Out Late with Friends and Regrets Read Online Free PDF

imprisoned –    you got me down with a flourish, but do you remember sweeping me into your arms and snogging me like there was no tomorrow?   You even put your tongue in my mouth!”
    “Oh God, yes I do!   How embarrassing! I always yearned to be the guy with the leather doublet and a handy way with a rapier. If I’d been doing a fencing class at the sports centre when I saw them in the car park, I really think Lynn’s boyfriend – make that ex-boyfriend - would have gone home with an intimate body piercing he wasn’t expecting. I don’t know what came over me.”
    “Maybe I do.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Remember Sister Francesca? All the hockey injuries you pretended you had so she’d check you over? You broke your heart when she was sent to the missions.”
    Fiona let a long moment pass, while she studied the gas flames of the fire, eventually saying,“Well, OK. Everybody has schoolgirl crushes.”
    “Yes, so they do. Did you ever know you were mine? I used to think you’d make a brilliant romantic lead.”
    It was getting too hot in the room altogether.
    “Oh come on. You always had loads of boyfriends, all the nice-looking ones, too, whilst I got all the dregs. Geeks, weirdos, no-hopers. They were always horrible,” said Fiona.
    “Your problem was that you put all the potential talent right off. Too feisty by half.”
    Fiona tried to visualise her former self. Always in trouble. Pushing her luck. Cheeky. Trying the nuns’ ironclad patience to the limit. Sending them off at explanatory tangents in the more boring lessons. Paper plane-maker, pellet-flicker, impromptu impressionist. A different person, a girl with whom she’d lost contact.
    “Hmm. Can’t say I’m itching to get a boyfriend, anyway. I mean, I assume Donal’s taken?”
    “Too right. But I think you’re ready for a change of direction, recovered enough to take a step into the arena. I sense a kind of – oh, I dunno, a kind of impatience in you.”
    “Maybe what I need is a nice, civilised, gay boyfriend. Someone I can talk to and go places with.”
    Rosemary looked at her intently for a moment.
    “Maybe what you need is a nice, civilised, gay girl friend, someone you can let rip with, and use up some of that pent-up energy!”
    Fiona stared. Her heartrate seemed to have shot up. She realised her mouth was open. She would have to say something.
    “No. No, I don’t think so. Not at all.” She was finding it difficult to breathe without gasping, as if she’d been running. She shouldn’t have come. She could have carried on as she was, without Rosemary in her life. Without anyone in her life. Could she decently leave this early? It was two o’clock, and a Wednesday because they both had the day off; she could plead early dusk and the impending rush hour.
    And Rosemary was just watching her, saying nothing.
    “So what does a respectable married woman like you know about... gay girlfriends?” Fiona managed, finally.
    Rosemary’s dimples winked in her cheeks as she smiled.
    “Oh, I had a little dabble at uni, y’know. We were all radical feminists, and constantly looking for boundaries to crash. Several of us went through an experimental phase of dating women. Rites of passage, Fee. I’m deeply happy with Donal, and I love him to bits, but I have to say that I could have acquired a taste for women if he hadn’t come along.” The dimples deepened. “Perhaps I was really lucky in my choices,” she added, rolling her eyes.
    “Oh God,” said Fiona, “and you think that I -”
    “Yes.”
    There was a pause, and Fiona reached for her cup. It made a quiet but discernible rattle in the saucer. She would have killed for a real drink.
    “Tell you what,” said Rosemary, resettling herself next to her friend on the sofa, “you can give my theory a try-out. Trial snog, free of charge.”
    She pushed her lips forward in a duckbill pout and lowered her eylids halfway.
    “Gwon,” she muttered through the pout, pointing at