Emily Prince

virginity and cigarettes

The fourth day he walked her home, she asked if he wanted to come inside. She didn’t look at him as she spoke, squinting instead at her house, at the shuttered windows, the overgrown grass. She worried the ends of her sleeves between her fingers.

Inside was dim and cool. There was a smell in the hallway, a dry, musty odour that made him wrinkle his nose. They passed the door of some sort of living room, and he could see a figure reclining on a couch, someone soft and large, the back of their head visible as they watched the television screen. A cloud of smoke hung suspended over the scene. They kept walking, down a corridor to the end of the house.

She opened the door and threw her schoolbag into a corner. He looked around, taking in the single bed and faded blanket, the desk cluttered with books and paper and paintbrushes, the pile of clothes spilling from the wardrobe. There was a fish tank on the bedside table, cleaner than anything else in the room. She kicked the pile of clothes into the wardrobe and attempted to close the door. He didn’t know what to do with himself – where to sit, what to do with his schoolbag – and his mouth was dry. He could feel the sweat collecting in his armpits, the weakness in his knees. It wasn’t how he imagined it, but it felt even better in a way.

She was tapping some flakes into the fish tank. A goldfish swam to the surface. Her gaze flicked toward him for a second, then away. She stood up and unbuttoned her school dress, stepping out of it with her back to him, then climbed under the blanket on the bed, lifting it to cover her chest. Her shoulders were small and pale. Her bra was dirty-white and he could see the straps starting to fray. He felt the blood surging through him and felt dizzy with anticipation, with the half-imagined expectations that had haunted him for weeks now.

He noticed her fingernails, bitten to the quick. He heard a cough from somewhere in the house, from a couch wreathed in smoke. He wondered if his feet would smell when he took his shoes off, if he could possibly get away with keeping them on? Then he took a breath and turned away, peering at the shelf of books above the desk, making a show of perusing.

‘What is your favourite book?’ he asked. He heard the mattress creak, the blanket shift, felt her pad up beside him, drawing her discarded dress back around her shoulders. She stood next to him as they looked at the shelf and he could feel the heat moving between their skin, warmer than a kiss. She leaned forwards, touched the spine of a volume.

‘This one was the first book I could read on my own.’

Her breath smelled like gum, sweet and sharp and young.

Emily Prince is a writer and librarian from Australia, currently living in Scotland. She was runner-up in the 2017 Emerging Writer Award, facilitated by Moniack Mhor, and in the Bridge Awards and her short fiction has appeared in Gutter, Sonder, Clover & White, and Voiceworks, among others. She tweets at @miss_e_prince.