Then you eat. Perfectly tender pasta and garlic bread oozing with butter – again, probably not a good first-date choice, but it’s a choice you believe you’ve decided from the menu, not preordained by the voice, and it’s cut pleasantly by the bottles of red wine.

After the meal, you are given parts to repeat in a dovetailed story, and then gradually given space to improvise. You can’t remember what your lines were now, because you were also instructed to keep looking into each other’s eyes as the story unwinds. The first minute is funny; the second and third uncomfortable and awkward; by the fourth, you are seeing rainbows around your partner’s head. By the tenth, their face is your own.

* * *

The tantalising foreplay of the show had reached an excruciating pitch by the last course. The game was over, and Petra had been left staring across at Vincent, her toes riding under his trousers and up his ankles under the table as she worked tiramisu between her lips. By the glazed look in his eyes, she guessed he was sharing her vision of her skin smeared with the stuff, lying back and waiting for Vincent to clean her.

But when they’d got to her flat, they hadn’t managed to act on that vision. They hadn’t even got the lights on in the kitchenette, just struggled out of their clothes by the doorway. The next time was slower and more comfortable, and by then Petra was kinda relieved they hadn’t gone the full sticky kink, because she could rest in his strong arms and trace his skin against hers, map hairs and the spots and the scars that made up his life as he talked and moved against her, his ridged solidity pressing indelibly into her.

Eventually, she had to get up for a pee and a glass of water. Vincent stood up and stretched, making for her shelves and plugging some smooth groove into her dock. Falling Man’s Post-Mindblow Comedown Playlist.

‘What do you want?’ she asked from the kitchenette.

‘That’s a big question for three in the morning,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

‘Besides rooibos tea?’

When he started riffling through a pile of her drawings, she let him – like letting someone scratch through her underwear drawer, skim through her diary – fighting the urge to hurry over and snatch his hands away as she steeped the tea and laid out biscuits on a plate. She avoided looking at him, afraid of one wrong reaction, but the noises were good, a muttering, a ‘hmm’, a gasp. ‘Jesus, these are good.’

When the tea was done, and only then, she placed them on the coffee-table crate and went to him and took his hand away, turning him and leading him back to the couch.

‘Show me some of your stuff. I loved what I saw in the studio. That was you, right?’ He allowed himself to be diverted and flicked onto a site on her tablet as she brought the tea. She settled herself into a twisted knot between his limbs and rested her head against his shoulder as he skimmed through the photos.