‘Poppy,’ I coo, taking her face in my hands. Her skin is burning. ‘It’s OK.’

‘It’s not, though. It’s just made me realise how much you mean to me. What if I’d lost you today?’

‘I know,’ I sigh tenderly, letting go of her face to curl my arm around her shoulders and pull her into me. She lets me, her head falling on to my shoulder, like in the Rothko room. ‘I’m not going anywhere, I promise.’

She tips her head back to look at me from under her wide eyelashes. ‘Promise?’

I lean down and press my mouth to hers, then pinch her chin between my forefinger and thumb. ‘Promise.’

The cab stops then and we jerk forward so suddenly, we almost slam into the front seats.

‘What the hell?’ I hear Poppy mutter as I look around to see what happened.

‘Is everything OK?’ I ask, wondering if someone tried to cut the driver up, or something.

He turns to me, his whole face red. He’s bald, so he looks like the angry face emoji. ‘Get out.’

‘Excuse me?’ I blink at him, looking around the cab again.

Did he hit someone?

Did a cyclist pull out of a side road from nowhere?

But the driver doesn’t look worried, he just looks angry. ‘Get out of my cab!’

I hold my hands up. ‘All right. Calm down, Peggy Mitchell,’ I say, which makes him even redder.

‘You’re disgusting, the pair of you!’

It’s Poppy’s turn to blink at him. ‘We’re what?’

‘Disgusting!’ He spits and she recoils, her hand to her chest as he jabs a finger in our direction, looking between us. ‘This is my cab. I get to choose who I have in it and I want you two out!’

‘OK.’ Poppy realises a moment before I do what he’s getting at.

I’m still confused, though, unsure what we’ve done to piss him off. We’re not drunk or loud or having a screaming fight. We haven’t even asked him to turn off the awful Ann Widdecombe interview.

‘What’s going on?’ I ask, looking at him, then at Poppy. ‘What’s happening?’

Poppy rolls her eyes, opening the car door. ‘It’s because we were kissing, babe.’

Really?

It’s not like Poppy and I were snogging each other’s faces off and feeling each other up.

It was just a peck.

‘Yes!’ The cab driver confirms. ‘And it’s disgusting!’

Poppy laughs and when he sneers at her, I go from zero to I will burn this fucking cab down.

‘Don’t you look at her like that, you homophobic prick!’

He turns to me now, smirking this time. ‘Nice mouth.’

I make sure I don’t take the bait because I know how this goes: say something so bone-breakingly offensive that it will make me angry then mock me for getting angry.

I smirk back. ‘Thanks.’