Page 39 of Sex Ed

I stop for a moment and roll up my shirt sleeves. Now this I can do.

So it turns out I can build three Billy bookcases in an hour, whilst eating pizza and talking mortgage rates, and these are things that make us nerds feel like true superheroes. And now it’s little things that I’m discovering that make me think Caitlin’s the ideal woman for me. She has a little Ficus plant in a gold ceramic pot that she places carefully on the shelves of her new bookcase; she has a good thesaurus, likes reading historical biographies and she asked me to put a sheet down on the floor before we moved the bookcases because she didn’t want to scratch the new laminate. These are all the things I look for. It was both a surprise and a shock therefore to be invited into her bedroom.

‘Can you just jam it in?’ she asks me.

‘It would damage the hole, I might have to make it bigger…’

‘How?’

‘What tools do you have?’

Get your mind out of the gutter because if Mia was here that’s where it would go. Caitlin hands me a power drill and I get to work, making that hole bigger so I can screw it down. Everything is innuendo now, I’ve been around Mia for far too long.

‘That should work,’ I say, placing my finger inside.

‘You are good at this,’ Caitlin mentions. ‘Did you have a handy dad growing up?’

‘Actually, no. It was just me and my mum. My dad left when I was five. You could argue I had to teach myself,’ I tell her.

She hands over the rest of the screws a little sadly. ‘God, I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I get by,’ I say, trying to laugh off her sadness. ‘People in far worse places than me. I had a good mum who did both jobs.’

‘And how did you meet Mia?’ she asks me. I feel myself blush at the mention of her name.

‘Oh, we started at Griffin Road at the same time, we’ve been mates ever since.’ Am I still her friend? It feels like we’ve levelled up somehow though I’m not sure I should be calling her my virginity taker.

‘The P.E. guys say she’s a bit unhinged…’

‘Oh, she has her moments.’

‘Tommy has some story about how she let the air out of his bike tyres. Is that true?’

It was the week after they slept together and he ghosted her so cruelly, she may have had some revenge. I told her how to do the tyres because her plan was to steal a knife from Food Tech and slash them.

‘I have no idea. I wouldn’t listen to everything Tommy tells you though.’

‘No? He seems nice. He’s a good laugh.’

‘Appearances can be deceiving. Mia’s one of the good ones, that’s all I know.’

She nods at me, and I wonder whose words she’s going to side with, the charismatic Tommy or the drawer-builder, Ed. I put my last screw into the drawer and then check the runners on it.

‘Perfect. What’s going in here?’

Caitlin empties a bag of knickers on to her bed. I stand there open-mouthed, not quite knowing where to look, willing myself not to stare at the sheer mint thongs, which would be both pervy and wrong.

‘Well, I will leave you to that,’ I say, putting both thumbs up like a complete idiot.

‘You’ve been awesome tonight, thank you so much!’ she says sweetly and as I get up, she holds out a hand to help me steady myself.

‘It’s been kinda fun. You got anything else you want help with?’ I say as I roll down my sleeves.

And then from out of nowhere, she’s there, in front of me and she kisses me on the cheek. I can hardly breathe as she touches me. When I meant I could help her with something, I meant I could put up a shelf or bleed a radiator, but in this moment, I realise that I’m in this woman’s bedroom. Is she hinting at something? I got pizza today. I got to be in her company and check out her books and paint selections, I don’t need anything else. But this bedroom is small and we’re standing here together in this enclosed space. Is she waiting for something? How am I meant to read this? I only had sex for the first time on Sunday. What is she hinting at? So, I do what any red-blooded man does and I stick out my hand.

‘Well, you know where to find me. In the staffroom. Room 56, too. Thank you for the Diet Coke and stuff.’

She takes my hand and laughs. I then bend down and gather all the cardboard boxes and plastic packaging in front of me.

---