*** Authors Note: Any similarity to real persons or places described within this story is probably not an accident, although I've made the effort not to expose anybody too much. The story circulates around a girl I met once, who told me some of her story. I will always regret not having spent more time with her. Enjoy & please leave your comments, good or bad! ***
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My name is Sam.
Actually it's Samantha, but only my mum calls me that when she's pissed at me for something. I'm sure you get that too if you have that kind of multi-syllabic name.
I grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Yep, the poor part of one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Not poor by world standards, by any means. But by Australian standards, our family has not done well.
Dad was a builder's labourer and concreter in his earlier days and earned a decent living. That was until too many shoddy industrial practices and workplace accidents cost him his youth and his ability to work anything better paying than the odd short-term job he could pick-up stacking supermarket shelves or driving delivery trucks for a construction project. Our back yard BBQs in those days tended to consist of a bunch of Islanders with equally shitty incomes sharing in my family's poverty.
But, he's a good man and I love him to death.
My mum, however, is another story. From as early as I can remember dad was never good enough for her and most of the conversations she directed around the dinner table centred on when he was going to find a decent job, or how my brother & I should work hard and make sure we never end up like him.
My dad always just kept a frozen smile and agreed with her, even though she never worked a day in her life as far as I remember. Any other response from him would just get mum going and invariably that would result in me or my little brother ending up in tears. I couldn't escape that place fast enough.
Lucky for me I was gifted with enough intelligence and work ethic to get me through school and into university. I'm studying business and IT, like a double degree. I want to become a systems architect, I think. But I've got another year left at uni to think on that and technology seems to be moving so fast, who knows what another year will bring.
University was my ticket to another world. Only 2 weeks into my studies I met Kelly. Kelly is a couple of years older than me and had spent those 2 years backpacking the world after school before she returned home to start university herself. Kelly and I quickly became besties. A lot of her old school friends had drifted away whilst she'd been travelling and I... well let's just say I never had any real close friends at school that made it through to graduation or didn't get moved away to wherever their fathers could find work.
Looking back now, we found each other exactly in that period in of each of our lives when each of us needed a friend & confidant. And then something else happened.
You see Kelly's parents are wealthy. Very wealthy. Her dad is a self-made businessman working in investment banking and her mum a commercial solicitor. By all accounts they met on the job and were very quickly inseparable, married and pregnant - though not necessarily in that order. I always smile when I think about the conversation over beers when Kelly told me her favourite "embarrassing dad story" of how she may have been conceived on the boardroom table of a prominent Australian merchant bank in North Sydney. Anyway, I digress.
When Kelly came back from her travels, her folks bought her a smallish 2 bedroom apartment in Crows Nest to live in whilst she was at university. The apartment came with 2 conditions. First, she had to get a job and pay her own way - her dad's way of making her learn some life lessons and a work ethic. Second, she had to have a room-mate. Something her mother insisted on, mostly for safety reasons. Even on Sydney's Lower North Shore, one can find some dodgy characters, believe me!
So she moved into her new apartment and started working in a local pub that her dad had some business interest in. She'd been looking for a flat-mate for a couple of weeks when we first met. A week later I was moving in.
Her folks had insisted on meeting me first though and I think they took a shine to me. Over dinner they asked me lots of questions about where I was from, my family and what I wanted to do after graduating university. Being the business people they were, it wasn't long before they'd coaxed out of me pretty much everything I had to tell. I think her dad particularly thought I would be good for his only daughter - a kind of "real world" reality check to her "entitled" upbringing. He also told me he'd put in a good word at the same pub that Kelly was working at. Seems his "good word" is as good as a job offer.
So, here I am, a month shy of 21. Kelly and I have a little under a year left to complete our 4 year degree programs and we are still best friends, flat-mates and co-workers. Over the past 3 years we've laughed, cried and studied our arses off. We've gotten drunk together and fooled around with boys together a bit, though me being far less enthusiastic than Kelly on the boy part. Once we even got arrested for disorderly & spent a night in the lockup together. Needless to say her dad never heard that story - at least not from us!
I think there's only 1 thing that we haven't shared since I've known Kelly: Virgin status. I know Kelly lost her virginity at 15 under the stands at a school rugby match at Knox grammar she had attended with her groupies. She's told me the story several times, with each re-telling in more vivid detail. I think she enjoys watching me squirm.
Me? Well I'm still a virgin. A near 21 year old virgin, which is not that easy to find in Australia. Not that Aussie gals are all that easy, but I'm pretty sure as a generalisation, we enjoy men and don't get too hung up about what's under the bonnet, so to speak.
It's not that I have any particular hang ups about sex or anything, I've just not come across a boy yet that I particularly wanted to fuck. Quite the opposite in truth.
All the boys back in school were arseholes whose prime interests were cars, booze, drugs and telling their mates about which girl they'd last coaxed into the back seat of their wheels for a bit of whatever. I'd made a decision pretty early on that I wasn't going to be one of those girls.
At university, I'd become focussed on my studies and balancing as many extra hours at the pub as I could to put some money away. Sure Kelly & I occasionally dragged a couple of fellas back to our apartment for some fun, but I always drew the line at snogging or the occasional hand job.
One time I was contemplating having a go at giving my first blow-job to a particularly attractive guy we'd met at The Oakes pub in Neutral Bay, while Kelly was riding his buddy on the couch and screaming like a banshee to boot. That night ended badly when it became obvious to my guy that, regardless of whatever else was going to happen, my panties were not leaving my arse under any circumstances. He and his mate both left the apartment with parting insults of "cock-tease" or some such.
I spent quite some time crying my eyes out against Kelly's comforting chest that night. Whilst I don't think she understands why I don't just relent and join the "I've been fucked club", she's never questioned me about it. She does ask me twice now before she offers to bring blokes back to the apartment though. And that's gotta be part of the reason that I love her so much. She's got my back!
She's also taught me a lot of things off the cuff. Let's just say that I'm intimately aware of what she has learnt through her travels and experiences, without having been there myself. There's been a couple of times when her stories have gone way beyond the level of detail you'd expect between mates and I've not quite managed to put my finger on why as yet.
So here I am: at work and thinking about Kelly watching my back as I literally watch her back clearing a table across the 2nd floor room of our pub. We both think of it as "our pub" but its real name is Halligans. Yep, it's one of those pseudo Irish bars you'll find anywhere across Australia and around the world from what I hear. But the menu is hearty and reasonably priced. The range of Australian boutique ales on tap, alongside the standard Guinness and Kilkenny types, is popular and the patrons are mostly fun to serve. A mixture of professionals having a meal and a drink on the way home during the week and locals just getting pissed on the weekend. Usually I prefer the weeknight shifts - less trouble and better tips!
