The Blue Guide by Carrie Williams

zone, though the last few months might suggest otherwise. Far from it, in fact. I’m pretty low-maintenance as friends go. But everyone gets themselves into a little pickle now and again. Everyone needs someone to hold their hand through the bumpy bits.
    Good old Jess – she didn’t even tell me, when I was obsessing about Daniel, to get a grip on myself. She never once said: look, Ally, you had the shag of yourlife and you really like the guy, but it was basically a one-night stand and nothing more and you have to get over it. He’s out of your league.
    No, she totally understands that however brief our encounter, I’d found, in Daniel, someone I just knew I could make a life with. Someone who made me laugh, who turned me on, who treated me – at least it seemed that way at the time – with respect. Someone who stayed remarkably down-to-earth when all the glamour could have turned him into the world’s biggest arsehole.
    Jess just held my hand, and called me up, and sat drinking vodka with me when I didn’t feel like going out, watching reruns of
NYPD Blue.
She’d even turned up on my doorstep one night with a pair of Eurostar tickets, and we’d spent a weekend in Paris looking at art, and wandering along the Seine, and drinking cheap red wine and talking about everything and nothing. Our hopes for the future. Our careers. Which rock stars we’d like to fuck. The best positions for orgasms (she prefers it doggy-style, with manual stimulation of the clitoris – whether by herself or her partner, doesn’t matter).
    I’ve never had lesbian inclinations, but sometimes, when I hang out with Jess, I think she’s so damn perfect that I don’t know why I don’t just tustle her into bed and fuck the living daylights out of her. Ever since our first term at uni together, when we were neighbours in our hall of residence, we’ve been the best of buddies. And she is gorgeous to boot. But we both like dicks, and that’s that.
    One night on that visit to Paris, when we got back to our room in the early hours, drunk on booze and talk, I’d seriously considered – for one mad, lonely moment – just going for it anyway, to see what it was like, tosee if it could work. But I knew she didn’t want me, as I didn’t
really
want her, and that we risked losing our friendship through one pissed experiment. And so after she’d gone to sleep I settled for a woozy wank, lying in front of the silently flickering TV, thinking about Daniel Lubowski in the dome room.
    Afterwards, my hands still sticky with my juices, I’d sneaked out of the room and – in direct defiance of all Jess’s advice to just stop thinking about him and get on with my life – dialled his number from my mobile. This time I actually went through with it, rather than just thinking about it, rather than calling up his number on my screen and then bottling out. My heart was in my throat, and I don’t know what I would have said if he’d picked up, but the call clicked through to his answerphone anyway, and I hung up. I never told Jess I did that, but nor did I try calling Daniel again after that weekend, though I still thought about him when I wanked.
    Jess is already sitting at a table when I arrive, sipping a glass of Chardonnay and making puppy eyes at the new barman, who’s pretending not to notice, although you can tell from his body language that he’s secretly rather enjoying the attention.
    She nods over at him as I sit down opposite her. ‘Might take him home tonight,’ she mutters. ‘Could do with a damn good shag.’
    Jess split up with her banker-wanker boyfriend a year ago and has been happily single ever since, although she’s not averse to a bit of rough and tumble when the mood takes her.
    â€˜Could do worse,’ I say, looking over appraisingly at the object of her desire. He’s polishing glasses now, affecting