James had a technique for these situations; if you were travelling, hungry, as often as him, you needed a technique. He wouldn’t normally do it with people around, but enough mild euphoria was still swimming around him to make this seem a special occasion. He levelled up the flabby point of his elbow with the rough area of the Lucozade bottles, and hammered it into the Plexiglas. The orange bottle toppled like a felled skittle into the gully at the bottom of the machine. Michaela clapped.

‘You did that like someone who knows their way round a vending machine!’ She broke off halfway through, squeezing it to her lips. ‘Oh! I didn’t mean, I obviously didn’t mean …’

‘No, no, it’s fine,’ said James, delighted. ‘I … what can I say. I have no money, but I have a certain set of skills.’

This was an over-quoted line from a famously silly film, plus he wasn’t even sure he’d got the words right. And yet she laughed a huge rude laugh and he thought about her on the way home.

The next session was only three days later: the idea was to rip off the plaster of their shyness. This time James looked for Michaela when they formed the circle. She was wearing black leggings this time, but the same canary-coloured T-shirt. The leggings hugged tight to the contours of her thighs and James began to be embarrassed by the things he was imagining when he looked at her.

They were put into pairs and asked to pass a heavy ball back and forth. James was too far away from Michaela to get into a team with her, but he was almost sure she glanced at him. He ended up with a huge Polynesian man who embraced the task with abandon, shoving the ball hard into James’s waiting arms, so that James felt moved to push it back equally hard. The two of them, wordlessly, gleaming with sweat, ramped it up, and Giles made everyone stop and watch them as an example of how to ‘give it some proper welly’. As he walked back to the changing rooms, James was fizzing with an unaccustomed joy. Neither of them was sure afterwards they’d definitely planned it, but he wasn’t surprised to see Michaela by the vending machine.

‘I was going to put my money in,’ she said, with a smile of pure mischief that James already felt he knew and recognized. ‘Then I thought, what if someone was passing, with certain skills …?’

She whooped with laughter as he elbowed a drink out of its cradle, with barely a run-up this time; even more when they realized that he’d also dislodged a packet of Skittles. Her laugh was the sort that made people tut to themselves on the train, or compose a scathing tweet at a party. It was exhilarating to be on the inside of a laugh like that.