I freak out at my accidental perving and jolt upright. As I do, my hair whips one of the candles over, which quickly causes a towel on the table to catch fire.

‘Oh, fuck,’ I blurt.

Freddie, who has hurried into his shorts, quickly soaks another towel in the sink and places it on top of the burning one to put the flames out. He is successful, but not before the smoke alarm on the ceiling starts going off.

‘What happened?’ he asks me, just as panicked staff members start flooding into the room.

‘I, erm… I don’t know,’ I lie.

Well, I’m not about to tell him how hot under the collar he made me, am I?

16

Tonight, Freddie and I are going for dinner together… and I’m weirdly terrified.

With my break-up being so fresh, and so out of the blue, I haven’t had much time to think about what happens next, but I suppose I'm going to have to go on a date with another man at some point, unless I want to die alone, which no one wants, do they?

In a way, going on a date with Freddie is a lot less pressure, because there is nothing romantic between us, so it’s not as if I need it to go especially well. On the other hand, just because I don’t need it to go well, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t aim for that.

Take earlier, for example. If that had been my and Freddie’s first-day date, it would have been an absolute disaster (or, if by some miracle we’d stayed together, one hell of a story to tell our grandkids). First of all, it was awkward. So awkward. From the getting naked in front of each other, to the forced hand-holding – and then there’s the icing on the cake, you know, when I set the room on fire. I don’t think I’d ever go on a second date with someone who caused a fire, just by being their awkward self, even if they were a movie star. Which brings me on to my next point…

Freddie is one of the hottest men in the world right now, in terms of both how famous he is, and how incredibly sexy he is. On the one hand, in the outside world, Freddie would never look twice at a girl like me – he wouldn’t even end up in a room with a girl like me – so it’s amazing that I’ve ended up at a candlelit dinner table with him. If you’re going to have a trial-run first date with anyone, why not practise on the sexiest man alive, right? Not my words (although I am tempted to say it), the words of People magazine, in their annual Sexiest Man Alive feature.

While I was in the bath, getting ready for this evening, I did what any self-respecting girl would do. I did my due diligence on my date – even if it’s not a real date. Normally I’d just type my date’s name (or, in more recent years, Ali’s date’s name – because she isn’t as security conscious as I am) into social media and troll through pictures of his ex-girlfriends and holidays. With Freddie, finding out what I want to know about him is the easiest thing in the world, because the Internet is full of everything you could possibly want to know about Freddie Bianchi, and the more I read, the more I want to know.