t feel this – quite the opposite. His generous nature extends to me and in the past has even caused problems with his unconventional views and by giving me more freedom than is perhaps good for either of us.

But it does mean I feel very little guilt, when, at the end of the night, I shared a soft, cool-handed embrace that went further than it should have with my girlfriend. Reader, we kissed, and it was, in it’s drunken way, quite perfect.

I told Tom of course. He grinned at me of course. But mostly I just felt flattered that this drop dead, solid ten of a woman, who was pictured long, lean and bikini-clad on an exotic beach a world away from the North Devon one where I was indulging in ice creams and pastries in my fat shorts in unforgiving spring light – could feel remotely attracted, however drunk she was –  to frumpy, oft mumsy rapidly aging me. Me, who’s spent the last two weeks embracing her greys and  fretting over no longer having the legs to wear an a-line denim skirt. To be desired, albeit temporarily, by so beautiful a creature perhaps goes some way to unpick the complicated relationships I’ve had with women all my life. But it also says something else that I’ve no desire to start holding hands and going on holiday together. Not now I’ve seen a picture of her in a bikini. She may be hot, but she’d absolutely put my legs to shame.