It’s a day of pride for many people – dressing up in a gown, hood and mortar board, walking up on the stage and collecting a rolled up piece of paper from a local dignitary. Family and friends applaud with pride and you usually have a formal gathering to raise a glass to your success as a conscientious and successful student…

Only my graduation wasn’t quite like that. In fact exam success never seemed that important to me. I studied and crammed, but all rather last minute and largely because it was what everyone else was doing, rather than through my own self-discipline. I scraped through.

So my motivation for turning up for the whole shebang, apart from pleasing my parents, was purely to see ‘Perforated Pete’. His nickname was down to the numerous piercings he had in his ears, nipples and eyebrow and to differentiate him from another Pete we sometimes hung out with.

But the metal-bearing moniker paints an inaccurately unattractive image. This guy actually had girls eating out of his hand. He was a 1990s grunge dreamboat with a twist*. His face was a cheeky, sexy shade of handsome, with large hazel eyes and a knowing smirk. He had long light brown hair, shaved at the sides (remember, this was the early 1990s) a stocky, toned build and dressed in black t-shirts, combat trousers and army boots. He was a couple of years older than me but had started his course a year later, in ‘Media’ or something a bit arty – my memory fails me here.

Perforated Pete and I had flirted for a while, but the timing had always been wrong – I was with my then boyfriend and he was seeing a tall, voluptuous blonde a friend and I referred to as the ‘strapping lass’.  The most we had managed was a cheeky kiss when we played some odd drinking game involving everyone kissing. When PP and I lingered a little too long in our smooch my boyfriend got very angry and almost punched him, bringing the game to a swift end.

So, travelling back to my rather gloomy university town, after a mutual split with that boyfriend, filled me with hope and excitement. In the days before mobile phones, widespread internet usage and few student homes even having a landline, all one could do was hope for the best.

My parents had booked a budget hotel with a room for themselves and separate one for my friend Lu and I.

We got the formalities over with, had the photos taken, went out for dinner with my folks, then fluffed our feathers to meet some of our friends at the pub later for celebratory drinks. The whole time I could only think about PP and whether he would show up. I had put on a red floaty top which clung to my cleavage, with my usual tight black jeans and boots in a special attempt to catch his eye.

As we walked in I looked around the room, desperately. No sign of him. We sat with friends and I tried to put him to the back of my mind. Half an hour passed and it dawned on me that maybe he was now seeing someone else – it had been a while since I had seen him and ‘strapping lass’ was still around.

But, just as I had settled into chatting to people and trying to shrug off my disappointment, a familiar figure casually walked in with a couple of friends. His pretty, long-lashed hazel eyes met mine and he flashed me a sexy grin. I immediately felt my cheeks flush and my whole body tense up. I wasn’t even sure I would be able to form the words to speak to him.

But he came over, pulled up a chair and asked me how the day had gone. As the cider and blackcurrant flowed, we relaxed into a conversation, peppered with his dry sense of humour and occasional touch on my thigh.

PP was very self-assured and knew how to press the right buttons to lure a girl back to his place, but he wasn’t cocky or arrogant and never took himself too seriously.

There was an obstacle to proceedings, though. I was supposed to go with Lu back to our hotel room at the end of the evening and be ready for 9am to have breakfast with my parents. Perfectly reasonable, you could say, but not when one had been waiting over four months to bed the sexiest man of the moment…

So a plan had to be hatched. PP and I walked Lu back to our hotel room and we agreed a special door knock for my return later on. This freed PP and I up to dive into the next available cab back to his house for some valuable hours.

He lived in a shared student house, so we had to hurry through some garbled introductions before we could escape to his room. Once the door was shut we just could not wait any longer.

In a cider haze, we dived on the bed, kissing like we only had seconds left before the world ended. His body was smooth and delicious. And for some reason after all the tension we were now totally relaxed and as we began to bonk we were chatting about how much we wanted it. He was saying something along the lines of “I have wanted this for ages. I knew it would be good because we are both tarts.” It was good and he had impressive staying power, but it was probably the only time I had had inaugural sex with someone and we had talked through the entire session. We covered a range of topics from our favourite positions to my tits to his tattoos, underwear and the photos on his bedroom wall. I wanted to do it again in a couple of hours without the chit-chat just to feel normal again.

After a smidgen of sleep daylight streamed into his room and I had to leave PP naked in his bed to call a cab from the nearest phone box. I got back to the hotel at 6am, knocked loudly on the hotel room door (hopefully not waking my parents) and poor Lu stumbled bleary-eyed to the door and let me in.  I slipped into my cold bed and tried to rest, with a big grin on my face, before we had to go down for a ‘full English’.

*What is the ‘twist’? I hear you ask. That’s one for a future post, as PP had a yet-to-be-discovered facet to his personality.