Now Dan is pacing round his room waiting for Atticus to knock or walk in without knocking. He wants to look as if he’s beavering away at his desk, professional, but is too full of nervous energy to sit still. On his tenth rotation, he stops to look out of the window and across the Brighton rooftops, where seagulls strut like kings and students smoke with their Dr Martens dangling off ledges. A heavy cloud sits low in the sky, the colour of a day-three bruise. Someone somewhere is playing a trumpet. The whole world seems to understand how to be itself – everyone except him. Control the controllable, Dan, he reminds himself, as the door opens and Atticus breezes in, smelling of spring and leather.

‘Sorry I’m late. Stopped to get caffeine.’ He waves a cardboard coffee cup at Dan, who has been picturing nothing but Atticus’s face since he last saw him.

He realizes he was wrong, and Atticus is more beautiful than he remembered, and all he can do is open his mouth and close it again.

‘Oh dear, does coffee offend your sensitive palate?’

Dan realizes his face must show his discomfort and he forces himself to make a noise that could be a laugh or perhaps a sort of sob. ‘Not at all. Please sit,’ he says, and gestures vaguely at the sofa before parking himself, with slightly weak knees, in the chair.

‘So you do like coffee?’ Atticus says, as he unwinds a long grey scarf from his neck.

‘I’m a tea man.’ Dan groans inwardly the moment he says it. What was that? A lie, for one thing. His coffee machine, bought with his first month’s wages, is one of his most treasured possessions. He polishes it daily and sometimes, only sometimes, says, ‘Coffee to go? Thanks, love,’ in a northern accent, because inside Dan is another Dan entirely, one who dances to the radio and sings into his potato masher and can do a cracking impersonation of Alan Rickman.

‘Oh, I say. A tea man!’ Atticus is delighted. ‘Please forgive me for bringing this black poison into your sacred space. Can you bear to have the cup in your bin, or shall I take it with me?’

Too scared to open his mouth in case he says something ridiculous, Dan just nods. A braver Dan, the one who dances to Kate Bush with Fitz (‘It’s me, Fitzy, I’m home now’), would say, ‘Have at it, sailor.’

Atticus tosses the cup with a flick of his wrist and it lands in the bin, right way up. He shrugs at Dan and says, ‘Don’t tell my parents I’m good at throwing. They were desperate for me to play sports. When I told them I batted for the other team, my dad thought I meant Worthing.’