The rain was beating down on the school field again. I’d threaded my left arm free and stretched my coat over the two of us as we sat snuggled against each other.

‘You keep telling me I’m smooth.’

‘The more I say it, the smoother you get.’

It was a sound observation. She’d also taken to telling me how cool I was whenever the turn of conversation permitted it. And, every time she said it, I grew more determined to be even cooler in her eyes. Twenty metres away from us stood a monument to just how cool I could be in her company. Her eyes followed mine, and again we laughed at that wall, defaced with red paint, defiantly clinging to its message in the face of the weather.

The hood of my jacket raised against the wind that drove in behind us, we huddled as one, our cheeks burning where they pressed against each other. We talked on, our noses smudging together, our lips centimetres apart, a heat trapped between our faces that no downpour could compete with.

I didn’t try to kiss her, even though I was sure she wouldn’t have stopped me. We breathed each other’s air as we spoke; we stared deep into one another. I felt as if the lines were blurring between us, as if our bodies were no longer completely solid, but somehow fluid, capable of overlapping. Kissing would have been so much less intimate in comparison. Kissing her would have seemed a waste.

An hour passed, maybe two. Or perhaps it was twenty minutes – I was too absorbed. I didn’t have the metronome of thought by which to gauge time. But I know that, by the time she asked me about Mum, I could no more hold secrets from her than I could from myself.

‘You don’t mention her,’ she whispered.

‘She’s not very well, that’s all.’

‘Tell me.’

‘She just has to have a bit of support. She’s not really able to live on her own.’

‘That’s sad. Must be hard for you.’

‘It’s harder for her.’

‘I want to know about her. What’s her name? What did she used to do?’

I broke away from Sophia and smiled into the darkness. ‘No one asks that,’ I told her. ‘They ask what’s wrong with her. They ask where they’ve stashed her away.’

‘Well, I’m guessing she’s a fully fledged human being, with dreams, and a heart that beats faster around the things of beauty that touch only her. Who, as it happens, also has an illness.’

I nodded slowly. Only one other person had ever understood this. Even how Sophia phrased it had the sound of a lost era.