What became of us

the floor. He lay down first, then pulled her down beside him. He was still fully clothed. She put her head against his T-shirt smelling him, trying to recapture all the fantasies she had ever entertained about being alone in a bedroom with him. Her fingers worked their way under the soft cotton to his flesh, but she was nervous when he did not respond.
    She had only ever slept with one man in her life. She wondered suddenly whether she had been doing everything wrong for the last fifteen years. The movements that made Barry’s penis stand proud, seemed to have no effect whatsoever on Liam’s. It nestled like a sleeping mouse. He took her hand and pushed it away gently.
    ‘It was a long drive,’ he said, with a yawn.
    Then she understood. How selfish of her to demand he satisfy her when he had driven all the way through the night. He was tired. They would sleep and in the morning they would do it all properly.
    A moment later, he was breathing regular damp blasts of air into her ear.
    I am in bed with my lover, she thought. She shifted her head to look at his face, trying to relive the feeling she had had outside the lodge when she saw him waiting there.
    In the space of less than an hour she had gone from feeling like an attractive woman in her prime embarking on a grown-up affair, to feeling like the sort of stupid teenage girl she often defended on minor drugs or prostitution charges. The sort of girl she asked, exasperated, ‘But why did you let him do that to you?’
    She watched Liam’s sleeping face, but the magnetic field of desire around him that had drawn her whole mind and body in, had gone, as if the current had been switched off.
    The bed was too narrow for two adults to share. The comforting intimacy of lying so close to him turned rapidly to frustration that she could not move. She wanted to get up and shake the fidgetyness out of her limbs but she was on the wall side of the bed and she would have to roll over him or wriggle down to the bottom of the bed, neither of which she could see herself doing without waking him.
    No wonder girls whose boyfriends regularly climbed over the back gates had always looked so exhausted at breakfast.
    His body felt unnaturally hot and the places where her skin touched his were wet with sweat. She found it impossible to get into a position where there was no point of contact. Her head ached, and her thirst was so profound she imagined herself drinking the entire contents of the huge upturned bottles in the mineral water dispenser at work and still having a dry throat.
    It’s not like this in the movies.
    Her inappropriate remark kept repeating in her brain and she winced at the dismissive response he had given it, and then, even though she was trying really hard not to, she thought of Barry. She thought of him lying alone in their big double bed with its fresh-smelling cotton pillowcases and the summer-weight duvet and she felt safe for a moment. Then the full horror of the situation she was in shuddered through her body, and she began to cry.
    Inching her way down to the bottom of the bed, she stood up, stretched her arms and shook them vigorously. At the sink, she splashed her face with water and then cupped her hands and drank some, but it tasted of chlorine and the moment it reached her stomach she felt sick. She couldn’t decide whether it would be better to make herself throw up or just lie down on the floor and try to sleep. The toilet was several doors down the corridor. She could not bear the thought of sticking a finger down her throat and choking her guts up in some chilly, unfamiliar loo.
    She tried to make a pillow of the hard foam cushion from the armchair. The fabric was rough on her face, and the dust in it made her want to sneeze. She bit her tongue to stop herself. The floor was cold. Suddenly, from being overheated, she was shivering. She stood up and tried to push Liam gently towards the wall, but he flopped over, taking up even more room. She lay down on the floor again, using his leather jacket as a blanket.
    The last time she had been really drunk was after the office party the previous Christmas. When she got home, she only just made it to the bathroom and Barry stood outside the door as she retched in case she choked. Afterwards he had sponged her forehead with cool water and ferried her mugs of hot sweet tea in bed before cleaning up the mess.
    She had been terrified that she’d made a fool of herself at the Christmas party, but he