Read Do You Remember the First Time? for Free Online Page A

…’
    ‘I hate it,’ said Clelland. ‘It’s a pissy job.’
    ‘Really? It sounds interesting,’ said Olly.
    ‘Everyone says that.’ He ran his hand through his dark hair. ‘It’s bloody endless government bureaucracy, and as to how much good we even do at the end of the day I couldn’t tell you. Certainly doesn’t seem to make anything any better. God, I’m sorry. Am I being really depressing at a wedding? Was I always like this?’
    He looked directly at me, and I couldn’t meet his eyes. Get a grip, I told myself fiercely. Any minute, surely, Olly was going to spot the hot vibes coming out of my head and give me serious trouble.
    ‘You were worse,’ I said.
    At Heather’s wedding, just before my birthday, I had flirted madly with the best man, danced up and down with theushers and ended up sharing a bottle of champagne down by the fountain with a grumpy-looking Clelland, who was talking about the bollocksy bourgeois imperative of forced enslavement. It was all rubbish, of course. It’s just coincidence it came true for Tashy’s sister.
    ‘I’m never getting married,’ he’d said, and my little teenage heart had dropped. What was I thinking? That we were going to run away to Gretna Green? Why did I think men two years older than me were grown up? Because I didn’t know anything else, I suppose.
    ‘Oh,’ I said, fingering the fading roses of my bouquet. I dabbled my hand in the fountain in what I hoped was an alluring manner.
    ‘Ritualised enslavement,’ he grumped, pulling me to him. ‘For men and women.’
    His long thin hand brushed across the top of the lace on my dress. I shivered. We had done heavy, long-distance, serious snogging, but I still had a very heavy layer of being-a-non-slut, anti-aids parental-warnings, throw-it-all-away-pregnant-schoolgirl outright fear morality hanging over my head and hadn’t let him go any further than the waistband of my C&A knickers.
    ‘You’re lovely,’ he said. I beamed. He took this as an excuse to slide his hand up the sixteen layers of tulle I was wearing. Unsurprisingly, he got fatally lost on the way, and the whole romance of the fountain started to peter away as we kissed onwards, he groping desperately somewhere heavily hemmed only slightly north of my knees.
    The more he pawed around, frantic, the more awkward and embarrassed I became. This wasn’t how they described it in our purloined copies of Cosmopolitan at all. And therecertainly wasn’t much of this going on in Lace , or Sweet Valley High .
    ‘Oh God,’ said Clelland in lust and frustration.
    I gulped, still at the stage of kissing when you’re very conscious of what to do with your saliva.
    ‘Erm …’ I said.
    Then he found it.
    ‘Ooh!’ I said.
    He looked at me, but with a misty expression in his eyes, like he couldn’t really see me.
    I gulped again. ‘I can’t,’ I said firmly.
    ‘What – never?’ he said, focusing on me.
    ‘I don’t know …’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but you are m-my girlfriend, Flo, and I-I thought …’
    He was so red-faced I thought his head might explode. This new stutter wasn’t helping either.
    ‘I … I don’t think so.’
    ‘Of course,’ he said.
    ‘Everyone! Bridesmaids! Ushers!’ I heard Tashy’s mum calling from the house. ‘Come on! We’re cutting the cake!’
    We looked at each other, two frightened deer.
    Clelland went to withdraw his hand but before he could I had stood up quickly. I was as pink as my skirt as I ran to the house, leaving him there looking after me, confused.
    Heather looked a picture, her hair as enormously rigid as it had been that morning, but now teetering unpredictably to the left.
    She held her hand over Merrill’s. The cake was a ludicrous,six-storey pink and white nightmare, flowers curling crisply round every corner. I shut my eyes tight.
    ‘What are you doing?’ whispered Tashy, who I’d been relieved to find when I came in.
    ‘Making a wish when they cut the cake.’
    ‘You