Summer of love

We didn't get married immediately, it took us another 6 years before we ended up in front of the altar, but we did move in together. When exams finished, I cranked up the hours in my part-time job so that I could afford to stay in London, and rented a room in halls over the summer. Double rooms were easier to come by, as fewer people wanted to share, so I suggested to Tom that he could also get a job in the same office as me, and we could share the room to halve the rent. He readily agreed, though before we could happily shack up, he had to lose the girlfriend back home.

This was easier said than done. She was still in the middle of her A levels, and he didn't want to be responsible for messing up her future by dumping her before they were over. Unfortunately, the day after they were finished, he was due to go on holiday with her, her family, and worst of all his family too. There was no way he could dump her before the holiday, it would be unbearable. I understood where he was coming from, and decided to let him just get on with it. If he came back and decided he wanted to be with her, fair enough, if he came back and jumped straight on a train back to me to tell me how awful it had been, so much the better.

It didn't work out quite like this though. First of all, he got really bad food poisoning, so really wasn't up to travelling so soon after getting back. Then, her grandma died. This all seemed rather farcical, but I had made up my mind not to get too worried. In my heart, I had already decided that we were always going to be together. But, just in case I was wrong, I protected myself by kissing someone else. This might seem like an interesting strategy to keep the man I had fallen in love with, but firstly, I was 19 and not entirely logical, and secondly, he was on holiday with someone else. I wasn't going to have sex with anyone, but some kissing, to keep me from getting lonely didn't seem too wrong. Especially as it was very good kissing.

In those rather strange days, disconnected from everything I was used to, becoming increasingly nocturnal (I only worked 20 hours a week, and not at fixed times), it seemed perfectly normal to know that the man I was kissing at night was not the one I had chosen as my forever. I knew that if it went further than kissing, things would become very complicated in my head, and it would be really unfair for my kissing partner, who was completely informed about the situation. And while, I'm very glad that Tom did eventually arrive (having dispatched his newly bereaved girlfriend - oh the guilt!), on sultry nights like tonight I do remember the illicit kissing, and wonder about what might have been...