I bit my lip. That bad. I didn’t say anything; he clearly didn’t want to go into it. After a pause, he rolled towards me, and we lay gazing at each other without speaking. I felt myself falling into his blue-grey eyes, so vivid under their black lashes. As I caught a wave of his emotions, my throat tightened: a deep yearning; a suppressed fear that the two of us wouldn’t have the long life together that we both wanted. The thought filled me with dread.

He reached out and touched a strand of my hair, as if he’d never seen it before, and then lowered his lips to mine. I could feel how much he needed to lose himself in me; it was what I needed too, with him. I held him to me tightly as we kissed, and wished there were no time limits and no other people, and that we could just do exactly what we wanted. Because even though I tried not to think about it, in my darkest moments I couldn’t help wondering if we’d really survive all this. And I didn’t want to die without ever truly giving myself to the boy I loved.

“Alex, maybe...” I whispered now. My heart was thudding; my body felt flushed and prickly.

He rose up on his elbows, scanning my face. Before he could say anything, we heard Sam and Brendan come back into the dorm, arguing about basketball. Basketball, when we were a thousand miles away from the NBA. I closed my eyes tightly; I felt like crying. Alex let out a breath, and then kissed me.

“Soon,” he said, and I could tell from the determination in his voice that he was going to make it happen, no matter what.

With only one digit left to crack on the six-number security code, it turned out that they changed the code every week, knocking us back to square one. Everyone was stressed – especially Kara, I think, whose task of finding the new code couldn’t be hurried, though we all longed for it to be. There was just over a week left now. The rest of the team spent any spare time either grimly working out or watching TV in near silence.

But the success of the plan wasn’t my only worry. Once or twice now, I’d gotten glimpses from Seb of the same powerful emotion I thought I’d felt in him the first day we’d met – warm, deep flashes, which told me exactly how much he still hoped that something more than friendship would happen between us.