‘Ssshh.’ I put my finger against his mouth. ‘You should. It’s nice. No one’s kissed me like that for –’

He kissed me again. He was so nice; such a boy, so very young. He tasted of tobacco and wine and I felt no lust for him, just a kind of drunken sweetness from lost teenage holidays. ‘You always look so sad, you know,’ he whispered.

‘Sad?’

‘You’re so beautiful – but you always look kind of haunted.’

I was touched that he’d noticed anything about me at all. ‘I thought I just looked – I don’t know.’ I tried to laugh. ‘Knackered all the time.’

‘No, just sad.’ He pushed my hair back off my face. ‘And beautiful. Would you –’ he cleared his throat nervously, ‘would you like to come home with me?’

‘What – back to your dad’s?’ I laughed. ‘I don’t think so, Sam, sweetheart.’

He looked embarrassed and I immediately felt guilty. ‘Sorry. That came out all wrong. It’s just, well, I’ve got a boyfriend, you know.’ I thought of Alex; I realised I didn’t feel any guilt about him at all. I looked at Sam again, into his black-fringed eyes that gleamed in the dark, and I smiled. ‘You’re so sweet.’

‘Don’t say that.’ He scuffed the gravel with his baseball boot. ‘It sounds a bit – you know. Patronising.’

‘Aha!’ Naz popped out of the glass doors, her glossy bob swinging in the candlelight. ‘Smokers united!’ Then she peered at us in the gloom. ‘Sorry, am I interrupting something?’

I moved away from Sam and accepted another fag from her. ‘Don’t be silly.’

Naz gave me a light. ‘Listen, Ben and Jeff from Roar have booked a suite on the twelfth floor. They’ve got a sound-system going and everything. Come up afterwards.’