For a second there’s just the sound of panting, and then I grunt as he pulls out of me and collapses at my side, his chest heaving.

“Shit,” I breathe, and he snorts.

“You can say that again.”

“Shit.”

I wait for his laugh. It pleases me more and more to hear him do that. The amount he’s done it over the last month has made me realise how little he laughed before.

I turn on my side and take the opportunity to ogle him while his eyes are closed. I have to seize these chances because he’s a little self-conscious about his body around me. I’d love to know why because he’s fucking gorgeous. I always knew he hid a good body under those swanky suits and I’m glad to report that I wasn’t wrong.

The last month has been filled with so many quirky dates. We played board games on a rainy day at a little café in Waterloo and then ventured to climb the Whispering Gallery at St Paul’s where I scandalized Zeb by whispering what I wanted to do to him. We played darts at a small club where we used the board to decide our next drinks. I’d even organised an escape-room date where I’d been vastly amused to watch Zeb organise everyone into the most well thought out and polite escape the place had ever had.

Stretching luxuriously, I smile at the twinge in my arse because it’s well earned. Zeb and I have hardly set foot out of his bedroom for the last two days. We abandoned the dates and barricaded ourselves in, ordering in food occasionally to fuel us, but our attention has been totally on each other.

Each time the sex seems to just get better and better. The benefits of an older man in bed are legion, but chiefly because he has so much stamina, and that calm eye for organisation and details means that he can play my body like a fiddle. I’ve come harder and more often in the last month than I have in the last two years.

But it’s not just all been sex. In the mornings we’ve escaped the flat when it’s started to smell like an explosion in a salami factory. We’ve got coffee and wandered the streets of Covent Garden in the early morning sunshine as the shops started to open, wrapped in each other and talking intently.

For the first time I don’t feel like he’s looking at me as too young anymore. Instead he seems as fascinated by me as I am with him. We don’t seem to run out of things to say, discussing politics and religion or saying the lines from our favourite songs.