“I am bad at relationships.”

That was the line I always used. It was easy and self-deprecating enough to sound honest and just vague enough to stop most questions. It sounded like something I could fix if I tried harder or met the right person or grew up a little more. It avoided the real problem, which was that I had never really wanted the relationships I kept forcing myself into.

I didn’t know that at the time. Or I knew it in a vague sort of way. The way you know a word is spelt wrong but keep reading anyway. Because really knowing would have required a level of introspection I didn’t possess.

Perhaps the line should have been, “I’m bad at hide and seek”.

When I think of high school, what I remember most is effort. The effort of showing up correctly. Smiling at the right moments. Saying yes when a boy asked me out even though all I really felt was disinterest.

I was tall and attractive, budding early. Strong and athletic, I played football because I was good at it, and because running until my lungs burned was easier than sitting still with my thoughts. The girls on the team drew my focus more that I realised. I noticed things about them I never noticed about boys. The way their thighs would part when they sat on the bench in the dressing room. The way their ponytails whipped against their necks when they ran. The way their nipples were always erect in the shower. I told myself this was normal. Everyone noticed everyone ... I told myself a lot of things.

My first boyfriend was ... nice. That’s the word people used. He held my hand at the movies and leaned in for kisses that felt, required, and I returned them like obligations. I waited for something to switch on inside me. Heat, hunger, anything. Instead, there was only the constant awareness of my own body, like I was watching myself play a role. An awareness that I just didn’t feel what the other girls said they felt.

When we broke up, he cried and I felt relief and guilt equally, which I mistook for heartbreak. The girls on the team gathering around me, reassuring me, telling me that he wasn’t right for me, showed me that this was the correct reaction. I was learning how to act.

Throughout high school that pattern repeated. Different boys, same script. I learned how to be agreeable. How to laugh at jokes that weren’t funny. How to let hands feel my thighs or breasts without reacting. I learned how to say, “It’s not you, it’s me,” ... and mean it in a way that kept the truth buried.

The truth was quieter, but persistent. It showed up in flashes I immediately shut down. The way my chest tightened when a teammate hugged me from behind. The way I felt an unreasonable sense of loss when a girl on the team got a boyfriend from another school. The arousal when we showered after a game. I told myself I admired them. I told myself I appreciated the friendship. I told myself anything that let my interest remain unnoticed. Anything that hid my real feelings ... my desire.

University felt like I had escaped. A new city with new rules and new version of me. I chose Sports Physiotherapy because it made sense on paper. Athletic girl, practical degree, something respectable and pragmatic. I didn’t choose it because I loved it. I chose it because it didn’t require me to look too closely at myself and let me exist in an environment where I’d already learned how to act.

Macquarie University’s City Campus was smaller than I expected. More multistorey buildings and concrete than open concourses and lawn. People moved with purpose, headphones in, eyes forward, looking focused and scholastic. No one cared who I had been before, which felt like a kind of freedom but also like being dropped into the deep end without warning.

First year was a blur of lectures, public transport, and share houses full of people who never quite became friends. I went to parties because that was what you did. I drank because it made the parties easier to deal with. I slept with guys that wanted me because that was what everyone else seemed to be doing.

Those nights all blur together now. Different rooms, same feeling. The strange dissociation of watching someone else’s hands on my skin and thinking... this should mean something. I was good at it in the way you can be good at anything you don’t feel. I learned how to sound convincing. How to touch back without committing. How to leave early in the morning with a smile that suggested that I had enjoyed them, stroking their ego just enough that they would forget me and move on.

I told myself I was independent ... Empowered and experimenting. Discovering my voice. Inside, there was a growing sense of fraudulence, a duplicity I didn’t know how to name.

I didn’t make friends that year. Not real ones. People drifted in and out of my life like changing fashions. Group assignments, shared drinks, nothing that stuck. I was polite and pleasant ... forgettable. It was safer that way.

My second year began the same way, moved with the same rhythm ... until it didn’t.

The party where I met Kathy and Paul was in a fourth-floor apartment. It smelled like spilled beer, and the weed smoke hit me the moment the door opened. Someone’s playlist kept replaying Katy Perry ... repeatedly. I remember thinking I shouldn’t just leave, I should run. I stayed anyway.

Kathy found me first. Or maybe I found her. Memory rearranges itself over time. What I know is that suddenly she was there, small and bright and too focused. She had blonde hair that caught the light and eyes that were an unsettling shade of jade green, the kind that didn’t flick away when they should have. Her gaze looked into me not just at me.

“Christine,” she said after I introduced myself, like she was testing the sound of it. Her smile was warm but assessing. Not unkind, just ... appraising.

This would prove to be my first mistake ... the one that would lead to so many others ... I noticed that she noticed me.

Paul arrived moments later, taller than her, broad-shouldered, quietly handsome in a way that didn’t ask for attention. He had the kind of face that made you assume competence. A presence that you could relax around, like he didn’t expect you to act for him. He smiled easily, put an arm around Kathy’s waist without looking down to check she was there. They fit together like something old and established and I felt like an intruder just standing near them.

We talked about nothing. Classes. Lecturers. The usual currency of strangers. Kathy touched my arm when she laughed. Not flirtatious exactly, just present. Almost anchoring and including. But I was acutely aware of every time her skin met mine.

“You should come sit with us,” she said, like it was already decided.

So I did.

The three of us fell into a rhythm so quickly and so easily that it surprised me. Coffee between classes. Shared complaints. Private jokes that made no sense to anyone else. Paul listened more than he spoke. Kathy spoke enough for them both.

She told stories about her childhood with Paul, the way their lives had braided together since before they could remember. Catholic school. Sunday dinners. Parents who approved. I watched Paul when she spoke. The way his attention never wavered ... an unspoken affection that bordered on devotion. The way he smiled at her like she was a constant, not a question. Radiating just how deep his connection was with her.

Kathy, on the other hand, watched me.

It started subtly. Questions asked a little too directly. Pauses held a moment too long. Her gaze didn’t skim the surface the way most peoples did. It went inward, as if she was reading something written just under my skin.

“You know, you’re hard to read ... but not impossible,” she said once, casually, over coffee in the student lounge.

I laughed. “I am?” Trying to conceal the dread that she was about to lift my mask.

She shrugged. “It’s interesting ... you’re hiding ... in plain sight. I feel like you see yourself as an outsider but ... you’re not trying to fit in ... just displaying what you think people want to see ... interesting.”

That word again. Interesting. I felt exposed. Kathy was studying me ... seeing me. Telling me in her own Kathy way that she understood. Perhaps she was also playing a part. I was to learn years later that I was frighteningly close to the mark.

Over time, she told me more, let me see a little of what lay under her own mask. She confided about the parties she went to without Paul. About the guys she toyed with, the guys she slept with ... the guys Paul didn’t know about. She framed it as discovery. Freedom. A delayed adolescence she was finally allowing herself to live. A secret indulgence.

“I was such a good Catholic girl,” she said once, rolling her eyes. “I stayed pure, until I met Paul. Here though, University, feels like ... permission ... to grow, explore. I still can’t believe I held off for so long.”

I didn’t know how to respond. She was echoing my thoughts, well, some of them ... Paul never came up in those conversations unless I mentioned him. When I did, Kathy waved it away.

“We’re not married,” she said. “We’ve never even said we’re exclusive. Paul just assumes that he is my one and only. I’m not shutting myself off from adventure because he wouldn’t approve. I like sex and if I want to try out a guy ... then I do. Paul gets all of me when we’re together.”

The way she said it made it sound adult, grown up, logical. I nodded, even though something in me tightened every time I thought of Paul’s easy faith in her.

She encouraged me to come out with her. To meet people. To stop being so careful.

“You’re too contained, I know you really want to try things out too.” she said once, pressing a drink into my hand. “You just need to loosen up. Let yourself get taken once or twice ... you’ll love it.”

So, I did. Or I tried to. It was easier than letting her see what I really wanted, what I truly desired.

We went home with guys together. Usually the same house, always the same room. It felt safer to orbit Kathy, to be part of her gravity. I told myself this was about curiosity. About experience. About becoming who I was supposed to be.

The truth was both simpler and harder. I wanted her near me. I wanted her attention. I wanted the parts of her she gave so freely to others to brush against me, even indirectly.

I watched her with other guys and told myself the ache in my chest was jealousy on behalf of Paul. Or envy. Or judgment. Anything but desire. But I knew what it was ... and so did she.

She never called me out. That was the strange thing. For someone who seemed to see so much, she never named it. Or maybe she did, and I just wasn’t ready to hear it.

Once, after too many drinks, she leaned close and said softly, “You know, you don’t have to do this just because you think you should. If you want to explore something different just say so.”

I laughed it off. Changed the subject. Avoidance was my native language, and I had become very good at deflecting.

Paul remained an enigma. Smart. Grounded. Studying Business and IT, a double degree, with a focus that seemed almost outdated next to the way Kathy approached Chemistry and Chemistry labs with a restless energy. He talked about the future in broad strokes. Careers, stability, family. He talked about Kathy like she was a given. He gave her everything ... and noticed ... nothing. He didn’t give the slightest clue that he knew of her play dates ... No idea that Kathy had taken residence in my heart just as strongly as in his.

Looking back now, I see how much I hid from him. From them. From myself. I see how desperately I wanted approval without exposure, closeness without consequence. I wanted to be known without being seen. So, I guess Paul could be forgiven for not picking up on the clues that seemed to be right in front of him. His love confirmed her place in his life and blinded him to her faults ... and my ambition.

That year ended without resolution. Just a deepening of our friendship ... and my desire. A quiet accumulation of moments and silences that would later demand attention. At the time, I told myself I was fine, I was growing, learning about myself.

I was growing, just not in the way I believed.

By third year, the shape of my life had settled into something that looked stable ... from the outside.

Same campus. Same train line. Same small circle of activity that had hardened into routine. Kathy and Paul were constants now, fixtures rather than coincidences. We had our places. Our seats. Our shared shorthand. People assumed we’d known each other longer than we had and we never corrected them.

What changed wasn’t visible. It was internal. And it was slow ... and relentless.

I had stopped pretending, at least privately, that what I felt around Kathy was neutral.

It began with my body betraying me in small, humiliating ways. A quickening pulse when she sat too close. A warmth that had nothing to do with alcohol. The way my breath shortened when she leaned over me to read something on my phone, her hair brushing my cheek. Heat and moisture in my core when she turned that jade green stare toward me. Her smile would leave me warm and tingling for hours.

I told myself this was admiration. Then jealousy. Then curiosity. Anything but attraction or arousal.

Eventually, the excuses ran out.

I remember one afternoon in the library. We were meant to be studying, though neither of us really was. Kathy was sitting on the floor she had her feet tucked close to her, her knees pulled to her chest, absently chewing the end of a pen. My eyes were on the panty covered patch between her thighs. She looked up at me suddenly and smiled, that direct, unsettling smile that felt like being chosen ... she knew.

I felt it then. Sharp and undeniable. My body responded before my mind could scramble for cover.

I looked away, heart pounding, heat pooling low and unwelcome, I could smell my own arousal, I’m sure Kathy could too.

Get a grip, I told myself. This is stupid. This is you letting your schoolgirl fantasies take you over. This isn’t real ... It’s hormones ... Lack of sleep.

But the lies sounded thin even to me.

Kathy noticed ... Of course she did. She didn’t move. She just watched me.

After that day in the library, she started watching me ... differently. Not constantly. Just enough. Her gaze lingered. Her touches lasted a second longer than necessary. Once, when she hugged me goodbye, she didn’t let go right away. I stood frozen, arms around her, aware of the exact shape of her against me, I melted against her, then stiffened as I realized what I was doing.